A private chivalry

In her own way—which was the quietest and least obtrusive of ways—Dorothy was quite as intolerant of mysteries as was her father, and after the evening when Brant had gone forth to seek and to save that which was lost, small mysteries seemed to lie in wait for her at every turn.

They began the following day with Brant’s brief visit and abrupt departure. She had heard his voice in the hall, and, a little later, the rustle of skirts as some one—her mother, she thought it was at the time—had gone in to meet him. Of what took place in the drawing-room she knew nothing, but a few minutes afterward, when she was going down to join them, he had stumbled out into the hall, snatched his coat and hat from the rack, and left the house without once looking behind him. So much Dorothy saw from the stair, and she also saw that he was excited and preoccupied, and that his face was the face of one upon whom trouble sharp and serious has come suddenly.

When she heard the gate clang behind him she went to the drawing-room and found it empty; whereupon that which had been merely singular became unaccountable. Was it possible that he had taken offense because he had been kept waiting? Dorothy thought she knew him better than that. He was a grown man, and not a foolish boy with a brand new dignity to battle for.

Failing to account for the unaccountable, Dorothy waited. He would doubtless come again, and with his coming the apparent mystery would vanish. But when the days passed and he came no more, she grew curious and asked guarded questions of her mother—and received ambiguous answers, since Mrs. Langford, with maternal self-sufficiency, had deemed it unnecessary to take either of her daughters into her confidence in Brant’s affair.

So Dorothy wondered, and laid innocent little snares to entrap her father, who had also grown singularly reticent. And when these traps sprung harmless, she tried Antrim, with no better results. No, Brant was still in town, and the chief clerk was not aware of any impending change in his plans. Thus Henry Antrim, vaguely; but Dorothy’s attempt fell upon an inauspicious moment, since it was made on the evening of Antrim’s off day, and her questions were put while he was waiting for Isabel to make ready for the jaunt à l’opéra.

After this failure Dorothy tried Will, and it was a measure of her concern that she should appeal to him. She had no news of him; had nothing save that which an affectionate sister usually gets in an attempt to fathom the unplumbed depths of a younger brother’s churlishness. Knowing Will’s weakness, she ventured carefully, but she was quite unprepared for his sudden outburst of petulant brutality.

“You wonder where Mr. Brant is, do you?” he sneered, mimicking her. “Well, you’ve no business to wonder; that’s all there is about that.”

“Why, Will——”

“You needn’t try to wheedle me. I don’t know where he is, and, what’s more, I don’t care, as long as he keeps away from here.”

“But, Will, you must have some reason——”

“Reason enough,” he interrupted rudely; “and that’s all you’ll get out of me in a thousand years.” And he lighted a cigarette and put distance between himself and the chance of further questioning.

Knowing nothing of Harding or his story, Dorothy set her brother’s anger down to the account of a natural feeling of resentment toward a comparative stranger who had interfered in Will’s private affair. None the less, the incident added another shrouding to the mystery involving the draughtsman, and Dorothy’s curiosity and concern went one step farther on the road toward anxiety.

It was about this time that she began to notice a rather remarkable change in Isabel. From being the most outspoken member of the family, the younger sister had developed a degree of reticence which was second only to Will’s churlishness, though Dorothy fancied it was sorrowful rather than sullen. From day to day she spent less time at her easel, and twice Dorothy had come upon her when her eyes were red with weeping. To inquiry, jesting or solicitous, she was stonily impervious, and when the thing became unbearable Dorothy went to her mother again, meaning to be at the heart of things if persistence could find the way. She chose her time cunningly, attacking after her mother had gone to bed, so there would be no chance of retreat.

“How should I know, dear?” was the mother’s reply to her first question about Isabel. “I haven’t noticed anything wrong with her.”

“But there is something wrong,” Dorothy insisted. “She hasn’t been like herself for days. She mopes, and she doesn’t paint; and twice I have caught her crying, though she denied it spitefully.”

Mrs. Langford’s answer to that was conventionally sympathetic.

“It is another of the unthinkable pictures, I suppose. I do wish the child wouldn’t torment herself so over her work. It is all well enough as an accomplishment, but she needn’t make a martyr of herself. Harry is quite right about that.”

Having a very considerable reverence for art, Dorothy was not so sure of this, but she left the point uncontested and asked a question suggested by the mention of Harry Antrim.

“You don’t suppose she has quarrelled with Harry, do you?”

“It is quite possible. It’s a way they have had ever since they were children together.”

“Still, it might be serious this time.”

“No fear of that,” said the mother easily. “Isabel thinks a great deal more of him than she has ever admitted, even to herself, perhaps. And as for Harry, I would as soon think of the world coming to an end as of his giving her up.”

Dorothy was silenced, but not convinced.

“That was one thing I wanted to speak about, mamma,” she said, gathering herself for the plunge; “but there is another. I want to know what has come over us all lately. We seem to be groping about in the dark, trying to hide things from each other. What is the mystery? and why can’t I share it?”

“Mystery? Nonsense, child! there is no mystery.”

But Dorothy was insistent. “Yes, there is. First, Mr. Brant does us a kindness and drops us, all in the same day. Then, when I wonder at it, you put me off, and father goes deaf, and Will gets angry. And when I ask Harry a civil question about his friend, he snaps me up only a little less savagely than brother. Now Isabel has turned blue and won’t talk, and—and, altogether we seem to be turning into a family of freaks. What is at the bottom of it all? Why doesn’t Mr. Brant come here any more?”

The mother’s smile would have been full of meaning for the daughter if the darkness had not hidden it.

“Mr. Brant probably has his own reasons for not coming, and they are doubtless very good ones.”

“What makes you say that? Do you know what they are?” Dorothy demanded, being fully determined not to be baffled.

It was a point-blank question, but Mrs. Langford evaded it with considerable skill:

“I? What a question! Mr. Brant is not likely to take me into his confidence.”

For the moment Dorothy had an uncomfortable feeling that she had been making mountains out of molehills, and in that moment she retreated. But when she was alone the perplexities assumed their normal proportions again; nay, they grew even larger when she was reluctantly driven to the conclusion that the late attack on the maternal stronghold had failed because her mother was the better fencer.

After all, it was Isabel who gave her the clew to a startling solution of the mysteries, and the manner of its giving was this: The sisters occupied adjoining rooms connected by a curtained archway, and when Dorothy went from her mother’s room to her own she found the curtains dropped—a thing without precedent, and emphasizing very sharply the barrier that Isabel sought to rear between herself and the other members of the family.

Dorothy was hurt, but she was too truly a Langford to take the risk of making unwelcome advances. So she went to bed with eyelashes wet, and with a sore spot in her heart in which the ache was quite out of proportion to the wounding incident of the dropped curtains. Just as she was falling asleep the curtains parted and Isabel stole softly into the room, to go down upon her knees at the bedside. Dorothy made no sign at first, but when her sister buried her face in the bedclothes and began to sob, compassion quickly found words—and a little deed.

“What is it, Bella, dear?” she asked, with an arm around her sister’s neck.

“Everything,” said Isabel to the counterpane.

“But what, dear? Can’t you trust me?”

Isabel shook her head to the first pleading and nodded to the second. Dorothy understood, and pressed the point gently.

“Is it a picture?—won’t the new one find itself?”

“It’s—it’s something a great deal worse than unthinkable pictures,” said Isabel dismally.

“Then it must be very bad indeed. Tell me about it, Bella, dear.”

“I can’t; there isn’t anything to tell. He is gone—I sent him away, and he will never come back!” sobbed Isabel, with womanly inconsistency.

Dorothy permitted herself a little sigh of relief. It was only a lovers’ quarrel between her sister and Harry, the last of many, and perhaps a little more serious than some of the others, but still only that. The wound would heal of itself, as such hurtings do, yet she made haste to pour the wine and oil of sympathy into it.

“Don’t cry, dear. He will come back—he can’t help coming back,” she prophesied confidently.

Isabel shook her head as one who knows and may not be comforted. “No, he won’t—not the man that I sent away. Harry, the good-natured, obstinate boy that we used to tease and make fun of, might; but this grown man that I never knew till the other day is quite different. He will never put it off with a laugh and come back as if nothing had happened—I know he won’t.”

Thus Isabel, thinking only of the seeming change wrought in her lover by the quick shifting of her own point of view, and Dorothy, with the chill of a nameless fear benumbing her, could only repeat her prophecy:

“He will come back; never fear, Bella.”

“I wish I could believe it, but I can’t. O Dothy, if you could have seen his face when he went away! I shall never forget how he looked, not if I should live to be a hundred.”

Dorothy had a fleeting vision of a man hurrying out through the hall with a look of desperate trouble in his eyes, and in a flash the apparent ambiguity in Isabel’s confession vanished. It was her sister, and not her mother, who had gone to meet Mr. Brant. It was he, and not Harry, whom Isabel had sent away, and for whose loss she was grieving.

Dorothy shut her eyes hard, and for a moment the pain of it was sharp enough to make her shrink from the innocent cause of it. Then a great wave of thankfulness swept over her when she remembered that her secret was yet her own. And close upon the heels of gratitude came a growing wonder that she could have been so blind. She might have known from the first that it was Isabel. It was plain enough now. His gentle deference to her sister’s moods, his helpful criticism of her work, his evident determination to give Antrim the preference which was his by right, leaving Isabel free to choose between them. All these things pointed to but one conclusion, and Dorothy was thankful again; this time for the darkness which hid the hot blushes. For she remembered how ready she had been to read quite a different meaning into all of his sayings and doings.

And the little sister of fickleness? Dorothy was loyal after her kind, and she quickly found excuses for Isabel. Was it not what always happens when a man of the world and a stranger is pitted against a playmate lover?

So the pyramid of misapprehension was builded course by course until it lacked only the capstone, and this was added in the answer to Dorothy’s question:

“When did all this happen, Bella, dear?”

“The last time he was here; years ago, it seems to me—but perhaps it is only months or weeks.”

This was the capstone, and there was now no room for doubt. It was nearly two weeks since Brant had stopped coming, and there had been no intermission in Harry’s visits. Indeed, it was only a few days since he had taken Isabel to the opera. Dorothy choked down a little sigh, put herself and her own dream of happiness aside, and became from that moment her sister’s loyal and loving ally.

“Don’t be discouraged, dear,” she said caressingly. “You must learn to wait and be patient. I know him—better, perhaps, than you do—and I say he will come back. He will never take ‘No’ for an answer while you and he live.”

Isabel got up and felt under her sister’s pillow for a handkerchief.

“You are good and comforting, Dothy,” she whispered, “and I think I am happy in spite of my misery.” She bent to leave a kiss on the cheek of goodness and comfort. “I am going to bed now; good night. Why, how hot your face is!”

“How cold your lips are, you mean,” said Dorothy playfully. “Go to bed, dear, and don’t worry any more. You will make yourself sick.”

But when her sister was gone she lay very still, with closed eyes and trembling lips, and so fought her small battle to the bitter end, winning finally the victory called self-abnegation, together with its spoils, the mask of cheerfulness and the goodly robe of serenity.