LOUISE AWAITS DURAND

Twenty-four hours later Bishop Marion’s residence was well lighted. Its evening appearance indicated something like a reception. But it was not to be, in the conventional sense of the word, a reception, although, as Judge Harrison, accompanying the two solemn arbitrators, remarked in nasal undertones to his cigar, “matters of great pith and moment” were to go forward that night within those walls.

Harrison, in fact, with the representatives of the men and of the company, was the first that evening to ring the Bishop’s bell and to be received into the public office. While the Arbitration Board, made complete by the Bishop, were examining their findings for the final signatures, the door-bell rang the second time. The man-servant answering the summons received Simms, as Durand’s attorney, and Durand himself.

They were shown into the reception-room and told that the Bishop would join them in a moment. The man, retiring, closed the door behind him.

Durand was neither in an amiable frame of mind nor in a waiting mood. The issue of the wage controversy had gone somewhat against him, and had added to his personal and corporate annoyance. Ignoring the parting invitation of the passive servant to be seated, he strode almost truculently from one to another of the pictures on the walls, inspecting them with rapid and impatient disdain, and glancing with querulous eyes in one direction after another as he heard the sound of footsteps outside the closed doors of the room--for the Bishop’s house was large and his visitors, on occasion, numerous; arrangements for the receiving of different parties without intruding one on the other had long been studied and pretty well perfected.

But on this evening an exception had been made to the careful arrangements for front-door entries. One of his expected guests the Bishop had thought entitled to even more protection from possible contretemps. The young woman, on whose shoulders he had laid, in the discharge of his office, the heavy duty of interpellating a gross and revengeful husband, he considered entitled to his own household entrance by the inconspicuous door of the side street.

There, Louise, accompanied by Gertrude, whom she had begged to come with her, and by Janeway, was received by Father Smyth, the Bishop’s secretary, and shown into a small anteroom to await Bishop Marion, when he should be ready to summon her for her ordeal. This anteroom communicated with the reception-room in which Durand was then waiting; it might easily have been the sound of his wife’s or Janeway’s footsteps that Durand at one moment impatiently heard. But the house was old and honestly built, and its walls and doors gave no echo to voices. The Bishop’s sister appeared in a moment. When she left the room she took Gertrude with her.

Durand, finding nothing to please him in his surroundings, turned on Simms. “Well, where _is_ this meeting here to-night?” he snapped.

“In the Bishop’s office, I suppose.”

“Why don’t we go in there? What’s all this red tape for? I thought you said they’d be waiting for us!”

Each question came sharper than the last. Simms knew there was nothing to do, but felt called on to get up out of the comfortable chair he had settled in and pace the floor a little himself. “I guess they _are_ waiting for us,” he said defensively, “but we’ll have to wait here till the Bishop takes us in.”

“Takes us in!” retorted Durand. “I’ll say so! Five hundred thousand dollars a year added to our pay-roll. Then this divorce settlement gouge! And you thought you’d get rid of her for nothing!”

His words made Simms sulky. “You’re lucky she didn’t cost you an even million. If Janeway’d had his way, you’d not have got off so light.”

Durand’s lips tightened. “I’ll get back at that fellow some time.”

“Watch him till you do. He made a mighty queer crack at me yesterday. It made me think he’s got some kind of home-brew fixing for both of us. He’s sticking mighty close to your wife. I saw ’em out yesterday together.”

“Sticking close to a fifty-per-cent fee,” said Durand. “I saw him out myself yesterday morning with a classy dame.”

“Where?”

“In Lake Street.”

“What time?”

“About eleven o’clock; I was driving down Fifth.”

“That was your wife with Janeway.”

“What?”

Durand’s exclamation expressed his incredulity. “Great Scott, man,” demanded Simms peevishly, “don’t you know your own wife when you see her?”

“Was that Louise? Well!” Durand half laughed. “Queening up, ain’t she?”

“She always was a queen. I never could see what you wanted to throw her over for,” observed Simms, willing to return to Durand something of his own daily portion of ill-humor at his employer’s hands.

Durand only made a mouth. “She’s caught the style.”

“If you’d held on to a wife like that, your lady friends wouldn’t all be hounding you to marry ’em.”

“Oh, hell!” Whatever Durand meant to add to an inelegant expletive was cut short. Bishop Marion opened the hall door.

“Well, Bishop,” said Simms, in his naturally pompous manner, and after the rather stiff greetings, “we’re--er--ready to meet the Board and--er--clean this thing up. Sooner the better, eh?”

“You will find the Board members and Judge Harrison in my office. Come this way, please.”

The meeting in the Bishop’s office, requiring the signatures of the parties at interest, was formal and not prolonged, but to Louise and her companion the moments dragged with leaden feet. Janeway used the tactics he had so often employed with a client when waiting for a verdict, that is, he kept going a series of remarks neither frivolous nor serious, choosing subjects to divert, if possible, her mind and his own.

“It’s a curious fact,” he said, musing, when other topics had failed, and staring in an absent-minded way at the high, bare walls of the little room in which the two were cooped, with two small chairs and a very small table. “I never come into this old house without feeling better when I go away from it. And somehow I feel that’s just what’s going to happen to-night.”

Louise smiled. It was a smile of sympathy for him, such sympathy as a woman is capable of expressing for a man she has learned to love, even at a moment when she herself is the greater sufferer; such as a woman is capable of feeling for one loved, even at a moment that she immolates herself on the altar of their mutual affection. Women can do these things; if men ever can, it is because they have learned how from women.

“I wish I had your courage,” she said, in simple reply.

Janeway reached across the table. “Your hands are cold.”

“I shouldn’t mind that if my knees would keep still.”

“I wish I could put mine under you,” exclaimed Janeway, “though they might carry you too far or too fast for your work to-night. But simply be composed, Louise, in what you say. And say only what the Bishop requires you to say. Don’t say too much; many a man has come to grief through that. Do you remember the Bishop’s exact words?”

“I think so.”

“Be everlastingly sure so.”

“But if I am in good faith, I must be natural?”

Janeway threw up his hands. “If you’re natural you’ll ruin us! Be cattish, cold, ominous--but not natural. While you talk, I’ll go into the office and sit with Judge Harrison.”

“And remember,” he continued, always in raillery, but with a shrewd admixture of prudence, “these are the vital words. I will repeat them: ‘It is my duty, under certain conditions, to live with you as your wife.’ Come out strong with ‘conditions.’ Don’t, for the love of God, Louise, let too much of the sweetness of your mouth breathe into your words. And these are the conditions: ‘That you will not, in any way, interfere in the practice of my religion.’ Use those very words, ‘in any way’--they will irritate him.”

“Henry!”

“And don’t talk too long. If you do, I’ll break into the room myself.” He regarded her critically, as a master might study a prized pupil, his glance roving from feature to feature, as if calculating the danger each might contribute to the impending situation. His eyes rested at length on her hat, a close-fitting affair, with just crown enough to add artfully to her height and frame the slender outline of her face. “Darling!” he exclaimed, with a despairing gesture. “Why did you wear your prettiest hat? _Why_ didn’t you put on an old one? You should have dressed dowdily for the part--_why_ didn’t we think of it? I’m always,” he said angrily, “forgetting something vitally important.”

“But this hat _is_ an old one,” cried Louise under her breath, in self-defense. “I brought it from Paris.”

“I wish you’d brought one from Oshkosh!”

“I might take it off.”

“That would be worse. When I began practice,” he went on, “I never let a feminine client appear before a jury till she had passed my inspection. If it were a widow suing a heartless corporation, she was drenched in grief and trappings of woe when she entered the court-room--no gay-widow business there; and even then I’d have to tell her that if her new fiancé put his head so much as inside the court-room door, I’d drop the case. And if it were breach of promise--well! My client was sent straight from my office to a beauty parlor--the very first shot out of the box--and dolled up, every morning the trial was on, within an inch of her life. I’ve had some queer-looking dames come back from those places.”

There was a slight knock. The door of the reception-room opened. Bishop Marion stood before them. “Your husband,” he said quietly to Louise, “is here.”

She rose with a start and looked from one to the other of the two men. “How shall I ever face him?” she murmured.

“Don’t be frightened,” said the Bishop calmly. “He is in the office with Mr. Simms and the arbitrators. They have signed. I’ve told him you are here and wish to speak to him a moment in the reception-room. You ask how you shall ever face him. You will face him, my child, by committing your cause to God, who will not fail you. And to the Mother of God, who was a woman, and knew suffering even as you have known it. Neither God nor His blessed Mother will for one moment desert you or see you tried beyond your strength. That is how you will face him--with the right on your side, and leaving the issue in God’s hands. We two will retire now. Come in this way. I will ask Father Smyth to send your husband in.”

Bishop Marion pointed the way to the reception-room. Janeway spoke.

“Give me just a moment, Bishop,” he said. “I will follow you.” The Bishop walked from the antechamber. Janeway took Louise’s hand. The two looked into each other’s eyes. Janeway drew her hand close and for the first time slipped his arm behind her. “Courage, my darling,” he said, tenderly. “This is the last battle you will ever fight alone; the last moment, I hope, that will ever separate us. And if it separate us forever--let it leave us, at least, the memory of a kiss!”

He drew her to him. Her hands caught the lapels of his coat. Their lips met. Releasing herself, she whispered, still looking into his eyes: “You must go!”