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Little Stories of Married Life

<div class='figcenter id001'> <ANTIMG src='images/cover.jpg' alt='' class='ig001' /> <div class='ic001'> The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. </div> </div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c000' /></div> <div> <h1 class='c001'>Little Stories of Married Life</h1></div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c002' /></div> <div class='nf-center-c1'> <div class='nf-center c002'> <div>“I ken far lands to wifeless men unknown.”</div> </div></div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c002' /></div> <div class='figcenter id002'> <ANTIMG src='images/i004.jpg' alt='' class='ig001' /> <div class='ic001'> “He kissed the laughing children as they clung to him” “The Happiest Time,” </div> </div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c000' /></div> <div class='nf-center-c1'> <div class='nf-center c002'> <div>Little Stories of</div> <div>Married Life</div> <div class='c000'>By</div> <div class='c000'>Mary Stewart Cutting</div> </div></div> <div class='figcenter id003'> <ANTIMG src='images/i005.jpg' alt='' class='ig001' /></div> <div class='nf-center-c1'> <div class='nf-center'> <div>GARDEN CITY   NEW YORK</div> <div>DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY</div> <div>1920</div> </div></div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c002' /></div> <div class='nf-center-c1'> <div class='nf-center c002'> <div>Copyright, 1902, by</div> <div>Doubleday, Page & Co.</div> <div class='c000'>Copyright, 1896, by</div> <div>S. S. McClure Co.</div> <div class='c000'>Copyright, 1899, by</div> <div>S. S. McClure Co.</div> <div class='c000'>Copyright, 1902, by</div> <div>S. S. McClure Co.</div> </div></div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c002' /></div> <div class='chapter'> <h2 class='c003'>Contents</h2></div> <table class='table0' summary=''> <colgroup> <col width='81%' /> <col width='18%' /> </colgroup> <tr> <td class='c004'>Their Second Marriage</td> <td class='c005'>1</td> </tr> <tr> <td class='c004'>A Good Dinner</td> <td class='c005'>23</td> </tr> <tr> <td class='c004'>The Strength of Ten</td> <td class='c005'>45</td> </tr> <tr> <td class='c004'>In the Reign of Quintilia</td> <td class='c005'>73</td> </tr> <tr> <td class='c004'>The Happiest Time</td> <td class='c005'>93</td> </tr> <tr> <td class='c004'>In the Married Quarters</td> <td class='c005'>115</td> </tr> <tr> <td class='c004'>Mrs. Atwood’s Outer Raiment</td> <td class='c005'>139</td> </tr> <tr> <td class='c004'>Fairy Gold</td> <td class='c005'>159</td> </tr> <tr> <td class='c004'>A Matrimonial Episode</td> <td class='c005'>181</td> </tr> <tr> <td class='c004'>Not a Sad Story</td> <td class='c005'>199</td> </tr> <tr> <td class='c004'>Wings</td> <td class='c005'>225</td> </tr> </table> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c002' /></div> <div class='nf-center-c1'> <div class='nf-center c002'> <div>Their Second Marriage</div> </div></div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c002' /></div> <div class='chapter'> <h2 id='ch01' class='c003'>Their Second Marriage</h2></div> <div class='c006'> <ANTIMG class='drop-capi' src='images/dch.jpg' width-obs='35' height-obs='42' alt='' /></div> “HENRY, do you know what day Thursday will be?” “Thursday? The twenty-first.” “Yes, and what will the twenty-first be?” “Thursday.” “Oh, Henry!” Pretty Mrs. Waring looked tragically across the breakfast-table at her husband, or rather at the newspaper that screened him completely from her view. “Do put down that paper for a moment. I never get a chance to speak to you any more in the morning, and I have to spend the whole day alone. Do you really mean to say that you don’t know what the twenty-first is?” “The twenty-first?” Mr. Waring met his wife’s gaze blankly as he hurriedly swallowed his coffee, and then furtively observed the hands of the watch that lay open on the table before him. “What do you mean, Doll? Say it quickly, for I’ve got to go.” “Henry, have you forgotten that it is the anniversary of our wedding?” “Oh—oh!” said Mr. Waring, a light dawning on him, and a suspicious note of relief perceptible in his voice. He rose from his chair as he spoke. “Forgotten that? Why, of course not; the day I was married to the sweetest girl in the world! How lovely you did look, to be sure, and what a lucky fellow I was to get you! Can you just help me on with my overcoat, dear? The lining of this sleeve—Yes, I know you haven’t had time to mend it yet. Now, Doll, I would like to stand here and kiss you all day, but the train is whistling across the bridge. By, by, dear; take good care of yourself and the babies!” His wife watched him fondly as he walked down the path to the gate, strong, alert, and masculine, and waved her hand as he looked back and took off his hat to her with a smile before joining another man hurrying for the train. She could see him almost visibly shut out the little cottage from his mind as he turned away from it, and set his shoulders squarely, as if to brace himself for entering the strenuous whirl of business life that makes up the larger, waking half of a man’s life, and in which wife and children have but a sub-existence. But this morning Mrs. Waring did not feel the chill depression that sometimes stole over her as she saw him disappear; her mind was too occupied with his words, which, few and perfunctory as they might sound to the uninitiated, carried deepest meaning to her ears. Her ardent mind conjured up the picture of the girl in bridal attire who had stood beside her lover on their marriage-day, and credited him with the same wealth of imagining and all the tender sentiment connected with it. She fell into a delightful dream of the romantic past, from which she was only aroused by the patter of little feet above and the reminder that she was needed in the nursery. Mrs. Waring had, unknown to her husband, set her mind for some months past on a celebration of her wedding anniversary, the observance of which had lapsed, for one reason or another, for a couple of years; but she had said to herself firmly that Henry must propose it, and not leave it all to her. If she had to plan it out as she had their moving into the country, or their trip to the seashore last summer, or the Christmas party for the babies—nay, if she even had to suggest it to him, it would be valueless to her. If he did not love her enough, if he did not have her happiness enough at heart to think of pleasing her without being reminded of it—why, she would have no celebration. It was entirely against her resolution that she had spoken of it this morning, but she knew in her soul that he never would remember if she did not, and she could only think that, the date once recalled, the rest must follow. She herself thought of nothing else all day. She told little Henry all about mamma’s pretty wedding “once upon a time,” when mamma wore a beautiful white dress with a long white veil, and walked up the aisle in church when the organ played, and the chancel was full of roses and palms; and although the child only asked innocently if there were any bears or lions there, her small nurse-maid, Beesy, was deeply though respectfully interested, and Mrs. Waring could not help being secretly conscious that, while apparently engaged with her infant audience, she was in reality playing to the gallery. She even got out her wedding jewels to hang around baby Marjorie’s neck, to provoke Beesy’s awestricken admiration. It would have taken close study of the influences of the past year to determine why this particular wedding anniversary should have assumed such prominence in young Mrs. Waring’s mind. Both she and her husband had been surprised to find that, in face of all preconceived opinions, they had not settled down into the cool, platonic friendship held up to them as the ultimate good of all wedded pairs, but were still honestly and sincerely in love with each other. Yet, in spite of this fact, there had lately been a certain strain. After all the first things are over—the first year, which is seldom the crucial one in spite of its conventional aspect in that light; after the first boy, and the first girl, and the first venture at housekeeping in the suburbs—there comes a long course of secondary living that tugs with its chain at character and sometimes pulls it sharply from its stanchions. Mrs. Waring greeted her husband that night with a countenance of soulful meaning, and eyes that were uplifted to his in a fervid solemnity that ought to have warned any man of peril ahead. She had a delightful sensation that their most commonplace utterances were fraught with repressed feeling, and when he finally said to her, after dinner, as they sat by the little wood fire together, “I’ve a surprise for you, Doll,” her heart gave a joyous bound, and she felt how truly he had justified her thought of him. “What is it, Henry?” “Mother and Aunt Eliza and Mary Appleton and Nan are coming here to lunch day after to-morrow—Thursday. Of course I said you’d be delighted. It’s all right, isn’t it?” “Coming on Thursday!” “Yes. That isn’t a washing day or a cleaning day, is it?” “No.” Mr. Waring looked confounded. “You’ve spoken so many times of their not coming out in the whole year we’ve lived here, I thought you’d be glad, Doll.” “Henry, why do you never call me Ethel any more? You used to say it was the most beautiful name in the world, and now you seem to forget that I have any name. Oh, if you knew how sick I get of always being called Doll! Such a horrid, common-sounding thing!” “Why, Doll—” “There it is again!” “Ethel, my dear girl, don’t cry. If I had had the dimmest idea—I seem always fated to do the wrong thing lately. Why can’t you tell me sometimes what you’re driving at? If you don’t want my mother and the girls, just say so. I can send them word to-morrow, and—” “If you do!” Mrs. Waring stood up tragically with one hand on her husband’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t have such a thing happen for worlds.” She gave a little gasp of horror at the thought. “But, oh, Henry, you nearly kill me sometimes! No, if you don’t know why this time, I shall not tell you again.” She leaned her head against her husband as if exhausted, and submitted to be drawn down beside him once more. “You never think of me any more.” “But I do think of you, sweetheart.” He patted her head persuasively. “Lots of times, when you don’t know it. If you’d only tell me what you want, dear. I’m such a bad guesser. And I know you really do wish to see my mother and show her the children.” “It’s the fourth time she has sent word that she was coming,” said his wife pensively. She was already forecasting the plan of action to be pursued in making ready for the expected guests. When you are a young housekeeper with infants and only a nurse-maid besides the cook, a day’s company means the revolutionizing of the entire domestic machinery. In the city people carelessly come and go, and the household of the entertainer is put to no special preparation for them, but it is an unwritten law in the country that before the advent of the seldom guest “to spend the day” the entire domicile must be swept and garnished from top to bottom. As Ethel Waring rubbed and polished and dusted she could but remember that she had gone through the process of cleaning three times before for Henry’s mother, who had always hitherto disappointed her. She prided herself on being really fond of her mother-in-law, and his sister Nan had been her particular friend, but Aunt Eliza and Mary Appleton were the kind of people—well, the kind of people that belonged to her husband’s family, and they always saw everything around the house. She cleaned now for the fourth time magnanimously. Since she had moved into the country, and went to and from the city two or three times a week, it had seemed odd to have her friends and relatives look upon the half-hour’s journey in train and ferry-boat as a mighty undertaking, to be planned for weeks ahead; and although she had been in her cottage over a year, she had not yet become used to this point of view, and still expected people to come after they had promised to. There was something grimly sacrificial in her preparations now that upheld her in her disappointment; her husband could not remember her pleasure, but she was working her fingers off for his people. Yes, she had nothing to look forward to but neglect—and the worst of it was that he would not even know that he was neglecting her. Perhaps, however, he did remember after all. She watched every word and gesture of his up to the very morning of their anniversary. He was so happy and merry and affectionate in his efforts to win her to smiles that she could hardly withstand the infectiousness of it. But she felt after his cheerful good-by as if the tragedy of her future years had begun. There was, indeed, no time for the luxury of quiet wretchedness. The two children had to be bathed and put to bed for the morning nap, which both she and Beesy prayed might be a long one, so that the last clearing up might be done, and the table set, and the salad-dressing made, and the cream whipped for the jelly, and she herself dressed and in the drawing-room before twelve o’clock. There was the usual panic when the butcher was late with the chickens, and the discovery was made that the green grocer had not brought what was ordered, and the usual hurried sending forth of Beesy to the village at the last moment for the missing lettuce, only to be told that “there was none in town this day”—a fact that smites the suburban housekeeper like a blow. But finally everything was ready, the table set to perfection, the drawing-room curtains drawn at their most effective angle, the logs burning on the andirons, the chairs set most cozily, and the vase of jonquils with their long, green stalks showing through the clear glass, giving a lovely brightness to the room in their hint of approaching spring. The babies, sweet and fresh, in the whitest of frocks, and hair curled in little damp rings, ran up and down and prattled beside the charmingly dressed, pretty mother, who sat with her embroidery in hand and who could not help feeling somewhat of a glow of satisfaction through her sadness. But after Harry had peeped out from the curtains some twenty times to see if grandmamma was coming, and little Marjorie had fallen down and raised a large bump on her forehead, and the one-o’clock train had come in, there was a certain change in the situation. The cook sent up word should she put on the oysters, and Mrs. Waring answered no, to wait until the next train, although that did not arrive until two o’clock. She pretended that her guests had missed the earlier train, but in her soul she felt the cold chill of certainty that they would not come. As she sat eating her luncheon afterward in solitary state, and wishing that she knew any of her neighbors well enough to ask them to join her, she received a belated telegram from her husband: “Nan says party postponed; Aunt Eliza has headache.” She read it, and cast it from her scornfully. And this was her wedding-day, passed in unnecessary work, futile preparation for people who didn’t care a scrap for her! Oh, if she had only been going in town that afternoon, as she had dreamed of doing, to have a little dinner with Henry at the Waldorf, or Sherry’s, or the St. Denis even—and go to a play afterward—she didn’t care where—and have just their own little happy foolish time over it all! She had hardly been anywhere since little Marjorie was born. She was surprised to have a caller in the afternoon, a Mrs. Livermore. The visitor was a large, stout woman with very blond hair, who lived on the opposite corner. She was dressed in a magnificently florid style, and sat in the little drawing-room a large mass of purple cloth and fur and gleaming jet spangles, surmounted by curving plumes, that quite dwarfed Mrs. Waring’s slender elegance. She apologized profusely for not having called before, as illness had prevented her doing so, and sailed at once smoothly off into a sea of medical terms, giving such an intimate and minute account of the many diseases that had ravaged her that poor Mrs. Waring paled. The one bright spot in her existence seemed to have been her husband, whom she described as the most untiring of nurses. “I really didn’t know whether I’d find you at home this afternoon or not,” she said. “Your nurse-girl, Beesy, told my cook that this was the anniversary of your wedding. Willie and I always used to go off somewhere for a little treat, but since I’ve been such an invalid I’ve had to stay at home. But he never forgets. What do you think, Mrs. Waring, every Saturday since our marriage, fourteen years ago, he has brought me home a box of flowers! He always says, ‘Here are your roses, Baby’—that’s his pet name for me. I don’t know what I’d do if Willie wasn’t so attentive.” “Indeed,” said Mrs. Waring. On her return to the nursery she took occasion to reprove Beesy for gossiping. Beesy was loud in extenuation. In a cottage one is thrown in rather close companionship with one’s nurse-maid. “Ah, I never said but two words to Ellen; but Mrs. Livermore—there’s nothing she doesn’t find out. And the way she and Mr. Livermore quar’ls!” “Why, she says he is so devoted to her,” said Mrs. Waring incautiously. “He brings her flowers every week.” She sighed as she thought of the husband who did not bring them once a year. “Him! Ah, ma’am, Ellen says they fights like cat and dog, and ’twas only a week ago a-Monday the plates was flyin’ that thick in the dinin’-room, Ellen she dassent put her head in at the door to take away the meat. Ellen says ’twould have curdled y’r blood to hear ’em. The neighbors have complained of ’em in the court. He drinks terrible!” “You must not tell me these things, Beesy,” said Mrs. Waring with dignity. “I do not wish to hear them. Come, Marjorie, sweetest, play pat-a-cake with mamma—this way, baby darling. Oh, Beesy, there’s the bell again!” This time it was a neighbor whom Mrs. Waring had met before and rather liked, a gentle, faded, sympathetic woman who had admired the children. Mrs. Waring confided some of the household perplexities to her, and they talked of the village markets and compared notes on prices, gradually reaching even more personal ground. Mrs. Waring finally divulged the fact that this was the anniversary of her wedding, and received her guest’s congratulations. “I had hoped to have celebrated the day in town,” she added impulsively, “but Mr. Waring’s business arrangements have prevented.” “It must be a real disappointment to you,” commented her visitor feelingly. “I often think how lonely you must be, knowing so few people. A man so seldom realizes what a woman’s life is! He goes off into the busy world every morning, little thinking of all she must endure throughout the day. I often watch you look after your husband when he has left you in the morning; you look so longingly, dear. I said to Mr. Morris just the other day, ‘I do wish Mr. Waring would look back just once at that sweet young wife of his.’ Mr. Morris always turns at the corner and waves his hand to me; perhaps you’ve seen him—dear fellow!” Mrs. Waring cooled suddenly toward this too sympathetic visitor, who soon left, but the words had left a secret sting. Her voice had a tragic sound when she told Beesy that she would order her meat henceforth from Einstein, as Mrs. Morris said that his prices were lower than O’Reilly’s. “Mrs. Morris, ma’am!” caroled Beesy. “Ah, ma’am, you wouldn’t be after eatin’ the kind of stuff she does. It’s not a roast of beef that does be going in at that house from one week’s end to another—nothin’ but little weenty scraps that wouldn’t keep a dog alive. Mr. Morris, poor man, he’s that thin and wake. Oh, ’tis she has all the money, and she keeps him that close! Ellen says ’tis only a quart of milk goes to them for five days, and nobbut one shovelful of coal allowed to be put on the furnace at a time, and him with the cough that’s tearing the heart out of him! Ellen says—” “That will do, Beesy,” said Mrs. Waring severely. The gossip of servants, the trivial conversation and fulsome pity of vulgar neighbors, was this all that was left to her? She went downstairs again, and sat in the drawing-room, inside of the window curtains, and wept. The gathering dusk seemed to prefigure the gloom that was to encompass her future years. If people only wouldn’t pity her she might be able to live; the children would love her at any rate. Six years ago how happy she was, how dear his eyes looked when he gave her that first married kiss! She could smell even now the fragrance of the bride roses that she had held. She heard the patter of the children’s feet overhead, and tried to wipe away the blinding tears. A quick footstep on the walk outside startled her, and the gate slammed to with a loud noise. Could it be possible? Her husband was running up the piazza steps with something white in his hand—an enormous bunch of white roses. Another moment and he was by her side, beaming down at her. Oh, how handsome he was! “How soon can you get on your things, Doll? I’ve tickets for the opera to-night—‘Romeo and Juliet’—Emma Eames and Jean de Reszke—does that suit you?” “Oh, Henry!” “I’ve brought some flowers, and we’ll make a lark of it. I’ve ordered a cab from the station to be here in twenty minutes, and we’ll have to dress and get a bite, too, if we can. I wanted to come out earlier, but I wasn’t certain about the tickets until the last moment. We’ll have a little supper after the opera, and take the one-ten out. What do you say to that?” “Oh, Henry! I thought you had forgotten, I thought—” But there was no time to talk. Could she ever forget that delightful, bewildering, hurried twenty minutes? She spent five of them in trimming over a hat, to the masculine creature’s amazement, her deft fingers pulling off bows and feathers and sticking them on again with lightning rapidity. She ate a sandwich in the intervals of dressing and giving directions to Beesy about the babies. When they finally whirled off in the stuffy little cab to the railway station they were like a couple of children in their happy abandonment to the expected pleasure. The opera—had they ever gone to any opera before? How inconceivably beautiful and brilliant the house, the lights, the gay assemblage to the erstwhile dwellers of the suburbs! Together they scanned the emblazoned women in the boxes, and pointed out to each other those whom they recognized. And when Gounod’s delicious music stole into their hearts, and Mrs. Waring sat with her bride roses in one hand, and the other tucked secretly into Henry’s, under cover of her wrap, was ever any woman happier? Had ever any girl a lover more devoted or more bubbling over with fun? Romeo and Juliet—what were they to a real married couple of to-day? Then the supper afterward with the gay throng at the Waldorf—the reckless disregard of the midnight train—could there be dizzier heights of revelry? It was when they stood outside on the ferry-boat coming home that Mrs. Waring spoke at last the thought that had lain nearest her heart all the evening. They were out alone in front, the cold night wind blew refreshingly, the dark water plashed around them, and across its black expanse the colored lights gleamed faintly from the New Jersey shore. Mrs. Waring leaned a little closer to her husband as they stood there in the night and the darkness. “Dear,” she murmured, “I can’t tell you how lovely the evening has been; but you know what has made it so to me, that has been making me so very happy? The opera and the supper would have been nothing without it. Darling, it’s because you thought of it all yourself.” A sudden tension in the arm on which she leaned startled Mrs. Waring. She bent forward to look up into her husband’s face, with a swift suspicion. “Henry?” “Well, Doll.” “Didn’t you think of it, yourself?” “Nobody could have enjoyed our little fun together more than I have, you know that, Doll; and nobody could want to make you any happier than I do. What’s the use of picking the whole thing to pieces now and spoiling it all?” “Henry Waring, you haven’t answered me. Did you remember that this was our wedding-day, or did you not? Who was it told you to take me out to-night?” “If you will not tell me these things yourself, Ethel—it’s mean of you, dear; it puts me at a disadvantage when you remember and I don’t. Heaven knows that I oughtn’t to forget anything that would give pleasure to you—that’s true; but I’m not mean on purpose, and you are. You know—But don’t let’s quarrel to-night.” “Quarrel!” Mrs. Waring lifted her head indignantly. “As if I wanted to quarrel! Who was it told you, Henry?” “Well, Ethel, if you must know, Nan was in the office to-day to say they couldn’t come, and she—” “Nan—your sister Nan!” Like a flash Mrs. Waring saw it all. She knew Nan’s impetuous, whole-souled way; but—One of Henry’s family! Life could have no further joy for her. She looked at him furtively as he stood beside her gazing ruefully out across the water. Were they quarreling—would they get to throwing plates after a while? His attitude was ludicrously dejected. In spite of herself and the tears that had been ready to well up in her eyes the moment before, a sudden sense of the absurdity of it all came over her, and she broke into a refreshingly unexpected peal of laughter. Her husband stared, and then laughed, too, in delighted relief. “Ah,” she murmured, with her cheek against his coat sleeve, “I suppose I’ll just have to love you as you are!” “If you only would, dear,” he assented humbly. The lights on the New Jersey shore shone brighter and brighter now, yellow and red and green, casting their reflection on the black lapping water below. The boat was nearing the dock. All unbidden with the last words had come a deep joy, a thrill from heart to heart, wonderful in its illuminating power. The warm silence that followed was an instant benediction to unrecorded vows. The chains clanked in the dock. As they stepped across the gangplank toward the dark, waiting lines of cars beyond, he pressed her hand in his as he bent over her, and whispered in tender playfulness, “Shall we take the train for Washington or Philadelphia?” <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c000' /></div> <div class='nf-center-c0'> <div class='nf-center c002'> <div>A Good Dinner</div> </div></div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c002' /></div> <div class='chapter'> <h2 id='ch02' class='c003'>A Good Dinner</h2></div> <div class='c009'> <ANTIMG class='drop-capi' src='images/dct.jpg' width-obs='40' height-obs='45' alt='' /></div> “THE butcher, ma’am.” Mrs. Chauncey Callender put down her half-eaten muffin with a gesture of despair, as she looked at the tidy, white-capped maid before her. “Why does he always come at breakfast time? As if it is possible to know then what one is going to want for the day! I’m sure I can’t think of a thing! Chauncey, you might help me. I get so tired planning the meals, and it’s very hard to order for a small family. What would you like for dinner to-night?” “Roast peacock,” said Mr. Callender. “Would you like a beefsteak?” His wife patiently ignored the last remark, which as a stock answer to a stock question had even ceased to irritate her. “I shouldn’t mind having it.” “‘Shouldn’t mind having it!’ I’m asking you if you want it.” “I want anything that you do.” “Oh, Chauncey! You’ll drive me crazy-mad some day. I wish you’d express a preference; it would make it so much easier for me. Would you like chicken? I know that Cadmus has poultry on Wednesday.” Mr. Callender’s expression became suddenly tinged with melancholy. Although he was now metropolitan in appearance, manner, and habit, his early existence had been spent upon a farm, where the killing and eating-up of chickens at certain periods of the year was an economic process, compulsory upon the household. A momentary sickness and distaste of life seemed evolved from the recollection as he answered, “I don’t seem to care much for chicken.” “You never do, and I am so fond of it. Well, chops then. Would you like breaded chops?” “We have those almost every night, don’t we?” returned Mr. Callender briskly, under the impression that he was being agreeable. “When in doubt, have chops. Oh, yes, I like them well enough, when they’re not raw in the middle, like the last. But get what you want yourself, Cynthia, it really doesn’t make any difference to me.” “That’s so like you! Why don’t you tell me at the time when things are wrong, instead of coming out with it like this, afterwards? Why didn’t you say the chops were raw? Mine were all right.” She regarded him with affectionate exasperation, her wrath tempered by a guilty consciousness that there had been undue sameness in the meals lately. “If I were like some wives—” “The butcher, ma’am—he’s waiting,” interposed the maid apologetically. “Tell him I’ll come down to the village myself and give the order,” said Mrs. Callender with dignity. “I’ll surprise you with a really good dinner to-night, something out of the ordinary. We’ll have a dinner party for ourselves.” “All right,” said Mr. Callender with amiable alacrity, feeling relieved of all individual responsibility. “Let’s, as the children say. I’ll bring out a bottle of wine and some flowers for you, to carry out the idea,” he added, with a magnificent cooperation in her plans that would have made up for all his previous shortcomings if he had not suddenly remarked as he was going out of the door, “By the way, we may have company to-night, but I’m not sure. I nearly forgot to mention it.” “Chauncey!” “A couple of Englishmen, over here to interview the firm; nice fellows, you’d like ’em. They may give us a big order if things are satisfactory, and we treat ’em right.” “Chauncey!” But he was gone for his train. Mrs. Callender looked horrified, and then laughed. It was a way she had. His unexpectedness was always a secret delight to her, although she outwardly bemoaned it; it gave her a gambler’s interest in existence, and also a pleasing sense of masculine masterfulness. She was wont to thank Heaven that she was married to a man. At no time would Mrs. Callender have been averse to the society of two nice men for dinner. She decided at once to expect them permanently, and accordingly took her cookery books in for consultation with the kitchen divinity, an elderly competent woman, newly installed, whose look of aggrieved patience had been gained from a peripatetic experience of young and erratic housewives. This being swooped a pile of dish-towels off in one arm from the back of a chair as Mrs. Callender drew it forward, swooped a cluster of dishes from the table, and with still another swoop wiped the white oil-cloth cover clean enough for the books to be deposited on it. She then stood, her hands in front of her, rigidly attentive to the words of fate. There was, however, an innate joyousness about young Mrs. Callender which bubbled forth at all times and in all places, carrying preconceived opinions with it. The countenance of the cook insensibly relaxed as Mrs. Callender beamingly said, “I’m going to have a good dinner to-night, Catherine, and I want you to help me.” “Yes, ma’am—for how many?” “Only four. I’ve decided on some of the things I want. You know how to make cream of celery soup?” “Yes, ma’am.” “And boiled salmon with white sauce—you made the last very nicely; and cucumbers dressed with oil and vinegar—” “You’ll have to order the oil, ma’am, as we’re just out of it.” “Yes, I will; of course, we’ll need it for the mayonnaise also. I’ll have tomato salad, and I wish you would make some cheese wafers to go with it like those we had when you came last week. They were awfully good. And I want just a few rhubarb tarts and a frozen chocolate pudding for dessert—here’s the receipt for that—with whipped cream. And you might make a small cake of any kind that’s easy, Catherine.” “What kind of meat is it to be, ma’am?” “Spring lamb,” said Mrs. Callender with all the solemnity which such a resolution demanded. To buy real spring lamb in the suburbs in early April puts one on a level with a moneyed aristocracy. “Spring lamb with mint sauce and fresh peas and new potatoes, if I can get them,” she added reverently as a saving clause. She blessed her lucky stars that it was not a Friday, when, as every suburban dweller knows, there are only a few wilted strands of green to be seen in the vegetable bins, and nothing but cold round potatoes and onions and turnips are untemptingly offered for sale. “And oh, Catherine,” concluded Mrs. Callender, “we’ll have coffee, of course; and I wish you’d make some of those lovely little rolls of yours—that is, if you have time,” she generously conceded. “I’ll put the bit of ironing I have on hand away until to-morrow,” said Catherine with the resignation of necessity. “And you’ll make out a list, ma’am, if you please, of the things we do be needing. I’d have to get at the cake and the rolls this morning. There’s not a thing in the house to-day to start on. We’ve no eggs, nor cheese, nor cream, nor chocolate, and not enough butter, and no rock salt for the freezing, and there’s no fruit either, if you want that.” “Oh, yes, certainly! It’s well that you reminded me.” Mrs. Callender beamed anew upon her help. “I’m going out to-day to luncheon, so you and Nelly will have all the time there is. I’ll go and see about the ordering at once as soon as I have given her directions about the table. I want everything to look as pretty as possible. Mr. Callender is going to bring me some lovely flowers for the center of it,” she concluded with a little flourish. In the little rounds of a suburban town any incident is an event. Mrs. Callender felt that the day had become one of real importance. She let her fancy play around the two Englishmen and her good dinner and her own toilet until she was in a very pleasurable state of excitement. And to be going out to luncheon besides! The latter, however, was not a real function, but only the usual concomitant of a French reading which she held every week with a friend—still, it was quite like having two invitations in one day. It happened that another friend stopped in casually that morning to see Mrs. Callender, on her way home from marketing, and from her she gained the pleasing knowledge that all the viands on which she had set her reckless fancy were really to be had that day—even to the fresh peas, whose pods might almost have contained small balls of gold, so stupendous was the price asked for them. But when she finally went upstairs to dress she found, to her consternation, that it was already half-past eleven, and not a thing ordered yet! <hr class='c010' /> Every moment now was precious. She concentrated all her attention, and sitting down by her desk took up a sheet of blue paper and wrote down rapidly on it a list of all her wants—one for the grocer, and one for the butcher. Then Fortune favoring her with the sight of little Jack Rand across the street, on his bicycle, she called him over and confided the list to his care. “And be sure that they both read the order carefully,” she said. “Take it on to Cadmus when O’Reilly is through with it. You will not need to tell them anything except that they are to send the things at once.” “Yes,” said Jacky, departing with swift-revolving red legs. As she saw the blue paper in his hands a strange reluctance seemed to hover over her, she couldn’t tell why, as if it were somehow wrong to write lists on blue paper. Perhaps it was extravagant. There was a load off her mind when Jack returned to affirm the faithful performance of his errand, before she started out for the luncheon. “‘They had all the things and they’ll send them right up, they promised.’” She repeated his words with a glow of satisfaction. There was no French after luncheon that day. Her friend had tickets for the private view of some pictures in town and persuaded Mrs. Callender to accompany her, under the pledge of taking an early train back. As a matter of fact, the six o’clock bells were ringing before Mrs. Callender had started to walk home from the station, feeling thoroughly guilty as she thought of her long defection from the affairs of the household on such a day, though it was quite likely that Chauncey’s friends would not come. The blue paper returned to her mind, unpleasantly, mysteriously. She hastened into the kitchen, to be confronted by a scene of spotless order, a brilliant fire in the range shedding a red glow over the hearth, and the white-aproned cook sitting in front of it with her hands folded and a stony glare in her eyes. “How is the dinner getting on?” asked Mrs. Callender nervously. “There ain’t no dinner,” said the cook. “No dinner! What do you mean, Catherine?” “Not the sign of a thing has come this whole blessed day, ma’am; and me a-waitin’ here with my ironin’ half done, in the middle of the week. Not an egg nor a potato is there in the house, even.” Mrs. Callender stopped, confounded. The shops were all closed at that hour. “Why, I saw Jack Rand myself, after he had given the order!” she exclaimed, and then—she knew: like lightning her association with the sheet of blue writing-paper was revealed to her; on the other side of it was written the address of a newcomer who lived across the track at the other end of the village. The marketing had gone there! “Well, I never heard of such a thing!” she commented blankly, and, as usual, laughed. It was but a brief ten minutes later that her husband was presenting his guests to her—they had come! She had been but hoping against hope that they would not. “Cynthia, I want to introduce Mr. Warburton and Mr. Kennard. I have persuaded them to dine with us to-night.” “It was awfully good of your husband to invite us,” said Mr. Warburton, who was the elder, pleasant-faced and gray-haired, with the refined accent and accustomed manner of a gentleman. “I hope we’ll not inconvenience you, Mrs. Callender.” “No, I hope we’re not inconveniencing you,” murmured the other, who looked nineteen and was twenty-nine, who spoke from somewhere down in his throat and blushed with every word. “Not in the least,” said Mrs. Callender, immediately and intrepidly rising to the occasion. She was a stanchly hospitable little soul, and to have refused a welcome to the guests foisted on her would have been as impossible to her at any time as to the proverbial Arab. There was an inscrutable defiance in her eyes, however, when they met her husband’s, which puzzled him uncomfortably. “Mr. Nichols wished us all to dine at the Waldorf-Astoria,” he explained—Mr. Nichols was the senior partner of the firm. “But I found, accidentally, that these gentlemen were extremely tired of living at hotels, and longed for a little home-like dinner, by way of variety.” “We have been so much in your big hotels,” said Mr. Warburton apologetically. “It makes one very dull, after a time, I think. You can’t imagine, Mrs. Callender, our joy when Mr. Callender so kindly offered to take us in. It’s so uncommonly jolly of you both to treat us in this way.” “I remembered that you said we were to have a particularly good dinner to-night, so I didn’t telegraph you when I found that they could come,” said Mr. Callender when the party had separated to dress and he and his wife were alone in their own room. “Nichols is very anxious to have them pleased—I told you that before, I think. They’re looking at machines, and if they take the London agency for us it will make a big difference. Why on earth did you look at me in that way downstairs? Is there anything wrong?” “No; nothing is wrong,” said his wife ironically, “except that we haven’t any dinner—to speak of. Oh, dear, if you make me laugh I’ll never be able to hook this gown. No, it isn’t the least bit tight, it’s almost too loose, in fact—but I can’t hook it when I laugh. Chauncey, the order went wrong in some way, this morning, and the marketing never came at all. Just stand and take that in. If you had only helped me at breakfast when I asked you to, it wouldn’t have happened. I was away all the afternoon, and, of course, Catherine never sent for anything—just sat and waited. There’s nothing in the house but some cans of mock-turtle soup and tomatoes, and one can of corned beef, and a small one of plum pudding. Catherine is going to warm the beef in the tomatoes, and make a sauce for the pudding. I’d die before I’d apologize beforehand to those men; they’d never forgive themselves for coming.” Mr. Callender whistled. “Good gracious! And to think we’ve come from the Waldorf-Astoria for this! But I don’t see yet how it happened,” he incautiously objected. “I should think you could have managed better in some way, Cynthia.” “Oh, you do, do you?” said Mrs. Callender. “Well, I don’t. If you had the housekeeping to look after in a place like this, Chauncey, where you never can get anything you want, and there’s not a shop in the place open after half-past six—” “Yes, I know, I know,” interposed Mr. Callender hastily, dodging the subject with the ease of long practice. “But couldn’t you knock up an omelet, or a Welsh rarebit, or some sort of a side dish? Couldn’t you borrow something?” Mrs. Callender shook her head tragically. “Nelly went to the Appletons and the Warings to see if she couldn’t get some eggs, but they had only one left at each place. It’s no use, Chauncey, we’ve got to do the best we can. I’ve put on my prettiest gown, and—did you bring the wine?” “Yes, and it’s good,” said Mr. Callender with returning cheerfulness. He was glad now that he had paid a price for it that was too large ever to be divulged to his wife. “And the flowers?” “What flowers?” “The flowers you said you were going to bring me.” “My dear girl, I never thought of them from that moment to this.” “Then we have nothing for the center of the table but that old crumpled-up fernery,” she paused tragically. “Not even fruit! There’s another plank gone.” “Never mind, you’re the whole platform,” said her husband with jollity. “You always manage some way.” “I have to,” she pleaded, looking at herself approvingly in the glass. The jetted black dress set off her white neck and arms very well. She never considered herself pretty, but she had an infectious smile, brilliant teeth, and those very light gray eyes that look black under excitement. She cast a provocative glance at her husband, with mock coquetry, and then deftly avoided his outstretched arm. “I’ve no time for you,” she said saucily. “But for goodness’ sake, Chauncey, rise to the occasion all you can!” The two irreproachably attired men who made their entrance into the drawing-room looked at her in a manner which she certainly found encouraging. She concluded that the chances were good for making them enjoy the dinner, irrespective of its quality. She was enjoying their unspoken admiration, and the conversation also, when Mr. Warburton returned to the subject of their invitation. “It’s so good of you to have us without any notice—so uncommonly jolly for us. We’ve been so tired of hotel cooking, after the steamer.” “Yes,” chimed in the other, “it grew to be almost as tiresome to us as the beastly tinned food we lived on when we were in Africa.” “Oh, have you been in Africa lately?” asked Mrs. Callender with composure, although she and her husband felt the piercing of a mortal dart, and did not dare to look at each other. “Yes, Kennard and I were on an exploring expedition last year, accidentally; it’s quite a long tale—but we lived on tinned soups and meats, and even plum pudding—fancy it in the hot climate!—until even the smell of them sickened us. We’ve not been able to touch a bit of tinned food since.” “Canned things—or tinned, as you call them—are very useful in emergencies,” said Mr. Callender with idiotic solemnity. “You know you have to eat them sometimes—when you can’t—help yourself, you know. Oh, yes, in emergencies tinned things are very useful—if you like ’em.” Mr. Kennard laughed heartily, as if at some delicate joke. “Ah, yes, yes, if you like them—if you like them, Warburton, yes—mind that, yes!” “Excuse me for a moment,” said Mrs. Callender with graceful deliberation, sweeping slowly out of the room, and as soon as the door had closed behind her rushing into the kitchen wildly. The fortunes of war were against her, but win the victory she would. There had to be some way out of this! “Don’t dish up a thing, Catherine,” she ordered breathlessly. “It is no use; the gentlemen never eat anything canned. I’ve got to think up something else.” Daunted by the grim face of the insulted cook, she turned appealingly to the waitress, a young and venturesome person, as woman to woman. “You must know of something I could do, Nelly!” “The Warings, ma’am—” “You told me you’d been there, and that everything they had was cooked for their own dinner.” The eyes of Irish Nelly sparkled. “That’s just it, ma’am. Mr. Waring’s home late to-night, and they’re only just now sitting down to the soup. I seen it going in through the window. If you—” she stopped tentatively. “Well, well—say it!” “Sure, they’d loan you the whole dinner, ma’am, if you asked it.” The light of kindred inspiration kindled in Mrs. Callender. The neighborhood was practically a joint-stock food company, where maids might be seen flitting through the back yard at any hour of the day or evening, with the spoils of the borrower. But an entire dinner! The magnificence of the scheme took Mrs. Callender’s breath away. “You’d give the lend of it yourself, ma’am,” said Nelly impartially. Mrs. Callender gasped—and assented. “Come!” she said, and followed by the maid, dashed out of the kitchen door, down the back piazza steps, and then up again on the piazza of the adjoining house. The people seated at the table in the dining-room looked up at the long window, amazed to see Mrs. Callender gesticulating insanely at them from without. “Don’t help any more of that soup,” she called insistently. “Don’t help any more of it—wait till I get in.” The window opened from the inside, and she hurled herself into the room. “No, no!” she answered the look on their horror-struck faces, “it’s not poisoned. I don’t mean that—it’s all right; but I want it myself, I want your dinner. Oh, will you let me take it home with me?” “My dear Mrs. Callender,” expostulated Mr. Waring in a quieting voice, rising cautiously. “No, I’m not crazy! I mean just what I say. My husband has brought home company, and we had only a canned dinner, and they can’t eat it because they’ve been in Africa—and, oh, I can’t explain. And it’s so important to treat them well, and—oh, you dear thing!” For Mrs. Waring had handed the soup to Nelly and was already giving orders to her own maid. “Don’t say another word,” she commanded rapidly, with a woman’s perception grasping the situation. “Send us over just what you have in exchange. We have only a plain home dinner—roast beef, vegetables, macaroni, cottage pudding—you can put the things in your oven again. Henry, carry over this roast, will you? Don’t make any noise, any of you.” “I’ll take the potatoes,” said Mrs. Callender fervently, but as she climbed her own piazza steps once more and saw the ghostly procession that came and went stealthily bearing dishes, her knees suddenly bent under her, and she leaned against one of the piazza posts, too weak from laughter to move. “Take care, you’ll drop that dish,” said Mr. Waring interposing a dexterous arm, while he endeavored to balance the roast on the railing. “Mrs. Callender, don’t sit down on the piazza; get up. You’ll have me laughing, too, if you don’t stop, and I’ve got to take this in and go back for plates.” “We have plates,” said Mrs. Callender, strangling. “Oh, Mr. Waring, we have plates—we have something. Oh, Mr. Waring, go and leave me, go and leave me! I’ll never be able to stand up.” “Hello, what’s the matter?” Mr. Callender, with an excited whisper, came peering out into the semi-darkness. “That back door keeps letting in an infernal draught. What on earth are you and Waring doing out here, Cynthia? And you without a thing over your shoulders! I call that mean, having a good time out here by yourselves, and leaving me inside to do all the entertaining. Don’t you know that we’re waiting for dinner, and it’s after half-past seven o’clock?” His ill-used expression was the last straw. Mr. Waring rocked and reeled with his platter, while the roast performed an obligato movement. “Oh!” moaned Mrs. Callender as her husband finally assisted her to an erect position, and offendedly took up the dish of potatoes. “Don’t say a word, don’t ask me a thing; you’ll never in this world know all I’ve gone through in the last hour—you couldn’t take it in. But I’ve got the dinner—your Englishmen are provided for—your future is assured, and all that we have to do now is to go in and eat—and eat—and eat.” <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c000' /></div> <div class='nf-center-c0'> <div class='nf-center c002'> <div>The Strength of Ten</div> </div></div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c002' /></div> <div class='chapter'> <h2 id='ch03' class='c003'>The Strength of Ten</h2></div> <div class='c009'> <ANTIMG class='drop-capi' src='images/dca.jpg' width-obs='35' height-obs='41' alt='' /></div> AFTER plunging from the light and comfort of the heated train to the track, just below the little Gothic station of Braewood, John Atterbury had well-nigh half a mile to walk before reaching his suburban residence. The way led in part across untilled fields from the inclosures of which bars had been removed to facilitate the passage of daily commuters. In the slant sunlight of a summer evening, with insects chirping in the dusty grass by the side of the worn foot-path, and a fresh breeze from outlying meadows scented with clover and milkweed to fan the brow of the toiler, this walk served as a pleasant approach, in the company of conversational friends, to further country refreshment—the hammock on the verandah, the intimate society of rosebushes, or a little putting on the sward at the back of the house. But on a night in January, with the thermometer five degrees above zero, and a fierce wind blowing out of illimitable blackness, life in the suburbs demanded strenuous will-power. Men put their heads down and ran in silence, with overcoats tightly buttoned, and hands beating together, their footsteps sounding heavily on the frozen earth. The wind cut John Atterbury’s strong lungs like a knife, and his feet seemed to stumble against the cold as if it had been a visible barrier. Moreover, he bore within him no lightness of spirit, but all the chill and fatigue of a hard day spent in business transactions that have come to nothing, added to the bitter knowledge of an immediate and pressing need for money in the common uses of life. He had a numbing sense of defeat, and worse than that, of inadequacy. If the man whom he was to meet to-night did not bring relief, he knew not where to turn. His tired brain revolved subconsciously futile plans for the morrow, while his one overmastering desire was to reach the light and warmth and rest of the cozy house that sheltered his young wife and three small children. With a sharp pang of disappointment, he perceived, as he turned the corner, that the front of the villa was in darkness except for a dim light in his wife’s room, and as he opened the door with his latch key no gush of hot air greeted him, but a stony coldness. He knocked against a go-cart in the square hall on his way to light the gas, and his wife’s voice called down softly, “Is that you, dear?” “Yes. Are you ill?” “No, only resting. Aren’t you coming up?” “In a moment.” He divested himself of his hat and coat, and stood absently trying to warm his hands at the frozen register, and then with a long sigh, prepared to take up this end of the domestic burden with the patient use of habit. He went upstairs with a firm and even step, treading more lightly as he passed the nursery door where the baby was going to sleep under the charge of Katy, the nurse-maid, and entered the room where his wife lay on the lounge in a crimson dressing-gown, a flowered coverlet thrown over her feet, her dark hair lying in rings on the white pillow, and her large, dark eyes turned expectantly toward him. The comfort of the pretty, luxurious room, which gave no hint of this new poverty in its fittings, was eclipsed by the icy chill that was like an opaque atmosphere. The wind outside hurled itself at the house and shook the shutters. Atterbury turned up the gas, and then sat down on the couch by his wife and kissed her. “What’s the matter?” “Nothing but that old pain; it will go over if I lie still—it was my only chance if we are to go out to-night. It’s really better now. I promised Mrs. Harrington faithfully this afternoon that we’d come, in spite of the weather. Do you mind?” “No. Is Harrington home yet?” “She expects him back this evening. Oh, Jack, Bridget was sent for this morning before the breakfast things were cleared away. She really didn’t want to go off this time, but that mother of hers—! The children were more troublesome than usual, and had to be taken care of. They’re all asleep now but the baby. I sent them off earlier than usual on account of the cold. Katy is no good around the house, and we’ve had such a day! The furnace—” “I see that it’s out.” “Both fires were out, but the range is going now. The wind was all wrong. We made up the furnace three times, but I couldn’t remember how to turn the dampers; they never seemed to be the right way. There’s a grate fire in the nursery, though.” “The water hasn’t frozen in the pipes, I hope?” There was an ominous sound in his voice. She nodded speechlessly, and looked at him, her eyes large with unshed tears. “Why didn’t you tell me?” He rose for action. “You should have sent for the plumber at once.” “There wasn’t anyone to send, and it was so late when I found it out; he wouldn’t have come until to-morrow, anyway.” There was a certain look in his wife’s face at times which filled Atterbury with extreme tenderness. In the seven years of their wedded life she had explained to him every varying grade of emotion which the sight of him caused her, but there were many things which he had never thought of telling her, or even consciously formulating to himself. He went over to the closet, poured out some cordial in a small glass and brought it to her to drink, watching narrowly until a faint tinge of color relieved the bluish pallor around her mouth. Then he poured out another small glass for himself, and spread the down coverlet more closely over her, frustrating her evident desire to rise. “You lie still.” He passed a heavy, affectionate hand over her forehead, and she rested her cheek against it with a passionate helplessness. “What on earth did you want to do all the work for, to-day? Why didn’t you get the McCaffrey woman? You’ve no business to tire yourself out like this, Agnes. I don’t see how you’re ever going out this evening!” “Oh, I can go, I’m so much better now. I thought—I know that we have so little money—I wanted to economize; other women seem to do such things without any trouble at all.” “Well, we won’t economize that way. Always get what help is necessary.” He spoke with the quick, matter-of-fact decision of a man used to affairs, temporarily regardless of the financial situation, whose cramping iron restrictions could be felt at every turn. “I’ll go down now and start things up!” “Your dinner is in the oven. I’ll send Katy to you as soon as Herbert is asleep. She can’t leave him now, for he crawls over the crib and drops out.” “All right! Don’t you worry, I’ll get it.” He ran downstairs, arrayed for service, and Agnes listened to his receding footsteps, a warm comfort in her heart despite that racking of the bones, as of one “smote hip and thigh,” which comes to the delicately-born with unaccustomed kitchen-work. After some moments—spent, as she guiltily divined, in searching for the coal shovel—the clatter and rattle of the furnace showed that a master hand had taken it in charge. Atterbury stoked and shoveled with every quick sense suddenly concentrated on a deep and hidden care. If anything should happen to his wife—vague, yet awful phrase—if anything should “happen” to his wife! She was not made for struggle; the doctor had told him that before. He knew, none better! how brave, loving, yet sensitive a spirit was housed in that tender and fragile body. If she were to leave him and their little children— No mist came over his eyes at the phantasm, but a sobered keenness of vision gleamed there. There were certain things which it behooved a man to do. He walked over to the coal bins—they were nearly empty. Well, more coal must be ordered at once; he would himself speak about it to Murphy, and make arrangements to pay that last bill—somehow. A catalogue of indebtedness unrolled itself before him, but he gazed at it steadily. The fog-like depression was gone. He felt in his veins the first tingling of that bitter wine of necessity which invigorates the strong spirit. And there was Harrington, at whose house the card party was to be held to-night. He drew a long breath, and his heart beat quicker. He had not told his wife how much he counted on seeing Harrington, but he was sure that she had divined it—nothing else would have taken him out again on such a night. This wealthy and genial neighbor had held out great hopes of furthering one scheme of Atterbury’s in that trip out West from which he had just returned. Atterbury had helped Harrington about his patent, and the latter professed himself eager to repay the service. If Harrington had used his influence—as he could use it—and had got the company to look at the land, why, it was as good as sold. Atterbury knew that it held the very qualities for which they were looking. If the plan were a success, then what had been started first as an attractive “flyer” might prove to be a main dependence when most needed. He felt a little bitterly that the friends on whom he had most counted had failed him. Callender—Nichols—Waring—in their plans there was no room for him. This meeting with Harrington was the crucial point on which the future hung. When Atterbury went back to his wife, warmed with his work, she was standing before the mirror, dressing; a faint, smoky smell arose from the register. The wind was still evidently in the wrong direction for chimneys. An infant’s prattle, mixed with an occasional whimper, came from the nursery. “I’ve wrapped hot cloths around the pipes,” he said cheerfully, “and left a couple of kerosene lamps lighted on the floor near them. We’ll have to take our chances now. What’s this envelope on the mantelpiece?” His face fell. “Another assessment from the Association? That makes the eleventh this month, besides the regular insurance, that was due on the first.” “But you can’t pay it!” She had looked bright when he came in, but now her lips quivered. “Oh, I’ll have to pay that; don’t you worry about it. I tell you, though, Agnes, I’d be worth a good deal more to you dead than I am now.” “Don’t! You know I hate to hear you talk like that. I’d never take your old insurance money.” She grasped him by her two slender, cold hands and tried ineffectually to shake him while he smiled down at her, and then hid her head on his breast, raising it, however, to say, “Did you eat your dinner? I hope that it wasn’t burned.” “I ate—some of it!” “Oh,” she groaned, “and on such a night!” “Never mind, I’m counting on a good hot little supper at Harrington’s. And, Agnes—” having none of the care of the children, he had a habit of intervening at inopportune moments with well-meant suggestions—“just listen to that child! Don’t you think he might go to sleep better if I brought him in here with us for a few moments?” “No,” said his wife. She added afterward, sweetly in token of renewed amity, “He’s such a darling, and he looks more like you every day. He’ll be asleep soon. But I’m sure Gwendolen will have the croup to-night, the house has been so cold.” “Oh, of course,” said Atterbury grimly. By some weird fatality the festive hour abroad was almost inevitably followed by harrowing attendance on one or other of the infants in the long watches of the night. Husband and wife looked at each other and laughed, and then kissed in silence, like two children, in simple accord. It was with many instructions to Katy that the Atterburys finally left the house, instructions that comprehended the dampers, the babies, and the pipes. “I don’t suppose that she will remember a word that we have told her,” said Agnes resignedly. “Well, we are only going three doors away; I’ll run back after a while and see.” “I’m so glad I’m going with you,” she whispered as they walked the few steps, he trying to shield her from the violence of the wind. “Ah, yes,” he jibed, “it’s such a new thing, isn’t it, to be with me! You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” The Harringtons’ house was certainly a change from the one they had left. Delicious warmth radiated from it as the ample doors unclosed to let the guests in; the crimson-shaded lights were reflected on the card tables and the polished floor, and laughing voices greeted the newcomers. “You are late,” said the hostess, who was considered handsome, with heavy black eyebrows, dimples in her white, rounded cheeks, and a petulant expression. She wore a bunch of violets in the belt of her light blue gown. “You are late, but not so late as my husband. I expected him home to dinner, and he hasn’t come yet. It’s the way I’m always treated,” she pouted engagingly; “you other men will have to be very, very nice to me.” She stared with public audacity into the eyes of the man nearest her, and then let her long black lashes sweep her cheek. It pleased her to pose as the attractive young married woman, and by tacit consent the suburban husbands were allowed by their wives to go through the motions of flirting with her. Atterbury settled down to the strain of waiting. The company was composed of couples who saw each other daily, the men on the trains, the women in their small social rounds. Every event that happened in their little circle was common property, to be discussed by all. The evolution of Mrs. Oliver’s black spangled gown, the expensive house which the new doctor was erecting under the auspices of the Building Loan Association, Totty Jenkins’ stirring experiences in the kindergarten, and Mr. Waring’s sudden substitution of the seven-thirty-one morning train for the eight-fourteen, were subjects interspersed with, and of the same calibre, as discussions on the presidential candidate, the last new book, or affairs in Africa. In spite of this pooling of interests, so to speak, the weekly gathering at the houses of different members always took on an aspect of novelty. Everyone dressed for the occasion, and there was usually a good game of cards, and a modest little supper afterwards, and the women met other men besides their husbands, and the men met each other and smoked after supper. The only real variety in the programme was that the simple and hearty friendliness beneath all this was more apparent at some houses than at others. The Harringtons—somewhat new arrivals—were the confessedly rich people of the set, and the entertainments which they gave were characterized with a little more pomp and circumstance. Mrs. Harrington, for all her perfunctory belleship, was a lively and entertaining hostess. Everyone strove to make up to her for Harrington’s absence, and a particularly cordial spirit prevailed. It was always a secret trial to Agnes not to play cards at the same table as her husband in the progressive game, but to-night she did not mind, for his steel-blue eyes met hers in a kind, remembering glance whenever she looked for it, that spoke of a sweet and intimate companionship, with which outside events had nothing to do. In one of the intermissions of the game Atterbury heard Henry Waring say to Nichols, “Did you see the little item in one of the evening papers about that Western Company to whom Harrington sold his patent?” “No, what was it?” asked Nichols. “They’re going to start up the plant at once near some town in Missouri, I’ve forgotten the name—paid fifty thousand for the ground. You see, they required peculiar natural facilities; that’s what’s kept them back so long. It seems a good deal of money to pay for a clay-bank. Of course, Harrington’s in a hurry to start them up; he’ll get a big royalty.” “You are not to talk business,” said Mrs. Harrington’s gay voice. Atterbury felt the room swirl around with him; he knew the name of the town well enough! He had been sure from the first that those barren acres of his held just what the Company was looking for, but he had never dreamed of getting more than ten or fifteen thousand for them. A warm gratitude to Harrington filled him, and then a chill of doubt. The newspaper only chronicled a rumor, not a certainty, for no real sale could take place without his knowledge. He did not know how he played after this, and it was a tremendous relief when the players left the tables and stood or sat in little home-like groups, all talking and laughing at once in a merry tumult. There was in the air that fragrant aroma of newly-made coffee which is so peculiarly convivial in the suburbs, and the absence of Harrington, who was nevertheless considered to be a jolly good fellow, had ceased to be noticed by anyone but Atterbury, when the sound of wheels was heard grating on the driveway outside. He clutched the chair he stood by, although his face was impassive. The hour he had been waiting for was here—Harrington had come. Mrs. Harrington ran into the hall with an exclamation of pleasure, as the door opened, letting in a flood of cold air and a large man heavily wrapped in fur. The listening company heard him say, “What in—time—have you got this crowd here to-night for?” The words were respectable, but the tone cursed. There was a stiffening change in her voice. “Hush! Didn’t you get my letter?” “What letter? No, if I had I wouldn’t have been fool enough to come home for a quiet night’s rest; I might have known I couldn’t get it here. You can’t live without a lot of people cackling around you.” “Go to bed, then. Nobody wants to see you!” It was the quick thrust of a rapier. “Much rest I’d get with that mob in there.” The woman flashed back at him with a white heat, “You have your men’s dinners and your wine parties—and you grudge me a little pleasure like this! It’s like you; it’s like—” For very shame’s sake, the guests were hurriedly talking to cover the sounds of strife. “Harrington’s trip evidently hasn’t done him much good,” said Nichols to Atterbury. “I doubt his success. He has too many large schemes on hand; what he makes in one way he uses to float something else.” “It’s possible,” said Atterbury thoughtfully. “It doesn’t do to take things like that; if you lose your grip you can’t get on.” “That’s what I’m finding out now. I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Nichols, that I’m in a hole. But you have no experience in that way; your business is secure.” The two men had drawn to one side and were talking in low and confidential tones. “Is it? I tell you, Atterbury, the time I went through five years ago was awful, simply awful. No, I never said a word to a soul here; nobody even suspected. There was one time when I thought I’d have to send Sue and the babies home to her father, and light out for the Klondike.” “But you didn’t,” said Atterbury, his own pulse leaping to the courage of the other man with a sudden kinship. “No, I didn’t go. You can’t be discouraged when you have a wife and children to support. Things turned out—it was most unexpected. I’ll tell you all about it some day. It’s well that the opportunities of life are not bounded by our knowledge of them, Atterbury.” They looked at each other in silence with a large assent. “By the way, we are rather at a standstill at present,” said Nichols after a pause. “We’ve got to get some one to represent us in South Africa at once—business possibilities are opening up there tremendously. You don’t happen to know of the right person?” “Myself,” said Atterbury. “I wish it were possible,” said Nichols politely. “But of course that’s out of the question. We must have some one who thoroughly understands the business, and the machines—one who can take the initiative. The fact is, either Callender or I ought to go, but we can’t leave. We virtually need a third man in the firm, but he must have capital.” “Please come into the other room, all of you,” said the hostess with a forced playfulness, pulling aside the porti—res which had concealed the little feast. There was a heightened color in her face, and her eyes were hard. “Mr. Harrington says that he is going to stay in here until we have finished, but I know you won’t miss him!” “Oh, come along in, Harrington,” said Nichols good-naturedly. “Tell us of your travels in the wild and woolly West.” “There’s nothing to tell,” said Harrington shortly, turning away from the instinctive question in Atterbury’s look with almost brutal rudeness, and pushing past him to an armchair, where he sat down and closed his eyes wearily. He was a big man, with thick, black hair, and a black mustache, which dropped over a heavy chin. “I’ve passed the nights in beastly sleeping cars, and the days in dining and wining a lot of low, greasy politicians. I’m dog-tired.” There were deep lines in his low forehead and under his eyes—and his large, white, powerful hand clasped and unclasped nervously. “You go in there, both of you. I’m all broke up. My wife will entertain you; her damn chatter drives me mad!” “I’ll stay here with you,” said Atterbury resolutely. “I will send your supper in to you,” called Mrs. Harrington lightly, as she saw him draw up a chair to one of the deserted card tables near which Harrington was sitting with his eyes still closed and his head leaned back against the cushions. He paid no attention to the dishes, but Atterbury ate and drank quickly, like the hungry man he was, though hardly knowing what he tasted, except that it was warm and good. Then he sat absently looking at the scene in the supper room where the guests were grouped around the table, the wax-lights in the candelabra illumining the women opposite him; Mrs. Harrington’s brilliant eyes and blue gown, the fair hair and scarlet draperies of pretty Mrs. Waring, the white teeth and charming smile of black-robed Mrs. Callender, and the old-rose bodice, slender neck, and dusky, drooping head that belonged to Agnes. <hr class='c010' /> In spite of the festive appearance, there was manifest chill and restraint. The men, all but Callender and Nichols, who talked apart, had shifted over to seats by their wives, a position which does not require due exertion in the matter of entertainment. It is difficult to eat and drink merrily when your host is palpably waiting for your departure. Agnes’s hand shook as she held the cup of hot coffee to which she had been looking forward, and her creamed oysters were untouched while she tried to open a conversation with Mrs. Callender all about the Book Club. <hr class='c010' /> “Well,” said Atterbury suddenly after a while, “what have you got to say to me, Harrington?” The other man’s manner was offensive, but Atterbury was disposed to be conciliating. Harrington unclosed his heavy, dark-ringed eyes and gazed at him. “What have I got to say to you?” He gave a short laugh. “Why, nothing that I know of—nothing but that I have an internal headache.” There was an extraordinary undercurrent of insolence in his manner which Atterbury was at a loss to explain. “I am sorry to have to disturb you if you are ill,” said Atterbury in level tones, “but a word will suffice, Harrington. I know that the land is virtually sold—it was in the evening paper. How much does it bring?” “What land?” “My land.” “I don’t know anything about your property; the ground that the Company bought belonged to me.” “To you! You never told me that you owned any in Missouri.” “Do I have to tell you everything?” Harrington’s black eyes were contemptuously defiant. “No, but you will have to tell me this,” said Atterbury. Harrington shifted uneasily. “Well, then, take the truth if you want it. I meant to keep faith with you fairly enough, and I would have stuck to your interests if I could have afforded to—that’s the whole gist of the matter. And you’ve no case for complaint; we hadn’t signed any agreement.” “You found another section like mine?” Harrington nodded. “Nearly as good. I bought it for a song, and the Company sent out a surveyor and a couple of geologists of their own to look it up, and paid me fifty thousand for it—that is, indirectly, of course. I didn’t appear in the sale and by—I lost every cent in a deal yesterday.” He swore under his breath. “You used the private information I gave you, I suppose?” said Atterbury in dangerously low tones. A flicker of a smile crossed Harrington’s moody face. “Well, yes. You gave me the points, and I used them; any man would.” “You miserable—sneaking—liar!” said Atterbury very slowly. He rose, and brought both hands down on the table with a gesture that did not lose in power because it made no sound. “No man that lives shall cheat me with impunity. I’ll brand you for what you are!” “You can’t,” said Harrington insolently. Atterbury smiled with the scorn which disdained reply, and turned on his heel. He did not see the startled glance of Nichols and Callender as he went over to a place beside them. His wife wondered, as they did, at a new royalty in his tall bearing, as of one used to high command, and bowed herself in adoration before it. He defeated, he cast down! In that moment of tingling indignation he felt himself a conqueror; nor obstacle, nor loss, nor circumstance, nor treachery should stand in his way. This blow had felled the last barrier that confined a free spirit, superbly at one with the elemental force which displaces atoms and creates new worlds. The current of a mighty strength was in him, dominant, compelling, that strength which in some mysterious way has a volition of its own, apart from him who possesses it, bending men and events to his uses. There was a vibrant tone in his voice as he said, “Mr. Nichols, I want to go to South Africa for you.” The gaze of the two men met with almost an electric shock. “But you don’t know the business!” The protest half invited discussion. “I can learn it.” “We don’t want a man to learn,” said Callender, speaking for the first time. “You must understand that, Atterbury! We can find men on every street corner who would like to learn. We want some one with a good working knowledge, who has had experience, and is familiar with our machines and our methods—one who can leave his family—and has capital—” Atterbury shook his head. “No! You want a man like me, one who cannot only handle your machines, but handle men, and has had experience outside of your narrow line. Good heavens, Callender, the man you speak of—barring the capital—can almost be picked up at the street corners. Your house is full of such as he—good, plodding, trustworthy men, who understand what they have been taught about your machines and your accounts and your methods, and who understand nothing else; who stick to their desks year in and year out. Will one like that do for you? You know that it will not! Granted that I don’t know the business as you do—that’s but a detail; I know what business really is. Granted that I’ve got no capital—I’ve got the one thing you really need, and that’s the brains and energy to get it for you. Take me into your conferences, give me a fighting knowledge of what you want, and I’ll bring in the capital. “The export trade has a tremendous future; my mind’s been full of it lately. You send me to South Africa—to China—to the Philippines, and I’ll undertake to double the business in three years, but you mustn’t confine yourself to one narrow line; you must broaden out. You ought to be able to distance all your competitors; you ought to be able to merge them in your own company. For many reasons I can be worth more to you than any other man you know. Great Scott, Nichols, can’t you see that I’m the opportunity you want?” Nichols sat immovable, holding on to the arms of his chair with both hands. Facing the light of Atterbury’s face, the answering light shone in his own. Callender still objected, although plainly under great excitement. “You haven’t managed your own affairs so well.” “No,” said Atterbury, turning on him like lightning, “and you know why. You know just what claims the death of Anderson laid upon me, and how I’ve tried to carry them. They will be paid off now. Callender, you’re not worth my powder and shot; you’re just talking. Mr. Nichols, I’m speaking to you. You know I can handle this thing!” Both men rose unconsciously and looked at each other, with a long breath between them. “When will you send me out?” asked Atterbury at last with his brilliant smile. “Come to me to-morrow at ten,” said Nichols, giving his hand to the other, who grasped it silently. “Mind, I don’t promise anything.” “No, we don’t promise anything,” agreed the excited Callender. “No,” said Atterbury jubilantly, “that’s all right. We’ve got a great future before us, my friends.” As he wheeled around he caught sight of Harrington, whom he had momentarily forgotten. “Ah,” he said airily, “do either of you own any stock in our host’s Company? It may be just as well for you to investigate a little; you may find that as the treasurer he’s been speculating with the funds. I’ll give you my reasons for this also—to-morrow.” “Come,” he said to Agnes, “we must be going.” As they stepped out once more into the darkness, the wind nearly hurled them off their feet; a million icy points of snow pricked and stung the face. She clung to him, and he put his arm around her and swept her through the storm as a lover might his bride, unknowing of it. Yet for all that warm clasp, she subtly felt the severance of his thought from her, and when they were safely landed in the hall, she said nervously, “What was that I heard you saying to Mr. Nichols? You’re not going to leave me!” Her tone had in it the universal protest of womankind, to whom the bodily desertion is less than the spiritual one that makes it possible. He bent his ardent eyes upon her with a glow which she had never seen in them even in the earliest days of their love. “Ah, but it will be only to come back to you,” he said with a leap forward to a joy that made parting dim, and she looked up at him with a soul so steeped in love that for the moment she could only desire what he did. The evidences of a clinging domesticity were again around them; fierce blasts of heat from the furnace showed that Katy had peacefully forgotten the dampers; the water dripped, dripped into the kitchen sink from the thawing pipes. A hollow clanging cough from the upper regions told that poor little Gwendolen’s post-festive croup had indeed set in, but even this no longer appeared a bitter and blasting ill to Atterbury, but merely a temporary discomfort, to be gone with the morrow. <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c000' /></div> <div class='nf-center-c0'> <div class='nf-center c002'> <div>In the Reign of Quintilia</div> </div></div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c002' /></div> <div class='chapter'> <h2 id='ch04' class='c003'>In the Reign of Quintilia</h2></div> <div class='c009'> <ANTIMG class='drop-capi' src='images/dca.jpg' width-obs='35' height-obs='41' alt='' /></div> AS Mr. Nichols sped on his homeward way to the suburbs by boat and train, the abstraction which the clerks had noted grew upon him. At forty-six, his leonine locks streaked with gray, the comfortable, solid, prosperous father of a family, the president of one corporation and member of Heaven only knows how many governing boards, Mr. Nichols was in love—deeply and irremediably in love—with his youngest daughter, an infant of parts. She was the sixth child, not the seventh, whom tradition surrounds with the mysterious opportunities of good fortune. She was, moreover, the fifth girl in unbroken succession, and her father, like many another man in like case, had not even looked at the baby until she was nearly a week old, only to fall a victim to the charms of the little warm, helpless being after he had once held it in his arms and felt the tiny rose-leaf fingers close over one of his. As he gazed intently at the face with its miniature features, the blue eyes suddenly opened and gazed at him unwinkingly for a space of seconds. Then the lids closed over them peacefully, and a long sigh issued from the parted lips, in its reflex breathing giving the indication of a ridiculous dimple at one corner of the mouth. When Mr. Nichols looked at his wife, who had been observing him, they both smiled, with a tightening of a new bond of affection between them. “Pretty nice sort of a girl, isn’t she?” he remarked as he handed the child back to the waiting nurse, and when he went downstairs his wife heard him whistling a tune that had been a part of their early betrothal days, and hid her face in the pillow with a happy glow on it, although she was a staid and respectable matron. It was noticed after this that Mr. Nichols contracted a habit of coming in each night and gazing at the child intently when he thought himself unobserved, and that he seemed to derive great and increasing satisfaction from the perusal. As the baby grew older her face lighted up for him as for no one else, and before she had reached her present age of two years they were sweethearts indeed, with a passion on his part which made it unbearable pain to him if she bumped her head or pinched her finger. “How is Quintilia?” The voice of a near neighbor arrested Mr. Nichols’s attention. A slow smile overspread his countenance at the mention of the beloved name, with which the doctor had playfully christened this fifth girl, to the exclusion of her lawful cognomen. “Oh, she’s all right. At least I hope she is to-night—she hasn’t been very well for a couple of days; it’s bothered me a good deal.” “My wife says that she grows prettier every day,” continued the obliging neighbor. Mr. Nichols beamed. “She does. I’m coming home a little earlier to-night to see how she is. Her mother usually keeps her up for me when she’s well.” He could not tell how much he hoped against hope that she would be up and looking out for him. He knew so well how the little lovely white thing with the starry eyes and glinting curls would run to the stairway in her nightgown, and sitting down on the top step with all the delicious fluttering and sidling motions of her babyhood, would thrust her plump, bare pink foot up against his rough cheek with the delighted cry of, “Pa-pa, kiss a footie! Kiss a footie, pa-pa!” Then how he would mumble and kiss that darling foot, and pretend to eat it, finally snatching the adored baby in his arms, laughing and struggling, to cuddle close to him when he pressed her to his heart, with the infinitely tender gentleness of the strong, as he carried her to her crib and laid her in it. His wife was always there, too, watching him with an indulgent smile. All love between them seemed to have grown deeper since it merged in this sixth child, whose advent had called forth a large offering of honest condolence from mistaken friends, and who had brought a joy which at first the parents decorously—nay, guiltily—concealed, to revel in it almost indecently afterwards. The novelty of the first-born, a boy, had hindered complete enjoyment, and with him, as with the four girls who followed close after, it was a matter of such supreme importance that all the small rules which governed the infantile world should be strictly observed. Even as a young woman Mrs. Nichols was a serious and conscientious mother, who read all the literature bearing on family health and education. The infants were trained with adamantine firmness from their birth, and as they grew older Mrs. Nichols attended kindergarten meetings where the child was meditated upon with deep graspings of the intellect, and also painstakingly sat through recitations mixed with exasperating calisthenics in the higher schools. In fine, she so ordered her days that when pussy-cats were under discussion in the morning classes to which Ethel and Edith belonged, she could still lead their thoughts intelligently pussywards in the afternoon, besides holding the fourteen-year-old Stan to that hour’s exercise in spelling which was also like an exercise in breaking stone. To the higher rule Quintilia promised from the first to be an exception. She made her own laws. When she lifted her little arms to be “taken up” it was not in the heart of mortal to resist her; food was given her when she cried for it, and for the life of her Mrs. Nichols could not always combat the temptation to hold the dear little clinging form in her arms, with the damp head and its thistledown curls nestling on her shoulder, and rock and sing her baby to sleep in the old-fashioned way. “No, I don’t think she’s any worse.” Mr. Nichols’s wife had met him at the door with the peaceful kiss of possession before reassuring him for the non-appearance of Quintilia. She was a woman of medium height, rather stout, with somewhat large features, a fresh complexion, thick black hair, brown eyes, and an expression that was at once pleasant and capable. The heart of her husband trusted in her implicitly, and her tone was a relief to him. “What did the doctor say?” “He thinks that it’s only a cold, but she must be kept very quiet. The nurse came this afternoon, but she doesn’t seem very—What is it, Miss Candy?” Mr. Nichols looked up at the stairs, and his tense gaze involuntarily softened. A pretty girl in a blue and white cambric uniform appears to most men as an angel of healing. This one had large and appealing eyes, and little brown fuzzy curls in front under her white cap. There was a slip of paper in the hand held forward. “Would you kindly have this prescription filled at once? I forgot it when you sent out last.” “Certainly,” said Mr. Nichols with alacrity. “I’ve got my coat on. I’ll go for it now.” “Oh, thank you! And would you mind bringing home some alcohol? I think there ought to be some in the house.” “There is a bottle of alcohol,” interpolated Mrs. Nichols. “I’m so sorry, but I just tipped it over accidentally. Would you please send one of the maids to sweep up the broken glass? Thank you.” The vision of the pretty face supported Mr. Nichols but insubstantially while he waited half an hour in the drug-store in contemplation of a deserted soda fountain, fly-specked packages of brown headache cure, a white and bony array of tooth-brushes, and some open boxes of flabby cigars in a glass case under an electric lighter. A suburban drug-store is not exactly an enlivening spot, and he was to become fatally well acquainted with it in the next few days. To-night he went up and looked at the baby on his return; she was asleep, with cheeks flushed to a beautiful rose. She was breathing very hard, but still she slept, with her head thrown back, and the soft rings of hair spread out over the pillow; the curves of the little round body were carved out in the white bedclothes. The light in the room was shaded, and the nurse sat by the table under it, writing out her official report with a gold pencil held in her taper fingers; but his wife sat and watched the child. A sudden ache invaded the man’s heart. “Is she all right?” he whispered. His wife nodded. “Oh, yes. Doesn’t she look darling?” But Mr. Nichols did not answer. The nurse came forward and smoothed little Quintilia’s pillow professionally. “She seems to take an interest,” he whispered to his wife as they left the room. He felt the tenderness which a good man has for a young girl who has to earn her own living; she is somewhat on the same plane as himself, and it is a state of being of which he appreciates the difficulties. He realized that his wife’s silence was distinctly unsympathetic. The children were very noisy that evening, without their mother’s presence, in the hour allotted them before bedtime. The youngest, Loulou, who was next to the baby, was seven years old—a stubby, chubby, black-haired child, with that genius for saying the wrong thing in the wrong place which is a mother’s woe. As she climbed on her father’s knee to-night she kept saying: “Quintilia’s sick, father. Quintilia’s sick! Do you think she’ll be worse, to-morrow, father?” she grinned at him pleasantly, showing a mouth with three front teeth missing. Mr. Nichols resisted a strong impulse to set her down forcibly. His attitude toward Loulou was a continual reproach to him. He knew, as his wife often reminded him, that Loulou had been his pet when she was a baby; he knew that he really loved her, and that if she were ill his fatherly affection would assert itself in the utmost care for her; but now her presence in rude and awkward health annoyed and irritated him beyond expression. “If Quintilia dies, I’ll be the baby!” “For shame, Loulou!” said the eldest girl, Christine, who had her mother’s own gentle manner. “You mustn’t talk like that. Ethel and Edith, don’t make so much noise. They can’t go to bed, father dear, until Ann comes back; she’s just gone to the village for something Miss Candy wanted.” “Miss Candy is awful pretty!” said the bounding Loulou. “Stan waited by the stairs to-night to see her come down. She calls him Mr. Stanley, and he’s been going errands for her all the afternoon. And he put on his best jacket!” “I didn’t,” blurted Stan, with a very red face, regardless of the chorus of horrified ohos! from the rest of the children. “Well, if I did, it was because the old one was torn.” “If Quintilia dies, I’ll be the baby.” Loulou reverted to the first idea. Stan cried, “Shut up, will you?” and threw his book at her, being a boy on whom years of training had had no appreciable effect; but Christine came and put her arm around her father’s neck and kissed him, with her soft braid of yellow hair falling across his shoulder, and he pressed the little comforter to him fondly. Anxiety about Quintilia had grown by morning. Mrs. Nichols came down to breakfast in a brown cambric gown, with her hair brushed severely back from her forehead, and hurriedly drank a cup of coffee. The tense expression of her face, which she strove to render cheerful, took some of the charm for Mr. Nichols from Miss Candy’s curls and crispness. He left the house with a load upon him, which grew heavier—and lighter—heavier—and lighter, with rhythmical regularity, as hope or fear predominated. Nearly a week passed, and still the baby’s life hung wavering in the balance; the president had come down town every day, looking grayer and quieter each morning. He came to the office mechanically, and attended mechanically to the business that had to be transacted. He was dulled to a strange and abnormal gentleness both there and at home. He thanked those who performed the usual services for him in the office with punctilious politeness. The children at home went unreproved by him. The chatter of poor little Loulou had ceased to irritate, although it occasionally gave him a spasm of pain. They were nothing to him, mere simulacrums of what had once power to please or displease. Even Stan did not come in for the usual disapprobation on the dirty hands, the slouching walk, or the uncouth expressions which characterized him. To Mr. Nichols his wife was the only real person in the house, and there was but one thought between them—the thought of Quintilia. The mother worked untiringly, while Miss Candy curled her hair, and wrote interminable reports, and stood in charming professional attitudes when the doctor was present, and sent the household individually and collectively for belated prescriptions, and bottles that were “just out,” and glycerine, and boracic acid, and camphorated oil, and disinfectants, and oiled silk, and medicine-droppers, and rubber water-bags, and absorbent cotton, and whisky, and malted milk, and biscuits, and candles, and lime-water, and all the various foods so chemically prepared that they are warranted to be retained by the weakest stomach, and of which no invalid can ever be persuaded to swallow more than the first teaspoonful. The doctor studied Miss Candy’s reports—patently composed from memory—with an imperturbable face, and questioned Mrs. Nichols closely afterwards. Mr. Nichols, as a mortal man, still derived a vague satisfaction in her presence, although he spent his tired evenings in going errands for her; she looked so pretty that he always felt as if Quintilia must be better. Sometimes he was allowed to sit by the child while his wife took a short rest. He knew, most humbly, his deficiencies in the sick-room—by some ulterior influence when he moved fire-irons fell over, bottles broke, papers rattled, his shoes made an earthquake, whatever he touched creaked. He would sit in a rigidly quiet attitude until his wife returned, with his head on his hand, watching the little pinched face, the half-closed eyes, listening to the breathing, the rise and fall of the little chest. Oh, God, the hours by a sick child! A night came that was long to be remembered in the Nichols household—a night of ringing bells and shutting doors and hurried running up and down stairs, with the scared children in their white night-gowns peeping out of the bedroom door after their tearful prayers for little sister. In the small hours the doctor’s steady tread could be heard in the sick-room, or on the landing where he came to give brief orders. Mr. Nichols sat on a couch in the wide hall outside the door. Sometimes his wife came from the sick-room and sat down by him for a few seconds, and they were together in an anguish of dreadful love. When she was gone he remained with his head on his breast thinking. He thought of the years of happiness they had had; he thought of the beloved sleeping children around them and of honest, clumsy Stan, and troublesome, inconsequent Loulou with special tenderness; he thought of all the blessings that had been his. It was as if life were brought to a close, and he humbly confessed to himself the unfaithfulness of his own part in it, his faults of temper, his neglect of opportunities to make others happy. He might have been drowning. His gaze, brought back to land once more, questioned those who passed him in the hall. Miss Candy went by once with red eyes, her cap pushed to one side, and her pretty hair all out of curl. She did not even see him as she passed. “Father dear!” He looked up—it was the little eldest daughter of the house, Christine. “Father dear, I can’t go to sleep, and I’ve been lying in bed so long!” She sat down beside him and slipped her hand into his; her blue eyes had the depth that comes from lying awake in darkness. “I’m thinking all the time of baby. Mayn’t I stay here with you, father dear? I want to stay with you so much.” “Yes, my darling.” He took the steamer-rugs his wife had left beside him and wrapped them around the woman-child, yellow braid and all, and they stayed there together. Once she whispered, “You’re praying, too, father dear, aren’t you? I feel that you’re praying;” and he held her closer and whispered, “Yes.” By-and-by she fell asleep, and he held her still. The first streaks of dawn filtered through the rooms, strange to those who sat bound in darkness and the shadow of death, a household prepared only for the night. Then an electric current seemed to run through the breathing souls in it. The doctor came out in the hall and said, “She will live!” A door opened farther down—one flashed to another, “She will live!” The message flew from lip to lip, from heart to heart. The returning breath of the little ruler of the house revivified all within it. The awakened children ran out for a moment to whisper the gladness, the servants stole down the back stairs to clatter in the kitchen and make preparations for an early breakfast, one could hear the cocks crowing, and the sunshine grew strong and gathered into a long bar of light. Quintilia would live. “You may come in and see her for just a minute,” said Mrs. Nichols to her husband, leading him in as one leads the blind. He fell on his knees by the bed, awestricken. Was this the little rosy darling of his love? But she would live—she would live! As he looked the eyes opened recognizingly; there was a faint roguish smile on the beautiful lips, and the faintest movement under the bedclothes. “She wants you to kiss her foot,” said the divining mother. “Just hearken to the voice of himself in there,” said Ellen, the waitress, as she came into the kitchen from the breakfast-room. “He says you’re to make some more coffee, for this isn’t fit to be drank. Oh, he’s ragin’! He’s sent Loulou from the table for spilling her milk, and the boy’s not to play golf for a week on account of the dirty hands of him, the poor child; and he’s got Miss Christine crying into the porridge, telling her how she’d oughter look after her little sisters better. Oh, he’s the holy terror the morn, and herself not downstairs to quaite him! Take your time with the coffee, Ann; sure he’ll murder me when I get back.” “The pore man!” said the cook indulgently, pouring out a fresh installment of the fragrant brown liquid into the coffee-pot. “’Tis the way wid ’em all; sure ’tis drunk wid sorrow he’s been! What can ye expict? The big sobs was rindin’ him whin he come from the child’s room early, and sure he’s got to take it out of somebody. Run you wid the coffee now!” “Please don’t go down town to-day,” his wife implored him afterwards. “You look so horribly tired. Stay at home and rest.” She put her arms round him tenderly, feeling that now was the opportunity for the happiness of mutual thanksgiving; and he unconsciously pushed her away from him as he answered, “Nonsense! There’s no reason why I should rest.” She smothered her disappointment at his rebuff. “You won’t be any good at all at the office; I know you have a dreadful headache. Go upstairs and lie down in the blue room for a while, and nobody will disturb you there.” “Well!” He gave a grudging assent. The blue room was white and chilly and unlived in. The stiff pillow-shams rattled down off the pillows as he touched them. He liked his own room, his own bed. The light glared down from the windows. But it was a place where he could be let alone, without those eyes continually waiting upon him to see how he felt. After his debauch of misery all feeling was nauseous to him. He lay stiffly on the cold, straight, unaccustomed bed, and looked with burning eyes at the pictures on the wall. Gradually the rack in his head slackened a little, his eyelids fell shut, he discerned the far-off approach of a blessed ease. The door opened and his wife came quietly in, unselfishly remembering his needs in the midst of her own fatigue; she had brought a warm coverlet to throw over him. She lowered the shades and went softly out again, taking with her every atom of the peace that he had begun to wrest from a torturing universe. The younger children talked in the hall; he heard them say, “Don’t wake father. Hush! Don’t talk so loud.” Then Loulou screamed, and some one came and took them away forcibly. Ellen, the waitress, knocked at the door to say that the man had come for the gas bill, and would he pay it? And Miss Candy came afterwards professionally with a cup of hot broth, which she thought he had better drink. Then Mr. Nichols rose up and took a bath and shaved and went down town. That day was long remembered in the rooms of the Electrographic Company. Worried heads of departments consulted together; scared clerks went hurrying hither and thither; mistakes were routed out, abuses which had the sanction of custom sternly reformed, lapses from punctuality clinched by new and stringent rules. There was a large arrearage of his own affairs to be attended to, by which he had lost money. The intellect of Mr. Nichols revolted fiercely against the sentiment to which it had been subjugated; he saw every fact at last stripped bare. As the afternoon waned and the rush of business was over, Mr. Nichols leaned forward over his desk and tried to make up his mind to get up and go home. He was weary. That blessed assurance that he had longed for so unutterably yesterday was his, yet it seemed no longer a new bliss, but a fact that he had always known. The pendulum had been set swinging so hard toward the extreme of grief that it could not at once reverse its motion and swing toward happiness. He felt indescribably worn, indescribably old. There are times in all lives that are safely passed through, but take something out of one which no after-delight can put back again; some of those delicate sinews are broken which make the unthinking strength of youth. In his sickness of soul Mr. Nichols sought mechanically for some bright ray in the gray around him—something to bring back his accustomed pleasure in living. Quintilia’s recovery—his wife—children—friends—success—even dinner—all were but words. In this gloom of effort he half drowsed off; some fleeting wave of a dream showed a spot of light before him; it grew larger and larger, and with it a figure grew also, until it was plainly revealed—the figure of the sixth child, a lovely rounded thing with starry eyes and thistledown curls, dimpling and laughing and thrusting a delicious little pink foot in his bearded face. He could hear the baby voice crying, “Pa-pa, kiss a footie. Kiss a footie, pa-pa!” A foolish smile overspread the countenance of the president of the Electrographic Company. In the rapture of love he forgot that he had been disloyal even for a moment to this Sovereign Joy. <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c000' /></div> <div class='nf-center-c0'> <div class='nf-center c002'> <div>The Happiest Time</div> </div></div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c002' /></div> <div class='chapter'> <h2 id='ch05' class='c003'>The Happiest Time</h2></div> <div class='c009'> <ANTIMG class='drop-capi' src='images/dca.jpg' width-obs='35' height-obs='41' alt='' /></div> “AREN’T you coming to church with me this morning?” “Well—not this morning, I think, petty.” “You said you would.” “Yes, I know I did, but I have a slight cold. I don’t think it would be best for me, really, petty. I’ve been working pretty hard this week.” Mr. Belmore carefully deposited a pile of newspapers beside his armchair upon the floor of the little library, removing and opening the top layer for perusal as he spoke, his eyes already glued to the headlines. “A quiet day will do me lots of good. I’ll tell you what it is: I’ll promise to go with you next Sunday, if you say so.” “You always promise you’ll go next Sunday.” Mrs. Belmore, a brown-haired, clear-eyed young woman in a blue and white spotted morning gown, looked doubtfully, yet with manifest yielding, at her husband. Mr. Belmore presented the radiantly clean and peaceful aspect of the man who has risen at nine o’clock instead of the customary seven, and bathed and dressed in the sweet unhurried calm that belongs only to the first day of the week, poking dilatorily among chiffonier drawers, discovering hitherto forgotten garments in his closet, and leisurely fumbling over a change of shirt-studs before coming down to consume the breakfast kept waiting for him. “Of course I know it’s your only day at home—” Mrs. Belmore reverted to her occupation of deftly setting the chairs in their rightful places, and straightening the books on the tables. “I suppose I ought to insist on your going—when you promised—but still—” She gave a sigh of relinquishment. “I suppose you do need the rest,” she added. “We can have a nice afternoon together, anyway. You can finish reading that story aloud, and we’ll go out and take a good look at the garden. I think the beans were planted too close under the pear tree last year—that was the reason they didn’t come up right. Edith Barnes and Alan Wilson are coming out from town after dinner for the rest of the day, but that won’t make any difference to us.” “What?” “Now Herbert, how could I help asking them? You know the boarding house she and her mother live in. Edith never gets a chance to see him alone. They’re saving up now to get married—they’ve been engaged a year—so he can’t spend any more money for theaters and things, and they just have to walk and walk the streets, unless they go visiting, and they’ve been almost everywhere, Edith says. She wrote and asked me to have them for this Sunday; he’s been away for a whole week somewhere up in the State. I think it’s pathetic.” In the warmth of explanation Mrs. Belmore had unwittingly removed the pile of newspapers from the floor to an ottoman at the further end of the room. “Edith says she knows it’s the happiest time of their lives, and she does want to get some of the benefit of it, poor girl.” “What do they want to be engaged for, anyway?” “Herbert! How ridiculous! You are the most unreasonable man at times for a sensible one that I ever laid my eyes on. Why did we want to be engaged?” “That was different.” Mr. Belmore’s tone conveyed a permanent satisfaction with his own case. “If every woman were like you, petty—I never could stand Edith, she’s one of your clever girls; there’s something about her that always sets my teeth on edge. As for Wilson—oh, Wilson’s just a usual kind of a fool, like myself. Hello, where are my newspapers—and what in thunder makes it so cold? You don’t mean to say you’ve got the window open?” Mrs. Belmore had a habit of airing the rooms in the morning, which her husband approved of theoretically, and combated intensely in practice. After the window was banged shut she could hear him rattling at the furnace below to turn on an extra flow of heat before settling down once more in comfort. Although the April sun was bright, there was still a chill in the air. She looked in upon him, gowned and bonneted for church, sweet and placid of mien, followed by two little girls, brave in their Sunday best, all big hats and ribboned hair, and little starchy ruffles showing below their brown coats. Mrs. Belmore stooped over her husband’s chair to kiss him good-by. “You won’t have to talk to Edith and Alan at all,” she said as if continuing the conversation from where they had left off. “All we have to do is to let them have the parlor or the library. They’ll entertain each other.” “Oh, don’t you bother about that. Now go ahead or you’ll be late, and don’t forget to say your prayers for me, too. That’s right, always go to church with your mother, girlies.” “I wish you were going, too.” Mrs. Belmore looked at her husband lingeringly. “I wish I were, petty,” said Mr. Belmore with a prompt mendacity so evidently inspired by affection that his wife condoned it at once. She thought of him more than once during the service with generous satisfaction in his comfortable morning. She wished she had thought it right to remain at home, too, as she did sometimes, but there were the children to be considered. But she and Herbert would have the afternoon together, and take part of it to see about planting the garden, a plot twenty feet square in the rear of the suburban villa. The Sunday visit to the garden was almost a sacrament. They might look at it on other days, but it was only on Sunday, beginning with the early spring, that husband and wife strolled around the little patch together, first planning where to start the summer crop of vegetables and afterwards watching the green things poking their spikes up through the mold, and growing, growing. He did the planting and working in the long light evenings after he came home, while she held the papers of seeds for him, but it was only on Sunday that he could really watch the green things grow, and learn to know each separate leaf intimately, and count the blossoms on the beans and the cucumbers. From the pure pleasure of the first radish, through all the various wiltings and shrivelings incident to amateur gardening in summer deluge and drought, to the triumphant survival of tomato plants and cucumber vines, running riot over everything in the fall of the year, the little garden played its old part as paradise to these two, who became more fully one in the watching of the miracle of growth. When they gathered the pears from the little tree in the corner of the plot, before the frost, and picked the few little green tomatoes that remained on the dwindling stems, it was like garnering a store of peaceful happiness. Every stage of the garden was a romance. Mrs. Belmore could go to church without her husband, but to have him survey the garden without her would have been the touch beyond. It must be horrid, anyway, she thought, to have to go every morning into town in those smoky cars and crowded ferry-boats; just to run into town twice a week tired her out. Now he would have finished the paper—now little Dorothy would have come in, red cheeked from her walk, to kiss daddy before her nap—now he must be pottering around among his possessions and looking out for her. She knew so well how he would look when he came to the door to meet her. The sudden sight of either one to the other always shed a reflected light, like the glow of the sun. It was with a feeling of wonder that she marked its disappearance, after a brief gleam, as he not only opened the door, but came out on the piazza to greet her, and closed it behind him. “They’re in there—Edith and Alan.” He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “I thought they weren’t coming until after dinner.” “Why, they weren’t.” “Well, they’re in the parlor, just the same. Came out over an hour ago. Great Scott, I wished I’d gone with you. I’m worn out.” “You don’t mean to say you’ve stayed with them all the time!” Mrs. Belmore looked scandalized. “I should say I had; I couldn’t lose ’em. Whichever room I went to they followed; at least, she did, and he came after. I went from pillar to post, I give you my word, petty, but Edith had me by the neck; she never let go her grip for an instant. They won’t speak to each other, you see, only to me. I haven’t had a chance to even finish the paper. I’ve had the deuce of a time! I don’t know what you are going to do about it.” “Never mind, it will be all right now,” said Mrs. Belmore reassuringly. She pushed past him into the parlor where sat a tall, straight girl with straight, light brows, a long straight nose, and a straight mouth with a droop at the corners. In the room beyond, a thick set, dark young man with glasses and a nervous expression was looking at pictures. It did not require a Solomon to discover at a glance how the land lay. If Mrs. Belmore had counted easily on her powers of conciliation she was disappointed this time. After the dinner, whereat the conversation was dragged laboriously around four sides of a square, except when the two little girls made some slight diversion, and the several futile attempts when the meal was over to leave the lovers alone together, Mrs. Belmore resigned herself, perforce, to the loss of her cherished afternoon. “It’s no use, we’ll have to give up the reading,” she said to her husband rapidly, in one of her comings and goings. “Perhaps later, dear. But it’s really dreadful, here we’ve been talking of religion and beet-root sugar and smallpox, when anyone can see that her heart is breaking.” “I think he is getting the worst of it,” said Mr. Belmore impartially. “Oh, it won’t hurt him.” “Well, you’ve given them plenty of opportunities to make up.” “Yes, but he doesn’t know how.” She added in a louder tone, “You take Mr. Wilson up to your den for a while, Herbert, Ethel and I are going to have a cozy little time with the children, aren’t we, dear?” “Have a cigar?” said Mr. Belmore as the two men seated themselves comfortably in a couple of wooden armchairs in the sunny little apartment hung with a miscellaneous collection of guns, swords, and rods, the drawing of a bloated trout and a dusty pair of antlers. “Thank you, I’m not smoking now,” said Mr. Wilson with a hungry look at the open box on the table beside him. “Oh!” said his host genially, “so you’re at that stage of the game. Well, I’ve been there myself. You have my sympathy. But this won’t last, you know.” “Does your wife like smoking?” “Loves it,” said Mr. Belmore, sinking the fact of his official limit to four cigars a day. “That is, of course, she thinks it’s a dirty habit, and unhealthy, and all that sort of thing, you know, but it doesn’t make any difference to her—not a pin’s worth. Cheer up, old fellow, you’ll get to this place too.” “Looks like it,” said the other bitterly. “Here I haven’t seen her for a week—I came two hundred miles on purpose yesterday, and now she won’t even look at me. I don’t know what’s the matter—haven’t the least idea—and I can’t get her to tell me. I have to be off to-morrow at seven o’clock, too—I call it pretty hard lines.” “Let me see,” said Mr. Belmore judicially, knitting his brows as if burrowing into the past as he smoked. “Perhaps I can help you out. What have you been writing to her? Telling her all about what you’ve been doing, and just sending your love at the end? They don’t like that, you know.” Mr. Wilson shook his head. “No, upon my soul I’ve done nothing but tell her how I—how I was looking forward to—oh, hang it, Belmore, the letters have been all right, I know that.” “H’m,” said Mr. Belmore, “there’s got to be something back of it, you know. Seen any girls since you’ve been gone?” Mr. Wilson hastened to shake his head more emphatically than before. “Not one,” he asseverated with the relief of complete innocence. “Didn’t even meet a soul I knew, except Brower—you remember Dick Brower? I went into a jeweler’s to get my glasses mended and found him buying a souvenir spoon for his fiancée.” “O—o—h!” said Mr. Belmore intelligently, “and did you buy a present for Edith?” “No, I didn’t. She made me promise not to buy anything more for her; she thinks I’m spending too much money, and that I ought to economize.” “And did you tell her about Brower?” “Why, of course I did—as we were coming out this morning.” Mr. Wilson stared blankly at his friend. “Chump!” said Mr. Belmore. He bit off the end of a new cigar and threw it away. “Wilson, my poor fellow, you’re so besotted in ignorance that I don’t know how to let the light in on you. A man is a fool by the side of his fiancée, anyhow.” “I don’t know what you mean,” said the bewildered Wilson stiffly. “I don’t know what I’m to do.” “No, of course you don’t—but Edith does—you can just trust her for that. A girl always knows what a man ought to do—she can give him cards and spades and beat him every time.” “Then why doesn’t she tell me what she wants? I asked her to, particularly.” “Oh, no! She’ll tell you everything the opposite—that is, half the time. She’ll put every obstacle possible in your way, to see if you’re man enough to walk over ’em; that’s what she wants to find out; if you’re man enough to have your own way in spite of her; and, of course, if you aren’t, you’re an awful disappointment.” “Are you sure?” said Mr. Wilson deeply, after an awestruck pause. “Half the time, you say. But how am I to find out when she means—I give you my word, Belmore, that I thought—I suppose I could have brought her a small present, anyway, in spite of what she said; a souvenir spoon—but she hates souvenir spoons.” “You’ll have to cipher it out for yourself, old man,” said Mr. Belmore. “I don’t set out to interpret any woman’s moods. I only give you cold, bare facts. But if I were you,” he added impartially, “I’d go down after a while and try and get her alone, you know, and say something. You can, if you try.” A swish of skirts outside of the open door made Mr. Wilson jump forward as Mrs. Belmore came in sight with her friend. The latter had her arm around the older woman, and her form drooped toward her as they passed the two men. The eyes of the girl were red, and her lips had a patient quiver. Mr. Wilson gave an exclamation and sprang forward as she disappeared in the further room. It was some hours later that the husband and wife met unexpectedly upon the stairs with a glad surprise. “You don’t mean to say it’s you—alone!” he whispered. “Wait—is she coming up?” They clutched each other spasmodically as they listened to the sound of a deflecting footstep. There was a breathless moment, and then the chords of a funeral march boomed forth upon the air. The loud pedal was doing its best to supplement those long and strenuous fingers. The listeners breathed a sigh of relief. “He’s gone to the station for a time table,” whispered the husband with a delighted grin: “though I can stand him all right. We had a nice walk with the little girls, after he got tired of playing hide and seek. I wished you were with us. You must be about used up. How are you getting along with her?” “Oh, pretty well.” She let herself be drawn down on the hall window seat at the top of the landing. “You see, Edith really feels dreadfully, poor girl.” “What about?” “Herbert, she isn’t really sure that she loves him.” “Isn’t sure! After they’ve been engaged for a year!” “That’s just it. She says if they had been married out of hand, in the first flush of the novelty, she wouldn’t have had time, perhaps, to have any doubts. But it’s the seeing him all the time that’s made her think.” “Made her think what?” “Whether she loves him or not; whether they are really suited. I remember that I used to feel that way about you, dear. Oh, you know, Herbert, it’s a very serious thing for a girl. She says she knows her whole life is at stake; she thinks about it all the time.” “How about his?” “Well, that’s what I said,” admitted Mrs. Belmore. “She says that she feels that he is so rational and self-poised that she makes little difference in his life either way—it has come to her all at once. She says his looking at everything in a matter-of-fact way just chills her; she longs for a whole-souled enthusiasm that can sweep everything before it. She feels that if they are married she will have to keep up the ideal for both of them, and she doesn’t know whether she can.” “No, she can’t,” said Mr. Belmore. “She says she could if she loved him enough,” pursued Mrs. Belmore. “It’s the if that kills her. She says that when she wakes up in the morning that she feels as if she’d die if she didn’t see him before night, and when she does see him it’s all a dreadful disappointment to her; she can’t talk to him at all, she feels perfectly hard and stony; then, the moment he’s gone, she’s crazy to have him back again. She cries herself thin over it.” “She’s pretty bony, anyway,” said Mr. Belmore impartially. “Even his appearance changes to her. She says sometimes he looks like a Greek god, so that she could go down on her knees to him, and at other times—Once she happened to catch a glimpse of him in a horrid red sweater, polishing his shoes, and she said she didn’t get over it for weeks, he looked positively ordinary, like some of the men you see in the trolley cars.” “Oh, good gracious!” protested Mr. Belmore feebly. “Oh, good gracious, petty! This is too much.” “Hush—don’t laugh so loud—be quiet,” said his wife anxiously. “If Wilson ever looks like a Greek god to her, she’s all right, she loves him—you can tell her so for me. Wilson! Here are we sitting up here like a pair of lovers, and they—Hello!” The hall door opened and shut, the piano lid closed simultaneously with a bang, and there was a swirl of skirts again towards the staircase that scattered the guilty pair on the landing. The hostess heaved a patient sigh. “They shall speak,” said Mrs. Belmore when another hour had gone with the situation still unchanged. Her gentle voice had a note of determination. “I can’t understand why he doesn’t make her. She is literally crying her eyes out, because the whole day has been lost. Why didn’t you send him into the parlor for a book as I told you to, when I came up to take care of Dorothy?” “He wouldn’t go—he said he wasn’t doing the kindergarten act any more. Hang it, I don’t blame him. A man objects to being made a fool of before people, and he’s tired of it. Here he goes off again to-morrow for two weeks, and she with no more heart than—” “Where is he now?” asked Mrs. Belmore. “Upstairs in my room, smoking.” “Smoking! I thought he’d promised her solemnly not to.” “Yes, he did; but he says he doesn’t care a—red apple; he’s going to have some comfort out of the day. I’ve left him with a box of cigars; good ones, too. He’s having the time of his life.” “O—o—h!” said Mrs. Belmore with the rapt expression of one who sees beyond the veil. When she spoke it was with impressive slowness. “When you hear me come downstairs with Edith and go in the parlor, you wait a moment and then bring him down—with his cigar—into the library. Do you understand?” “No,” said Mr. Belmore. “Oh, Herbert! If she sees him smoking—! There’s no time to lose, for I have to get tea to-night. When I call you, leave him and come at once, do you hear? Don’t stop a minute—just come, before they get a chance to follow.” “You bet I’ll come,” said Mr. Belmore, “like a bird to its—I will, really, petty.” That he nearly knocked her down by his wildly tragic rush when she called from the back hall—“Herbert, please come at once! I can’t turn off the water,” was a mere detail—they clung to each other in silent laughter, behind the enshrouding porti—res, not daring to move. The footfall of the deserted Edith was heard advancing from the front room to the library, and her clear and solemn voice, as of one actuated only by the lofty dictates of duty, penetrated distinctly to the listeners. “Alan Wilson, is it possible that you are smoking? Have you broken your promised word?” “Well, they’re at it, at last,” said Mr. Belmore, relapsing into a chair in the kitchen with a sigh of relief, and drawing a folded newspaper from his pocket. “I wouldn’t be in his shoes for a farm.” “Oh, it will be all right now,” said Mrs. Belmore serenely. She added with some irrelevancy, “I’ve left the children to undress each other; they’ve been so good. It’s been such a different day, though, from what we had planned.” “It’s too bad that you have to get the tea.” “Oh, I don’t mind that a bit.” She had tucked up the silken skirt of her gown and was deftly measuring out coffee—after the swift, preliminary shaking of the fire with which every woman takes possession of a kitchen—pouring the water into the coffee-pot from the steaming kettle, and then vibrating between the kitchen closet and the butler’s pantry with the quick, capable movements of one who knows her ground thoroughly. “Really, it isn’t any trouble. Margaret leaves half of the things ready, you know. If you’ll just lift down that dish of salad for me—and the cold chicken is beside it. I hate to ask you to get up, but—Thank you. How good the coffee smells! I know you always like the coffee I make.” “You bet I do,” said Mr. Belmore with fervor. “Say, petty, you don’t think you could come out now and take a look at the garden? I’m almost sure the peas are beginning to show.” “No, I’m afraid there isn’t time. We’ll have to give it up for this Sunday.” She paused for a great effort. “If you’d like to go by yourself, dear—” “Wouldn’t you mind?” She paused again, looking at him with her clear-eyed seriousness. “I don’t think I mind now, but I might—afterwards.” If he had hesitated, it was for a hardly appreciable second. “And I don’t want to go,” he protested stoutly, “it wouldn’t be the same thing at all without you.” ——“Everything is ready now,” said his wife. “Though I do hate to disturb Edith and Alan. I’ll just run up and hear the children say their prayers before I put those things on the table. If you would just take a look at the furnace—” it was the sentence Mr. Belmore had been dreading—“and then you can come up and kiss the children good night.” Mr. Belmore, on his way up from stoking, caught a glimpse projected from the parlor mirror through an aperture in the doorway which the porti—res had left uncovered. The reflection was of a girl, with tear-stained face and closed eyes, her head upon a young man’s shoulder, while his lips were touchingly pressed to her hair. The picture might have been called “After the Storm,” the wreckage was so plainly apparent. As Mr. Belmore turned after ascending the flight of stairs he came full in sight of another picture, spread out to view in the room at the end of the hall. He stood unseen in the shadow regarding it. His wife sat in a low chair near one of the two white beds; little Dorothy’s crib was in their room, beyond. The three children were perched on the foot of the nearest bed, white-gowned, with rosy faces and neatly brushed hair. While he looked, the youngest child gave a birdlike flutter and jump, and lighted on the floor, falling on her knees, with her bowed head in the mother’s lap, her hands upraised. As she finished the murmured prayer, helped by the tender mother-voice, she rose and stood to one side, in infantine seriousness, while the next one spread her white plumes for the same flight, waiting afterwards in reverent line with the first as the third hovered down. It was plain to see from the mother’s face that she had striven to put all earthly thoughts aside in the performance of this sacred office of ministering to innocence; her eyes must be holy when her children’s looked up at her on their way to God. This was the little inner chapel, the Sanctuary of Home, where she was priestess by divine right. It would have been an indifferent man, indeed, who had not fallen upon his knees in spirit, in company with this little household of faith, in mute recognition of the love and peace and order that crowned his days. He kissed the laughing children as they clung to him, before she turned down the light. When she came out of the room he was waiting for her. He put his arm around her as he said, with the darling tenderness that made her life, “Come along, old sweetness. We’ve got to go down and stir up those lunatics again. Call that ‘the happiest time of your life!’ We know better than that, don’t we, petty? I’ll tell you what it is: I’ll go to church with you next Sunday, if you say so!” <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c000' /></div> <div class='nf-center-c0'> <div class='nf-center c002'> <div>In the Married Quarters</div> </div></div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c002' /></div> <div class='chapter'> <h2 id='ch06' class='c003'>In the Married Quarters</h2></div> <div class='c009'> <ANTIMG class='drop-capi' src='images/dcm.jpg' width-obs='45' height-obs='41' alt='' /></div> MR. BROOKTON RIVERS watched the spark at the end of his cigar as he held the short stub between his thumb and forefinger. It was going out. While he had had that cigar to smoke his mind had been at rest, for he knew that he was going to sit in that particular angle in the piazza until he finished it, which would be about half-past eight. After that—what? He threw away the cigar and leaned meditatively forward to catch a glimpse of the moon as it rose over the patch of straggling woods next to the Queen Anne cottage opposite him. It showed a deserted piazza, and a man and his wife and two small children walking past it. The man walked with the heavy, shuffling steps of a laborer, and the woman, in a white shirt-waist and a dragging skirt, held one child by the hand, while the other, in tiny trousers, toddled bow-leggedly behind. As they vanished down the street, two silent men on bicycles sped past, their little lamps twinkling in the shadows; then half a dozen more, laughing and calling to each other, then a swiftly driven buggy that sent the dust flying up on the vines that were already laden with it. The prevailing smell of the humid night was of damp weeds. It was also very hot. There were no lights in the house opposite, nor in the one next to it, or in the one next to that, nor were there any, as he knew without seeing, in either of the houses next to his own. From farther down the street came the sound of a jangling piano, obstructed intermittently by the loud, unvaried barking of a melancholy dog. From nearer by the persistent wail of a very young infant, protesting already against existence in such a hot world, became more and more unbearable each instant. Mr. Rivers absent-mindedly killed three feasting mosquitoes at a blow, and rose to his feet with determination. He could stay here no longer. Should he go out, or retire to his room in the doubtful comfort of extreme negligee, and read? It will, of course, be evident to the meanest suburban intelligence that the month was August, and that Mrs. Rivers was away, as were most of her immediate neighbors, enjoying a holiday by either mountains or seashore. Rivers could see in imagination how glorious this moonlight became as the waves rolled into its path and broke there on the wet sands into a delicious rush and swirl of silvery sparkling foam. He could smell the very perfume of the sea, and feel the cold breath that the water exhales with one’s face close down by it, no matter how warm the night. It had been a pretty bad day in town. He was glad, very glad, that Elizabeth had the change. She needed it. He had said this stoutly to himself many times in the last six weeks, and knew that it was true. She had protested against going, and only yielded at last for the children’s sake and in wifely obedience to lawful masculine authority. He had insisted on sleeping in the house alone, in defiance of her pleading, alleging an affinity for his own bed, his own belongings, and an individual bath tub. A woman came once a week to sweep and straighten up the house. He had repeatedly declared there would be really nothing to do after business hours but to go around and enjoy himself. He had made her almost envious of these prospective joys. He would take little trips to Manhattan Beach with “the boys” and go to Bronxville to see Tom Westfield, as he had been meaning to for five years, and visit the roof garden with the Danas, who were on from St. Louis, and take dinner at the Café Ruritania. On the between nights he would visit the neighbors. All these things he had done, more or less disappointingly, but what should he do to-night? “I beg your pardon, Rivers, but have you any paregoric in the house? We’ve got to get something to quiet the baby.” A tall, thin, wearied-looking young man had come up the steps, hidden by the vines in which dwellers in a mosquito country are wont to picturesquely embower themselves, defiant of results. “Why, how are you, Parker?” said Rivers cordially. “Paregoric is it that you want? Come inside, and we’ll have a look for it, old man.” He led the way, scratching matches as he went to relieve the darkness, dropping them on the floor as they went out, and finally lighting the gas in the butler’s pantry. “My wife keeps the medicines on the top shelf here to be out of the way of the children,” he explained. “I don’t know about the paregoric, though. I seem to remember that she didn’t believe much in using it for babies.” “We’ve had a fight with the nurse about it,” said the other man, gnawing at a very light mustache as he leaned against the door, “but Great Scott, Rivers, we’ve got to do something. I would have murdered anybody whose child cried like this one. We’ve been complained of as it is. That’s paregoric, isn’t it?” “It was, but the bottle’s empty,” said Rivers, who was standing on the rung of a chair, holding out a vial now and then from an inner recess to read the name on it. “That’s another empty bottle—and here’s another empty bottle—and, this is—another. Bottle of sewing machine oil. Prescription for neuralgia, 178, 902, empty. Bottle of glycerine—confound the thing! the cork was out of it; get my handkerchief for me out of my pocket, will you? Prescription for hair tonic; empty bottle—another empty prescription bottle—dregs of cough medicine. What in thunder does Bess want with all these empty bottles? I’m awfully sorry, Parker, but we don’t seem to have the stuff you want, or any other, for that matter.” “Never mind,” said Parker. “I’ll ride down to the village and get some. I’d have gone there first, but the tire of my wheel wants blowing up.” “I’d lend you my wheel, but it’s at the shop,” called Rivers as they disappeared out of the door. He put the bottles back, upsetting, as he did so, a package of some white powder, out of which ran three cockroaches. As he stooped to gather it up again in the paper he disturbed a half-eaten peach which he remembered leaving there the night before, and a small colony of ants that had made their dwelling in it scuttled cheerily around. He uttered an exclamation of disgust, and shut the door of the butler’s pantry upon them. The whole house seemed given up to a plague of insects, utterly unknown in the reign of its careful mistress. In spite of screens, small stinging mosquitoes whizzed out from everything he touched; spiders hung down from webs in the ceiling, and a moth had flown from his closet that very morning. He kept the blinds and windows closed while he was away all day; he had begun by leaving them open, but a slanting shower had made havoc in his absence and also flooded the cellar through the open cellar door. It had not dried up since, and he was sure that there were fleas down there. There was a deadly hot damp and silence in the dining-room and parlor as he came through them, and the same unnatural atmosphere in the rooms above as he drearily invaded them for a clean collar. Every place was shut up and in order; the tops of the dressing tables even were bare save for the clean towel laid over each. His own room was in an ugly, disheveled confusion, and though his windows were open, no air came through the wire screens. He opened a closet door inadvertently, and the sight of a pink kimono of his wife’s, and the hats of the two little boys hanging up neatly beside it, emphasized his solitude. His latent idea of spending the rest of the evening at home was gone from him—he felt that he could not get out of this accursed house quickly enough, although he had not made up his mind where to go; he did not feel up to cheering the sick man in the next street, or equal to a gentle literary conversation with the two elderly ladies beyond who had known his mother. He wanted to go somewhere where he could smoke and have some pleasing light drink for refreshment, and be cheered and amused himself. The Callenders! If he only had his wheel—it was nine o’clock now, and the place was away over on the other side of town. Never mind, he would go, and chance their being at home and out of bed when he got there. Anything to get away from this loathsome place, although coming back to it again seemed suddenly an impossible horror. He wondered if he were getting ill. The night before— As he walked, the shadows of the moonlight lengthened his long legs, and their dragging strides. His face, with its short brown beard and the hollows under his dark eyes, was bent forward. He figured out anew the income there would be from his insurance money, and how it might be supplemented for Bess and the children. Clearly, he would have to earn more before he died. And oh, the burden, the burden, the burden was his! The thought leaped out like a visible thing. Her sweet presence, her curling hair, her dimples, her loving feminine inconsequence, with the innocent, laughing faces of the little boys, overlaid the daily care for him, but with these appointed Lighteners of Life away it loomed up into a hideously exaggerated specter that seemed to have always had its hand upon his fearsome heart, and only pressed a little closer upon him now in this hot windless night. Even his wilted collar partook of the tragic; he might as well have kept on the first one. “Hello! Hello! Where are you going? This is the place.” A shout of laughter accompanied the words. “Come up, brother, we’ve been waiting for you!” He looked up to see that he was in front of Callender’s house, and that the piazza, a large square end of which was screened off into a room, held a company in jovial mood, under moonlight as bright as day. The women were in white, with half bare neck and arms, rocking and fanning themselves, and the men in tennis shirts and belts, two of them smoking pipes, and the other a cigar. A tray, holding a large crystal bowl and glasses, stood on a bamboo table at one side, half shielded by jars of palms whose spiked shadows carpeted the floor and projected themselves across the white dress and arms of Mrs. Callender, while she held the door open with one hand, and half welcomed, half dragged him in with the other, amid a chorus of voices, “Come in, come in, you’re one of us.” “If you let a mosquito in—Take that chair by Mrs. Weir if you feel up to it; she wants to be entertained.” “I feel up to anything—now,” said Rivers, taking with alacrity the seat allotted to him, after shaking hands with pretty Mrs. Waring, who lived next door, and her cousin, Mrs. Weir. “Same old crowd, I see.” The laughter broke out anew as his wandering eyes took tally of the group, and he said, “Where’s Callender? and Weir? What’s the joke?” “Oh, don’t ask for any woman’s husband or any man’s wife,” said Mrs. Callender despairingly, with her graceful figure reclining back in the low chair. “Can’t you see that we’re all detached?” Her charming smile suddenly broke forth. “It’s really too absurd.” “No!” said Rivers, a light dawning on him. “Nichols, you don’t mean that you are on the waiting list too?” Mr. Nichols, a large man with a grizzled head, nodded and helped himself to the contents of the suggestive bowl. “The missus and the kids went off last week; I’m detained for a while longer. As for Callender; he got a summons from the company, and he’s half way to Chicago by this time, I hope. I came over on purpose to tell his last words to his wife, who didn’t want them.” “Ned had already brought them,” said Mrs. Callender, turning to the tall, quiet man of the cigar, Mr. Atwood, who was her brother. “It’s such a mercy that he happened to come on, or I’d have been here all alone.” “Looks like it,” said Mr. Porter, a stout fair gentleman with a cool gray eye, a bald head, and a gurgling laugh. “What do you think, Rivers, these girls here”—he waved his hand—“had been counting on seeing the whole lot of us to-night, and brewed that lemonade on purpose.” “Everyone has come now but the Martindales,” said Mrs. Weir, a little woman with loosely piled dark hair, and a gentle, winning voice, occasionally diversified with a surprising shriek of laughter. “The Martindales! Why, they only returned this evening—I met them on the boat,” said Rivers. “Yes, we know that, but one of them will be over here just the same,” said Mrs. Callender placidly. “They’ll want to see what we’re doing. Do somebody pay a little attention to Mrs. Waring; she hasn’t said a word for half an hour. I believe she’s hoping that Henry’ll be too homesick to stay away.” “Not quite,” said Mrs. Waring with a little tremble of her lower lip. “Nice, kind little woman you are,” said Porter severely. “Want to enjoy yourself thinking how unhappy Waring is. Well, I’m glad he went, and I hope he’ll stay until he’s well; if any man needed a change, he did.” “He would have taken me with him if I could have left the children,” murmured Mrs. Waring. “Yes, the children win every time,” said Porter with easy philosophy. “You think you’re important, my brothers, until you’re confronted with your own offspring, and then you’re not in it.” “I don’t see,” said Mr. Nichols, filling his pipe again, “why a man’s family should stay in town and broil because he has to. It wouldn’t be any satisfaction to me, I know that. My little girls write to me every day.” “I remember,” said Rivers, leaning forward, “once when Bess and I took a trip together we had to come home just when the fishing was at its height, because she imagined what it would be like if a menagerie broke loose and a tiger got at little Brook when he was asleep in his crib. She said she knew it was perfectly absurd, but she couldn’t stand it a moment longer. So we came home.” He laughed tenderly at the reminiscence, and the other men laughed with him, but the women, even Mrs. Callender, who had no children, were serious, and Mrs. Weir said, as if speaking for the rest, “Yes, one does feel that way sometimes.” The men looked at each other and nodded, as in the presence of something known of old, something to be smiled at, and yet reverenced. The fierce maternal impulses of his wife were divine to Rivers, he loved her the more for her foolishness; it seemed fitting, and all he could expect, that the children should be her passion, as she was his. If he had once dreamed that it would be otherwise, he knew better now. Women were to be taken care of and loved for their very limitations, even if one bore a little sense of loss and soreness forever in one’s own heart. What could they know? “Why don’t you take a vacation, Mr. Rivers?” asked Mrs. Weir later as the others had fallen into general conversation. “You look as if you needed it. Mr. Nichols says it was dreadful in town to-day; forty-seven heat prostrations.” “Oh, I can’t get off,” said Rivers with unconscious weariness in his voice. “It makes an awful lot of difference when you’re running the business yourself. If I were working for somebody else I’d take my little two weeks the way my own clerks do, without caring a hang what became of the concern in my absence. I thought I was going to get up to Maine over the Fourth, and after all I couldn’t leave in time. It’s quite a journey, you know. Bess and the boys were as disappointed as I was,” he added conscientiously. “But they’re getting along finely. Sam and Jack are learning to swim, she says—pretty good for little shavers of five and six! They’re as brown as Indians. She says—” he began to laugh as he repeated confidentially some anecdotes of their prowess to which Mrs. Weir apparently listened with the deeply interested attention that is balm to the family exile, only asking him after a while irrelevantly, as he pushed back the hair from his forehead, “How did you get that ugly cut on your temple?” Even in the moonlight she could see his face flush. “Oh, come, Rivers,” said Atwood, who was passing, “make up some story, for the credit of mankind.” “Then you might as well have the truth, I suppose,” said Rivers, laughing, yet embarrassed. “It’s really nothing, though; I felt dizzy and queer when I went to bed last night. I suppose it was just the heat, and I have had a good deal to carry in a business way lately. I found myself at daylight this morning lying on the floor with my head by the edge of the bureau, and I don’t know in the least how I got there. I have a faint memory that I started to go for some water. I’m all right to-day, though; it hasn’t bothered me a bit.” “No, of course not,” said Mrs. Weir encouragingly. “And you don’t mind staying alone?” she dropped her voice. “Oh, no, not at all. Only—I don’t mind telling you—” he looked at her with strange eyes—“I hate the house! It’s got all the plagues of Egypt in it. And all the hours I’ve spent alone there are shut up in it too. I know just how it’s going to be when I open that front door and walk in.” “Stay here to-night,” said Mrs. Weir smoothly. “Stay here with Mr. Atwood; Mrs. Callender will be delighted to have you.” “Oh, I can’t, possibly,” said Rivers with decision. “I didn’t even lock the front door when I came away. I only remembered it a moment ago. And I won’t really mind a bit after I’m once back there—it’s only the plunge. You’re awfully good to me, Mrs. Weir,” he added gratefully; but he wanted his wife—he did not want to be confidential with anyone but her. No matter what enjoyment he had in this brief hour, it was bound to fail him at the end. One of the dearest pleasures of married life is the going home together after the outside pleasuring is over. As they all trooped into the dining-room for the crabs and salad Mrs. Callender told of as in the ice-box, the figure of Elizabeth in her pink kimono seemed to weave in and out among the others, but in another moment he was laughing and talking uproariously with the men, while the women, on Mrs. Callender’s assertion that the servants were in bed, tucked up their gowns and descended the cellar stairs for the provisions, refusing all masculine assistance. “I think it’s an eternal shame,” said Mrs. Callender as the three held an excited conclave in cellared seclusion by the open refrigerator. “It’s just as Celeste says, he’s ill—anyone can see it. Why, he starts whenever he’s spoken to. He told Mr. Callender the other day that he’d been horribly worried about business. He’s a nervous kind of a fellow, and he takes everything too hard. He ought not to be left alone in this way.” “I think somebody ought to write to her,” said Mrs. Waring solemnly, resting the dish of salad on the top of the ice-box. “I think it’s perfectly heartless of her to go on enjoying herself when he’s ill.” “She doesn’t know it,” interrupted Mrs. Callender with rare justice. “That’s what I say, somebody ought to tell her. She never seems to think about anything but herself, though—or the children, or clothes. If I thought that Henry—but I’d never leave him this way, never; I wouldn’t have a bit of comfort. He’s so devoted to his home, just like Mr. Rivers.” “Do you know—I have a dreadful feeling that something is going to happen to him to-night?” “If you had heard him talk—” said Mrs. Weir with tragic impressiveness. The three women looked at each other silently. “Are we to have anything to eat to-night, or are you girls going to talk until morning?” came the steady tones of Porter from the head of the stairs. “It’s after eleven now.” “Goodness!” said Mrs. Callender, hastily completing her preparations. “Yes! we’re coming. You can send Ned down now to crack some more ice, and then we’ll be ready.” But she turned to say, “I think someone ought to go home with him.” “This is what I call comfort,” said Porter as they sat hilariously around the Flemish oak table, eating the cool viands and drinking anew from the iced bowl, a lacy square of white linen and a glass vase of scarlet nasturtiums gracing the center of the board. “Clear, clear comfort!” “I feel at peace with all mankind—even with Atwood, who believes in an imperial policy.” “Hush,” said Mrs. Callender, “who is that on the piazza?” The door opened, a head was thrust in, and a shout arose. “Martindale! Martindale, by all that’s holy! Come in, we’re expecting you.” “That’s mighty good of you,” said the intruder, who seemed to be all red hair and smiles. “All the same, you don’t seem to have left me much of anything to eat.” He drew up a chair to the table and sat down. “Where’s your wife?” asked Mrs. Weir. “Oh, she had a headache this evening. I went out for a ride, and when I came back I saw you were on deck over here, so I thought I’d look in and see what was up.” He stopped, oblivious of the renewed laughter, and stared at Rivers. “Why, when did you get here? I saw a light in your house ten minutes ago. I nearly dropped in on you.” “A light in my house!” exclaimed Rivers. He rose, and the others instinctively rose also, with startled glances at each other. “Perhaps your family has come home,” suggested Mrs. Waring. Rivers shook his head. “No, I had a letter from Bess to-day saying she had taken the rooms for two weeks more. It might have been Parker, but I don’t think so. Are you sure you saw a light?” “On the lower floor,” asseverated Martindale. “Was the door locked when you came out?” “No.” “All right,” said Atwood briskly. “Porter and I’ll go back with you, Rivers. No, we don’t need you, Nichols, you’re tired. Come upstairs and choose from Callender’s arsenal.” “Each of those women begged me secretly not to let him get shot,” whispered Porter to his companion as they set off at a jog trot down the street, Rivers a little ahead. “I suppose they could sing our requiems with pleasure.” “I know. They pounded it into me, too. They’ve got some kind of an idea between ’em that he’s coming to harm. Anything for an excitement. We’ll get ahead of him when we’re a little nearer to the house.” It looked very dark and still as they reached it. The moon had set, and the patch of straggling woods stretched out weird and formless. The piano, the infant, the yelping dog had given place to an oppressive silence save for the dismal chirping of insects and the shuddering of a train of coal cars as it backed far off down the track. “There is no light now,” said Porter. The three were drawn up in a line outside the house, and even while he spoke the gas flared up bright in the second story. The edge of a shadow wavered toward the back of the room; then it came forward and disappeared. The next moment the shade of the front window was partly drawn up and pulled down again by a round white arm, half clad in the loose sleeve of a pink kimono. <hr class='c010' /> <div class='c008'> <ANTIMG class='drop-capi' src='images/dcr.jpg' width-obs='40' height-obs='39' alt='' /></div> RIVERS sat in the big wicker chair with his arms around his little wife. Her head, with its light curls, lay on his shoulder, and both of her hands held one of his large ones as she talked. “You are sure you do not mind my coming in this way?” “No. No, my Betsy, I do not mind.” He touched his lips to her forehead, and smoothed the folds of her pink gown with the strong, unnecessarily firm touch of a man. “But where are the boys?” “I left them with Alice”—Alice was her sister—“for another week. I couldn’t bring them back in this hot weather.” “Left them with Alice!” “Yes, don’t talk about it.” She colored nervously and then went on. “I know they’re all right, but if I think about it too much I’ll get silly—as I did about you. But, of course, it’s really different with them, for they have someone to look after them, and Alice will telegraph every day.” “How did you get silly about me?” She clasped and unclasped his hand. “I don’t know. Yes, I do. It was worse than the time I thought of little Brook and the tiger. I kept imagining and imagining dreadful things. Last night I thought you were—dead. I saw you fallen on the floor.” Her voice dropped to a note of horror, and her eyes grew dark as they stared at him. “Where did you get that cut on your forehead? Were you ill last night? Did you have a fall?” He nodded, gazing steadily at her. “I’m all right now.” “Oh,” she said with a long, shivering breath, and hid her face on his shoulder. Presently she fell to kissing his hand, holding it tight when he strove to draw it away. Then she went on in a smothered tone, with a little pause between each sentence, “I got here at ten o’clock. I thought you’d never come home. Of course, I knew you were at the Callenders’. I went to work and cleared up the butler’s pantry, or I couldn’t have slept here! The house is in a dreadful condition.” “Yes. Don’t you care.” “I don’t. I’ll have an army here cleaning to-morrow. But oh, Brookton—” she broke off suddenly—“don’t send me away again!” There was a new, passionate ring in her voice. “Never send me away again. I’ve been wild, wild, wild for you! Promise never to send me away again. Let me stay with you always—whatever happens—like this—until we die!” A sob caught her by the throat. The strong and tender clasp of his arms answered her—her trembling ceased. After a silence, he said gently, “I’m going downstairs now to lock up.” She rose, flushing under his smiling eyes as he held her off at arm’s length to say, “It seems to me you’ve reached a high pitch of romance after seven years, Mrs. Rivers!” “Ah, don’t, don’t,” she deprecated. She raised her drooping head and flashed a reckless glance at him, half mirthful, half tragic. “Oh, it’s dreadful to care so much for any man! Goodness knows what I’ll get to in seven years more!” <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c000' /></div> <div class='nf-center-c0'> <div class='nf-center c002'> <div>Mrs. Atwood’s Outer Raiment</div> </div></div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c002' /></div> <div class='chapter'> <h2 id='ch07' class='c003'>Mrs. Atwood’s Outer Raiment</h2></div> <div class='c009'> <ANTIMG class='drop-capi' src='images/dch.jpg' width-obs='35' height-obs='42' alt='' /></div> “HOW much will a new suit cost, Jo?” Mr. Atwood held his fingers reflectively on the rubber band of his pocketbook as he asked the question, and glanced as he did so at the round brunette face of his wife, which had suddenly become all flush and sparkle. “Oh, Edward!” “Well?” “You oughtn’t to give me the money for it now—you really oughtn’t. There are so many calls on you at this season of the year, I don’t see how we can meet them as it is. The second quarter of Josephine’s music lessons begins next month, and the dancing school bill comes in too—besides the coal. Everything just piles in before Christmas. I meant to have saved the money, for a coat at any rate, this summer out of my allowance, but I was obliged to fit Josephine out from head to foot—she grows so fast, she takes as much for a dress as I do. But it doesn’t make any difference—I can do very well for a while with what I have—really!” “How about the Washington trip with me next month? I thought you said you couldn’t go anywhere without a new suit?” “Well, I can’t, but—” “That settles it.” Mr. Atwood pulled off the rubber band from the pocketbook and laid it on the table before him, as he extracted a roll of bills and began to count them. It was a shabby article, worn brown at the edges, but it had been made of handsome leather to begin with, and still held together in spite of many years of service. Mrs. Atwood would hardly have known her husband without that pocketbook. It represented in its way the heart of a kind and generous man, always ready to do his utmost in help of the family needs, without complaint or caviling. His wife always experienced mingled feelings when that leather receptacle appeared—a quick and blessed relief and a sharp wince, as if it were really his heart’s blood that she was taking. Her fervent imagination was perennially ready to picture unknown depths of stress. He paid no attention now to her inarticulate murmur of protest; but asked, in a business-like way, “How much will it take?” “I could get the material for a dollar a yard—” Mrs. Atwood sat with her hands clasped and her eyes looking off into space, feeling the words wrung from her—“I could get it for a dollar a yard, but I suppose it ought to be heavier weight for the winter.” “Have it warm enough, whatever else you do,” interrupted her husband. “It would take seven yards, or I might get along with six and a half, it depends on the width. It’s the linings that make it mount up to so much, and the making. You can get a suit made for ten dollars; Cynthia Callender did, and hers looks well, but Mrs. Nichols went to the same place, and—” “Will thirty dollars be enough?” asked Mr. Atwood with masculine directness, seeking for some tangible fact. “Oh, yes. I’m sure it will be, I—” “Then here’s fifty,” said Mr. Atwood. He counted out five tens and pushed them over to her. “Get a good suit while you’re about it, Jo.” “Oh, Edward. I don’t want—” “Make her take it,” said a girl of sixteen, rising from the corner where she had been sitting with a book in her hand, a very tall and thin and pretty girl, brunette like her mother, with a long black braid that hung down her back. She came forward and threw her arm around her mother’s neck, bending protectingly over her. “Make her take it, papa. She buys everything for me and the boys, and goes without herself, so that I’m ashamed to walk out in the street with her; it makes me look so horrid to be all dressed up when she wears that old spring jacket. When it’s cold she puts a cape over it. I wish you’d see that cape! She’s had it since the year one. She doesn’t dare wear it when she goes out with you, she just shivers.” “Hush, hush, Josephine,” said the mother embarrassed, yet laughing, as her husband lifted his shaggy eyebrows at her in mock severity. “You needn’t say any more, either of you. I’ll take the money.” She paused impressively, and then gently pushed the girl aside and went over and kissed her husband. “If I were only as good a manager as some people! I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I try, and I try, but—” “Yes, yes, I know,” said the husband. “All I ask now is that you spend this money on yourself; it’s not for other needs. Remember! You are to spend it all on yourself.” “Yes, I will,” said Mrs. Atwood, with the guilty thrill of the perjured at the very moment of her promise. She knew very well that some of it would have to be spent for other needs. She had but fifty cents left of her allowance to last her until the end of the month, five long days away. No one but the mother of a family of moderate means realizes what the demand for pads, pencils, shoestrings, lunches, postage stamps, hair ribbons, medicines, mended shoes, and such like can amount to in that short time. She had meant to ask Edward to advance her a little more on the next month’s allowance—already largely anticipated—but she had not the face to after his generosity to her now. A couple of dollars out of the fifty would make very little difference, and she did not need it all, anyway. She almost wept as she thought of Josephine’s championship of her, and her husband’s thoughtfulness. Mrs. Atwood adored her husband and her three children. She firmly believed them to be superior in every way to all other mortals; sacrificing service for them was her joy of joys, her keenest affliction the fear that she did not appreciate them half enough. It is certain that the children, truthful, loving, and obedient as they had been trained to be, would have been spoiled beyond tolerance if it were not that the very strength of her admiration made it innocuous. They were so used to being told that they were the loveliest and dearest things on earth that the words were not even heard. As they grew older the extravagance of her devotion was beginning to rouse the protective element in them, to her wonder and humility. Mrs. Atwood, at twenty, the time of her marriage, had been a warm-hearted, fervent, loquacious, impulsive child. At thirty-eight she was still in many ways the girl her husband had married; even to her looks, while he appeared much older than his real age, in reality but a couple of years ahead of hers. She was always longing to be a silent, noble, and finely-balanced character, quite oblivious of the fact that she suited him, a humorous but self-contained man, exactly as she was, and that he would have been very lonesome with anything more perfect. Perhaps, after all, there are few things that are better to bring into a household than an uncalculating and abounding love, even if the manifestations of it are not always of the wisest. The extra money cast a rich glow over Mrs. Atwood’s horizon. In the effulgence of it she received a bill for twelve dollars presented to her just after breakfast the next morning, by the waitress, with the word that the man waiting outside the door had already brought it once before, when they were out of town. Could Mrs. Atwood pay it now? He needed the money. “Why, certainly,” said Mrs. Atwood with affluent promptness. The bill was for work on the lawn during the summer, something her husband always paid for, but it seemed a pity to have the man go away again when the money was there at hand. She would not in the least mind asking Edward to refund it to her. But she felt the well-known drop into her usual condition of calculating economy. Her husband came home that night with a bad headache, and the night after she had another bill waiting for him for repairs on the furnace. It was unexpectedly and villainously large, and Mrs. Atwood was constitutionally incapable of adding another straw to his burden, while she stood by consenting sympathetically unto his righteous wrath. A day later, when she spoke of going to town to buy the material for her new costume with outward buoyancy, but inward panic at the rapid shrinkage of her funds, Sam, a boy of twelve, announced the fact that he must have a new suit of clothes at once. As it was Saturday, he could accompany her. “What is the matter with those you have on? They are not in the least worn out,” said his mother. “Mamma, they’re so thin that I’m freezing all the time I’m in school. You ought to have heard me coughing yesterday.” “You have the old blue suit; I’m sure that’s thick enough.” “The blue suit! Yes, and it hurts me, it’s so tight I can hardly walk in it. I can’t sit down in it at all. It makes ridges all around my legs.” Mrs. Atwood looked at her son with rare exasperation. It was well known that when Sam took a dislike to his clothes for any reason, they always hurt him. His coats, his trousers, his caps, his shoes, even his neckties developed hitherto unsuspected attributes of torture. And there was always a haunting feeling with the outraged dispenser of these articles that it might be true. A penetrative and scornful remark from the passing Josephine at once emphasized this view of the case to the anxious mother, remorseful already at her own lack of sympathy. “I’m astonished at you, Josephine. If the clothes hurt him—” but the girl had disappeared beyond hearing. Sam came from town that jubilant evening, in warm and roomy jacket and trousers, and, oh, weakness of woman! with a new football, besides. Mrs. Atwood carried with her a box of lead soldiers for Eddy, and a sweet little fluffy thing in neckwear for Josephine, such as she saw other girls displaying. After all, what was her own dress in comparison with the darling children’s happiness? She would get some cheap stuff and make it up herself. No one would know the difference. “How about your suit, Jo?” asked her husband one evening as they sat around the fire. “Is it almost finished?” “Not—exactly,” said Mrs. Atwood. “The club goes to Washington on the fifteenth of the month, it was decided to-day. Nearly all the men are going to take their wives with them. I’m looking forward to showing off mine.” “My mamma will look prettier than any of them,” said Eddy belligerently. “And lots younger,” added Sam. “Have you ordered the suit yet?” asked the voice of Josephine. Oh, how her mother dreaded it! “No, I haven’t—yet,” she felt herself forced into saying. “I don’t believe there is any money left for it,” pursued the pitiless one. “She spends it for other things, papa. She pays bills and doesn’t tell, because she hates to bother you. And she buys things for us. And she paid a subscription to the Orphan’s Home yesterday, and she got a new wash-boiler for Katy. And—” “Hush, hush, Josephine,” said her father severely. “I found that receipted bill of Patrick’s lying around the other day, Jo. I should have paid you back at once. How much money have you left?” “Oh, Edward—I’m so foolish. I—” “Have you thirty dollars?” “I—I don’t think so.” “Have you twenty?” “I haven’t—more than that.” She had, as she well knew, the sum of nine dollars and sixty-seven cents in the purse in her dressing table drawer. “Will this help you out?” His tone had the business-like quality in it as natural as breathing to a man when he speaks of money matters, and which a woman feels almost as a personal condemnation in its chill removal from sentiment. “Oh, Edward—please don’t! It makes me feel so—” She tried not to be too abject. “But nearly all of it has gone for necessary things.” “That’s all right.” He added with a touch of severity. “Don’t let there be any mistake about it this time, Jo,” and she murmured contentedly, “No. No, indeed.” With her allowance money, too, how could there be? Mrs. Atwood now set herself seriously to the work of getting appareled. She read advertisements, and went to town two days in succession, bringing home samples of cloth for family approval; she sought the advice of her young sister-in-law, Mrs. Callender, and of her friend, Mrs. Nichols, with the result that she finally sat down one morning immediately after breakfast, and wrote a letter to a New York firm ordering a jacket and skirt made like one in a catalogue issued by them, and setting down her measurements according to its directions. Just before she finished, a maid brought her up word that Mrs. Martindale was below. “Mrs. Martindale—at this time in the morning!” Mrs. Martindale was her cousin, and lived over the other side of the track, some distance away. Mrs. Atwood hurried down with a premonition of evil to find the visitor, a pretty woman, elegantly but hastily gowned, sitting on the edge of a chair, as if ready for instant flight. There was a wild expression in her eye. She began at once, taking no notice of Mrs. Atwood’s greeting. “I suppose you think I’m crazy to come here in this way. I didn’t sleep a wink last night. I didn’t know what to do. We’re in such a state!” “Is it the business?” “Oh, it’s the estate and the business and everything. Mr. Bellew’s death has just brought the whole thing to a standstill. All the money is tied up in some dreadful way—don’t ask me. Of course it will be all right in three or four weeks, Dick says, and we have credit everywhere. It’s just to tide over this time. But we haven’t a penny of ready money; not a penny. It would be ridiculous if it wasn’t horrible. Dick gave me all he could scrape together last week, and told me to try and make it last, but it’s all gone—I couldn’t help it. And the washerwoman comes to-day. If you could let me have ten dollars, Jo; I couldn’t bear to let Dick know.” “Why, certainly,” said Mrs. Atwood with loving alacrity. “Don’t say another word.” If she felt a pang, she scorned it. “You don’t know how many calls there are on one,” murmured the other, sinking back with relief. Mrs. Atwood thought she did, but she only said, “You poor thing,” and rushed upstairs to get one of her crisp ten-dollar bills; she could not use the house money for this. She passed Josephine in the hall, afterwards, on her way to school, and held the bill behind her, but she felt sure the girl’s keen eyes had spied it. “I’m so glad I had it! Are you sure this will be enough?” she asked as the other kissed her fervently. What were clothes for herself in comparison with poor Bertha’s need? She would look over the catalogue again to-morrow, when she had time, and order a cheaper suit, or buy one ready made. After all, she did neither. Her money—but why chronicle further the diminution of her forces? Delay made it as inevitable as the thaw after snow. Her entire downfall was completed the day she had unexpected and honorable company to dinner, and sent Sam out to the nearest shops instead of those at which she usually dealt, to “break a bill”—heart-rending process—in the purchase of fruits and sweets for their consumption. No one has ever satisfactorily explained why the change from five dollars never amounts to more than two dollars and sixteen cents. Poor Mrs. Atwood could never get quite used to the fact that if she spent money it was gone. She cherished an underlying hope that she could get it back somehow. As the time approached for the Washington trip she did not dare to meet her Edward’s eye, and replied but feebly to his unusually jolly anticipations of “this time next week.” She had hoped that she might have some excuse to remain at home, much as she had longed for this jaunt alone with her husband, but there seemed to be no loophole of escape. She tried to freshen up her heaviest skirt, and took the spring jacket she was wearing and made a thick lining to it, planning to disguise it further with a piece of fur at the neck. She felt horribly guilty when Josephine came in and caught her at it. The tall girl with her red cheeks just out of the wintry air looked at her mother with an inscrutable expression, but she merely said, “I suppose that’s to save your new suit. You’ll never be able to get into it, if you put so much wadding in,” and went off again. The mother felt relieved, yet a little hurt, too, in some mysterious way. Many a time she tried to screw her courage up to confessing that she had no outer raiment; that after all the money and all her promises she had nothing to show in exchange. The fatal moment had to come, but she put it off. She had done it so many times! For herself she did not mind; she could have confessed joyfully to all the crimes in the Decalogue, if it would have benefited her dear ones, but to wound their idea of her, to pain them by showing how unworthy she was, how unfit to be trusted—that came hard. She prayed a great deal about it on her knees by the bed in the dusk of her own room when she came upstairs after dinner, on the pretext of “getting something”; she belonged to the old-fashioned, child-like order of women who do pray about things, not only daily, but hourly, and who, unknown to themselves, exhale the sweetness born of heavenly contact. She wondered if, perhaps, it might not be better if she were dead, she was such a poor manager, and set such a bad example to the children. Josephine had that clear common sense that she lacked. The girl was getting to be so companionable to her father, too. She had the sacrificial pleasure of the victim when she heard them laughing and talking downstairs together. “Well, Jo, has your suit come home yet?” It was three nights before the fateful Thursday, and the family were grouped in the library as was their wont in the evenings immediately after dinner. Eddy was lying on the fur rug playing with the cat in the warmth of the wood fire, and Mr. Atwood, in a big chair with his wife leaning on the arm of it, sat watching the little boy. The two older children were studying by a table in the back of the room in front of a shaded lamp, with a pile of books before them. Mr. Atwood, although his hair and mustache were grizzled and his face prematurely lined, had a curious faculty of suddenly looking like a boy, under some pleasurable emotion; anticipation of his holiday made him young for the moment. His wife thought him beautiful. “Did you say it had not come home yet? You must be sure to have it on time. Take all your party clothes along, too.” “Oh, yes, I’m going to,” said Mrs. Atwood. She was on sure ground here. The gown she had had made for a wedding in the spring was crying to be worn again. “What color did you decide on?” “I—I decided on—brown,” said Mrs. Atwood with fixed eyes. Her respite was gone. “Brown—yes, I always liked you in brown. Have you heard your mother talk much about her new clothes, Josephine?” “No,” said Josephine, “I haven’t.” “Didn’t you wear brown when we went on our wedding trip? It seems to me that I remember that. I know you had red berries in your hat, for I knocked some of them out.” “Were you married in a brown dress?” called Sam. “No,” answered the father for her, “your mother was married in white—some kind of white mosquito-netting. What makes you look so unhappy, Jo? Aren’t you glad to go off with me—in a new suit?” “Edward!” said Mrs. Atwood. She rose and stood in front of him, her dark eyes unnaturally large, the color coming and going in her rounded olive cheek. Her red lips trembled. Here, before the loved and dreaded domestic tribunal she would be shriven at last. Her children should know just what she was like. “Edward! I have something to tell you.” “There’s the door bell,” said her husband with an arresting hand, as he listened for the outer sounds. “A package, sir. By the express. Twenty-five cents.” “Have you the change, Jo? It’s some clothes I ordered myself for the Washington trip; I wanted to do you credit. Oh, don’t go upstairs for it.” “I don’t mind,” said Mrs. Atwood. Change! She had nothing but change. Clothes! How easy it was for him to get them! Do her credit—in his glossy newness, while she was in that old black skirt, grown skimp and askew with wear, and that tight, impossible jacket! She charged up and down stairs in the vehemence of her emotion, filled with anger at her folly, and paid the man herself before reentering the library. Her husband was untying the cords of the long pasteboard box with slow and patient fingers. He was a man who had never cut a string in his life. The children were standing by in what seemed unnecessary excitement, their faces all turned to her as she came toward them. Edward had lifted the cover of the box. “What color are your clothes, Edward?” asked his wife. It was the first time that he had ever bought anything without consulting her. “What color? Oh—brown,” said Mr. Atwood. He swooped her into a front place in the circle with his long arm. “Here, look and tell me what you think of this.” “Edward!” “Lined throughout with taffeta, gores on every frill—why, Jo! Bring your mother a chair, Josephine.” Before the eyes of Mrs. Atwood lay the rich folds of a cloth skirt, surmounted by a jacket trimmed with fur. She lay back in the armchair with the family clustered around her, their tongues loosened. “We all knew about it—” “We promised not to tell—” “We wanted to see you get it—” “There won’t be anybody as pretty as you, mamma.” “You left out that letter of measurements, and papa and I took it to Aunt Cynthia”—this from Josephine—“and she helped us. She says you’re disgracefully unselfish.” The girl emphasized her remark with a sudden and strangling hug. “There isn’t anybody in the world as good as you are. I was watching you all last week; I knew you wouldn’t buy a thing. But it was papa who thought of doing it, when I told him. Feel the stuff—isn’t it lovely? so thick and soft. He and Aunt Cynthia said you should have the best; she can spend money! And you’re to go uptown to-morrow with me to buy a hat with red in it, and if the suit needs altering it can be done then. Don’t you like it, mamma?” “It’s perfectly beautiful,” said the mother, her hands clasped in those of her three darlings, but her eyes sought her husband’s. He alone said nothing, but stood regarding her with twinkling eyes, through a suspicion of moisture. What did she see in them? The love and kindness that clothed her not only with silk and wool, but with honor; that made of this new raiment a vesture wherein she entered that special and exquisite heaven of the woman whose husband and children arise up and call her blessed. <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c000' /></div> <div class='nf-center-c0'> <div class='nf-center c002'> <div>Fairy Gold</div> </div></div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c002' /></div> <div class='chapter'> <h2 id='ch08' class='c003'>Fairy Gold</h2></div> <div class='c009'> <ANTIMG class='drop-capi' src='images/dcw.jpg' width-obs='50' height-obs='48' alt='' /></div> WHEN Mr. William Belden walked out of his house one wet October evening and closed the hall door carefully behind him, he had no idea that he was closing the door on all the habits of his maturer life and entering the borders of a land as far removed from his hopes or his imagination as the country of the Gadarenes. He had not wanted to go out that evening at all, not knowing what the fates had in store for him, and being only too conscious of the comfort of the sitting-room lounge, upon which, after the manner of the suburban resident who traveleth daily by railways, he had cast himself immediately after the evening meal was over. The lounge was in proximity—yet not too close proximity—to the lamp on the table; so that one might have the pretext of reading to cover closed eyelids and a general oblivion of passing events. On a night when a pouring rain splashed outside on the pavements and the tin roofs of the piazzas, the conditions of rest in the cozy little room were peculiarly attractive to a man who had come home draggled and wet, and with the toil and wear of a long business day upon him. It was therefore with a sinking of the heart that he heard his wife’s gentle tones requesting him to wend his way to the grocery to purchase a pound of butter. “I hate to ask you to go, William dear, but there really is not a scrap in the house for breakfast, and the butter-man does not come until to-morrow afternoon,” she said deprecatingly. “It really will only take you a few minutes.” Mr. Belden smothered a groan, or perhaps something worse. The butter question was a sore one, Mrs. Belden taking only a stated quantity of that article a week, and always unexpectedly coming short of it before the day of replenishment, although no argument ever served to induce her to increase the original amount for consumption. “Cannot Bridget go?” he asked weakly, gazing at the small, plump figure of his wife, as she stood with meek yet inexorable eyes looking down at him. “Bridget is washing the dishes, and the stores will be closed before she can get out.” “Can’t one of the boys—” He stopped. There was in this household a god who ruled everything in it, to whom all pleasures were offered up, all individual desires sacrificed, and whose Best Good was the greedy and unappreciative Juggernaut before whom Mr. Belden and his wife prostrated themselves daily. This idol was called The Children. Mr. Belden felt that he had gone too far. “William!” said his wife severely, “I am surprised at you. John and Henry have their lessons to get, and Willy has a cold; I could not think of exposing him to the night air; and it is so damp, too!” Mr. Belden slowly and stiffly rose from his reclining position on the sofa. There was a finality in his wife’s tone before which he succumbed. The night air was damp. As he walked along the street the water slopped around his feet, and ran in rills down his rubber coat. He did not feel as contented as usual. When he was a youngster, he reflected with exaggerated bitterness, boys were boys, and not treated like precious pieces of porcelain. He did not remember, as a boy, ever having any special consideration shown him; yet he had been both happy and healthy, healthier perhaps than his over-tended brood at home. In his day it had been popularly supposed that nothing could hurt a boy. He heaved a sigh over the altered times, and then coughed a little, for he had a cold as well as Willy. The streets were favorable to silent meditation, for there was no one out in them. The boughs of the trees swished backward and forward in the storm, and the puddles at the crossings reflected the dismal yellow glare of the street lamps. Everyone was housed to-night in the pretty detached cottages he passed, and he thought with growing wrath of the trivial errand on which he had been sent. “In happy homes he saw the light,” but none of the high purpose of the youth of “Excelsior” fame stirred his heart—rather a dull sense of failure from all high things. What did his life amount to, anyway, that he should count one thing more trivial than another? He loved his wife and children dearly, but he remembered a time when his ambition had not thought of being satisfied with the daily grind for a living and a dreamless sleep at night. “‘Our life is but a sleep and a forgetting,’” he thought grimly, “in quite a different way from what Wordsworth meant.” He had been one of the foremost in his class at college, an orator, an athlete, a favorite in society and with men. Great things had been predicted for him. Then he had fallen in love with Nettie; a professional career seemed to place marriage at too great a distance, and he had joyfully, yet with some struggles in his protesting intellect, accepted a position that was offered to him—one of those positions which never change, in which men die still unpromoted, save when a miracle intervenes. It was not so good a position for a family of six as it had been for a family of two, but he did not complain. He and Nettie went shabby, but the children were clothed in the best, as was their due. He was too wearied at night to read anything but the newspapers, and the gentle domestic monotony was not inspiring. He and Nettie never went out in the evenings; the children could not be left alone. He met his friends on the train in that diurnal journey to and from the great city, and she occasionally attended a church tea; but their immediate and engrossing world seemed to be made up entirely of persons under thirteen years of age. They had dwelt in the place almost ever since their marriage, respected and liked, but with no real social life. If Mr. Belden thought of the years to come, he may be pardoned an unwonted sinking of the heart. It was while indulging in these reflections that he mechanically purchased the pound of butter, which he could not help comparing with Shylock’s pound of flesh, so much of life had it taken out of him, and then found himself stepping up on the platform of the station, led by his engrossing thoughts to pass the street corner and tread the path most familiar to him. He turned with an exclamation to retrace his way, when a man pacing leisurely up and down, umbrella in hand, caught sight of him. “Is that you, Belden?” said the stranger. “What are you doing down here to-night?” “I came out on an errand for my wife,” said Mr. Belden sedately. He recognized the man as a young lawyer much identified with politics; a mere acquaintance, yet it was a night to make any speaking animal seem a friend, and Mr. Belden took a couple of steps along beside him. “Waiting for a train?” he said. “Oh, thunder, yes!” said Mr. Groper, throwing away the stump of a cigar. “I have been waiting for the last half hour for the train; it’s late, as usual. There’s a whole deputation from Barnet on board, due at the Reform meeting in town to-night, and I’m part of the committee to meet them here.” “Where is the other part of the committee?” asked Mr. Belden. “Oh, Jim Crane went up to the hall to see about something, and Connors hasn’t showed up at all; I suppose the rain kept him back. What kind of a meeting we’re going to have I don’t know. Say, Belden, I’m not up to this sort of thing. I wish you’d stay and help me out—there’s no end of swells coming down, more your style than mine.” “Why, man alive, I can’t do anything for you,” said Mr. Belden. “These carriages I see are waiting for the delegation, and here comes the train now; you’ll get along all right.” He waited as the train slowed into the station, smiling anew at little Groper’s perturbation. He was quite curious to see the arrivals. Barnet had been the home of his youth, and there might be some one whom he knew. He had half intended, earlier in the day, to go himself to the Reform meeting, but a growing spirit of inaction had made him give up the idea. Yes, there was quite a carload of people getting out—ladies, too. “Why, Will Belden!” called out a voice from the party. A tall fellow in a long ulster sprang forward to grasp his hand. “You don’t say it’s yourself come down to meet us. Here we all are, Johnson, Clemmerding, Albright, Cranston—all of the old set. Rainsford, you’ve heard of my cousin, Will Belden. My wife and Miss Wakeman are behind here; but we’ll do all the talking afterward, if you’ll only get us off for the hall now.” “Well, I am glad to see you, Henry,” said Mr. Belden heartily. He thrust the pound of butter hastily into a large pocket of his mackintosh, and found himself shaking hands with a score of men. He had only time to assist his cousin’s wife and the beautiful Miss Wakeman into a carriage, and in another moment they were all rolling away toward the town hall, with little Mr. Groper running frantically after them, ignored by the visitors, and peacefully forgotten by his friend. The public hall of the little town—which called itself a city—was all ablaze with light as the party entered it, and well filled, notwithstanding the weather. There were flowers on the platform where the seats for the distinguished guests were placed, and a general air of radiance and joyful import prevailed. It was a gathering of men from all political parties, concerned in the welfare of the State. Great measures were at stake, and the election of governor of immediate importance. The name of Judge Belden of Barnet was prominently mentioned. He had not been able to attend on this particular occasion, but his son had come with a delegation from the county town, twenty miles away, to represent his interests. On Mr. William Belden devolved the task of introducing the visitors; a most congenial one, he suddenly found it to be. His friends rallied around him as people are apt to do with one of their own kind when found in a foreign country. They called him Will, as they used to, and slapped him on the shoulder in affectionate abandon. Those among the group who had not known him before were anxious to claim acquaintance on the strength of his fame, which, it seemed, still survived him in his native town. It must not be supposed that he had not seen either his cousin or his friends during his sojourn away from them; on the contrary, he had met them once or so in two or three years, in the street, or on the ferry-boat—though they traveled by different roads—but he had then been but a passing interest in the midst of pressing business. To-night he was the only one of their kind in a strange place—his cousin loved him, they all loved him. The expedition had the sentiment of a frolic under the severer political aspect. In the welcome to the visitors by the home committee Mr. Belden also received his part, in their surprised recognition of him, almost amounting to a discovery. “We had no idea that you were a nephew of Judge Belden,” one of them said to him, speaking for his colleagues, who stood near. Mr. William Belden bowed, and smiled; as a gentleman, and a rather reticent one, it had never occurred to him to parade his family connections. His smile might mean anything. It made the good committeeman, who was rich and full of power, feel a little uncomfortable, as he tried to cover his embarrassment with effusive cordiality. In the background stood Mr. Groper, wet, and breathing hard, but plainly full of admiration for his tall friend, and the position he held as the center of the group. The visitors referred all arrangements to him. At last they filed on to the platform—the two cousins together. “You must find a place for the girls,” said Henry Belden, with the peculiar boyish giggle that his cousin remembered so well. “By George, they would come; couldn’t keep ’em at home, after they once got Jim Shore to say it was all right. Of course, Marie Wakeman started it; she said she was bound to go to a political meeting and sit on the platform; arguing wasn’t a bit of use. When she got Clara on her side I knew that I was doomed. Now, you couldn’t get them to do a thing of this kind at home; but take a woman out of her natural sphere, and she ignores conventionalities, just like a girl in a bathing-suit. There they are, seated over in that corner. I’m glad that they are hidden from the audience by the pillar. Of course, there’s that fool of a Jim, too, with Marie.” “You don’t mean to say she’s at it yet?” said his cousin William. “‘At it yet!’ She’s never stopped for a moment since you kissed her that night on the hotel piazza after the hop, under old Mrs. Trelawney’s window—do you remember that, Will?” Mr. William Belden did indeed remember it; it was a salute that had echoed around their little world, leading, strangely enough, to the capitulation of another heart—it had won him his wife. But the little intimate conversation was broken off as the cousins took the places allotted to them, and the business of the meeting began. If he were not the chairman, he was appealed to so often as to almost serve in that capacity. He became interested in the proceedings, and in the speeches that were made; none of them, however, quite covered the ground as he understood it. His mind unconsciously formulated propositions as the flow of eloquence went on. It therefore seemed only right and fitting toward the end of the evening, when it became evident that his Honor the Mayor was not going to appear, that our distinguished fellow-citizen, Mr. William Belden, nephew of Judge Belden of Barnet, should be asked to represent the interests of the county in a speech, and that he should accept the invitation. He stood for a moment silent before the assembly, and then all the old fire that had lain dormant for so long blazed forth in the speech that electrified the audience, was printed in all the papers afterward, and fitted into a political pamphlet. He began with a comprehensive statement of facts, he drew large and logical deductions from them, and then lit up the whole subject with those brilliant flashes of wit and sarcasm for which he had been famous in bygone days. More than that, a power unknown before had come to him; he felt the real knowledge and grasp of affairs which youth had denied him, and it was with an exultant thrill that his voice rang through the crowded hall, and stirred the hearts of men. For the moment they felt as he felt, and thought as he thought, and a storm of applause arose as he ended—applause that grew and grew until a few more pithy words were necessary from the orator before silence could be restored. He made his way to the back of the hall for some water, and then, half exhausted, yet tingling still from the excitement, dropped into an empty chair by the side of Miss Wakeman. “Well done, Billy,” she said, giving him a little approving tap with her fan. “You were just fine.” She gave him an upward glance from her large dark eyes. “Do you know you haven’t spoken to me to-night, nor shaken hands with me?” “Let us shake hands now,” he said, smiling, flushed with success, as he looked into the eyes of this very pretty woman. “I shall take off my glove first—such old friends as we are! It must be a real ceremony.” She laid a soft, white, dimpled hand, covered with glistening rings, in his outstretched palm, and gazed at him with coquettish plaintiveness. “It’s so lovely to see you again! Have you forgotten the night you kissed me?” “I have thought of it daily,” he replied, giving her hand a hearty squeeze. They both laughed, and he took a surreptitious peep at her from under his eyelids. Marie Wakeman! Yes, truly, the same, and with the same old tricks. He had been married for nearly fourteen years, his children were half grown, he had long since given up youthful friskiness, but she was “at it” still. Why, she had been older than he when they were boy and girl; she must be for—He gazed at her soft, rounded, olive cheek, and quenched the thought. “And you are very happy?” she pursued, with tender solicitude. “Nettie makes you a perfect wife, I suppose.” “Perfect,” he assented gravely. “And you haven’t missed me at all?” “Can you ask?” It was the way in which all men spoke to Marie Wakeman, married or single, rich or poor, one with another. He laughed inwardly at his lapse into the expected tone. “I feel that I really breathe for the first time in years, now that I’m with you again. But how is it that you are not married?” “What, after I had known you?” She gave him a reproachful glance. “And you were so cruel to me—as soon as you had made your little Nettie jealous you cared for me no longer. Look what I’ve declined to!” She indicated Jim Shore, leaning disconsolately against the cornice, chewing his moustache. “Now don’t give him your place unless you really want to; well, if you’re tired of me already—thank you ever so much, and I am proud of you to-night, Billy!” Her lustrous eyes dwelt on him lingeringly as he left her; he smiled back into them. The lines around her mouth were a little hard; she reminded him indefinably of “She”; but she was a handsome woman, and he had enjoyed the encounter. The sight of her brought back so vividly the springtime of life; his hopes, the pangs of love, the joy that was his when Nettie was won; he felt an overpowering throb of tenderness for the wife at home who had been his early dream. The last speeches were over, but Mr. William Belden’s triumph had not ended. As the acknowledged orator of the evening he had an ovation afterward; introductions and unlimited hand-shakings were in order. He was asked to speak at a select political dinner the next week; to speak for the hospital fund; to speak for the higher education of woman. Led by a passing remark of Henry Belden’s to infer that his cousin was a whist player of parts, a prominent social magnate at once invited him to join the party at his house on one of their whist evenings. “My wife, er—will have great pleasure in calling on Mrs. Belden,” said the magnate. “We did not know that we had a good whist player among us. This evening has indeed been a revelation in many ways—in many ways. You would have no objection to taking a prominent part in politics, if you were called upon? A reform mayor is sadly needed in our city—sadly needed. Your connection with Judge Belden would give great weight to any proposition of that kind. But, of course, all this is in the future.” Mr. Belden heard his name whispered in another direction, in connection with the cashiership of the new bank which was to be built. The cashiership and the mayoralty might be nebulous honors, but it was sweet, for once, to be recognized for what he was—a man of might; a man of talent, and of honor. There was a hurried rush for the train at the last on the part of the visitors. Mr. William Belden snatched his mackintosh from the peg whereon it had hung throughout the evening, and went with the crowd, talking and laughing in buoyant exuberance of spirits. The night had cleared, the moon was rising, and poured a flood of light upon the wet streets. It was a different world from the one he had traversed earlier in the evening. He walked home with Miss Wakeman’s exaggeratedly tender “Good-by, dear Billy!” ringing in his ears, to provoke irrepressible smiles. The pulse of a free life, where men lived instead of vegetating, was in his veins. His footstep gave forth a ringing sound from the pavement; he felt himself stalwart, alert, his brain rejoicing in its sense of power. It was even with no sense of guilt that he heard the church clocks striking twelve as he reached the house where his wife had been awaiting his return for four hours. She was sitting up for him, as he knew by the light in the parlor window. He could see her through the half-closed blinds as she sat by the table, a magazine in her lap, her attitude, unknown to herself, betraying a listless depression. After all, is a woman glad to have all her aspirations and desires confined within four walls? She may love her cramped quarters, to be sure, but can she always forget that they are cramped? To what does a wife descend after the bright dreams of her girlhood! Does she really like above all things to be absorbed in the daily consumption of butter, and the children’s clothes, or is she absorbed in these things because the man who was to have widened the horizon of her life only limits it by his own decadence? She rose to meet her husband as she heard his key in the lock. She had exchanged her evening gown for a loose, trailing white wrapper, and her fair hair was arranged for the night in a long braid. Her husband had a smile on his face. “You look like a girl again,” he said brightly, as he stooped and kissed her. “No, don’t turn out the light; come in and sit down a while longer, I’ve ever so much to tell you. You can’t guess where I’ve been this evening.” “At the political meeting,” she said promptly. “How on earth did you know?” “The doctor came here to see Willy, and he told me he saw you on the way. I’m glad you did go, William; I was worrying because I had sent you out; I did not realize until later what a night it was.” “Well, I am very glad that you did send me,” said her husband. He lay back in his chair, flushed and smiling at the recollection. “You ought to have been there, too; you would have liked it. What will you say if I tell you that I made a speech—yes, it is quite true—and was applauded to the echo. This town has just waked up to the fact that I live in it. And Henry said—but there, I’ll have to tell you the whole thing, or you can’t appreciate it.” His wife leaned on the arm of his chair, watching his animated face fondly, as he recounted the adventures of the night. He pictured the scene vividly, and with a strong sense of humor. “And you don’t say that Marie Wakeman is the same as ever?” she interrupted with a flash of special interest. “Oh, William!” “She called me Billy.” He laughed anew at the thought. “Upon my word, Nettie, she beats anything I ever saw or heard of.” “Did she remind you of the time you kissed her?” “Yes!” Their eyes met in amused recognition of the past. “Is she as handsome as ever?” “Um—yes—I think so. She isn’t as pretty as you are.” “Oh, Will!” She blushed and dimpled. “I declare, it is true!” He gazed at her with genuine admiration. “What has come over you to-night, Nettie?—you look like a girl again.” “And you were not sorry when you saw her, that—that—” “Sorry! I have been thinking all the way home how glad I was to have won my sweet wife. But we mustn’t stay shut up at home as much as we have; it’s not good for either of us. We are to be asked to join the whist club—what do you think of that? You used to be a little card fiend once upon a time, I remember.” She sighed. “It is so long since I have been anywhere! I’m afraid I haven’t any clothes, Will. I suppose I might—” “What, dear?” “Take the money I had put aside for Mary’s next quarter’s music lessons; I do really believe a little rest would do her good.” “It would—it would,” said Mr. Belden with suspicious eagerness. Mary’s after-dinner practicing hour had tinged much of his existence with gall. “I insist that Mary shall have a rest. And you shall join the reading society now. Let us consider ourselves a little as well as the children; it’s really best for them, too. Haven’t we immortal souls as well as they? Can we expect them to seek the honey dew of paradise while they see us contented to feed on the grass of the field?” “You call yourself an orator!” she scoffed. He drew her to him by one end of the long braid, and solemnly kissed her. Then he went into the hall and took something from the pocket of his mackintosh which he placed in his wife’s hand—a little wooden dish covered with a paper, through which shone a bright yellow substance—the pound of butter, a lump of gleaming fairy gold, the quest of which had changed a poor, commonplace existence into one scintillating with magic possibilities. Fairy gold, indeed, cannot be coined into marketable eagles. Mr. William Belden might never achieve either the mayoralty or the cashiership, but he had gained that of which money is only a trivial accessory. The recognition of men, the flashing of high thought to high thought, the claim of brotherhood in the work of the world, and the generous social intercourse that warms the heart—all these were to be his. Not even his young ambition had promised a wider field, not the gold of the Indies could buy him more of honor and respect. At home also the spell worked. He had but to speak the word, to name the thing, and Nettie embodied his thought. He called her young, and happy youth smiled from her clear eyes; beautiful, and a blushing loveliness enveloped her; clever, and her ready mind leaped to match with his in thought and study; dear, and love touched her with its transforming fire and breathed of long-forgotten things. If men only knew what they could make of the women who love them—but they do not, as the plodding, faded matrons who sit and sew by their household fires testify to us daily. Happy indeed is he who can create a paradise by naming it! <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c000' /></div> <div class='nf-center-c0'> <div class='nf-center c002'> <div>A Matrimonial Episode</div> </div></div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c002' /></div> <div class='chapter'> <h2 id='ch09' class='c003'>A Matrimonial Episode</h2></div> <div class='c009'> <ANTIMG class='drop-capi' src='images/dci.jpg' width-obs='35' height-obs='53' alt='' /></div> IT was in the year that Dick Martindale spent out West in the service of the Electrographic Company that his wife became acquainted with Sarah Latimer. Although the latter was by birth a Western girl she had lived long enough in the East to seem like a compatriot to Bertha Martindale, who had come from the dear gregarious suburban life with its commingling of family interests and sympathy, to a land peopled thinly with her husband’s friends, mostly men. Dick laughingly asserted that she had never forgiven him for his few years of Western life previous to their marriage, ascribing all his faults of habit and expression to that demoralizing influence, and he wondered at her courage in exposing little Rich and Mary to the chance of acquiring the wide ease and carelessness she objected to in him. He had been a little uneasy, in view of her previous opinions, as to the manner in which she would dispense hospitality in the little furnished house that they hired, but he need not have feared. Bertha had always been used to popularity. “Don’t you think I get on well with people?” she asked. “Like a bird,” said her husband. “No, but really. Don’t you think I adapt myself?” “You do so much adapting that I’m getting afraid of you.” “Don’t.” She put his newspaper one side and kissed him, and he submitted to the caress patiently, his eyes still following the paragraph on which they had been fixed. “The two women I really feel at home with,” she continued musingly, “are the clergyman’s wife, who is just a dear, poor soul! and a living reproach to everyone, and Sarah Latimer. I wonder that you never told me about her, Richard.” “Sarah Latimer! I always thought she was a stick,” said Richard, glancing up from the newspaper. “Well, she is not, at all; at any rate, she’s only the least little bit stick-y. Oh! I suppose if I were at home I mightn’t have taken such a fancy to her, but out here—! and I do think it’s pathetic about her.” “How on earth you can discover anything pathetic about Sarah Latimer, Bertha, beats me. That long, sandy-haired wisp of a girl! Let me alone; I want to read my paper.” “No,” she held the paper down with one hand. “It’s really important; do listen to me, Dick! I want to do something for her.” “You are doing something for her; you have her here morning, noon, and night. She’s forever going about with little Rich and Mary; people will be taking her for my wife some day, you just see if they don’t. I nearly kissed her by mistake for you yesterday; she was right in the way as I came in the door. Now don’t feel jealous!” “No, I won’t,” said Bertha with indignation. “But look here, Dick! I know she is with us a good deal, but I do want to give her a chance.” “A chance of what?” “A chance to enjoy herself, and to see people, and to feel that she’s young, and—oh, a chance to get married, if you will have me say it.” “I thought so,” said Dick. “You may as well let her go back to private life, Bertha; she’ll never be a success on any stage of that kind. I don’t believe any man ever wanted to marry her, or ever will.” “You can’t tell,” said Bertha musingly. “So many fellows come here! I should think some of them might fancy her.” “No, they will not,” said Richard deliberately. “You mark my words; that girl will never get married. Yes, I know she’s good, and she’s clever, and really not bad looking, either, when you take her to pieces. But she’s not interesting—that’s the gist of the whole matter, and nothing you can say or do will alter that.” “She may not be interesting to you, but she is to me,” returned Bertha. “And that argument goes for nothing, Dick. Scores of uninteresting girls get married every year. Here is Sarah Latimer at thirty, or near it, with nothing in this world to occupy her, or take up her attention. Her uncle and aunt are very good to her, but they don’t need her—she is rather in the way, if anything. That big house is all solemnly comfortable and well arranged, and oppressively neat. The servants have been there for years. The furniture was bought in the age when it was made to last, and it has lasted. The curtains are always drawn in the parlor, and if a chink of light comes in, Mrs. Latimer draws them closer; everything is dim and well preserved, and smells stuffy when it doesn’t smell of oilcloth. It gives me the creeps!” “You are eloquent,” said Richard. “There is only one place that looks as if it were ever used,” continued Bertha, unheeding, “and that’s the sitting-room off the parlor. It has a faded green lounge in it, and discolored family photographs in oval walnut frames, and two big haircloth rockers, with tidies on them, on either side of the table, which holds a lamp, a newspaper—not a pile of them, they are always cleared away neatly—and a piece of knitting work. Here Mr. and Mrs. Latimer doze all the evening.” “What on earth has all this to do with Sarah’s marriage?” asked Richard. “Everything! Don’t you see that the poor girl is just being choked by degrees; it’s a case of slow suffocation. She lived East after she left school until five years ago, and came back to find her girl friends married and moved away. People, of course, sent her invitations, and were polite to her, but there seemed no particular place for her, anywhere. She’s too clever for most of the men here, and her standard is above them. She’s what I call a very highly educated girl.” “You seem to suit them,” said Richard, laughing. “I’m naturally frivolous,” said Bertha with a sigh, “but Sarah isn’t. If she only had to work for a living she would be a great success, but she has enough of a little income to support her. She reads to Rich and Mary, and she is giving music lessons to some little girls just for occupation. Besides, she practices Beethoven three hours a day—she’s making a specialty of the sonatas. She reads Herbert Spencer a great deal, and has theories of education, and on governing children. I’m afraid that neither Mr. Allenton nor your friend Dick Quimby care about sonatas or Herbert Spencer.” “Not a hang!” said Richard. “If she could play the banjo, or give them a dance—by Jove, I’d like to see Sarah Latimer dance a—” “Richard!” cried Bertha, indignantly. “If you’re going to be horrid I’ll go away, I won’t say another word.” “Then I’ll be horrid, for I don’t want you to say another word! I’m dead sick of Sarah with her pale, moony eyes and her straw-colored smile—send her to Jericho, and let me read my newspaper, and don’t embrace me any more, you’ll muss my hair.” He turned and kissed his wife as an offset to the words. Bertha could not help owning to herself that week that Sarah was a little heavy. She was a tall, thin girl, with a long nose, light gray eyes, and a quantity of sandy red hair. She had no color in her cheeks, and she had a peculiar look of withered youth, like a bud that the frost has touched. Beneath that outer crust of primness and shyness there was, as Bertha had divined, an absolutely virginal heart, as untried in the ways of love or love’s pretense as that of a child of six. She had not had any real girlhood yet at all, while she was apparently long past it. Bertha wondered at that slow development, which occurs much oftener than she dreamed of. She asked Sarah indefatigably to spend the evenings with her. On these occasions Sarah sat completely, appallingly silent amid the jokes and laughter of the others. Bertha had long consultations with her dear friend, the clergyman’s wife, about her. “She will never like anyone who is not on the highest intellectual plane,” said Bertha with a sigh; “but there’s a sort of wistful sentimentality through it all that makes me so sorry!” It was some days after this that Bertha sat one morning cutting out garments for little Rich and Mary, when Sarah Latimer came in. The children greeted her, but not effusively. They were always instructed to be on their best behavior in her presence, and regarded her more as an awe-inspiring companion, who read to them, took them walking, and picked up blocks for them, than as a friend to be loved; she was always oppressively quiet while they chattered. “Sit down, Sarah,” said Bertha cordially, sweeping a pile of cambrics from a chair. “Here’s a fan, if you want it, but you don’t look a bit hot; you never do. I think you’re pale this morning. Aren’t you well?” “Why, yes,” said Sarah slowly. Her eyes had a dazed look in them, and there was an uncertain note in her voice. Bertha observed her critically. Sarah’s drab gown, made with severe plainness, took all the life out of her hair and complexion, and made her tall figure gaunt. Bertha cast her brown eyes down at her own lilac muslin, overflowing with little rippling frills and furbelows, and sighed, a genuine sigh of pity, for another woman’s misuse of her opportunities. “What have you been doing lately, Sarah? I haven’t seen you for some days.” “Nothing much,” said Sarah. “I expected you yesterday; Dick Quimby asked why you were not here. He’s asked after you twice lately, Sarah. I think he’s beginning to be fond of you.” “Because he asked after me twice?” said Sarah. “Perhaps he’ll propose to me to-morrow.” She gave a spasmodic laugh, and the color came and went in her face. Bertha gazed at her in genuine surprise. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you, Sarah,” she said. “I’m glad you came in, for I wanted to ask you to join us in a little trip to the Lakes. Dick has to go Thursday, and we have concluded to make up a party. We’ll be gone a couple of weeks, and Mr. Quimby is to join us there. I think we’ll have a lovely time.” “You’re very kind,” said Sarah, pulling nervously at her fan, “but I don’t think I can go.” “Why not? You won’t have to dress.” “It’s not that. The fact is—Did I ever speak to you of Will Bronson?” “No, who is he?” “I had almost forgotten that myself,” said Sarah, “until he came to call yesterday. I knew him years ago when I was a young girl; we went to school together. He was a nice boy, but I never had much to do with him; boys never cared for me as they did for other girls. At any rate, he came to see us yesterday. He lives in Idaho; he’s been out there for a dozen years, and he says he’s pretty well off.” “Well,” said Bertha expectantly, as the other stopped, “what does he look like?” “Oh, he’s pretty tall, and he has a big brown beard.” “I suppose that he is intellectual?” “Not a bit! He’s very—very—Western. You think we are Western here, Bertha, but we’re not.” “And is this gentleman stopping with you?” pursued Bertha. “No, he left for New York to-day.” “Then why can’t you join our party for the Lakes?” “Because—” The fan dropped from Sarah’s fingers. “The truth is, Bertha, he asked me to marry him; that’s what he came for.” “What!” cried Bertha. “He brought some letters to uncle,” went on Sarah, “recommendations, and all that, and afterwards he spoke to me. He says he’s always thought he’d marry me when he had time, but he has never been able to leave the mines before. He has an aunt who lives here, and she has written to him about me, sometimes. He has gone on to New York for a week, and wants to stop back here over one day to get married and then go straight out to Idaho. He wanted me to answer him yesterday, but I asked him to give me until this morning to make up my mind.” “And what did you say then?” asked Bertha breathlessly. “I said yes,” said Sarah. Bertha rose up, heedless of all her sewing materials, which dropped on the floor, and walking over to Sarah, solemnly embraced her. “You are a dear girl,” she said. Then she took Sarah’s hand in hers, solicitously. “Hadn’t you better lie down, Sarah, and let me bathe your forehead and get you a glass of lemonade?” “I’m not ill,” said the girl with a convulsive laugh. “You are just shaking all over,” said Bertha, “and no wonder! Do you think you love him, Sarah?” “I don’t know.” “Well, you are sure he loves you?” “He says he does.” “And does he seem perfectly splendid to you, dear?” “I guess so,” said Sarah. “And you are to be married—when? A week from to-day? Oh, what a time you will have getting your clothes! And to think I’ll not be here at the wedding—it’s too, too bad. Sarah, I’m just delighted with you. I always knew you weren’t like other people; most girls wouldn’t have dared.” “Maybe I’ll wish that I hadn’t,” said Sarah, and the dazed, vacant expression came back with the words. Richard and his friends were at first incredulous when Bertha narrated the news to them; then, to quote Dick’s expression, Sarah’s stock, in the general estimation, went up fifty per cent. “The old girl must have had something jolly about her, after all,” he said. “You were right this time, Bertha. I met this Bronson once, and he’s a good fellow. What a lot of courage he must have!” Bertha only met Sarah once after this before she left for the Lakes. She saw the bridegroom’s picture, which represented him as a tall, stalwart fellow, with a big beard and merry, honest eyes. Bertha liked the face, and felt that it was one that inspired confidence. “To think that after all my planning she should have done it just by herself,” said Bertha to her husband, “and it was such an unlikely thing.” “It is singular that the world can move without your pushing it,” replied her husband with a quizzical smile. Within a few months the Martindales’ plans were broken up; their stay West was no longer necessary, and they went back home again. Bertha received one letter from Sarah after her marriage, a singularly flat and colorless epistle, which told nothing. Bertha had periodical times of wonderment as to Sarah’s present life and chances of happiness. Her own short experience of Western life resolved itself mainly into a recollection of the girl with whom, after all, she had been most intimately associated, and who had disappeared from her horizon so suddenly and romantically. It was not until three years later that she heard of Sarah again. Then she received a note from Mrs. Bronson, who, it appeared, had come East for a few days and was stopping at a large hotel in town. Bertha was delighted. With a whimsical remembrance of her long, tedious days with Sarah was a real affection for her. She left the children at home, although they clamored to be taken to see their old friend. She felt that there was so much to talk about that she must be absolutely untrammeled. How she would astonish Dick when he came home! As she ascended in the gorgeous elevator, her mind mechanically reverted to Sarah’s former surroundings; she was glad to be able to infer that the silver mines had proved fortunate. She was shown into a private parlor, equally gorgeous in its appointments. She heard the sound of a laughing voice in the adjoining room, and the next moment a porti—re was pushed aside and Sarah appeared. She was dressed in a trailing silken tea-gown of a deep crimson tint—her hair shone like a coronal of gold, there was a rosy flush on her cheeks, and her eyes gleamed with merriment. In her arms she held a handsome baby boy of about a year old, who suddenly turned and ducked his head into his mother’s neck as he saw the stranger, taking hold of her hair with both hands and giving it a pull that loosened its fastenings and sent it tumbling around them both. “You little rogue,” she said. “His nurse has gone out for a few moments, and I don’t know what to do with him. Keep still, Wilfred.” Two small, fat, black-stockinged feet, like little puddings, were kicking wildly in a vain attempt to get up on her shoulder, and, presumably, over on the other side, where his head and hands already were, as far as possible from the strange lady. Sarah sat down on the sofa, clasping the boy in one arm; with the other she swept the tumbled hair back from her face. “Now I can at least look at you, Bertha,” she said. Bertha made a movement forward to kiss her, but the infant, who had turned his head for furtive observation, ducked back again with renewed scramblings and kicking at the first indication of her approach. “I think he will kill me soon,” said his mother resignedly. “Where is your Herbert Spencer?” Bertha couldn’t help asking; but at that moment the truant nurse arrived; the boy, still in his attitude of clutching, was detached from his mamma’s gown, one hand and foot at a time, as one separates a cat from a cushion. As soon as this was accomplished, he turned and fell upon his nurse in like manner, and the sight of a round little body, entirely headless, with two waving black feet, was Bertha’s last view of the heir of the Bronsons. The two women clasped hands impulsively and looked at each other; then they both burst into a fit of laughter, deliciously inconsequent. “It is so perfectly ridiculous!” said Sarah at last. “What?” asked Bertha. “Why, that it is I, at all. It’s so absurd to think that that’s my baby! I haven’t the least idea what to do with him.” They both laughed again, helplessly. “You are very happy?” asked Bertha, trying to be serious. “I suppose I am. Sometimes I think everything is topsy-turvy, and I don’t see straight; it’s all so different from the life I used to live, but—it’s nice.” “Do you keep up your music?” asked Bertha again, after a pause. “I don’t keep up anything. I play dance music, and read the newspapers. I’ve been traveling nearly all the time since I was married. Will’s business keeps us flying, for one reason or another, there are so many companies that he has to see. I’m always packing or unpacking, or in a Pullman car, and I think always that when I get through traveling I will find myself back at uncle’s once more, and begin to dust everything neatly. You know that we go off again to-night. I’m so sorry you won’t see my husband; he’ll not be back here until train time.” “I’m sorry, too,” said Bertha. “I want to thank you for all you did for me in the old days,” pursued her hostess. Their positions were reversed; it was she who led the conversation, while Bertha replied. “If it hadn’t been for you I should never have been married at all.” “My dear, I had absolutely nothing to do with the matrimonial cyclone which swept you off,” said Bertha, laughing again. “Yes, you did, you were so happy, it made me very envious to see you and your husband together. If it hadn’t been for that, I don’t think I’d ever have had the courage to say yes when Will asked me. And you were so kind and good to me, and I know I’m only a stupid thing at best.” “You’re just a dear,” said Bertha very warmly. Then the two women had a long and exhaustive conversation, before they finally parted. “She’s very handsome,” said Bertha to her husband that night. He was quite interested and curious about it all. “She’s rich, and she’s happy. Isn’t she the last woman on earth you would have imagined such a romance happening to!” “Yes, indeed,” said Richard. “What do you suppose there is in married life to improve a girl so? She’s not in the least uninteresting now.” “Judge from your own experience,” said Richard. “Association with a superior being cannot fail—” “You need not say any more,” said Bertha with the scorn expected of her. Then, with a sudden change of tone, “If she had married you, darling, instead of that Bronson man, I could have understood it—no woman could help being nicer for loving you!” <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c000' /></div> <div class='nf-center-c0'> <div class='nf-center c002'> <div>Not a Sad Story</div> </div></div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c002' /></div> <div class='chapter'> <h2 id='ch10' class='c003'>Not a Sad Story</h2></div> <div class='c009'> <ANTIMG class='drop-capi' src='images/dct.jpg' width-obs='40' height-obs='45' alt='' /></div> THE little Rhodes boy was dead. The two women who slipped out of the back door of Mrs. Rhodes’s house had red eyes, and conversed in low tones as they came down the street facing the bitter wind. One of them wore a long cloak of rich fur, which covered her from throat to ankles, but the other only drew her short gray shawl tightly around her and walked in the snow with feet encased in the carpet slippers which she had worn all night. Although one woman was young, and the other well past middle age, they had a certain likeness in the haggard look which watching and grief bring. The early morning light shone wanly over the snow, the white houses with their closed blinds, and the range of white hills beyond. The smoke was beginning to rise from the kitchen chimneys at the back of some of the houses, where occasional lights were seen flickering to and fro, and the smell of the burning wood pervaded the frosty air. “You’re tired,” said the older woman suddenly, as if noticing her companion’s fatigue for the first time. “So are you, Mrs. Rawls.” “Oh, I’m used to it. I ain’t been rested since Jimmy was born, and that was—let me see—thirty-five year ago. There ain’t a week passed in all that time that I haven’t planned to rest the next week, but I ain’t never compassed it yet.” She laughed a little as she spoke, and trudged along more vigorously. “I guess you ain’t often been out at this time in the mornin’.” “Not very often,” said the other. Her voice was low and sweet, with a little tremulous catch in it, as if she were almost exhausted. “’Tisn’t but a step now to the house,” said Mrs. Rawls encouragingly. “I knew the sleigh wouldn’t be down for you for a couple of hours yet, and it did seem best to leave Mis’ Rhodes for a while, with just Elmira downstairs, after we’d done all we could. There’ll be neighbors in later, and people to inquire, and she won’t get much quiet. She wants just to be alone with him for a little. That dear child—” she stopped and choked for a minute. “There! It don’t seem right to cry, and him so sweet and peaceful. It was mighty good of you to stay these last two nights.” “Oh, don’t, don’t!” said the other in a pained tone. “As if I could have helped wanting to stay! It was so good of her to let me. All that I could do seemed so little. She was so brave, so patient; I shall never forget it, and that sweet child—” she stopped as Mrs. Rawls had done. “Why, it was only last week that I was walking along here in the snow, and he ran across the street to me and said: ‘It’s so slippery here now, Mrs. Armstrong, I’m afraid you’ll fall; you had better lean on me.’ He put out his little hand for me to take, as seriously as you please, and I let him help me over the crossing. I can see his blue eyes now, with that merry light in them, gazing at me. It doesn’t seem possible—” “Hardly a morning passed,” said Mrs. Rawls, “that was fit for him to be out, that he didn’t put his head in at my door and say, ‘How are you, Mis’ Rawls? Can I do anything for you?’ He was just like a bit of sunshine, with his curly golden head. It don’t appear as if it could be right that such as him should be took—him as was just born to be a blessing, and his mother without a soul in the world but the boy, and they all in all to each other. I can’t understand it, nohow.” “It is very difficult,” said the other with a long-drawn sigh. “My heart just aches for her, she seems so alone. Is this your house, Mrs. Rawls? It is odd, isn’t it, that we’ve both lived here all these years, and yet this is the first time I’ve ever known you to speak to. I always thought you had such a kind face. I’ve often felt that I’d like to speak to you, but I didn’t know how.” “Why, my dear!” said Mrs. Rawls, stopping on the threshold, her countenance fairly illumined with pleased surprise; “you that’s so rich and proud and handsome—why, I never even sensed that you saw me. You afraid to speak to me! Well, that does beat all! But you’re just done out now, poor child; come right in here! I’m going to slip off your cloak, so, and lay you right down on the lounge and make you a good hot cup of coffee, and then you’ve got to take a little nap before the sleigh comes for you.” Almost before she knew Helen Armstrong was lying on the old chintz lounge with Mrs. Rawls’s gray shawl wrapped around her feet. The room was small, low-ceilinged, and homely, filled with evidences of daily occupation; nothing could be further removed from her own luxurious chamber, yet she felt an unwonted sensation of comfort which reached its height after the fragrant coffee had been swallowed, and Mrs. Rawls’s motherly hand had smoothed back the pillows for her. Helen caught the hand and held it tight in her own for a minute, before she turned over on one side and closed her eyes. It was years since she had been taken care of. It was she who planned and gave orders for the comfort of others, but she had no near relatives of her own, and hers had been the personal isolation which state and riches bring. With her eyes closed, she thought of many things; of her old school friend Anne Rhodes, whom she had always been fond of, yet with whom she had kept up but a spasmodic intercourse since marriage had claimed both lives. Most of Anne’s unfortunate wedded life had been spent in the far West, and when she came back four years ago in straitened circumstances, with the child, the breadth of riches and a different way of living still divided them. But with the boy it was otherwise. The little fellow, with his blue eyes, his sunny smile, his trusting heart, and his infant manliness, had touched a chord that it half frightened Helen to feel vibrating so strongly. That chord belonged to the far past—another child had made its harmony. A little grave had its depths in Helen’s heart, although she had kept it out of sight for many years; it almost scared her to feel that it was still there, and yet it was sweet, too. When she put her arms around little Silvy Rhodes, he was like an angel of resurrection. When she had taken him home in her carriage out of the wet snow not a week ago, his cheeks rosy red, his tongue chattering sweetly, his eyes looking at her so confidingly, she did not dream that it was for the last time. The mortal illness had stolen upon him in the night, and Helen had gone to inquire, and then stayed to help. Somehow trouble brought back the old days when Anne had leaned on her for comfort and protection. Helen had always felt a nervous dread of a sick-room, yet she had stayed, and was glad—glad of it! No one would ever know how many necessaries her money had supplied to the dying child and the stricken mother. “John Sylvester Rhodes, aged eight years.” The formal words glanced across her thoughts unbidden, and brought a sudden hot rush of tears. She wondered whether her husband was surprised that she had stayed away. Perhaps he didn’t even know it, they were together so little these days, and she remembered that he had gone on a journey about that syndicate. There would be nobody at home but Kathleen. Kathleen! Her face reddened. Kathleen would have full scope in her absence. Helen wondered if she had taken advantage of it to see that man. No, the girl would do nothing underhand. It was unimaginable that a girl like Kathleen Armstrong, her husband’s sister, should have fallen in love with James Sandersfield, now the superintendent of the hat factory in which he had been a common “hand” for many years. How unfortunate that she had met him on that visit South! It could never have happened in their own town. Helen had felt deeply with her husband’s disgust, for Kathleen had been immodestly obstinate; what the outcome would be they did not know; Helen grew hot with the thought. She had forgotten where she was till Mrs. Rawls’s voice came to her through the half-open door, crooning an old hymn tune in the kitchen; and the tears came again to her eyes. The dear old soul—she thought, and then once more came the feeling of Silvy’s warm, chubby hand as he helped her over the slippery crossing—and Helen slept. “You needn’t go in there,” said Mrs. Rawls impressively, as one of her friends appeared an hour later. “Mis’ Armstrong’s asleep on the lounge. She’s clean beat out watchin’. I sent the coachman back to the stable when he came for her just now; I wouldn’t have her woke.” “It don’t seem possible that little Silvy’s gone,” said the newcomer in an awestricken voice. “I just come up the street now, and I could hardly get here for people stopping me to ask about it. Old Squire Peters himself halted the sleigh and sent Miss Isabel over to inquire. She said if there was anything in the world they could do, to let them know; and she was goin’ home to fix up something that might tempt Mis’ Rhodes to eat, for I told them she hadn’t taken hardly a mouthful for the last two days. And you know them two ladies in black that moved into the big house on the hill last fall? One of them came up afterward and said, “‘You don’t mean that that dear little boy with the blue eyes and yellow hair, who lived at the foot of the hill, is dead!’” “And when I said yes, ’twas as true as Gospel, though the dear Lord alone knew why it was so, she looked almost as if she were crying, and said, ‘Oh, do you think his mother would mind if I sent her some flowers from our greenhouse? I don’t know her at all, but we have had sorrow ourselves; and the dear little boy brought us some golden-rod just the day we came here—it seemed like a welcome to us.” “I told her I would tell Mis’ Rhodes ’twas for Silvy’s sake.” “What beats me,” said another woman, who had joined the other two, “is why the Lord should take Silvy—‘the only son of his mother, and she a widow’—cut off that child before his time, and leave old Gran’pa Slade dodderin’ ’round, who is near ninety and ain’t never been no good to nobody all his days. There’s Amelia Slade with her own mother and sister to care for, an’ him always a trouble. It does seem that the old might be taken before the young, when they just cumber the ground, like gran’pa.” “Well, I don’t think he’s much care to Amelia, Mis’ Beebe,” said the first visitor, Mehitable Phelps. “She’s always grudged him his keep, as far as I see. Not but what he is tryin’.” “Mis’ Rawls! Mis’ Beebe! Hitty Phelps!” cried another comer breathlessly. “Do somebody come over to Mis’ Slade’s; gran’pa’s in a dreadful way, cryin’ and moanin’ about little Silvy’s death. He says he’d oughter have been took instead, and that he’s no good to anybody. ‘Melia’s afraid he’ll take his life; she never sensed before that he felt his age so.” The three women gazed at each other with a scared expression as they rose to the summons. “Well, I presume it ain’t his fault that he’s let to live,” said one. “I tell you what,” said Mrs. Beebe. “I’ll send Josiah around with the cutter to bring grand’pa over to our house to spend the day and get a good dinner. All he needs is cockerin’ up; I don’t believe he’s had an outing in dear knows when, and a change will hearten him. You coming with us, Mis’ Rawls?” “I’ll just step along a piece to Emma Taylor’s,” said Mrs. Rawls, getting down her shawl from a hook. “I won’t be gone a minute. I’d clean forgot the baby was sick.” She glanced into the sitting-room, and then, closing the outer door noiselessly behind her, hurried up the street with her friends. She was welcomed at the little white cottage where she stopped by a pretty, worn-looking young woman, who came to the door with a baby in her arms and two small children pulling at her skirts. “Oh, we’re all right,” she said cheerfully, in answer to Mrs. Rawls. “Come in; you’ll be surprised to see John around at this time of day—here he is now. He’s staying home a spell on account of Mrs. Rhodes. The Batchellor boys brought her wood, and Mr. Fellows’s coachman shoveled off the snow, but we thought she might like to feel there was a man waiting near to call upon if she wanted anything.” “Let me take the baby, Emma,” said her husband, “you’re tired, dear.” He stretched out his arms and took the child, holding the little white face fondly against his own bearded one. “Poor little man, he didn’t sleep much last night; kept us both awake; but we didn’t care a mite for that, we were so glad we had him. Do you see his light curls? Emma and I think he has a look of Silvy, Mrs. Rawls.” “I don’t know but he has,” said Mrs. Rawls as she turned toward the outer world once more. “Must you go, Mrs. Rawls? It was kind of you to stop in. If you see Mrs. Rhodes you’ll tell her, please, that John’s waiting home so’s she can feel there’s a man near her to call on if she wants for anything.” “She’s bound to be awake, now,” thought Mrs. Rawls as she hurried home to her guest. Helen had wakened suddenly in the empty, quiet house. She could not, in a sort of sweet, drowsy contentment, understand at once where she was. She gradually realized that a big wooden clock on the mantel ticked with a loud, aggressive noise, that a teakettle was singing somewhere, and that a large faded red hood hung on the brown-papered wall directly in her line of vision, with a many-flowered pink geranium on a shelf below. She was closing her eyes once more when a loud knock on the outer door startled her instantly into a sitting position. The knock was followed by another, more tentative; then the door opened, and a footstep was heard inside. Helen jumped hastily up and went toward the kitchen. A tall man stood there, drumming with his fingers absently on the table while he waited. He raised his head quickly as she entered, and she saw that he had a thin, clean-shaven face with firm lips and dark, steady eyes. His dress was the dress of a gentleman. Although Helen had never spoken to him, she knew that this was James Sandersfield. “I beg your pardon,” he said stiffly, “I came for Mrs. Rawls. I was sent for Mrs. Rawls.” “She must have gone out,” said Mrs. Armstrong, “but I am sure that she will be back soon. The message—” “Is from Mrs. Rhodes,” said the stranger, taking up his hat, “Mrs. Rhodes would like Mrs. Rawls to come over to her when she can.” “Is she—” Helen began. “She is very quiet—very peaceful. I did not expect to see her this morning, but she had sent for me; she knew—” He bit his lip, and stopped as if it were very hard to go on; his steady eyes met hers with a certain piteousness in them. “I—I carried Silvy downstairs; she said I was so strong it was a comfort to her to have me do it.” He stopped again and turned away his head. “I loved the child,” he added after a minute, very simply. “I am glad you were with her; I know it was a comfort,” said Helen. Her eyes roved over the man’s tall figure thoughtfully. “And I am glad that I was in to take your message, Mr. Sandersfield,” she added a little coldly. “I am Mrs. Armstrong.” “I know, I know,” he replied with a gesture that was almost rough in its curtness. He stood as if he were about to speak further, then hesitated, and finally turned resolutely away. “Good morning,” he said as he passed out of the door, but Helen did not answer. To her that pause had been strangely voiceful of Kathleen; she tingled to the very finger tips with the strong current of his thoughts. She could not tell whether she resented it or not. Mrs. Rawls was full of pleasure that her visitor had slept so long. The sleigh was once more waiting for Helen. “Tell Mrs. Rhodes I will be with her later,” she said as she tucked herself comfortably in, and lay back against the red velvet cushions. The glare of the sunshine on the snow dazzled her. “Ma’am,” said a voice in her ear. The coachman was waiting to let some teams pass. “Ma’am, may I speak to ye?” She turned, startled, to find a large, gaunt, bearded man standing beside her, with his big, hairy hand laid detainingly on the sleigh. His working clothes had all the color worn out of them. “What is it?” asked Helen, drawing back. “As I come up I seen white crape and ribbons on the door below, and I just heard ye speak her name, ma’am; it’s not the gay little felly with the light curls that’s dead?” “Oh, it is,” cried Helen, the tears coming to her eyes. The man took off his hat and stood bare-headed in the snow, his lips moving, though Helen heard no sound. “He was one of the Lord’s own,” he said after a minute in a husky voice. “Sure He knows best. Not a day that little felly passed us a-workin’ on the road but he had a word for each man! Sure he was known all over this town. ’Twas no more than a couple of weeks ago that he brought home Mike O’Brien’s little gell that was sitting in a puddle in Dean Street, and she just free of the measles. Ma’am, my heart’s sore for the boy’s mother, and she a widdy. Would ye just tell her that me and me mates would turn our hands to any work for her for the boy’s sake? Sure there’s no other work a-doin’ this weather.” “If you will come up to Lawndale this afternoon Mr. Armstrong will see about some employment for you,” said Helen hurriedly. “Do you know the place? The big stone house with the pillars? Yes, that is right. And I will tell Mrs. Rhodes. Drive on, Benson.” The richly-appointed, quiet mansion that she entered was a change, indeed, from the meager little house, sickness-crowded, where she had been watching for two days and nights, or from the homely room she had just left in the nurse’s cottage. The velvet-shod silence seemed almost an alien thing. Not in years had she felt so alive, so warm at the heart with other people’s loves and sorrows brought close to it. Habit should not chill her yet into the indifferent self-centered woman whose cold manner and shy distrust of herself kept her solitary. She was glad when her maid asked her timidly some question about little Silvy, and answered with a cordiality that surprised herself, although she was always kind, taking note of a cold the girl had, and giving her some simple remedy for it. “What is it, Margaret?” she asked, seeing that the girl lingered as if she wished to speak. Margaret hesitated. “Mrs. Armstrong, we do all be feelin’ so bad for the sweet child that’s gone. May the saints comfort his mother! And I was thinking, ma’am, to-morrow is my day out, and if it’s not making too bold I could take my clean cap and apron with me and stay at the house to open the door for the people that’ll be troopin’ there—if you think I might, maybe. I know she’s a lady born, and ’twould be no more than she was used, to have things dacent.” “You are a good girl, Margaret,” said Helen, more moved than she cared to show. “Yes, indeed, you shall go.” Kathleen came in later. Her cheeks were scarlet from the cold wind, her dark hair was tangled and blown, there was a rushing vigor in her movements as of exuberant young health and bounding impulse. She kissed her quiet sister-in-law impetuously and threw her cap and furs from her before she seated herself by the blazing wood fire. Helen looked at her from a new standpoint—she was trying to fancy that glowing, tumultuous young beauty by the side of James Sandersfield’s rugged strength, trying to fancy his steady eyes gazing into those flashing ones. The feeling of repugnance might be lessened, but it was still there! Why, Kathleen had patrician written in every line of her face, in every curve of her body, in her least gesture. “I’ve just come from the Country Club,” said the girl, shielding her face with one slim hand from the blaze of the fire. “What on earth could you do this morning? Play golf in the snow?” “Oh, we tried to, but it didn’t amount to anything. A lot of us got around the fire in the hall and talked. They said—But sister, aren’t you tired? Weren’t you up all night? Have you been home long?” “I did sit up all night,” said Helen, “but I am not tired, and I have been home for some time.” “And she—poor Mrs. Rhodes?” “I left her very quiet, dear.” “There!” said Kathleen stormily, “we could talk of nothing else this morning but darling, darling little Silvy, and of her. Of course they don’t all know Mrs. Rhodes, but every one had seen him, at any rate. It seems so dreadful for her to lose all she had in the world! She isn’t very young, is she?” “About my age, dear.” “Well, that’s not old, of course, but still—What I can’t make out, sister, is why she should be afflicted in this way. Mrs. Harper had known her, like you, ever since she was a little girl, and she has had so many troubles; all her people died soon after she was married, and her husband was not—nice, and he lost all her money before he died, and she has always been so good and lovely and patient and uncomplaining, so earnestly striving to do right, so that Mrs. Harper says she has been an example to everyone. Why should she have this terrible, terrible blow fall upon her? Why should her sweet, darling little child be taken away? What has she done that she should be punished so? It seems wrong—wrong! I don’t understand it.” “I’m afraid I don’t, either,” said Helen very low. She put her hand on her heart for a minute and looked up, smiling a little wistfully. Her own trouble was so old that people had forgotten it. “We nearly got crying,” pursued Kathleen, “all the girls, I mean. Harvey Spencer tried to make us laugh; he told jokes—horrid ones. Oh, how silly he was! I hate society men. But it seemed as if we couldn’t get off the subject; first one thing brought it up, and then another. Everybody wants to do something for Mrs. Rhodes. What I was going to tell you was that Mary Barbour said she believed that sweet little Silvy was taken because his mother made an idol of him; that you shouldn’t love anybody so much—that it was wrong. I don’t believe it, sister! I don’t believe it; you can’t love anyone too much! People forget what love means, and it seems unnatural to them when we love as much as we can. Oh, you may look at me! I think of a great, great many things I never tell. You and my brother Orrin, who have done everything and had everything, you think me silly and romantic, but I am wiser than you. It’s because you’ve forgotten. Why, there’s nothing but love that makes life worth living!” said young Kathleen, her voice thrilling through the room. “I shall never try to love only a little, no matter what happens, but as much, as much, as much, always, as God will let me, if I die for it myself!” She went over to Helen and flung herself down on the floor beside her, and laid her head in Helen’s lap. “He will let you,” said Helen with an unsteady voice. Something in her tone made the girl raise her head suddenly—their eyes met in a long look, and a deep rose overspread Kathleen’s face before she hid it again. To the elder woman had come quite unbidden a picture of a man carrying tenderly in his strong arms the white, still body of a little dead child. She would like to have told Kathleen if shyness had not held her tongue. After all, he did not seem quite unworthy. If Orrin thought— He made a grimace when she told him in the brief half hour they had together before she left the house. “It is only the conclusion I had been coming to,” he said. “There is nothing personally against the man; I almost wish there were. I knew Kathleen would be too much for us—Kathleen and love. But how she can want him, I cannot see.” “Ah, but, Orrin, we don’t either of us have to marry him,” said his wife. “I have just found out that it’s Kathleen’s happiness, not ours, that is at stake. What are you looking at?” He had walked over to her dressing table, where there stood the faded photograph of a little child, with a vase of flowers near it. He gazed steadily at it without speaking. “I always thought this better than the large portrait,” he said at last huskily. “You have not had it out in some time.” “No,” she replied, “the frame wanted repairing, and the picture had grown so dim I—I couldn’t bear to see it, someway. But to-day—oh, Orrin, I have been so longing to have someone remember—” “I have never forgotten,” he said; “did you think that? It is only that I am so busy, there are so many things that crowd upon me that I don’t get a chance to tell you. I gave a thousand dollars to the Children’s Hospital to-day for little Silvy’s sake—and our child’s. Why, Helen, Helen, Helen! Poor girl, poor girl, I’ll have to look after you more, I shall not allow you to go again to-night.” “But it has done me more good than anything else in this world,” said his wife. “I’ve been one of the dead souls in prison. It’s not for sorrow that I’m crying, Orrin, not for sorrow alone—oh, for so much else, dear! And now I must go, and I think my man is downstairs for some work from you, and I’ll say good-by until to-morrow.” When Helen reached her friend’s house she found the clergyman just descending the steps. It was beginning to snow again in the dusk, and he buttoned his overcoat tightly around his spare figure as he came forward to assist her from the sleigh. “Mrs. Rhodes told me that she was expecting you,” he said. “Then have you seen her?” “Yes, for a few minutes.” He sighed and stood meditatively looking up the street. “Judge Shillaber has just been here. I was surprised to see him, he so seldom goes out, and never seemed to take any interest in his neighbors. But perhaps I should not say that,” he added hastily. “Everyone must feel the blow that has fallen here; the circumstances are so peculiarly sad. The ways of the Lord are very mysterious.” As he spoke he raised his face, which was thin and careworn because the sorrows of his people weighed very heavily upon him. “The ways of the Lord are very mysterious. We must have faith, Mrs. Armstrong, more faith.” “Yes, indeed,” cried Helen, “I feel that.” “I would like to speak to you about—But I must not keep you out here. There is Mrs. Rawls. Another time!” He hurried off down the street, while Helen found herself drawn inside the door by Mrs. Rawls and into the little dining-room, where the blinds were open somewhat, now that the evening dusk had settled down. The room was warm and quiet, with a heavy perfume of flowers loading the air. “Such a time as we’ve had!” said Mrs. Rawls in a loud whisper. “Me and Mis’ Loomis and Ellen Grant has just had our hands full seein’ people. Ellen’s as deaf as a post, but she would stay, and she set by the winder and let us know when she seen anyone comin’ up the steps. Mis’ Dunham, she spelled us for a while. You never see anything like it in all your born days, Mis’ Armstrong! The hull town’s been here, and carriages driving up, folks some of ’em Mis’ Rhodes didn’t even know, comin’ to inquire or leave cards. There’s been port wine sent for her, and Tokay, and chicken broth, and jellies—I thought there’d been enough sent last week for him, but they’re comin’ yet. What to do with ’em I don’t know, for she won’t touch nothin’. And there’s flowers, flowers, flowers!—from them great white lilies from Colonel Penn’s greenhouse to a little wilty sprig o’ pink geranium that one of them colored children at the corner brought tied with a white ribbon, for ‘little Marse Silvy’; the child was cryin’ when she came. I filled her full of broth and jelly before she went home. Some of the things has on ’em ‘For Silvy’s mother’—that pleases her best of all. And the dear child lies there so peaceful and sweet—She put the geranium by him herself. But she’s waitin’ in there to see you, I know.” Such a slender, drooping figure in its black garments that came to meet Helen! Such patience, such gentleness in the pale face! The tears rose once more to Helen’s eyes as she put her protecting arms around her friend and held her close in a long embrace. “I’m glad you’ve come,” said Anne Rhodes at last. “I want you to sit here by me, we shall be alone for a little while. There is something I want to say—while I can.” Her voice was very sweet and low, and her tearless eyes were luminous. “Let me take your hand—this one; it held my darling’s hand when he was dying. I knew! Dear hand, dear hand!” She held it close to her cheek. After a moment she went on. “Such love, such goodness! I never dreamed of anything like it, that people should be so good. I want you to tell everyone—all who have done the least thing for my little child’s sake, yes, or who have wanted to do anything, that never while my life lasts—I hope it won’t be long—but never while it lasts will I forget them, never will I cease to ask God to bless them, ‘to reward them sevenfold into their bosom.’ I have been praying to-day, when I could pray, that He would teach me how to help others, that the world might be better because my little child had lived in it, and I had had such joy. Helen, you will not forget?” “No,” said Helen. She drew her friend’s head to her shoulder, and they spoke no more. It grew darker and darker in the room where they sat, but in the next chamber the moonlight poured through an opening in the curtains and shone upon the lovely face of the child whose life had been a delight, whose memory was a blessing, whose death touched the spring of love in every heart, and, for one little heavenly space, made men know that they were brothers. <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c000' /></div> <div class='nf-center-c0'> <div class='nf-center c002'> <div>Wings</div> </div></div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c002' /></div> <div class='chapter'> <h2 id='ch11' class='c003'>Wings A Study</h2></div> <h3 class='c011'>I</h3> <div class='c009'> <ANTIMG class='drop-capi' src='images/dci.jpg' width-obs='35' height-obs='53' alt='' /></div> IT was a lovely morning in the early summer that Milly Clark’s lover brought her the engagement ring with which she was also to be wedded some sweet day. It was a plain hoop of gold, with the word Mizpah graven upon its inner side, not because there was any thought of parting between them then, but simply in accordance with a somewhat sentimental fashion of the day. Milly had been given her choice between the ring and a little padlocked bracelet of which Norton was to keep the key, after it had been safely fastened on her white wrist, and this, indeed, appealed to all the instincts of barbaric womanhood, in its suggestion of a lover’s mastery; but the ring was the holier symbol, and the pledge of love eternal. The bees were buzzing around the syringa bushes in the corner of the old-fashioned garden, where the lovers stood looking out upon the road through the white fence which was built upon a stone wall, and covered with climbing roses. The road, shining in the sunlight, sloped down to a bridge half hidden by chestnut trees, and beyond was a glimpse of hills against the blue sky of June. The air, the countryside, the hum of unseen insects, contained that suggestion of joy unspeakable that comes only at this heavenly time of the year, but there were only the two by the garden wall to feel it in its perfection this morning. As far as the eye could see there was no other human being anywhere. At eleven o’clock in a New England village, after the marketing is seen to and mail time over, all self-respecting persons are at home behind the bowed green blinds of the white houses by the roadside, or at work farther off in the fields. For Milly and Norton to be out in the garden now was to be quite alone, and when he put his arm around her and drew her down beside him on the stone wall among the roses, she only smiled confidingly up into his face, and flushed sweetly as he kissed her. “I can’t seem to get used to it,” she said. “Get used to what, dear?” “Your—loving me.” “I don’t want you to get used to it!” he cried fervently. “I’m sure I never shall. Why, when we’re quite old people it will be just the same as it is now. Love can never grow old—not ours, anyway. Can it, Milly!” She gave him a smile for answer and he gazed down at her admiringly, taking note anew of the deep blue of her eyes, the little veins on her forehead, where the soft brown hair was drawn smoothly back from it, and the pure curve of her throat and chin—a face of the highest New England type, fine and beautiful. He himself was the product of a different civilization, and cast in a rougher mold. It was the very difference that had drawn them close together, his rude strength giving sweetest promise of protection to her delicate fineness. She sat silently looking at him, her soul steeped in a delicious dream. “Yes, we will be like this always,” she said at last with almost religious solemnity. “Always,” he assented. “Only growing better and better all the time, Norton. I feel as if I could never be good enough to show how thankful I am that you love me. Do you think I ever can?” “Hush,” he said, frowning. “You must not talk in that way. I’m only a stupid, commonplace fellow at best, not half good enough for you. You’ll have to make me better.” “Oh, Norton!” she protested. “Ah, never mind now, dear! You haven’t put on my ring yet, Milly—remember it is not to come off until I have to put it on the next time—do you know when that will be? When we are married, when you are mine, really and forever. May that day soon come! Give me your hand now, dear, and let me ‘ring your finger with the round hoop of gold,’ as you were reading to me last night.” “There is someone coming,” said Milly nervously. She stood up as the shadow of a parasol touched the roses, and met the gaze of the Episcopal clergyman’s wife, as she stopped to rest, panting a little, by the garden wall. She was a thin woman in a black and white print gown, and with a black lace bonnet trimmed with bunches of artificial violets surmounting her sallow face. “Oh, it’s you, is it, Milly?” she asked with a kindly inflection of her rather sharp voice. “And Mr. Edwards, too, of course. Well, good morning to you both. Isn’t it a perfect day! A little hot in the sun though. It always tires me to walk up this hill; I have to stop a moment here to get my breath. I suppose you’re not going to the funeral, either of you? No, it’s not a bit necessary, but I fancied you might like to see the service performed as it should be for once.” “I did not know anyone had died,” said Milly. “My dear, it’s only a little boy from the poorhouse. His relatives—such as he had—are not able to bury him, and Mr. Preston did want to show the parish what a properly conducted funeral was like. You know what a frightfully bigoted place this is! We had to give up candles altogether, Mr. Edwards. It fairly makes me shiver at times—the ignorance! I wonder—I do wonder, they don’t knock the cross off the spire some day, because it’s a symbol. I wonder they even have a church, instead of a circus tent!” “Oh, Mrs. Preston!” remonstrated Milly. She glanced sideways nervously at Norton, who was picking a rose to pieces with an imperturbable expression. “You will hear the choir boys at any rate as they march in procession around the grave,” pursued Mrs. Preston, raising her parasol again. “I don’t suppose there will be a soul there but ourselves. Well, I put on my best bonnet, anyway, out of respect—I know you will both be glad when I’m gone, although you’re too polite to say so.” She relaxed into a quizzical smile as she regarded them. “Well, good-by.” “Thank Heaven! she’s gone at last,” said Norton with boyish petulance, as they watched her disappear behind the evergreens that bordered the churchyard. “What possessed her to give us so much of her society just now—the very wrong moment, wasn’t it, dear? She has left me only a quarter of an hour before the noon train to town, and I’ll not be back until Monday, you know, this time. To think that I shall be working for you now, Milly—for a sweet girl in a blue dress, with a dimple in one cheek and long brown lashes that droop lower and lower as I—oh, you darling!” They both laughed in joyously blissful content. “Shall I put the ring on now?” he asked after a few moments. “Stand up beside me, then. There, that is right. This is our betrothal, Milly. Say the words, dear, since you would have them, while I slip on the ring.” “Let us say them together. Oh, Norton, it is to be forever!” “Forever. Give me your dear hand. Now with me. ‘The Lord’—‘The Lord,’”—her clear voice mingled with his deep one. “The Lord watch—between thee—and me—when we are parted—(but we never shall be!) when we are parted—the one from the other.” The ring shone on her finger, their lips met in a long kiss. He caught her to him and laid her head upon his breast and her arms around his neck, and they stood thus, silently, while the seconds passed. What power was in those words of might to bring a sudden hush upon both hearts, and to change the sunshine into the awesome, beautiful light of another world? Something deeper, nobler, purer than they stirred those two souls, and made them sacredly, divinely one. Each felt intensely what neither could have expressed. Never, while life lasted, could the witness of that moment be forgotten. Long after her lover had left her Milly sat in the garden, her face half hidden in the roses, with the bees still booming around the syringas, and the sky growing bluer and bluer in the heat of noon. She heard the choir boys singing now in the little churchyard near by as they marched around the open grave, <div class='lg-container-b c012'> <div class='linegroup'> <div class='group'> <div class='line'>“Brief life is here our portion,</div> <div class='line in3'>Brief sorrow, shortlived care,</div> <div class='line in1'>The life that knows no ending,</div> <div class='line in3'>The tearless life, is there.</div> <div class='line in1'>Oh happy retribution,</div> <div class='line in3'>Short toil, eternal rest!</div> <div class='line in1'>For mortals and for sinners,</div> <div class='line in3'>A mansion with the blest.”</div> </div></div> </div> The words brought her no realization of the shortness of human life, of inevitable sorrow, of impending care, and no remembrance of the dead pauper child, or of the open grave—they only served to add to the fullness of her bliss the thought that after all this measureless happiness of earth, there was still the joy of heaven beyond. <h3 class='c011'>II</h3> <div class='c009'> <ANTIMG class='drop-capi' src='images/dci.jpg' width-obs='35' height-obs='53' alt='' /></div> IT was only a few weeks after their betrothal that Norton sailed for Australia on that long journey from which he did not return for three years. The trip was to make his fortune, and fortune meant a home and Milly for his own; so neither rebelled, and, indeed, it was only intended at first that he should stay away a year. In the first ardor of romance parting seemed but a little thing—two hearts like theirs could beat as one with a continent between them. And love shows sweetly in different lights; the purple shadows of impending separation gave it a deeper, richer glow. She took a little journey in from the country to see him off, and they talked of this beforehand as of something quite festive, although there proved to be a bewildering hurry and bustle about it that mixed everything up in a whirl. Mrs. Preston went with her, and there was a disjointed attempt at conversation on the deck of the steamer with some of Norton’s friends who had also come to see him off, and the examination with them, amid laughter and jokes, of Norton’s tiny stateroom, and the few moments there when, lingering behind, the two kissed each other good-by, and, the veil of pretense ruthlessly torn aside, Milly felt a sudden terrible spasm of heartbreak. “I cannot let you go—I cannot!” she sobbed, and her lover had to loosen her arms from around his neck and dry her eyes with his handkerchief, whispering soothing words, and then she must be led out into the glaring sunlight and turn her face away from the group of friends, while her hand still lay in Norton’s. And then the bell rang—the signal for parting—and then—do we not know it all? The last look from the pier at the beloved face, and then the slow watching, watching until the vessel is out of sight and the vision is filled with green overlapping waves, and afterwards the walk back again along the wharf, among bales and vans of plunging horses, out into the world of dusty streets and houses, and the midsummer sights and smells, and the busy, empty life that is left. Milly was grateful to Mrs. Preston for not talking. She blindly let herself be piloted anywhere to find that she was at last ensconced in a hurrying train proceeding homeward through a green landscape, with freshly cooler air blowing in through the open window to soothe her aching head. When they reached the village in the dusk it was Mrs. Preston who walked home with her up the long hill (and, oh, the going home when the one we love most has just left it) and answered all the questions that were showered upon both, and afterward went upstairs to Milly’s room and saw that the girl put on a loose gown to rest in, and made her drink the cup of tea she had brought up. She gave Milly a little kiss, “like a peck,” thought Milly, suddenly alive to the remembrance of those other kisses, and after the elder woman had left, she slipped from the bed where she had even submitted to have her feet covered, and went over to the window and knelt down by it with her head on the sill almost in the branches of the maple tree through which she could see the moon rising in golden quiet. He was looking at the same moon now, and the Lord was watching between them. She pressed the ring to her lips, she pressed it to her bosom—the ring that made her his—joy flooded back upon her with the thought. She had forgotten that she could speak to him still, that she could write. Oh, quick, quick, lose not a moment; it was treachery to have a thought in her soul and he not know it! Down on her knees in the moonlight she wrote, and wrote, and wrote, all that she never could have said—her very heart. She woke to joy the next morning, still in this consciousness of new-found power, and with a high ideal of the life before her. She was to grow and grow that she might be worthy of him—that she might help him grow to be worthy of the highest. Every minute of the day she could live for him, just as in every minute of the day he was living for her. She went about her daily tasks with renewed energy, because he was thinking of her while she performed them. Even during little Letty Stevens’s tedious music lesson she smiled, thinking how she would write him that the child’s halting five-finger exercise counted itself out to her in the words, “How I love you, how I love you, how I love you, how I love you, dear!” She had a little note from him by the pilot boat, written a few hours after they had parted; how little it seemed after all she had thought and felt in this twenty-four hours! But it made the color rise in her soft cheeks, and she cried over it and wore it next her bosom by day and laid it under her pillow by night. For many long weeks it was the only message from him that she had to feed on. The mail does not come quickly from Australia. She had sent off pages and pages to him in the two or three months before his first letter came, and it was much longer before she had an answer to hers. How she studied those letters—simple, almost boyish effusions—full of wondering pride in those that she wrote to him. “Why, you are a real poetess, Milly; I don’t see how you manage to think of such things. I wish I had been thinking of you at the time you speak of, but I’m afraid that must have been when I was staying at Jackson’s, and he and Blessington and I played cards every evening; awfully poor luck I had, too. I suppose I must have been thinking of you, after all, and that’s what made me play so badly, don’t you believe it? No, I don’t do much reading out here; you’ll have to do the reading for both of us, and you can tell it all to me when I get home. When I get home. Oh, Milly! I can’t write about it as you do, but I’m working for my sweet, sweet girl with all the strength I’ve got.” The girl bloomed as she never had before with this quickening of her soul. The days were so full of duties; her music scholars, the household matters, in which she helped her widowed aunt, the two young cousins to be looked after, her reading, and, when she could attend them, the weekday afternoon prayers at the little church where she sometimes, with the sexton, represented all Mr. Preston’s congregation. Milly’s people were of the Congregational faith, but Norton and she had gone to St. John’s together. People found fault with Mr. Preston—a rather dull man with impassive wooden features—because he had no variety of expression; he read service and sermon in a low monotonous voice which, however, grew to have a soothing charm for Milly. Why need anyone express anything? It was all in herself—other people’s expression only jarred. Those few moments in the half light of the empty church gave a sense of peace that was an actual physical rest, undisturbed by the personality of others. She was even guilty of slipping from the church afterwards to avoid Mr. Preston’s perfunctory handshake. Then, after each quickly-passing day, came the long evening when in her little white room she wrote to him—wrote to Norton, her own, own lover. Ah, what fire there can be in the veins of a little Puritan girl! So the swift winter passed and the spring came around again, and he had not returned. Then came hours when the sense of separation began to press more heavily upon her, when the soft breeze wearied her and the common roadside flowers brought tears to her eyes—especially when the Australian mail was long delayed. It was in a mood of this kind that she went one day to see Mrs. Preston, whose sharp features relaxed at the sight of her. Mrs. Preston was sitting in the front parlor by the window, with her sleeves rolled up a little, and a gingham apron tied around her waist, beating up eggs in a large bowl. “Come in,” she called cheerfully to Milly. “I just saw Mrs. Furniss go past; she looked as if she thought I was committing one of the seven deadly sins when she discovered that I was beating my eggs in here. The aborigines consider a parlor a sacred thing, you know. It’s the pleasantest place in the whole house this morning, and this lilac bush is budding. It’s spring again, for certain.” “Yes,” said Milly listlessly. “I’m making custard for dessert to-morrow; the bishop’s coming. He always says, ‘Mrs. Preston, it’s such a relief to reach your house and get sponge cake and syllabub, instead of relays of pie!’ You know the poor, dear man has the dyspepsia terribly, and you New England people have no mercy on him. I’m glad he’s coming to-morrow, it gives me something more to do; one must work in the spring, or die. If this weather keeps on I’ll get at the garret. What is the matter with you this morning, Milly?” “I’m tired,” said Milly with a quiver of her lip. “Work.” “I have worked! I’m busy all the time, but it doesn’t do any good. It’s hard to have Norton away for so long. I can’t help feeling—” she stopped a moment and looked very hard out of the window. “I’m afraid I’m beginning to get—melancholy about it.” She was trying to smile, but a bright tear fell in her lap. “I don’t think you’re very unhappy,” said Mrs. Preston. She put the bowl of eggs down on the table and folded her thin arms. “It’s the luxury of grief that you’re enjoying—part of the romance. Be melancholy—as you call it—while you can.” “You are always so cheerful,” said Milly rather resentfully. “I, my dear! I don’t dare to be anything else. I have to be cheerful, or—” She turned a darkening face to the budding lilacs. “I don’t dare to think long enough to be depressed, to even—remember. There’s an awful abyss down which I slip when I get melancholy; it’s the bottomless pit. I know it’s there all the time, but I have to pretend to myself that I’m not near it, or I get dragged under. I avoid it like the plague!” A momentary spasm contracted her face; she added in a lower tone, “Did you know that I had four children once? They died within a year.” “Oh, you poor thing!” cried Milly. She reached forward and tried to take one of the fast-locked hands of the woman before her. “Oh, how terrible, how terrible! How did you live?” “I didn’t; all the best part of me went too, this thing you see here—” she stopped, and the same shiver as before went over her. “But you have your husband,” said Milly, seeking about for comfort. A vision of Mr. Preston, stiff, dull, formal, with his wooden features, fronted her confusingly. “Yes, that’s the worst of it—if I only had not William!” “Oh, Mrs. Preston!” cried Milly. “I suppose it is surprising. After having bored each other for so many years, we really ought to be very much attached, don’t you think? Perhaps even you can see how much comfort I get from William. If I were an article of the Rubric, instead of a woman—but of course, that is different.” “But you must have loved him when you were married,” cried Milly, shocked. “Did I, dear? I loved something that went by his name, it wasn’t William. There, don’t let us talk of it; I find no fault. He should have been a celibate priest; I agree with him there. He has never really cared for me, or for—the children.” The spasm passed over her face again. “Oh, if I did not have him, if I were not tied to this narrow round which chokes every higher instinct of me, if I could go off somewhere by myself, to California or Egypt, or Cathay—travel, travel, travel, keep going on and on, seeing something new every hour, breathing freer every day, getting out into the great life of the world!” She clenched her hands. “I have given my life, my aspirations, the whole strength of my being, to William, and now I have nothing left—but William.” “You have four children in heaven,” said Milly softly. The elder woman broke down into a fit of weeping that seemed to rend her. Milly sat by, appalled at this glimpse of the inner life of two respectable married people. Later, as she was going home, she met Mr. Preston, his tall, thin figure in its clerical garb silhouetted against the bright green of the spring foliage. His pale eyes gazed solemnly at her as he drew near across the fields; she felt that he might be murmuring Credos, or even Aves, quite oblivious of her presence. But he reached the bars in time to let them down for her, and offer her the handshake from which she had been wont to flee, and then stood a moment as if he would have spoken, while she gazed at him furtively. Could any woman put her arms around that stiff neck or kiss those thin, set lips? Oh, poor Mrs. Preston! But he was really speaking. “I saw you in the distance and I stopped to pick these for you,” he said in his slow, even tone. It was a little bunch of violets that he held out to her. “Oh, Mr. Preston, thank you!” said Milly in wonder. “It is a pleasure to me that you attend our services. If—” he paused, “if my daughter had lived she would have been your age—like you, in her springtime.” He gazed past her solemnly and then taking off his hat to her, went on his way, leaving Milly overpowered with bewilderment. What did it all mean? Who was right, and who was wrong? How did people drift apart after they were married? A new idea of the complexity of life came to her, the strange way in which human beings acted on each other, drawn, as by magnets, with the differing forces. Marriage to her had always presented a picture of growth in happiness, growth in goodness, a path upward together for lover and beloved. She tried now and for the first time vainly to recall if any in her limited circle of acquaintance seemed to fulfill these conditions. Sordidness, narrowness, selfishness, a jealous love of one’s children, these stood revealed instead to the casual eye. She wrote a long page in her journal letter that night. His answer came back at last. It said: “Don’t bother your head, dear, about these things. You will always be the dearest girl in the world to me, and the purest and the best; and as for me, I never forget that I’m working for you, and if that won’t keep me straight, nothing will. What do you care about those old fossils of Prestons, anyhow? You are you, and I am I, and that’s all I care for, sweetheart.” The wealth of meaning with which Milly freighted these honest lines it would take pages to chronicle; perhaps it was partly on account of some words of Mrs. Preston’s which haunted her: “I loved something that went by his name—it wasn’t William.” The clergyman’s family remained in her mind an unsolved problem; it was nearly a month before she went to the rectory again, where she found Mrs. Preston “up to her ears,” as she expressed it, endeavoring to settle the affairs of a poor family who were preparing for emigration to the West. Her snapping black eyes and vivacious mien showed thorough enjoyment of the task, to say nothing of her dominant volubility. Mr. Preston, who came in from the garden bearing the first strawberry solemnly on a gilt plate for his wife’s acceptance, was unheeded until Milly directed attention to him. He had been waiting, he explained gravely, some days for this particular strawberry to ripen. Mrs. Preston said, “Oh, yes,” and thereupon ate the fruit absent-mindedly as she went on talking, with apparently no more appreciation of flavor than if it had been gutta percha, and quite ignoring the giver. Milly could not help smiling, but she left the house more bewildered than ever. Mrs. Preston must like her life more than she thought she did, and it was impossible not to feel a little tinge of sympathy for Mr. Preston. Did people after all know what they really liked—or, indeed, what they really were? The moods of different days, of different hours, what kind of a whole did they form? Her own life seemed to be all question in these days, to which nobody gave the answer. Thus the second year stole on, and Norton’s home-coming appeared to grow no nearer. The photograph which he sent her startled by its unlikeness to her thought of him; those were the eyes that were to look into hers again some day, those the lips that were to kiss hers. After a while by much poring over it, the picture looked to her any way she pleased. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”—possibly, and possibly not always fonder of the unseen beloved, but of one’s own personality, projected into the suitable position. But if any moment of serious doubt came, the remembrance of the betrothal in the garden quenched it. There was always that to fall back upon. Milly lived that over again, and again, and again, never without the solemn rush of feeling that had accompanied the pledge with God for their witness—“never to be forgotten, never to be denied”—the latter words Norton had himself used in a letter to her once, a letter from which she never parted. With love came at last the teaching of death to Milly, and she went down into the shadows and cried out affrighted. All props were torn away from her, and she stood alone trembling, reaching out on the right hand and on the left. “I had not thought it meant this,” she wrote piteously. “I believe in God, and in heaven, why, then, should this desolation touch me? Words—words that I have said all my life and believed in, mean nothing to me. I believe in them now, but they mean nothing. I can’t make anything real but death, not even your love! Oh, help me, tell me that I shall not die alone, that you will go with me, tell me that you are not afraid; help me, Norton. You must know something to make it all better!” She had gained some peace before his reply reached her—a sense of the eternal Fatherhood that pervaded the unseen world as well as the one she walked and lived and loved in now—a protection that was a rest and brought light into the sunshine once more. But he wrote, “Milly, if you love me, don’t send me any more letters like the last. To think of such things would drive me mad. I can’t think of death. It’s as much as I can do to work for a living, and try and be worthy of you, and I’ll have to leave the rest to the good Lord, I expect. I’ll be coming home some day before you know it—drop me a line to tell me how you’d feel if you saw me walking in just after you get this.” If there was a graver look in Milly’s eyes than had been, there was also a sweeter depth. The lines around her mouth were very gentle. She did not talk much. It was the third summer of the separation; she no longer tried to solve the problem of the Prestons, but accepted the fact that she stood a little nearer to each of them than anyone else did. People said she was a good listener, but although she seemed to give a quiet attention to them, it was the voice across the sea that she was always listening for. The letters came now so full of matters and people that she knew nothing of; the whole burden of them for her lay in the few loving sentences that began and ended the pages. Had she ever had a lover? It was so long ago, and for so short a time! Yet at last she had word that he was coming home. It was after this news had reached her, and nearly three years from the day of the revealing of love in the garden, that the second revelation was given her. This time it was of immortality. She was kneeling in the church during the afternoon service; the church was almost empty. She had had a singularly calm spirit all day, and as she knelt in the dim aisle, her gaze directed upward to the stained glass window in one of the arches of the ceiling, she was not praying, she was only peaceful. The window was partly open, so that a glimpse of pale blue sky slanted through it with the afternoon sunshine. And as she gazed, not consciously, her spirit went from her and mingled with that sunlight, becoming one with it, and in a rapture of buoyancy, of radiance, of exultant immortality. It had in it no acknowledged perception of God, no conviction of sin, no so-called “experience”; it was simply life eternal, utterly free from the body, the spirit divested of the hampering bonds of the flesh. The wonder of it, the joy of it—yet the wonderful and joyful familiarity with it, as of something known always, that had been only forgotten for a little while, and was now remembered; and beyond and through all something indescribable. One cannot translate the meaning of life into words that belong to mortality. Milly bowed her head and the light closed over her and her spirit came back to her body once more. She neither wept nor trembled; like Mary of old she marveled and was silent. She thought she would write it all to Norton, but she could not; she thought to tell him when he came, but she did not. She never had the revelation again, but like the first it could never be forgotten nor denied. <h3 class='c011'>III</h3> <div class='c009'> <ANTIMG class='drop-capi' src='images/dct2.jpg' width-obs='40' height-obs='37' alt='' /></div> THEY were married at St. John’s a couple of months after his return. Mr. Preston united them in the bonds of holy matrimony with his still unvarying wooden gravity, through which, however, Milly was able to discern some faint, limited attempt at warmth, and Mrs. Preston folded her in her arms afterwards with a scoffing fondness that rather troubled the bride when she thought of it. She did not want to think now of spoiled lives. Something in Mrs. Preston’s manner implied—could it be pity? It had been delightful after three years of maiden dreaming and shadowy aspiration to be carried forcibly out of them into a clear, cheerful, masculine territory where things seemed to be exactly what they were. The charm of having a lover who was almost a stranger, yet whom it was taken for granted must be both dear and familiar, was nearly too bewildering. She laughed at absurd jokes, was betrayed into demonstrative foolishness, and could scarcely believe in her own metamorphosis. She was in a state of suppressed excitement which must be happiness. “I hardly knew you when I saw you coming in the gate,” she confessed one day soon after his arrival. “Think of it! I ran and hid.” “You did not hide long,” he answered gravely, taking a hairpin from her smooth locks. “Let your hair down, I want to see if it has grown.” “Norton! how silly. Are you always like this?” “Certainly.” “But I want to tell you of so many things that I could not write when you were away. Oh, Norton, the years have been short, yet they were so very, very long, too! There is so much I have to confess to you—how shall I ever begin?” “Don’t try,” he answered laconically. “Leave all that time out, Milly, I hate it. We’ll begin fresh now.” He drew a long breath. “It was a hard, coarse life out there—you couldn’t even understand it, sweetheart. But one thing I can tell—” he turned around and faced her with steadfast gaze—“I can look you straight in the eyes, dear, and not be ashamed.” “Why, of course!” said Milly. And so the new life began. A few months after the wedding they went to live in a narrow street in the great city, away from all the dear lovely hills and fields and sky that had hitherto made Milly’s world. She was surprised to find that the dreary outlook on brick and stone affected her like a physical blow, and that she missed familiar voices strangely. She had often and often thought that she would be willing to live with Norton in a desert, and forego all other companionship than his, which necessarily must be satisfying. Was it? Gradually, very gradually, but surely, a sinking of the heart, a gnawing homesickness began to take possession of her—the homesickness of one transplanted in body and mind to an alien soil; a feeling fiercely combated, fiercely denied, yet conquering insidiously. To many women—to most women, perhaps—there is no medium between worshiping and delicately despising the man they love. They must either look up or down; anything but a level view, with clear eyes meeting, and the honest admission: Dear friend, my insufficiency balances thine. What thou art not to me, that other thing I am not to thee. But it is torture not to be able to look up! The sense of superiority is only a sting. Milly took life with intense earnestness. She could not understand Norton’s light, jocular way of looking at things; he cared for nothing “improving,” he simply wanted recreation. He loved her—yes, as much, she thought, sadly, as he could have loved any woman, but not, oh, not as she loved! She missed so much, so much! Each day brought a subtle shock of disappointment with it, a miserable feeling of loss. What could she do about it? She tried vainly to adjust her vision to the man’s point of view. Her husband seemed to her shallow, coarse, with no high standard of honor. It must be her mission to elevate him. The more unsatisfied her mind became, the more her heart endeavored to make up for it. “You are not what I dreamed—but kiss me, kiss me more passionately that I may forget it!” was the continued inner cry. But kisses do not grow more passionate under the insistent claim. She prayed for him with a hysterical uplifting of the spirit, followed by fathomless exhaustion and depression. He was always very, very kind to her when she wept—and very glad to get away. She relapsed into an obedient endurance, a patient and uncomplaining disapproval. There seemed to be nothing in him of the man she had married except a certain sweet boyishness that had always been one of his charms, and which showed at times through everything, and a bright, yet delicate kindness which other people liked, although to her it had no depth. Sometimes she felt a little envious of his ease with others. “How you talked to Mrs. Catherwood to-night,” she said one evening after the guests had gone. “You quite monopolized her. I wonder what she thought of you!” “Oh, that was all right!” he answered somewhat absently. Then he looked up with a smile. “What do you think? I found that she came from the town I used to live in. I knew her sister well. We went back over old times.” “You never talk to me about them.” “You—oh, that’s different; you wouldn’t be interested, dear.” He shook his head with a kind of rueful amusement. “I always feel when I tell you of such things that you are wondering how I could enjoy them. It came sort of easy to talk to Mrs. Catherwood—she seemed to understand; some people do make you feel that way, you know.” He looked up a little sadly, and then came over to his wife and kissed her. “You’re a saint, Milly, and saints are not expected to take stock in vain jestings. You have to be good for both of us, you know.” Milly flushed angrily. “I wish you wouldn’t say such things—you take such a low view! And I wanted you to see something of Professor Stearns to-night, he is such a fine man, so thoroughly high-minded, so firm in principle, he never gives way an inch in what he thinks is right. How people dislike him for it! It’s really splendid.” Norton looked humorous, but discreetly held his peace. “I tell you, Jordan,” he said one day to a friend, half sadly, half jestingly, “my wife wants me to be a good woman, to like all the things she likes, and to do all the things she does. I know she mourns over me every day of her life. I suppose it’s a hopeless job for both of us. I never was anything but a commonplace sort of fellow, not near good enough for her.” “That is the proper frame of mind, old fellow,” said his friend, and they went on riding together in silence. To what end had the higher life been Milly’s? In five years she and Norton had been drifting slowly but surely ever further apart. Had companionship with her elevated him? Impossible not to see that he had deteriorated, that the lax hold on former ideals had lapsed entirely! Can any human soul thrive in an atmosphere of doubt? It was when this knowledge of further separation lay heaviest upon her, that word came to Milly one morning in the bright sunlight that Norton had been arrested for embezzlement and was in jail. Her heart stood still. This, then, was what she had been foreboding all along; the instantaneous conviction of his guilt was the cruel blow. Oh, the awful, awful wrench of the heart, when disgrace lays its hand on one we love! Death seems an honest, joyful thing in comparison. Yet she could think of a thousand extenuations for him—she found herself yearning over him as she might have done over the children that had never been hers. She prayed all the way to jail. How often she had read of similar journeys—the prisoner was always “sitting on the side of his bed,” in the cell. Norton was sitting on the side of his bed; his face was turned away as she came in. She sat down beside him and took his hand. “Norton!” she said and yet again, “Norton!” and he turned and looked at her. “I knew you would come,” he said, “and I knew—you would think—I had done it.” “Oh, Norton, Norton! Say only that you did not, and I will believe you.” “You will believe—if I tell you—that I am not—a thief? What would a thief’s word be good for, Milly? Do I have to tell such a thing to my own wife? Why, even that poor Irish woman you can hear crying in the next cell believes in her husband; you should have heard her talking before you came—and he’s a brute.” Milly gasped painfully, the tears were running down her cheeks. “You know you always thought some things honest that I did not—some transactions—we have often talked—how could I tell—” “You had your ideas and I had mine,” he interrupted. “It’s mighty hard to conduct business on abstract principles—perhaps—I don’t deny it! My ways weren’t always what they ought to have been. But this is stealing. It somehow kills me to think that you—” he stopped short with a gesture, and hid his face in his hands. Milly longed to put her arms around him, to kiss the hands that hid him from her, to do anything to show her love and grief, and her faith in him, but she did not dare. This was her husband, but she did not dare. He spoke quite calmly after a few minutes. “You had better go back to the house now. My arrest was all a stupid blunder; I sent for Catherwood at once, and he saw Forrest. They are on the right track and I will be set free as soon as possible, to-morrow, probably; the charge is to be withdrawn. And don’t feel so badly, dear, I suppose it’s all my fault that you have never believed in me since we were married—for you never have, Milly.” He stooped and kissed her good-by, saying gently, “You must go now, dear.” Three days after that he came home very ill. All that Milly had been longing to say to him, all that she had been longing to hear, must wait until the morrow—until the next week—until the next month; and then, and then, could it be? Until the next life! He was so very ill from the beginning that there was nothing else to be considered; for the first time her own wishes and feelings were as naught. In the delirium he did not even know her. But there came a time before the end when she was startled as she sat by him in the twilight, holding his wasted hand to see his conscious eyes fixed upon her through the shadows. Her own responded with a depth of piteous eager love in them as she bent closer to him. Still the eyes gazed at her—what, oh, what were they saying? “Darling,” she whispered. His lips did not move, but the fingers of the hand which lay in hers felt feebly for something—touched the golden circle on her finger, and held it as if contented at last. And still the eyes— It was again the moment of their betrothal, and God was with them as in the garden. <hr class='c010' /> <div class='c008'> <ANTIMG class='drop-capi' src='images/dcl.jpg' width-obs='45' height-obs='40' alt='' /></div> LATE in the moonlight, the tender moonlight of June, Milly sat alone by a grave. The soft night wind touched her face, the smell of countless budding flowers was around her. It was again the beautiful youth of the year, the time of love, and for her youth and love were done. Such a little while ago it seemed since she had been looking forward to it, and now it was done. Oh, what did it all mean, the love, the yearning, the striving, that it should end in such bitter loss; how had they made such a failure of marriage—marriage, that could have been so beautiful! Why was it that that last moment with Norton had been the first to show it to her? In the utter solitude she thought and thought, with strained brow, with hands tightly clasped. She searched her soul as if it were the judgment day. Death held up the lamp by which she saw her husband at last clearly—all that he was, all that he might have been if she had not used her higher thought to build up a barrier between them. The sense of his maimed life, the loss of all the joy and trust there might have been, pierced her to the heart. His nature, lower than hers, had yet held in it the capacity to be more than hers—had seen more clearly, and had been more generous. Could it be that, after all, she who had loved so much had not loved enough? Oh, what was it that was expected of love; to desire utterly the good of the best beloved, the development along lines where one cannot follow, on which one has no claim, which touch no answering chord of self—no one poor human being can love perfectly, as perfectly as that! If one were only God— But there was God. Milly raised her head, and the moonlight fell on her face. “Oh, far beyond this poor horizon’s bound” shone the answer to all her thought. The capability of endless growth, the mating of two souls beyond the spheres and through all ages was the message of high emprise that called her like the voice of a star. With the heart of love, with the wings of immortality came the third revelation, reaching to infinite depths and heights, revealing the ineffable space where self is lost in the divine. The secret of life and death, of loss and reprisal, of the seen and the unseen, of thou and I, was there in the oneness of all that our mortal sense divides. Oh, the great, free, beautiful vision! In the long silence—in the blowing of the night wind—when the clouds veiled the moon—spirit to spirit she stood with her beloved at last, as never, oh, never before upon this earth, and repeated aloud once more the words of eternal might: “The Lord watch between thee and me—between thee and me—when we are parted the one from the other.” <div class='nf-center-c0'> <div class='nf-center c002'> <div>The End</div> </div></div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c002' /></div>   <div class='figcenter id004'> <ANTIMG src='images/i269.jpg' alt='' class='ig001' /></div> <div class='nf-center-c0'> <div class='nf-center c002'> <div>THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS</div> <div>GARDEN CITY, N. Y.</div> </div></div> <div class='pbb'> <hr class='pb c002' /></div>   <div class='tnbox'> <ul class='ul_1 c014'> <li>Transcriber’s Notes: <ul class='ul_2'> <li>Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected. </li> <li>Unbalanced quotation marks were corrected. </li> <li>Typographical errors were silently corrected. </li> <li>Inconsistent spelling was made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book. </li> </ul> </li> </ul></div> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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