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Title: Life at High Tide
       Harper's Novelettes

Author: Various

Editors: William Dean Howells and Henry Mills Alden

Release Date: April 21, 2003 [eBook #7362]
[Most recently updated: March 19, 2023]

Language: English

Produced by: Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Sandra Bannatyne, David Garcia and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE AT HIGH TIDE ***




LIFE AT HIGH TIDE

Harper's Novelettes

Edited By

William Dean Howells and Henry Mills Alden




CONTENTS:

THE IMMEDIATE JEWEL ........ MARGARET DELAND

"AND ANGELS CAME ........... ANNE O'HAGAN

KEEPERS OF A CHARGE ........ GRACE ELLERY CHANNING

A WORKING BASIS ............ ABBY MEGUIRE ROACH

THE GLASS DOOR ............. MARY TRACY EARLE

ELIZABETH AND DAVIE ........ MURIEL CAMPBELL DYAR

BARNEY DOON, BRAGGART ...... PHILIP VERRILL MIGHELS

THE REPARATION ............. EMERY POTTLE

THE YEARLY TRIBUTE ......... ROSINA HUBLEY EMMET

A MATTER OF RIVALRY ........ OCTAVE THANET




PREFACE


  There is a tide in the affairs of men
  Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.


Thus the poet--and poetry, of the old order at least, always waiting
upon great events, has found in the high-tide flotations of masterful
heroes to fortune themes most flatteringly responsive to its own high
tension.

The writer of fiction has no such afflatus, no such high pitch of
life, as to outward circumstance, in his representation of it, as
the poet has; and therefore his may seem to the academic critic the
lesser art--but it is nearer to the realities of common human existence.
He deals with plain men and women, and the un-majestic moments of their
lives.

"Life at High Tide"--the title selected for this little volume of
short stories, and having a real significance for each of them, which
the reader may find out for himself--does not reflect the poet's
meaning, and, least of all, its easy optimism. In every one of these
stories is presented a critical moment in one individual
life--sometimes, as in "The Glass Door" and in "Elizabeth and Davie,"
in two lives; but it leads not to or away from fortune--it simply
discloses character; also, in situations like those so vividly
depicted in "Keepers of a Charge" and "A Yearly Tribute," the tense
strain of modern circumstance. In all these real instances there are
luminous points of idealism--of an idealism implicit but translucent.

The authors here represented have won exceptional distinction as
short-story writers, and the examples given of their work not only are
typical of the best periodical fiction of a very recent period--all
of them having been published within five years--but illustrate
the distinctive features, as unprecedented in quality as they are
diversified in character, which mark the extreme advance in this
field of literature.

H. M. A.








THE IMMEDIATE JEWEL

BY MARGARET DELAND

  "_Good name, in man and woman, dear my lord,
   Is_ the immediate jewel of their souls."
                               --_Othello_.


I


When James Graham, carpenter, enlisted, it was with the assurance that
if he lost his life his grateful country would provide for his widow.
He did lose it, and Mrs. Graham received, in exchange for a husband
and his small earnings, the sum of $12 a month. But when you own your
own very little house, with a dooryard for chickens (and such stray
dogs and cats as quarter themselves upon you), and enough grass for a
cow, and a friendly neighbor to remember your potato-barrel, why, you
can get along--somehow. In Lizzie Graham's case nobody knew just how,
because she was not one of the confidential kind. But certainly there
were days in winter when the house was chilly, and months when fresh
meat was unknown, and years when a new dress was not thought of. This
state of things is not remarkable, taken in connection with an income
of $144 a year, and a New England village where people all do their
own work, so that a woman has no chance to hire out.

All the same, Mrs. Graham was not an object of charity. Had she been
that, she would have been promptly sent to the Poor Farm. No sentimental
consideration of a grateful country would have moved Jonesville to
philanthropy; it sent its paupers to the Poor Farm with prompt common
sense.

When Jonesville's old school-teacher, Mr. Nathaniel May, came wandering
back from the great world, quite penniless, almost blind, and with a
faint mist across his pleasant mind, Jonesville saw nothing for him
but the Poor Farm.... Nathaniel had been away from home for many years;
rumors came back, occasionally, that he was going to make his fortune
by some patent, and Jonesville said that if he did it would be a good
thing for the town, for Nathaniel wasn't one to forget his friends.
"He'll give us a library," said Jonesville, grinning; "Nat was a great
un for books." However, Jonesville was still without its library, when,
one August day, the stage dropped a gentle, forlorn figure at the door
of Dyer's Hotel.

"I'm Nat May," he said; "well, it's good to get home!"

He brought with him, as the sum of his possessions, a dilapidated
leather hand-bag full of strange wheels and little reflectors, and
small, scratched lenses; the poor clothes upon his back; and
twenty-four cents in his pocket. He walked hesitatingly, with one
hand outstretched to feel his way, for he was nearly blind; but he
recognized old friends by their voices, and was full of simple joy
at meeting them.

"I have a very wonderful invention," he said, in his eager voice, his
blind eyes wide and luminous; "and very valuable. But I have not been
financially successful, so far. I shall be, of course. But in the
city no one seemed willing to wait for payment for my board, so the
authorities advised me to come home; and, in fact, assisted me to do
so. But when I finish my invention, I shall have ample means."

Jonesville, lounging on the porch of Dyer's Hotel, grinned, and said,
"That's all right, Nat; you'll be a rich man one of these days!" And
then it tapped its forehead significantly, and whispered, "Too bad!"
and added (with ill-concealed pleasure at finding new misfortune to
talk about) that the Selectmen had told Mr. Dean, the superintendent,
that he could call at Dyer's Hotel--to which Nathaniel, peacefully
and pennilessly, had drifted--and take him out to the Farm.

"Sam Dyer says he'll keep him till next week," Mrs. Butterfield told
Lizzie Graham; "but, course, he can't just let him set down at the
hotel for the rest of his natural life. And Nat May would do it,
you know."

"I believe he would," Lizzie Graham admitted; "he was always kind of
simple that way, willin' to take and willin' to give. Don't you mind
how he used to be always sharin' anything he had? James used to say
Nat never knowed his own things belonged to him."

"Folks like that don't never get rich," Mrs. Butterfield said; "but
there! you like 'em."

The two women were walking down a stony hillside, each with a lard-pail
full of blueberries. It was a hot August afternoon; a northwest wind,
harsh and dry, tore fiercely across the scrub-pines and twinkling
birches of the sun-baked pastures. Lizzie Graham held on to her
sun-bonnet, and stopped in a scrap of shade under a meagre oak to
get breath.

"My! I don't like wind," she said, laughing.

"Let's set down a while," Mrs. Butterfield suggested.

"I'd just as leaves," Lizzie said, and took off her blue sunbonnet and
fanned herself. She was a pretty woman still, though she was nearly
fifty; her hair was russet red, and blew about her forehead in little
curls; her eyes, brown like a brook in shady places, and kind. It was
a mild face, but not weak. Below them the valley shimmered in the
heat; the grass was hot and brittle underfoot; popples bent and twisted
in a scorching wind, and a soft, dark glitter of movement ran through
the pines on the opposite hillside.

"The Farm ain't got a mite of shade round it," Lizzie said; "just sets
there at the crossroads and bakes."

"You was always great for trees," Mrs. Butterfield said; "your house
is too dark for my taste. If I was you, I'd cut down that biggest
ellum."

"Cut it down! Well, I suppose you'll laugh, but them trees are real
kind o' friends. There! I knowed you'd laugh; but I wouldn't cut down
a tree any more 'an I'd--I don't know what!"

"They do darken."

"Some. But only in summer; and then you want 'em to. And the Poor Farm
ain't got a scrap of shade!--I wonder if he feels it, bein' sent there?"

"I ain't seen, him, but Josh, told me he was terrible broke up over it.
Told me he just set and wrung his hands when Hiram Wells told him he'd
got to go. Josh said it was real pitiful. But what can you do? He's
'bout blind; and he ain't just right, either."

"How ain't he just right?"

"Well, you know, Nathaniel was always one of the dreamin' kind; a real
good man, but he wa'n't like folks."

Lizzie nodded.

"And if you remember, he was all the time inventin' things. Well, now
he's got set that he can invent a machine so as you can see the dead.
I mean spirits. Well, of course he's crazy. Josh says he's crazy as a
bluefish. But what's troublin' him now is that he can't finish his
machine. He says that if he goes to the Farm, what with him bein'
blindish and not able to do for himself, that his glasses and
wheels--and dear knows what all that he's got for ghost-seein'--will
get all smashed up. An' I guess he's 'bout right. They're terrible
crowded, Mis' Dean says. Nat allows that if he could stay at Dyer's,
or some place, a couple of months, where he could work, quiet, he'd
make so much money that he'd pay his board ten times over. Crazy. But
then, I can't help bein' sorry for him. Some folks don't mind the
troubles of crazy folks, but I don't know why they ain't as hard to
bear as sensible folks' troubles."

"Harder maybe," Lizzie said.

"Josh said he just set and wrung his hands together, and he says to
Hiram Wells, he says, 'Gimme a month--and I'll finish it. For the
sake,' he says, 'of the blessed dead.' Gave you goose-flesh, Josh
said."

"You can see that he believes in his machine."

"Oh, he's just as sure as he's alive!"

"But why can't he finish it at the Farm? I guess Mis' Dean would give
him a closet to keep it in."

"Closet? Mercy! He's got it all spread out on a table in his room at
the hotel. Them loafers go up and look at it, and bust right out
laughin'. Josh says it's all little wheels and lookin'-glasses, and
they got to be balanced just  so. Mis' Dean ain't got a spot he could
have for ten minutes at a time."

They were silent for a few minutes, and then Lizzie Graham said: "Does
he feel bad at bein' a pauper? The Mays was always respectable. Old
Mis' May was real proud."

Mrs. Butterfield ruminated: "Well, he don't like it, course. But he
said (you know he's crazy)--'I am nothin',' he says, 'and my pride is
less than nothin'. But for the sake of the poor Dead, grant me time,'
he says. Ain't it pitiful? Almost makes you feel like lettin' him
wait. But what's the use?"

Lizzie Graham nodded. "But there's people would pay money for one of
them machines--if it worked."

"That's what he said; he said he'd make a pile of money. But he didn't
care about that, except then he could pay board to Dyer, if Dyer'd let
him stay."

"An' won't he?"

"No; and I don't see as he has any call to, any more 'an you or me."

Lizzie Graham plucked at the dry grass at her side. "That's so.
'Tain't one person's chore more 'an another's. But--there! If this
wa'n't Jonesville, I believe I'd let him stay with me till he finishes
up his machine."

"Why, Lizzie Graham!" cried Mrs. Butterfield, "what you talkin' about?
You couldn't do it--you. You ain't got to spare, in the first place.
And anyway, him an unmarried man, and you a widow woman! Besides,
he'll never finish it."

Lizzie's face reddened angrily. "Guess I could have a visitor as well
as anybody."

"Oh, I didn't mean you wouldn't be a good provider," Mrs. Butterfield
said, turning red herself. "I meant folks would talk."

"Folks could find something better to talk about," Lizzie said;
"Jonesville is just nothin' but a nest o' real mean, lyin' gossip!"

"Well, that's so," Mrs. Butterfield agreed, placidly.

Lizzie Graham put on her sunbonnet. "Better be gettin' along," she
said.

Mrs. Butterfield rose ponderously. "And they'd say you was a
spiritualist, too; they'd say you took him to get his ghost-machine
made."

"That's just what I would do," the other answered, sharply. "I ain't a
mite of a spiritualist, and I don't believe in ghosts; but I believe
in bein' kind."

"I believe in keepin' a good name," Mrs. Butterfield said, dryly.

They went on down the windy pasture slope in silence; the mullein
candles blossomed shoulder-high, and from underfoot came the warm,
aromatic scent of sweet-fern. Once they stopped for some more
blueberries, with a desultory word about the heat; then they picked
their way around juniper-bushes, and over great knees of granite, hot
and slippery, and through low, sweet thickets of bay. At the foot of
the hill the shadows were stretching across the road, and the wind was
flagging.

"My, ain't the shade good?" Lizzie said, when they stopped under her
great elm; "I couldn't bear to live where there wa'n't trees."

"There's always shade on one side or another of the Poor Farm,
anyway," Mrs. Butterfield said, "'cept at noon. And then he could set
indoors. It won't be anything so bad, Lizzie. Now don't you get to
worryin' 'bout him;--I know you, Lizzie Graham!" she ended, her eyes
twinkling.

Lizzie took off her sunbonnet again and fanned herself; she looked at
her old neighbor anxiously.

"Say, now, Mis' Butterfield, honest: do you think folks would talk?"

"If you took Nat in and kep' him? Course they would! You know they
would; you know this here town. And no wonder they'd talk. You're a
nice-appearin' woman, Lizzie, yet. No; I ain't one to flatter; you
_be_. And ain't he a man? and a likely man, too, for all he's
crazy. Course they'd talk! Now, Lizzie, don't you get to figgerin' on
this. It's just like you! How many cats have you got on your hands
now? I bet you're feedin' that lame dog yet."

Mrs. Graham laughed, but would not say.

"Nat will get along at the Farm real good, after he gets used to it,"
Mrs. Butterfield went on, coaxingly; "Dean ain't hard. And Mis' Dean's
many a time told me what a good table they set."

"'Tain't the victuals that would trouble Nat May."

"Well, Lizzie, now you promise me you won't think anything more about
him visitin' you?" Mrs. Butterfield looked at her anxiously.

"I guess Jonesville knows me, after I've lived here all my life!"
Lizzie said, evasively.

"Knows you?" Mrs. Butterfield said; "what's that got to do with it?
You know Jonesville; that's more to the point."

"It's a mean place!" Lizzie said, angrily.

"I'm not sayin' it ain't," Mrs. Butterfield agreed. "Well, Lizzie,
you're good, but you ain't real sensible," she ended, affectionately.

Lizzie laughed, and swung her gate shut. She stood leaning on it a
minute, looking after Mrs. Butterfield laboriously climbing the hill,
until the road between its walls of rusty hazel-bushes and its fringe
of joepye-weed and goldenrod turned to the left and the stout, kindly
figure disappeared. The great elm moved softly overhead, and Lizzie
glanced up through its branches, all hung with feathery twigs, at the
deep August sky.

"Jonesville's never talked about _me_!" she said to herself,
proudly. "I mayn't be wealthy, but I got a good name. Course it
wouldn't do to take Nat; but my! ain't it a poor planet where you
can't do a kind act?"


II


Nathaniel May sat in his darkness, brooding over his machine. Since it
had been definitely arranged that he was to go to the Poor Farm, he
did not care how soon he went; there was no need, he  told Dyer, to
keep him for the few days which had been promised.

"I had thought," he said, patiently, "that some one would take me in
and help me finish my machine--for the certain profit that I could
promise them. But nobody seems to believe in me," he ended.

"Oh, folks believe in you, all right, Mr. May," Dyer told him; "but
they don't believe in your machine. See?"

Nathaniel's face darkened. "Blind--blind!" he said.

"How did it come on you?" Dyer asked, sympathetically.

"I was not speaking of myself," Nathaniel told him, hopelessly.

There was really no doubt that the poor, gentle mind had staggered
under the weight of hope; but it was hardly more than a deepening of
old vagueness, an intensity of absorbed thought upon unpractical
things. The line between sanity and insanity is sometimes a very faint
one; no one can quite dare to say just when it has been crossed. But
this mild creature had crossed it somewhere in the beginning of his
certainty that he was going to give the world the means of seeing the
unseen. That this great gift should be flung into oblivion, all for
the want, as he believed, of a little time, broke his poor heart. When
Lizzie Graham came to see him, she found him sitting in his twilight,
his elbows on his knees, his head in his long, thin hands. On one
hollow cheek there was a glistening wet streak. He put up a forlornly
trembling hand and wiped it away when he heard her voice.

"Yes; yes, I do recognize it, ma'am," he said; "I can tell voices
better than I used to be able to tell faces. You are Jim Graham's
wife? Yes; yes, Lizzie Graham. Have you heard about me, Lizzie? I am
not going to finish my machine. I am to be sent to the Farm."

"Yes, I heard," she said.

They were in the big, bare office of the hotel. The August sunshine
lay dim upon the dingy window-panes; the walls, stained by years of
smoke and grime, were hidden by yellowing advertisements of reapers
and horse liniments; in the centre was a dirty iron stove. A poor,
gaunt room, but a haven to Nathaniel May, awaiting the end of hope.

"I heard," Lizzie Graham said; she leaned forward and stroked his
hand. "But maybe you can finish it at the Farm, Nathaniel?"

"No," he said, sadly; "no; I know what it's like at the Farm. There is
no room there for anything but bodies. No time for anything but
Death."

"How long would it take you to put it together?" she asked; and Dyer,
who was lounging across his counter, shook his head at her, warningly.

"There ain't nothin' to it, Mrs. Graham," he said, under his breath;
"he's--" He tapped his forehead significantly.

"Oh, man!" Nathaniel cried out, passionately, "you don't know what you
say! Are the souls of the departed 'nothing'? I have it in my
hand--right here in my hand, Lizzie Graham--to give the world the gift
of sight. And they won't give me a crust of bread and a roof over my
head till I can offer it to them!"

"Couldn't somebody put it together for you?" she asked, the tears in
her eyes. "I would try, Nathaniel;--you could explain it to me; I
could come and see you every day, and you could tell me."

His face brightened into a smile. "No, kind woman. Only I can do it. I
can't see very clearly, but there is a glimmer of light, enough to get
it together. But it would take at least two months; at least two
months. The doctor said the light would last, perhaps, three months.
Then I shall be blind. But if I could give eyes to the blind world
before I go into the dark, what matter? What matter, I say?" he cried,
brokenly.

Lizzie was silent. Dyer shook his head, and tapped his forehead again;
then he lounged out from behind his counter, and settled himself in
one of the armchairs outside the office door.

Nathaniel dropped his head upon his breast, and sunk back into his
dreams. The office was very still, except for two bluebottle flies
butting against the ceiling and buzzing up and down the window-panes.
A hot wind wandered in and flapped a mowing-machine poster on the
wall; then dropped, and the room was still again, except that leaf
shadows moved across the square of sunshine on the bare boards by the
open door. When Lizzie got up to go, he did not hear her kind good-by
until she repeated it, touching his shoulder with her friendly hand.
Then he said, hastily, with a faint frown: "Good-by. Good-by." And
sank again into his daze of disappointment.

Lizzie wiped her eyes furtively before she went out upon the hotel
porch; there Dyer, balancing comfortably on two legs of his chair,
detained her with drawling gossip until Hiram Wells came up, and,
lounging against a zinc-sheathed bar between two hitching-posts, added
his opinion upon Nathaniel May's affairs.

"Well, Lizzie, seen any ghosts?" he began.

"I seen somebody that'll be a ghost pretty soon if you send him off to
the Farm," Lizzie said, sharply.

"Well," Hiram said, "I don't see what's to be done--'less some nice,
likely woman comes along and marries him."

Dyer snickered. Lizzie turned very red, and started home down the
elm-shaded street. When she reached her little gray house under its
big tree, she went first into the cow-barn--a crumbling lean-to with a
sagging roof--to see if a sick dog which had found shelter there was
comfortable. It seemed to Lizzie that his bleared eyes should be
washed; and she did this before she went through her kitchen into a
shed-room where she slept. There she sat down in hurried and frowning
preoccupation, resting her elbows on her knees and staring blankly at
the braided mat on the floor. As she sat there her face reddened; and
once she laughed, nervously. "An' me 'most fifty!" she said to
herself....

The next morning she went to see Nathaniel again.

He was up-stairs in a little hot room under the sloping eaves. He was
bending over, straining his poor eyes close to some small wheels and
bands and reflectors arranged on a shaky table. He welcomed her
eagerly, and with all the excitement of conviction plunged at once
into an explanation of his principle. Then suddenly conviction broke
into despair: "I am not to be allowed to finish it!" He gave a quick
sob, like a child. He had forgotten Lizzie's presence.

"Nathaniel," she said, and paused; then began again: "Nathaniel--"

"Who is here? Oh yes: Lizzie Graham. Kind woman; kind woman."

"Nathaniel, you know I ain't got means; I'm real poor,--"

"Are you?" he said, with instant concern. "I am sorry. If I could help
you--if I had anything of my own--or if they will let me finish my
machine; then I shall have all the money I want, and I will help you;
I will give you all you need. I will give to all who ask!" he said,
joyfully; then again, abruptly: "But no; but no; I am not allowed to
finish it."

"Nathaniel, what I was going to say was--I am real poor. I got James's
pension, and our house out on the upper road;--do you mind it--a mite
of a house, with a big elm right by the gate? And woods on the other
side of the road? Real shady and pleasant. And I got eight hens and a
cow;--well, she'll come in in September, and I'll have real good milk
all winter. Maybe this time I could raise the calf, if it's a heifer.
Generally I sell it; but if you--well, it might pay to raise it,
if--we--" Lizzie stammered with embarrassment.

Nathaniel had forgotten her again; his head had fallen forward on his
breast, and he sighed heavily.

"You see, I _am_ poor," Lizzie said; "you wouldn't have comforts."

Nathaniel was silent.

Lizzie laughed, nervously. "Well? Seems queer; but--will you?"

Nathaniel, waking from his troubled dream, said, patiently: "What did
you say? I ask your pardon; I was not listening."

"Why," Lizzie said, her face very red, "I was just saying--if--if you
didn't mind getting married, Nathaniel, you could come and live with me?"

"Married?" he said, vacantly. "To whom?"

"Me," she said.

Nathaniel turned toward her in astonishment. "Married!" he repeated.

"If you lived with me, you could finish the machine; there's an attic
over my house; I guess it's big enough. Only, we'd _have_ to be
married, I'm afraid. Jonesville is a mean place, Nathaniel. We'd have
to be married. But you could finish the machine."

He stood up, trembling, the tears suddenly running down his face.
_"Finish it?"_ he said, in a whisper. "Oh, you are not deceiving
me? You would not deceive me?"

"I don't see why you couldn't finish it," she told him, kindly. "But,
Nathaniel, mind, I am poor. You wouldn't get as good victuals even as
you would at the Farm. And you'd have to marry me, or folks would talk
about me. But you could finish your machine."

Nathaniel lifted his dim eyes to heaven.


III


"Well," said Mrs. Butterfield, "I suppose you know your own business.
But my goodness sakes alive!"

"I just thought I'd tell you," Lizzie said.

"But, Lizzie Graham! you ain't got the means."

"I can feed him."

"There's his clothes; why, my land--"

"I told Hiram Wells that if the town would see to his clothes, I'd do
the rest. They'd have to clothe him if he went to the Farm."

"Well," said Mrs. Butterfield, "I never in all my born days--Lizzie,
now _don't_. My goodness,--I--I ain't got no words! Why, his
victuals--"

"He ain't hearty. Sam Dyer told me he wa'n't hearty."

"Well, then, Sam Dyer had better feed him, 'stid o' puttin' it onto
you!"

Lizzie was silent. Then she said, with a short sigh, "Course if I
could 'a' just taken him in an' kep' him--but you said folks would
talk--"

"Well, I guess so. Course they'd talk--you know this place. You've
always been well thought of in Jonesville, but that would 'a' been the
end of you, far as bein' respectable goes."

"Well, you can't say this ain't respectable."

"No; I can't say it ain't respectable; but I can say it's the
foolishest thing I ever heard of. An' wrong too; 'cause anything
foolish is wrong."

"Anything cruel is wrong," Lizzie said, stubbornly.

"Well, you was crazy to think of havin' him visit you. But it don't
follow, 'cause he can't be visitin' you, that you got to go
_marry_ him."

"I got to do something," Lizzie said, desperately; "I'd never have a
minute's peace if he had to go to the Farm."

"He'd be more comfortable there."

"His stomach might be," Lizzie admitted.

"Well, then!" Mrs. Butterfield declared, triumphantly. "Now you just
let him go, Lizzie. You just be sensible."

"I'm goin' to marry him. I'm goin' to take him round to Rev. Niles day
after to-morrow; he said he'd marry us."

Mrs. Butterfield gasped. "Well, if Rev. Niles does that!--There! You
know he was a 'Piscopal; they'll do anything. What did he say when you
told him?"

"Oh, nothin' much; I asked him about him visitin' me, an' he said it
wa'n't just customary. Said it was better to get married. Said we must
avoid the appearance of evil."

"Well, I ain't sayin' he ain't right; but--" Then, in despair, she
turned to ridicule: "Folks'll say you're marryin' him 'cause you
expect he'll make money on his ghost-machine!"

"Well, you tell 'em I don't believe in ghosts. That'll settle
_that_."

"If folks knew you didn't believe in any hereafter, they'd say you was
a wicked woman!" cried Mrs. Butterfield, angrily;--"an' that fool
machine--"

"I never said I didn't believe in a hereafter. Course his machine
ain't sense. That's what makes it so pitiful."

"He'll never finish it."

"Course he won't. That's why I'm takin' him."

"Well, my _sakes!_" said Mrs. Butterfield, helplessly. And then,
angrily again, "Course if you set out to go your own way, I suppose
you don't expect no help from them as thinks you are all wrong?"

"I do not," Lizzie said, steadily; and then a spark glinted in her
leaf-brown eye: "Folks that have means, and yet would let that poor
unfortunate be taken to the Farm--I wouldn't expect no help from 'em."

"Well, Mis' Graham, you can't say I ain't warned you."

"No, Mis' Butterfield, I can't," Lizzie responded; and the two old
friends parted stiffly.

The word that Lizzie Graham--"poor as Job's turkey!"--was going to
marry Nathaniel May spread like grass fire through Jonesville. Mrs.
Butterfield preserved a cold silence, for her distress was great. To
hear people snicker and say that Lizzie Graham must be "dyin' anxious
to get married"; that she must be "lottin' considerable on a good
ghost-market"; that she "took a new way o' gettin' a hired man without
payin' no wages,"--these things stung her sore heart into actual anger
at the friend she loved. But she did not show it.

"Mis' Graham probably knows her own business," she said, stiffly, to
any one who spoke to her of the matter. Even to her own husband she
was non-committal. Josh sat out by the kitchen door, tilting back
against the gray-shingled side of the house, his hands in his pockets,
his feet tucked under him on the rung of his chair. He was in his
shirt-sleeves, and he had unbuttoned his baggy old waistcoat, for it
was a hot night. Mrs. Butterfield was on the kitchen door-step. They
could look across a patch of grass at the great barn, connected with
the little house by a shed. Its doors were still open, and Josh could
see the hay, put in that afternoon. The rick in the yard stood like a
skeleton against the fading yellow of the sky; some fowls were
roosting comfortably on the tongue. It was very peaceful; but Mrs.
Butterfield's face was puckered with anxiety. "Yet I don't know as I
can do anything about it," she said, her foot tapping the stone step
nervously; "she ain't got no call to be so foolish."

"Well," Josh said, removing his pipe from his lips and spitting
thoughtfully, "seems Mis' Graham's bound to get some kind of a
husband!" Then he chuckled, and thrust his pipe back under his long,
shaven upper lip.

"Now look a-here, Josh Butterfield; you don't want to be talkin' that
way," his wife said, bitterly. "Bad enough to have folks that don't
know no better pokin' fun at her; but I ain't a-goin' to have you do
it."

"Well, I was only just sayin'--"

"Well, don't you say it; that's all."

Josh poked a gnarled thumb down into the bowl of his pipe,
reflectively. "You ain't got a match about you, have you, Emmy?" he
said, coaxingly.

Mrs. Butterfield rose and went into the kitchen to get the match; when
she handed it to him, she said, sighing, "I'm just 'most sick over
it."

"You do seem consid'able shuck up," Josh said, kindly.

"Well,--I know Lizzie's just doin' it out of pure goodness; but she'll
'most starve."

"I don't see myself how she's calculatin' to run things," Josh
ruminated; "course Jim's pension wa'n't much, but it was somethin'.
And without it--"

"Without it?--land! Is the government goin' to stop pensions? There! I
never did like the President!"

"No; the government ain't goin' to stop it. Lizzie Graham's goin' to
stop it."

"What on airth you talkin' about?"

"Why, Emmy woman, don't ye know the United States government ain't no
such fool as to go on payin' a woman for havin' a dead husband when
she catches holt of a livin' one? Don't you know that?"

"Josh Butterfield!--you don't mean--"

"Why, that's true. Didn't you know that? Well, well! Why, a smart
widow woman could get consid'able of a income by sendin' husbands to
wars, if it wa'n't for that. Well, well; to think you didn't know
that! Wonder if Lizzie does?"

"She don't!" Mrs. Butterfield said, excitedly; "course she don't.
She's calculatin' on havin' that pension same as ever. Why, she
_can't_ marry Nat. Goodness! I guess I'll just step down and tell
her. Lucky you told me to-night; to-morrow it would 'a' been too late!"


IV


Lizzie Graham was sitting in the dark on her door-step; a cat had
curled up comfortably in her lap; her elm was faintly murmurous with a
constant soft rustling and whispering of the lace of leaves around its
great boughs. Now and then a tree-toad spoke, or from the pasture pond
behind the house came the metallic twang of a bullfrog. But nothing
else broke the deep stillness of the summer night. Lizzie's elbow was
on her knee, her chin in her hand; she was listening to the peace, and
thinking--not anxiously, but seriously. After all, it was a great
undertaking: Nathaniel wasn't "hearty," perhaps,--but when you don't
average four eggs a day (for in November and December the hens do act
like they are possessed!); when sometimes your cow will be dry; when
your neighbor is mad and won't remember the potato-barrel--the outlook
for one is not simple; for two it is sobering.

"But I can do it," Lizzie said to herself, and set her lips hard
together.

The gate clicked shut, and Mrs. Butterfield came in, running almost.
"Look here, Lizzie Graham,--oh my! wait till I get my breath;--_Lizzie,
you can't do it._ Because--" And then, panting, she explained.
"So, you see, you just can't," she repeated.

Lizzie said something under her breath, and stared with blank
bewilderment at her informant.

"Maybe Josh don't know?"

"Maybe he does know," retorted Mrs. Butterfield. "Goodness! makes me
tremble to think if he hadn't told me to-night! Supposin' he hadn't
let on about it till this time to-morrow?"

Lizzie put her hands over her face with an exclamation of dismay.

"Oh, well, there!" Mrs. Butterfield said, comfortably; "I don't
believe Nat'll mind after he's been at the Farm a bit. Honest, I
don't, Lizzie. How comes it you didn't know yourself?"

"I'm sure I don't know; it ain't on my certificate, anyhow. Maybe it's
on the voucher; but I ain't read that since I first went to sign it. I
just go every three months and draw my money, and think no more about
it. Maybe--if they knew at Washington--"

"Sho! they couldn't make a difference for one; and it's just what Josh
says--they ain't goin' to pay you for havin' a dead husband if you got
a live one. Well, it wouldn't be sense, Lizzie."

Lizzie shook her head. "Wait till I look at my paper--"

Mrs. Butterfield followed her into the house, and waited while she
lighted a lamp and lifted a blue china vase off the shelf above the
stove. "I keep it in here," Lizzie said, shaking the paper out. Then,
unfolding it on the kitchen table, the two women, the lamplight
shining upon their excited faces, read the certificate together,
aloud, with agitated voices:

"BUREAU OF PENSIONS

"It is hereby certified that in conformity with the laws of the
United States--" and on through to the end.

"It don't say a word about not marryin' again," Lizzie declared.

"Well, all the same, it's the law. Josh knows."

Lizzie blew out the lamp, and they went back to the door-step. Mrs.
Butterfield's hard feelings were all gone; her heart warmed to
Nathaniel; warmed even to the mangy dog that limped out from the barn
and curled up on Lizzie's skirt. But when she went away, "comfortable
in her mind," as she told her husband, Lizzie Graham still sat in the
dark under her elm, trying to get her wits together.

"I know Josh is right," she told herself; "he's a careful talker. I
can't do it!" But she winced, and drew in her breath; poor Nathaniel!

She had seen him that afternoon, and had told him, this time with no
embarrassment (for he was as simple as a child about it), that she had
arranged with Mr. Niles to marry them. "An' you fetch your bag along,
Nathaniel, and we'll put the machine together, evenin's," she said.

"Yes, kind woman," he answered, joyously. "Oh, what a weight you have
taken from my soul!"

His half-blind eyes were luminous with belief. Lizzie had smiled, and
shaken her head slightly, looking at the battered rubbish in the
bag--the little, tarnished mirrors, one of them cracked; the two small
lenses, scratched and dim; the handful of rusty cogs and wheels. With
what passion he had dreamed that he would see that which it hath not
entered into the heart of man to conceive! He began to talk, eagerly,
of his invention; but reasonably, it seemed to Lizzie. Indeed, except
for the idea itself, there was nothing that betrayed the unbalanced
mind. His gratitude, too, was sane enough; he had been planning how he
could be useful to her, how he was to do this or that sort of work for
her--at least until his eyes gave out, he said, cheerfully. "But by
that time, kind woman, my invention will be perfected, and you shall
have no need to consider ways and means."

Lizzie, smiling, had left him to his joy, and gone back to sit under
her elm in the twilight, and think soberly of the economies which a
husband--such a husband--would necessitate.

And then Mrs. Butterfield had come panting up to the gate; and now--

"I don't see as I can tell him!" she thought, desperately. To go and
say to Nathaniel, all eager and happy and full of hope as he was, "You
must go to the Farm,"--would be like striking in the face some child
that is holding out its arms to you. Lizzie twisted her hands
together. "I just can't!" But, of course, she would have to. That was
all there was to it. If she married him, why, there would be two to go
to the Farm instead of one. Oh, why wouldn't they give her her pension
if she married again! Her eyes smarted with tears; Nathaniel's pain
seemed to her unendurable.

But all the same, the next morning, heavily, she set out to tell him.

At Dyer's, Jonesville had gathered to see the sight; and as she came
up to the porch, there were nudgings and whisperings, and Hiram Wells,
bolder than the rest, said, "Well, Mis' Graham, this is a fine day for
a weddin'--"

Lizzie Graham, without turning her head, said, coldly, "There ain't
goin' to be no weddin'." Then she went on upstairs to Nathaniel's
room.

The idlers on the porch looked at each other and guffawed. "I knowed
Sam was foolin' us," somebody said.

But Sam defended himself. "I tell you I wa'n't foolin'. You ask Rev.
Niles; she told me only yesterday he said he'd tie the knot. I ain't
foolin'. She's changed her mind, that's all."

"Lookin' for a handsomer man," Hiram suggested;--"chance for yourself,
Sam!"

Lizzie, hot-cheeked, heard the laughter, and went on up-stairs.
Nathaniel was sitting on the edge of his bed, his hat on, his poor
coat buttoned to his chin; he was holding his precious bag, gripped in
two nervous hands, on his knee. When he heard her step, he drew a deep
breath.

"Oh, kind woman!" he said; "I'd begun to fear you were not coming."

"I am--a little late," Lizzie said. "I--I was detained."

"It does not matter," he said, cheerfully; "I have had much food for
thought while awaiting you. I have been thinking that this wonderful
invention will be really your gift to humanity, not mine. Had I gone
to the Farm, it would never have been. Now--!" His voice broke for joy.

"Oh, well, I don't know 'bout that," Lizzie said, nervously; "I guess
you could 'a' done it anywheres."

"No, no; it would have been impossible. And think, Lizzie Graham, what
it will mean to the sorrowful world! See," he explained, solemnly; "we
poor creatures have not been able to conceive that of which we have
had no experience; the unborn child cannot know the meaning of life.
If the babe in the womb questioned, What is birth? what is living?
could even its own mother tell it? Nay! So we, questioning: 'God, what
is death? what is immortality?' Not even God can tell us. The unborn
soul, carried in the womb of Time, has waited death to know the things
of Eternity, just as the unborn babe waits birth to know the things of
life. But now, _now_, is coming to the world the gift of sight!"

There was a pause; Lizzie Graham swallowed once, and set her lips;
then she said, "I am afraid, Nathaniel, that I--I can't marry
you--because--"

"Marry me?" he said, with a confused look.

"We were to get married to-day, you know, Nathaniel?"

"Oh yes," he said.

"Yes; but--but I can't, Nathaniel."

"Never mind," he said. "Shall we go now, kind woman?" He rose,
smiling, and stretched out one groping hand. Involuntarily she took
it; then stood still, and tried to speak. He turned patiently towards
her. "Must we wait longer?" he asked, gently.

"Oh, Nathaniel, I--I don't know what to say, but--"

A startled look came into his face. "Is anything the matter?"

"_Oh!_" Lizzie said. "It just breaks my heart!"

His face turned suddenly gray; he sat down, trembling; the contents of
his bag rattled, and something snapped--perhaps another mirror broke.
He put one hand up to his head.

"It's that pension," Lizzie said, brokenly; "if I get married, I lose
it. An' we wouldn't have a cent to live on. You--you see how it is,
Nathaniel?"

He began to whisper to himself, not listening to her. There was a long
pause, broken by his strange whispering.

Lizzie Graham looked at him, and turned her eyes away, wincing with
pain;--the tears were rolling slowly down his cheeks. She put her
hand on his shoulder in a passion of pity; then, suddenly, fiercely,
she gathered the poor bowed head against her soft breast. "I don't
care! My name ain't worth as much as that! Let 'em talk. Nathaniel,
are you willin' _not_ to get married?"

But she had to speak twice before he heard her. Then he said, looking
up at her out of his despair: "What? What did you say?"

"Nathaniel," she explained, kneeling beside him and holding his hand
against her bosom, "if you were to come and live with me, and we were
not married--"

But he was not listening. A door opened down-stairs, and there was a
noisy burst of laughter; then it closed, and the hot room was still.

"Emily Butterfield will stand my friend," she said, her lips
tightening. Then, gently: "We won't get married; Nathaniel. You will
just come and visit me until--until the machine is finished."

"You will let me come?" he said, with a gasp; "you will let me finish
my invention?" He got up, trembling, clutching his bag, and holding
out one hand to clasp hers.

Lizzie Graham took it, and stood stock-still for one hard moment....

Then she led him down-stairs, out upon the porch, past the loafers
gaping and nudging each other.

"Goin' to be married, after all, Mis' Graham?" some one said.

And Lizzie Graham turned and faced them. "No," she said, calmly.

Then they went out into the sunshine together.






"AND ANGELS CAME--"

BY ANNE O'HAGAN


The full effulgence of cloudless midsummer enveloped the place. The
lawns, bright and soft, sloped for half a mile to the sweetbrier
hedge. Among them wound the drive, now and again crossing the stone
bridges of the small, curving lake which gave the estate its affected
name--Lakeholm. To the left of the house a coppice of bronze beeches
shone with dark lustre; clumps of rhododendrons enlivened the green
with splashes of color. Lombardy poplars, with their gibbetlike
erectness, bordered the roads and intersected them with mathematical
shadows; here and there rose a feathery elm or a maple of
wide-branched beauty. To the right, a shallow fall of terraces led to
the Italian garden, Mrs. Dinsmore's chief pride, now a glory of
matched and patterned color and a dazzle of spray from marble basins.
Beyond all the careful, exotic beauty of the place, the wide valley
dipped away, alternate meadow and grove, until it met the silvery
shiver of willows marking the course of the river. Beyond that again,
the hills, solemn in unbroken green, rose to cloud-touched heights.

Before the house Brockton's new automobile waited. He himself leaned
against a stone pillar of the piazza, facing his hostess, who sat on
the edge of a chair in the tense attitude of protest against delay.
She had scarcely recovered from her waking crossness yet, and found
herself more irritated than amused at the eccentricities of her guest.
She was wondering with unusual asperity why a man with such
lack-lustre blue eyes dared to wear a tie of such brilliant contrast.
He interrupted her musings.

"Miss Harned seems mighty stand-offish these days."

"Millicent is a little difficult," admitted Millicent's cousin.

"What do you suppose it is? She seemed all smooth enough in New York
last winter, and even in the spring after--But now--" He paused again
without finishing his sentence. "And I had counted on your influence
to make her more approachable."

"Oh, Millicent is having a struggle with her better nature, that is
all," laughed Mrs. Dinsmore. "It's hard living with her during the
process, but she's adorable once her noble impulses have been
vanquished and she's comfortably like the rest of the world again."

"I don't know what you mean," said the downright Mr. Brockton.

"No?" Mrs. Dinsmore was sure that the impertinence of her monosyllable
would be lost upon her elderly protege. "I'll make it clear to you, if
I can. Millicent, you know, has nothing--"

"With that figure and that face?" interrupted Brockton, with gallant
enthusiasm.

"I was speaking in your terms, Mr. Brockton," said the lady, with
suave hauteur. "Of course all of us count my cousin's charm and
accomplishments, though we do not inventory them as possessions far
above rubies. But in the valuation of the 'change she has nothing. Oh,
she may manage to extract five or six hundred a year from some
investments of my uncle, and she has the old Harned place in New
Hampshire. That might bring in as much as seven hundred dollars if the
abandoned farm-fever were still on--"

"By ginger!" boasted Brockton, whose expletives lacked _ton_,
"it's more than I had when I started."

"So I remember your saying before. But I fear that my cousin is not a
financial genius. What I meant by her struggles with her better nature
is that she sometimes tries to thwart us when we want to make things
easy for her. Her better nature had a fearful tussle with her common
sense about five years ago, when Aunt Jessie asked her to go abroad;
and it nearly overcame her frivolity and her vanity last winter when I
met her at the dock and insisted upon having her spend the winter with
me, and our second cousin, Alicia Broome, offered to be responsible
for her wardrobe. But, thanks be," she added, laughing, "the world,
the flesh, and the devil won. So cheer up, Mr. Brockton. It may happen
again."

"Oh, I'm not hopeless by any manner of means. I want her pretty badly,
and I'm used to getting what I want. I told her, out and out, when she
turned me down, back there in May, that if she were a young girl I
wouldn't urge her any more, after what she said about her feelings.
But she wasn't, and I thought she could look at a proposition from a
plain business point of view."

"You told her that? You mentioned to her that she was no longer a
young girl?" Mrs. Dinsmore's laugh rippled delightedly on the air.

"I did. Oh, I'm used to bargaining," he rejoined, proudly. "I always
could make the other fellow see what he'd lose by refusing my offers.
And I got her to take the matter under consideration. I heard
somewhere that she was interested in some philanthropy. Well, money
comes in handy in charity." He grinned broadly at Mrs. Dinsmore.

At that moment her protege was extremely distasteful to the lady. But
she was a philosopher where marriage was concerned, and she
whole-heartedly hoped that her cousin Millicent would not dally too
long with her opportunity and allow the matrimonial prize to escape.
She was sincerely fond of Millicent, and desired for her the best
things in the world. She sometimes said so with touching earnestness.

"She told me"--Mr. Brockton stumbled slightly--"that there wasn't any
one else."

"There isn't. She has her train--she's enormously admired--but there
is no one in whom she is sentimentally interested. And Aunt Jessie
says it was so all the time they were in Europe."

"Wasn't there ever?" he demanded.

"My dear Mr. Brockton, Millicent is twenty-nine, as you reminded her,
and she's a normal woman! Of course there have been some ones--her
music-master at fourteen, I dare say, and an actor at sixteen, and a
young curate at eighteen--oh, of course I'm jesting. But I suppose she
was somewhat like other girls. She was engaged at nineteen--and he
must have been quite twenty-three! No, I should dismiss all jealousy
of her past if I were you."

"Engaged?"

Mrs. Dinsmore wondered suddenly if she had been wise, after all, to
admit that widely known fact.

"Oh yes, a bread-and-butter engagement. My uncle was notoriously
inadequate in all practical affairs; he was a scholar and something of
a recluse and the most charming gentleman I ever saw, but a child in
worldly matters,--a child! It ended, you see."

"How did it end?"

"Oh, poor Will Hayter died."

"Dead long?"

"Five or six years."

"Well, I'm not afraid of dead men." Brockton laughed in relief. Mrs.
Dinsmore did not point out to him from her more subtle knowledge that
constancy to the unchanging dead is sometimes easier than constancy to
the variable living. She was only too glad to have the inevitable
disclosure made lightly and the truth dismissed without frightening
off the desirable suitor. "And certainly Miss Harned don't look as if,
as if--"

"Any irremediable grief were gnawing at her damask cheeks?--"

"What's this about damask cheeks?" The question came along with a
swirl of skirts from the great hall. "Cousin Anna, don't hate me for
keeping you so long. Mr. Brockton, I owe you a thousand apologies."

Some of those who admitted Millicent Harned's charm declared that it
lay in her voice. Always there sounded through its music the note of
eagerness, with eagerness's underlying hint of pathos. Her tones were
like her face, her motions, herself. Impulse, merriment, yearning, and
the shadow of melancholy dwelt in her eyes and shaped her lips to
sensitive curves. She was tall, and her motions were of a spontaneous
grace, swifter and more changeful than most women's.

"You have been a disgracefully long time, Millicent," her cousin
answered her apology. "But"--she looked at the beautifully gowned
figure, the lovely, imaginative face, thereby, like a good showman,
calling Mr. Brockton's attention to them--"we'll forgive you."

"Oh, it wasn't primping that kept me. I stopped for a few minutes at
the schoolroom door. Poor Lena! She seemed to be feeling the
responsibilities of erudition terribly this morning. She showed me her
botany slides with such an air! Do you know what genus has the
_rostellum_, Anna?"

"No, I don't," said Anna, shortly. "And Lena's growing up a perfect
young prig. I'll have to change governesses. Heaven knows what I'll
draw next time! The last one had charm, but no learning, and mighty
little intelligence. This one has no manner at all, and is of
encyclopaedic information. A daughter's a terrible responsibility."

"Isn't she?" Millicent's tone was one of affectionate raillery as she
gathered her draperies about her in the automobile. The notion of
Anna's responsibilities amused her; Anna was so untouched by them--as
smooth-skinned, as slim and vivacious, as the forty-year-old mother of
two boys entering college, a girl in the schoolroom and another in the
nursery, as she had been as a _debutante_.

"Oh, you may make fun," said Anna, snapping open the frothy thing she
called a sunshade, "but you don't know how I lie awake nights,
shuddering lest Lena grow up a near-sighted girl with no color and
serious views."

Millicent only smiled as the great machine moved off. The sunshine,
the rare and ordered beauty of the place, the fragrance of the soft
winds, all lapped her in indolence. As they neared the gate that gave
upon the open road, a turn brought them in sight of the front of the
house. It was very beautiful. She breathed deeply in the content of
the sight--the delicate lines, the soft color, the perfection of
detail. In the gardens were stained, mellow columns and balustrades
which Anna had brought from the dismantled palace in the Italian hills
where she had found them. Everywhere wealth made its subtlest, most
delicate appeal to her eyes.

"My house," thought Millicent, as they shot out of the grounds, "shall
be different, but as beautiful. The Tudor style, I think, and for my
out-of-door glory a vast rose-garden,--acres, if I please!" Then she
called sternly to her straying imagination. She was picturing what she
might have as the wife of the man before her--the man whose first
proposal she had unhesitatingly refused, whose appearance at Lakeholm
she had regarded as proof of disloyalty on Anna's part--the man who at
the best represented to her only the artistic possibilities of riches.
She dismissed her reverie with a frown and joined in the talk.

"Do you know," she confessed, "I forget where it is that we are going?"

"We're coming back to the Monroes' for luncheon," Mrs. Dinsmore
reminded her. "But Mr. Brockton is going to skim over most of the
Berkshires first. I think you said you hadn't been in this part of the
country before, Mr. Brockton?"

"No," said Brockton, "I haven't had much chance to get acquainted with
the playgrounds of the country. I've been too busy earning a holiday.
But I've earned it all right." He turned to emphasize his boast with a
nod toward Millicent. She blushed. His very chauffeur must redden at
his braggart air, she thought. The Tudor castle grew dim in her vision.

"What do you think of the bubble, Miss Harned?" he went on. "Goes like
a bird, don't she?"

"Indeed she does," answered Millicent, characteristically making
immediate atonement in voice and look for the mental criticism of the
moment before. "It's really going like a bird. I don't suppose we
shall ever have a sensation more like flying."

"Not until our celestial pinions are adjusted," said Anna. Brockton
laughed, but Millicent went on:

"Seriously, the loveliest belief I ever lost was the one in the wings
with which my virtues should be at last rewarded. To breast the ether
among the whirling stars,--didn't you ever lie awake and think of the
possibility of that, Anna?"

"Never! I'm no poet in a state of suffocation, as I sometimes suspect
you of being."

"As for heaven," declared Brockton, "I don't take much stock in all
that. We're here--we know that--and we'd better make the most of it.
For all we know, it's our last chance to have a good time. Better take
all that's coming to you here and now, Miss Harned, and not count much
on those wings of yours."

Millicent smiled mechanically. Could any Elizabethan garden of delight
compensate for the misery of having each butterfly of fancy crushed
between Lemuel Brockton's big hands in this fashion?

They were entering a village. Before them was the triangular green
with the soldier's monument upon it. About it were the post-office,
the stores, the small neat houses of the place. A white church,
tall-steepled, green-shuttered, rose behind the monument, and with it
dominated the square. A wagon or two toiled lazily along the road;
before the stores a few dusty buggies were tied. The place seemed
drowsy to stagnation in the summer heat. Why, Millicent wondered, were
towns so crude and unlovely in the midst of a country so beautiful?

There was a sudden explosive sound, and, with a crunch and a jerk
which almost threw them from their seats, the machine came to a
standstill. Brockton and his chauffeur were out in an instant, the one
peering beneath, the other examining more closely. He emerged in a
moment, and there was a jargon of explanation, unintelligible to the
two women. All that Anna and Millicent understood was that the
accident was not serious; that they would be delayed only a few
minutes, and that Brockton was very angry with some one for the
mishap. The two men worked together. Anna looked at her cousin.

"I'm dead sleepy," she half whispered. "The wind in my face and the
sun are too soporific for me. Let us not say a word to each other."

"You read last night," Millicent accused her. "But I don't feel
particularly conversational myself."

She leaned back and surveyed the scene again. She could read the words
graved on the granite block beneath the bronze soldier:

"To the men of Warren who fought that their country might be whole and
their fellows free this tribute of love is erected."

And there followed the honor-roll of Warren's fallen.

Millicent's sensitive lips quivered a little. Her ready imagination
pictured them coming to this very square, perhaps,--the men of Warren.
Boys from the hill farms, men from the village shops, the blacksmith
who had worked in the light of yonder old forge, the carpenter who was
father to the one now leisurely hammering a yellow L upon that
weather-stained house,--she saw them all. What had led them? What call
had sounded in their ears that they should leave their ploughshares in
the furrows, their tills, their anvils, and their benches? What better
thing had stirred with the primeval instinct for fight, with the
unquenchable, restless longing for adventure, to send them forth? She
read the words again--"that their country might be whole and their
fellows free."

She moved impatiently. For now an old shadowy theory of hers--an
inheritance from the theories of the recluse, her father--stirred from
a long-drugged quiet: a theory that there was a disintegrating
unpatriotism in the untouched, charmed life of riches she and her
fellows sought. She felt the disturbing conviction that those common
men--she could almost hear their blundering speech, see their uncouth
yawns at the sights and sounds of beauty on which she fed her
soul--that those men had wells of life within them purer, sweeter,
than she. She averted her eyes from the monument.

"Honey!" called a voice, full-throated and loving--"honey, where are you?"

There was a play-tent on the little patch of yard before the brown
cottage to the left. The voice had come from the narrow piazza.
Millicent shivered as she looked at it, with its gingerbread
decorations already succumbing to the strain of the seasons. The
answer came from the tent:

"Here I am, muvver. Did you want me?"

She came out--a child of five or six years. The round-eyed solemnity
of babyhood had not left her yet. She brought her small doll family
with her, and a benevolent collie ambled beside her. Her mother
watched, tenderness beautifying her brown eyes: she was a young woman,
no older than Millicent, but her face was more lined than Anna's; a
strand of dark hair was blown across her cheek; there were fruit
stains on her apron. All the marks of a busy household life were about
her, all the bounteous restfulness of a woman well beloved, and the
anxieties of a loving woman. She gave the automobile a passing glance,
but it had no interest for her. Her eyes came back to caress the young
thing which toiled up the steps to her, babbling of a morning's events
in the tent.

"Yes, sweetheart, that was very nice," she said, in answer to some
breathless demand for sympathy. "And mother has brought you the bread
and jam she promised you this morning. Will you eat it here, or in the
tent?"

"Couldn't I come into the kitchen to eat it, where you are?"

"Why, yes, honey, if you want to."

The door closed upon the vision of intimate love. Millicent saw Lena
walking sedately with the governess of no charm and encyclopaedic
information.

"Now we're all right," called Brockton, loudly. "Upon my word, Mrs.
Dinsmore, I think you were asleep! Miss Harned, you can't be as
entertaining as I thought if your cousin falls asleep with you."

"But think how soothing I must be; that's even better than to be
entertaining."

"By ginger! I never found that out--that you were soothing, I mean."
It was evident that Mr. Brockton intended a compliment. Anna Dinsmore
saw the annoyed red whip out upon Millicent's cheeks. She interposed a
few ready, irrelevant questions before the tide of Brockton's
flattery.

They made their swift way through the hills, sometimes overlooking the
winding course of the river, sometimes skirting the great estates of
the region, again whizzing noisily through an old village. Anna and
Brockton sustained the weight of conversation. Millicent smiled in
vague sympathy with their laughter and Joined at random in the talk.
Obstinately her mind had stayed behind her--with the men of Warren,
with the round-faced child, and the woman to whose life love and not
art gave all its beauty.

They approached one of the larger old towns of the country--a place
with a bustling main street and elm-shaded thoroughfares branching
from it. Here were ample, well-kept lawns and houses of prosperous
dignity. It seemed charming to Millicent with its air of unhurried
activity or undrowsy repose.

"What is this, Anna?" she asked.

Anna told her.

"Riverfield?" Millicent repeated the name, but in a strange voice.
Anna stared a little.

"Yes. Why? Do you know any one here?"

"No." The word trickled slowly, unwillingly, from Millicent.

"Lovely town, and there are some good places outside," said Anna. "The
Ostranders have one, and Jimson, the artist. But the native city, or
whatever you call it, is adorable. It has that air of rewarded virtue
which makes one ashamed of one's life--"

"I wish"--Millicent still spoke remotely, as if out of a sleep--"I
wish, Mr. Brockton, that we might find a little library and museum
they have here."

"Why, of course!"

"Are you going to compare it with the Vatican, Millicent?" asked Anna,
flippantly. Millicent turned a distant, starry gaze upon her cousin.

"No," she said; and then, in a flash of sympathy and fright, Anna
remembered that it had been for some little Berkshire town that Will
Hayter had built a library and museum just before his death, six years
before--the town from which his family had originally come. Her memory
worked rapidly, constructing the story. The blood dyed her face at the
thought of her obtuseness. Then she set her lips firmly. She had done
her best; if a wanton fate chose to interfere now and make Millicent
slave to the phantom of her early, radiant love, she, Anna, could do
no more!

"Here we are, I guess," called Brockton. The machine shot into a broad
street. A promenade between a double row of elms down its centre gave
it a spacious dignity. The modest courthouse stood on one side, as
green-bowered as if Justice were a smiling goddess; a few churches
broke the stretch of houses. And on the other side the library and
museum stood.

"Pretty little building, but plain," commented Brockton, making
disparaging note of its graceful severity.

"It's exactly suited to the place; it epitomizes its spirit," said
Anna, glibly. "It's austere without being forbidding--perfect Colonial
adaptation of the Greek."

Millicent made no architectural observation. Instead she said: "If you
don't mind, I should like to go in for a while. You could pick me up
later, perhaps on your way back to--Where is it we are lunching?"

Consternation looked out of Anna's eyes, bewilderment out of
Brockton's. But Millicent turned to them with such gentle command in
her gaze that they could offer no protest.

"Come back in half an hour, if you are ready," she said. Upon Anna,
whose baffled look followed her up the flagging between the
close-clipt lawns, there came the feeling that she was leaving her
cousin alone with the beloved dead.

"Now what--" began Brockton, in full-toned protest,--"what the--"

"That was the last thing Will Hayter did,"--Anna interrupted his
question. "And the first, so to speak. It was a fairly important
commission. Jessup, the Trya Drop liniment man, came from
Riverfield--he has a mammoth place outside now. When he began to coin
money faster than the mint, he gave lots of things to his
birthplace--which has always blushed for him. It's prouder that
Whittier once spent Sunday with one of its citizens than that Alonzo
Jessup is its son. Well, he gave the library and museum, and the
commission went to Will Hayter. The Hayters came from here two or
three generations ago. It was just before his death, and Millicent has
been abroad almost ever since. So she had never seen it."

Brockton gave a look of speechless chagrin at his hostess, which she
answered haughtily:

"My dear Mr. Brockton, after all, I never undertook to be a
marriage-broker!" Then she glanced at the chauffeur and forbore.

Meantime Millicent sat in one of the square exhibition-halls. The
sweet air, with the scent of hay from the farther country faintly
impregnating it, blew through the quiet. No one else shared the room
with her. The even light soothed her eyes, the stillness calmed the
fluttering apprehension in her breast which had presaged she knew not
what fresh anguish of loss. There were pictures on the walls--one or
two not despicable originals which Trya Drop Jessup had given, many
copies, and a few specimens of Riverfield's native talent. But she saw
none of them, any more than one sees the windows and the paintings in
a great cathedral in the first fulness of reverence. To her this was a
sacred place. That grief had lost its poignancy, that youth and health
with cruel insistence had reasserted their sway over her life, did not
mean forgetfulness, unfaith.

"Truly, truly,"--she almost breathed the words aloud,--"there has been
no other one. That was my love, young as we were. But I must fill up
the days--I must fill up the days."

       *       *       *       *       *

Her eyes were fixed unseeingly upon a great canvas at the other end of
the hall. Some Riverfield hand had portrayed a Riverfield
imagination's conception of the moment in the life of Christ when, the
temptations of Satan withstood, angels came to Him upon the mountain.
In the lower distance the kingdoms of the world grew dim beneath the
shadow that fell from the vanquished and retreating tempter, and from
the opening heavens a dazzling cloud of angels streamed toward the
solitary Figure on the height. By and by Millicent's eyes took note of
it. She half smiled. There was daring at least!

Then the picture faded, and again the persistent figure of the child
which had so filled her imagination came before her. But this time it
was toward herself that the rosy face was turned and limpid eyes
lifted in unquestioning dependence. She was the mother; she stood on
the piazza, and by her side he stood, who had been so dear in himself,
so infinitely dearer in the thought of all that should be; toward them
the child came; they were enveloped by breathless love for each other
and for that being, innocent, trusting, which their love had called
into life. So, dimly, she had dreamed in the radiant days of old.
Almost she could feel his hand upon her shoulder, hear his voice full
of tenderness that expressed itself only in tone, not in word, taking
refuge from too great feeling in jest. She closed her eyes against the
vision that made her faint with anguish.

Some one entered the room with a brisk little trot; Millicent opened
her eyes and turned her head. A small woman, "old maid" from the top
of her neat gray head to the toe of her list shoes, came forward. She
held a pad and pencil and wore the badge of authority in her manner.
At sight of Millicent she paused, blinking behind her glasses.
Millicent came slowly out of her trance; recognition dawned upon her.
She rose.

"Miss Hayter--Aunt Harriet!" she cried, advancing.

"It is you, then!" chirped the elder lady. "My dear, who could have
expected this?"

"Not I, for one!" She held both Miss Hayter's hands. "I had no idea
you were here. Surely you haven't given up your beloved Boston
school?"

"Oh no. Only in the summer I come here for a month and substitute for
the regular curator while she is on her vacation. It"--she struggled
against a constitutional distaste for self-revelation--"it seems like
a little visit with Will, somehow."

Millicent's throat throbbed with a strangled sob. No one had spoken
his name in so long! Her people had had no interest but to banish the
memory of him from her heart; this quaint little aunt of his, who had
adored him and lived for him, was the first who had spoken of him
in--she did not know how many years. She held tight to the old hands,
her eyes clung to the withering face. "Say it again," she whispered;
"say his name."

"Why, my dear," cried the older woman, "is it still as hard as this?
Come, sit down here with me. Of course I knew that you were not one of
the changing kind,"--Millicent winced,--"but I'm sorry to think you
should suffer now as keenly as you do."

"It is not just that," said Millicent, shamefacedly. "Only, seeing you
unexpectedly gave me a pang. And then, being in the place he built--"

The older woman patted her hand soothingly. "I understand," she said.
"I've always understood. When--when you didn't write after the very
first, I knew it was because you couldn't, not because you forgot. You
were really made for each other, you two. I think I never saw two such
radiant, happy creatures in the world. Ah, well!" she wiped a sudden
dew from her glasses, "waiting's hard, my dear, but it ends,--it
ends."

Millicent was hurt by the unbroken faith in her, by the unquestioning
belief she could not share. She looked wistfully upon the shining,
tearful eyes.

"It is very beautiful to think that," she said, "but, dear Aunt
Harriet, you are mistaken about me. I am going to tell you everything.
I--I loved your nephew. I shall not love any one else. It happened to
come to me in perfectness when I was young--love. But I live, I am
well, I am alive to pleasure and pain. How shall I fill up my life but
with the things that still matter to me?"

"You think of marrying, you mean?" Aunt Harriet's voice was dry and
harsh. "Well--I am sure Will would wish your happiness, and I--it
would not be for me to object. Every day it is done, and very often
rightly, I suppose; for money, for companionship, for the chance of
self-development, women marry without love. I--I could only wish you
happiness."

"You--do not understand."

"My dear,"--her voice softened again; something in the pallor and the
quivering pain of the girl touched her,--"I do not mean to speak
hardly to you. It seems to me like this: when it comes to piecing out
a life that has been broken, as yours was--as mine was, my dear, as
mine was--there are two ways of doing it. Either you keep your ideal
of perfect love, and lead your poor every-day life of odds and ends,
like mine, filling your days with the best scraps of pleasure or
usefulness you may, or you give up your ideal of perfect love and
marry, and have your home and your children and your rounded outward
life. There is, maybe, no question of higher or lower. Each one of us
does what her nature bids her. I had always thought of you as one
who--But it is not for me to judge."

Her voice was gentle, and she did not look at Millicent. Her eyes
seemed to pierce the canvas on the opposite wall and the hangings and
the stones behind it, and to see a far image of souls in the struggle
of choice. The woman beside her sat silent, her thoughts with the
idealists--the men who gave up the comfort of their firesides, the
gain of their occupations, and followed whither the vision led; the
woman whose home was built upon love and who would see only infamy in
houses founded otherwise; the poor soul beside her, stronger in
courage, more aspiring in thought, than she, with all her delicacies,
her refinements of taste. The ideal had led them all--the ideal, as it
had once shone for her and for him whose spirit had informed and
beautified the spot where she sat and made her choice.

"Aunt Harriet," she said, and her face was like the sudden flashing of
stars between torn clouds,--"Aunt Harriet--" She could not utter the
decision in words. "May I come to see you--and learn something from
you?"

Miss Hayter looked. There was no need to question. No knight ever rose
from his accolade with a face more glorified than Millicent's when she
silently dedicated herself to the shining company of those who keep
unsullied the early vision.

As she passed out of the hall, her eyes fell again upon the painting
of the Temptation. She read the black and gilt legend below it--"And
Angels Came and Ministered Unto Him." Then she laughed down upon the
old-fashioned figure trotting by her side. "And angels came," she
said.

Her rapt look frightened Anna when the automobile returned for her.
Then the heart of that frivolous woman was stricken for a moment with
wistfulness.

"You seem very happy," she faltered, "and--amused, is it? What are you
smiling over?"

"I am still thinking of angels. Would you ever have dreamed, Anna,
that they sometimes wore list shoes, and sometimes ate bread and jam,
and occasionally spoke with granite lips? They do."

Brockton stirred uneasily, foreboding failure. And Anna sighed,
mourning two lost visions.






KEEPERS OF A CHARGE

BY GRACE ELLERY CHANNING


The Doctor's brougham stood at the door; the Doctor's liveried
servants waited at the foot of the stairs; the Doctor himself in his
study was gathering together his paraphernalia for the day, and the
Doctor's face was a study.

He was tired; he was cross; he was feeling ill. His nervous hands were
unsteady; his movements were by jerks; his face was a knitted tangle
of lines. He had rheumatism in both shoulders, and a headache, and a
pain in his chest. He had slept but little, and one of his patients
had had the happy idea of despatching a messenger for him in the dead
hour of the night. The Doctor never went out nights, and she ought to
have known this, but her only son was ill and she was persuaded he
could not survive a dozen hours together without the Doctor's personal
attendance.

It never seemed to occur to any of his patients that his own life was
of the smallest consequence in the balance with theirs or that of any
member of their families. Occasionally, when his rheumatism was
exceptionally severe or his cough racking, this reflection embittered
the Doctor. At other times--and this was generally--he accepted with
philosophy this integral selfishness of clients as a part of their
inevitable constitution. They were a set of people necessarily
immersed and absorbed in their own woes, or in that extension of their
woes which was still more passionately their own, and even more
unmercifully insisted upon in proportion to the decent veneer of
altruism it possessed.

Without being strictly a handsome man, the Doctor produced the effect
of one. Nothing gives distinction like character, and this he had and
to spare. He was not a popular physician, but a famous one; the day
was long past when his professional success depended upon anything so
personal as appearance or manner. He could afford to be--and he
frequently was--as disagreeable as he felt; desperate sufferers could
not afford to resent it, and their relatives, in the grim struggle for
a precious life, swallowed without a protest the brusqueries and
rebuffs of the man who held in, the hollow of his potent hand their
jewel of existence.

He had his passionate detractors and his personal devotees, and these
last afflicted him far more than the first. Like the priest, the
physician cannot escape taking on superhuman proportions in the eyes
of those to whom he has rendered back life, their own or a dearer, and
the Doctor (having long outlived the time when it flattered him) was
often exasperated to the limits of endurance by the blind faith which
asked miracles of him as simply as cups of tea. The strain these
women--they were mostly women, of course--put upon him was beyond
belief, and he got but a mild pleasure out of the reflection that,
being in their nature foolish, they could not help it.

It was quite in keeping, therefore, that one of them should have
broken up his night's sleep. He knew those attacks of the boy's by
heart; there was exactly one chance in one hundred that his presence
should be necessary. He had sent a safe remedy, telephoned a severe
but soothing message, and mentally prayed now for patience to meet the
irrational, angered eyes of maternity, and to administer a reproof
equally gentle and deterrent--gentle, for of course the woman's nerves
had to be allowed for; she had been nursing this boy for months. The
Doctor slipped into his long, fur-trimmed overcoat and reached for his
tall hat.

"You may as well send those Symphony tickets to somebody," he said,
impatiently, to his wife; "I sha'n't be able to go. Ten to one I shall
be late to dinner, and I doubt if I get home to lunch at all."

His wife, who was patiently holding his gloves and cigar-case, looked
at him with a sweet maternal anxiety as he tumbled together the papers
on the table, but she only said, "Very well." As he turned to take the
gloves and cigar-case, she added, quickly, with a second anxious
glance:

"Do try to get a few minutes' rest somewhere. Any of our friends will
be so glad to give you a cup of tea--or a little music--and it always
rests you so."

The Doctor took the things from her hands; he looked abstractedly at
his wife, then stooped hurriedly and kissed her.

"Don't worry about me; I shall be all right," he said, as he hastened
from the room. It was characteristic of him that he forgot his
clinical thermometer, and was never known to have a prescription-pad
or pencil.

One servant opened the house door for him, and another the carriage
door; the Doctor stepped in quickly, growling out a direction and
ignoring the bows of his retainers. He kept his own for the benefit of
his clients, he was wont cynically to say. He settled himself in the
seat, and before the door was fairly closed had lighted a cigar and
unfurled a medical journal.

As the carriage whirled recklessly down the street and around corners,
several feminine patients looked longingly after, as if virtue went
out from it, and several masculine ones raised their hats, but the
Doctor, his eyes glued to the paper, saw none of them.

Perhaps his most restful moments were these spent in his brougham. It
was almost his only time for reading; he had found, moreover, that
this served to keep his mind fresh from case to case, detaching it
from one train of thought and bringing it with new concentration to
the next. These brief intervals belonged wholly to himself. His home
was never safe from invasion, and little time and less strength
remained to him for domestic joys.

Life had not brought to him all that he was conscious might have been
within its gift. Professionally, indeed, he had reached great heights,
but these only enabled a measure of the territory beyond, and if to
his patients he appeared as a species of demigod, to himself he was
merely a "lucky" physician--his peculiar luck consisting in that sixth
sense which put him so easily into his patients' skins and pierced
through obscure maladies to possible sources. How he knew a great many
things puzzled them, but puzzled him still more. Simply at certain
crises he was aware that mysteries were momentarily revealed to him.
Back of that he possessed, of course, the usual outfit of medical
knowledge, open to any one, but which had never yet made a great
physician since the world with all its aches and pains began. For
_that_ other things were needed: a coloring of the artistic
temperament, a dash of the gambler's, a touch of femininity, as well
as the solid stratum of cool common sense at the bottom of all;
_these_ eked out the modicum of scientific knowledge which is all
mankind has yet wrested from secretive nature. The Doctor sometimes
described himself as a "good guesser." Surgery might be an exact
science; few things in medicine were exact, and what was never exact
was the material upon which medicine must work. The great bulk of his
fraternity went through their studious, conscientious, hard-working,
and not infrequently heroic lives under the contented conviction of
having to deal with two principal facts--disease and medicine--both
accessible through study. To them the imponderable factor of the
patient represented such or such an aggregation of material--muscle,
nerve, blood, brawn, bone, and tissue--which might be counted upon to
respond to such and such a treatment in such and such a manner, with
very slight variation. The Doctor envied them their simplicity of
faith. To him, on the contrary, the patient was a factor which could
not be counted on, at all--a force about which he knew virtually
nothing, acting upon a mechanism about which he knew little more, and
capable of interactions, reactions, and counteractions innumerable,
reversing and nullifying all past experience at a moment's notice--an
_unforeseen_ moment always.

He eyed this mystery, accordingly, with respect, lying in wait for
hints from it, and frequently reversing in his turn patiently prepared
plans of action, with a prompt speed impossible to a less supple
mind,--impossible at all, quite often, to any process of conscious
thought. To have these intuitions--that was his touch of femininity;
to risk largely upon them was the gambler in him; his swift
appropriation of the subject's temperament betrayed the artist in his
own; while the hard common sense which drew the rein on all these was
a legitimate inheritance--both national and personal. So was his
manner--not often extremely courteous and quite often extremely rude.
In this latter case his adorers called it "abstracted," while his
enemies qualified it as "ill-bred." But his voice, ordinarily abrupt
and harsh, could pass to exquisite intonations in the sick-room, and
there were moments when to anxious watchers therein, the man seemed
more than a man.

The affinity between physician and artist is one of the most curious
and suggestive. Every one will recall the famous surgeon-etcher, and
the distinguished specialist in nerves and novels. The Doctor's
artistic passion was for music. Unfortunately, it was not materially
portable, like a writing-pad, and there would have been something
unseemly in the spectacle of a physician fiddling in his carriage, so
he nursed this love in seclusion. His violin was his one indulgence,
and when he permitted himself to dream, it was of a life with music in
it. Sometimes he wished his wife were musical; more often he
congratulated himself that she was not. He was sincerely attached to
her, owing--and, what was more significant, realizing that he
owed--her much besides the promising twins; most of all, perhaps, that
she consented to be his wife on his own terms. But she was distinctly
not musical.

The Doctor laid down his paper and took up his mail, and a
disagreeable expression came into his face. It was one of the pleasant
features of his professional career that his brother physicians
occasionally vented their jealousy of him upon one of their joint
patients--stabbing him, so to speak, through _their_ lungs or
heart, wherein he was most vulnerable. Just as he expected! They had
deliberately neglected his prescriptions, after calling him a
winter-journey north to deliver them, and as deliberately allowed the
victim to die according to their treatment rather than permit him to
live according to the Doctor's.

The look upon his face was ugly to behold; he flung open the door with
unnecessary violence before the carriage had stopped, and his foot was
on the pavement before the footman could descend. Then he braced his
rheumatic shoulders for the four steep flights of stairs; he could not
justly complain of the number, since he himself had sent the patient
there to be high and dry and quiet. On the way up he had one of his
nameless seizures of intuition, and in the dark upper hall his hand
fell sharply away from the knocker and his face set whitely. There had
been just one chance in a hundred that his presence was necessary;
before the door opened he knew this had been the hundredth chance.

The ghastly woman's face which met him added nothing to that
certitude, yet he winced before it in every nerve.

"You have come too late," she articulated only.

"_No_!" thundered the Doctor. He put her aside like a piece of
furniture and strode into the darkened room beyond.

It was more than an hour later when he emerged. The woman stood
exactly where he had left her. It was another, tall and young, who
turned from the window and looked at him with eyes that hurt. But he
did not wince this time.

"It's all right!" he said, cheerfully. His voice quite sang with
sweetness. He came and stood a moment by the window, breathing hard.
His face was gray, but his eyes smiled, and there was something boyish
in his aspect. He looked from one woman to the other sunnily.

"Bless me--you ought never to let yourselves go like that! He'll pull
through all right."

The younger woman continued to look at him silently, but the elder,
with a long quivering sigh, fainted.

"Best thing she could possibly do," said the Doctor, his fingers on
her pulse. "Get her to bed as soon as you can,--and have these
prescriptions sent out. I'll come back later. He'll sleep hours now."

He ran down-stairs, consulting his visiting-list as he ran, and jumped
into the brougham, calling an address as he pulled the door to with a
slam. This time, however, he did not take out his papers, but sat with
an unlighted cigar between his lips, gazing intently at nothing.

In the course of the next few hours he looked over an assortment of
ailing babies, soothed as many distracted mothers, ordered to a gay
watering-place one young girl whom he was obliged to treat for chronic
headache--chronic heartache not being professionally
recognizable,--administered the pathetically limited alleviations of
his art to a failing cancer-patient (she happened to be a rich woman,
going with the fortitude of the poor down the road to the great
Darkness), and so, looking in on various pneumonias and fevers, broken
souls and bruised bodies, by the way, brought up at last at the hospital
to see how yesterday's operation was going on. It was going on in so
very mixed a manner that he telephoned he should not return to
lunch--prophesying long after the event.

It was turning dusk when he started on his second round of visits
homeward, stopping on the outskirts to rebandage, in one of the
tenements, a child's broken arm. He had not returned his footman's
salutation that morning, but had carried in his subconsciousness all
day this visit to the footman's child. In one manner or another that
inconvenient locality had been compassed in his circuit for the past
three weeks. From it he passed to his daily ordeal, another rich
patient, a nervous wreck, whose primary ailment--the lack of anything
to do--had passed into the advanced stages of an inability to do
anything, with its sad Nemesis of melancholia--the registered protest
of the dying soul. It was a case which took more out of the Doctor
than all his day's practice put together; he always came from it in a
misery of doubts.

The dusk was becoming the dark when he set his foot wearily on the
carriage step once more, and with his hand on the carriage door paused
suddenly. He was sick of sickness, mortally tired of mortality! For
the first time in the whole day he hesitated; an odd, irresolute look
came into his face; he pulled out his watch, glanced, and changing his
first-given address for another, threw himself back on the cushions
with closed eyes. He did not open them again until the carriage,
rolling through many streets, came to a halt under some quiet trees,
before an apartment-house. There were yellow daffodils between white
curtains--very white and high up. As he stepped out, the Doctor
glanced involuntarily towards them, and a half-breath of relief
escaped him, instantly quenched in a nervous frown and jump as his arm
was seized by a firm gloved hand.

"Doctor,--this is really _providential_! You are the very person
I wished to see!"

It was the younger of two heavily upholstered and matronly ladies who
spoke, in a voice of many underscorings. The Doctor, who had removed
his hat with a purely mechanical motion, knew himself a prey,
identified his captor, and eyed her with restrained bitterness.

"Doctor,--it is about my Elsie;--she hasn't a particle of color, and
she complains of feeling languid all the time--"

"No wonder!--What do you expect?"--it was the Doctor's harshest tone.
"She is loaded up with flesh,--she doesn't exercise,--you stuff her.
Send her out with her hoop,--make her drink water,--stop stuffing her.
What she, wants is thinning out."

"_Elsie_!--Why, Doctor, the child eats _nothing_,--I have to
tempt her all the time;--and when she goes out she complains of feeling
tired."

"Let her complain,--and let her get tired;--it will do her good. Don't
feed her in betweentimes,--and when you do feed her, give her
meat--something that will make red blood,--not slops, nor sweets, nor
dough. There's nothing in the world the matter with her." He lifted
his hat and strode on up the stairs.

Maternity, grieved and outraged, stared after him, speechless, then
turned for sympathy in the nearest feminine eye.

"Really, dear,--I think that was almost _vulgar_,--as well as
unkind," murmured the other mother at her side.

"_Vulgar_! _Unkind_! Well, it is the last time he will have
the opportunity to insult me! The idea! _Elsie_!--But it's not
the first time I have thought of changing physicians!" (This was
true,--but she never did; the solid Elsie was her only one.) "And such
desperate haste;--he must have a _most critical_ case!" She cast
an indignant glance at the building, as if to make it an accessory to
the fact, and turning a kindling and interrogative glance upon her
companion, encountered one of profound and scintillating significance.
For a moment they contemplated their discovery breathlessly in each
other's eyes.

"Did you ever!" exclaimed number one at last. "Oh, of course I had
heard things,--but I will do myself the justice to say I _never_
believed a word of it before! _This_, of course, makes it plain
enough;--this explains _all_!"

The two--good women, but wounded withal--coruscated subtle knowledge
all down the street.

Meantime the Doctor climbed the stairs. He was perfectly conscious
that he had been, in fact, both unkind and rude, even though his mood
did not incline him to take measure of the extent of his delinquency.
He knew equally that he should presently have to write a note of
apology--and that it would not do an atom of good, _Tant pis_. He
rang at the door of the daffodil-room, and it was opened by the tall
girl whose eyes had hurt him that morning. They did not hurt him now,
but enveloped him with a keen and soft regard that left no question
unanswered. In another moment she had put out a firm hand and drawn
him over the threshold in its clasp.

"Don't speak,--don't try to say a word! There!" She had taken from him
his hat and gloves and pushed forward a low chair in front of the
fire, all in one capable movement. "What is it? Tea? Coffee? A glass
of wine?"

"_Music_!" answered the Doctor, raising two haggard eyes, with
the exhausted air of an animal taking shelter.

The girl turned away her own and walked towards the piano, stopping on
the way, however, to push forward a little table set forth with a
steaming tea-urn and cups, matches and a tray, and to lift to its
farther edge a bowl of heavy-scented violets. Her every motion was
full of ministry, as devoid of fuss.

The room was low, broad, and large, and full of books, flowers, low
seats, and leaping firelight. A grand-piano, piled with music,
dominated the whole. The girl seated herself before it and began to
play, with the beautiful, powerful touch of control. After the first
bars, the Doctor's head sank back upon the cushions of the chair and
the Doctor's hand stole mechanically to the matches. He smoked and she
played--quiet, large music, tranquilly filling the room: Bach fugues,
German Lieder, fragments of weird northern harmonies, fragments of
Beethoven and Schubert, the Largo of Handel,--and all the time she
played she looked at the man who lay back in the chair, half turned
from her, the cigar drooping from his fingers. There was no sound in
the room but the music and light leaping of little flames in the
fireplace,--no motion but theirs and the pulsing fingers on the keys.
The girl played on and on, till the fire began to die, and with a
sudden sigh the Doctor held up his hand. Then she rose at once, and
going forward, stood as simply at the side of the fireplace opposite
him. She was not beautiful, but, oh, she was beautiful with health and
calm vigor.

The Doctor let his eyes rest on her.

"If you knew," he said, with a little, half-apologetic laugh.

In her turn she held up one of her long hands.

"But I do;--you forget I was there all the morning. And you pulled him
through. As for the rest--" She stooped suddenly and began to pile
together the logs; the Doctor watched her, noting with a trained and
sensitive eye the muscular ease and grace of the supple arms and
shoulders--like music. "Of course"--she spoke lightly--"they will kill
you some day, among them; but--it's worth while, isn't it?--and there
isn't much else that is, is there?" Still kneeling, she turned and
looked straight up at him. "Do you know what it was like this
morning--before you came?"

The Doctor shook his head.

She hesitated a moment, smiling a little. "'Lord, _if Thou hadst
been here_, our brother had not died!'" she quoted.

The Doctor got up quickly from his chair. He knocked the ash from his
cigar and laid it down on the tray. "Well," he said, lightly, "I must
be off." He squared his shoulders and held out his hand; its grip upon
her own trembled very slightly, but he smiled sunnily. "I'll come back
for some more music some day."

"Do," the girl said. She had risen and was smiling too.

The Doctor looked about the room wistfully. "Jolly place,--I don't get
up very often, do I?"

"Not very."

They smiled at each other again, then the girl, turning abruptly away,
walked to the window and came back with a double handful of yellow
flowers.

"Will you carry these to your wife? They are the first of the year."

She held the door open for him, and from the little landing watched
him down the stairs. At their turn he glanced up for a moment, holding
his hat raised silently. She waved him a mute acknowledgment, then
going into the room again, closed the door.

The firelight still leaped languidly on the hearth, and on the
half-smoked cigar and pile of ashes in the tray. The girl stood a
moment looking at these things and the chair, then walked quietly to
the piano and sat down before it. But she did not play again.

Meantime the Doctor, an erect and urgent presence in the dusk, had
driven through dim streets and climbed again the four flights of the
morning, to find the hush of heaven fallen on the house.

"I knew _you_ could save him!" said the pale mother only, lifting
blind eyes of worship from the couch.

The Doctor laughed, poured her out with his own hands a
sleeping-draught, and sat patiently beside her till she slept, then
stole away, leaving injunctions with the nurse, established in his
absence, to telephone if there came a crisis--"even," after a moment's
hesitation, "in the night."

"Home!"--he gave the order briefly. There were black circles beneath
his eyes, making him look thinner than when he left the house that
morning; he had no distinct reminiscence of lunch, and he was very
tired; but his shoulders no longer ached, his headache was gone, and
his hands were perfectly steady.

Odd bits of music hummed perversely through his head, mixing
themselves up with all things and rippling the air about him into
their own large waves, bearing now and then upon them, like the
insistent iteration of an oratorio chorus, fantastic fragments--"If
Thou hadst been here!--If Thou hadst been here!" His fingers ached
towards the responsive strings, and pulling out his watch, he made a
hasty calculation. There should be good fifteen minutes, he
decided--toilet allowed for--and he hurried the coachman again and
leaned forward, looking with bright, eager eyes into the night, and
humming to himself.

One liveried servant opened the house door, another the carriage door,
and a third relieved him of his hat and coat. Out of the warmth and
brightness his wife advanced to meet him, a child in either hand,
their long curls brushed and tied with bright ribbons. Her face was
filled with tender solicitude.

"You must be worn out;--what a long day you have made! Would you like
the dinner sent in at once, or would you rather wait? Children, don't
hang so on papa; he must be dreadfully tired. Oh, and there's a man
been waiting over an hour; he simply _wouldn't go_; but you'll
let him come back to-morrow?--you won't try to see any one else
tonight?"

The Doctor hesitated a moment, letting all the warmth and brightness
sink into him, while his hands played with the soft hair of his little
son and daughter. He smiled at his wife, a bright, tired smile.

"Robin," he said, "run down to the carriage; there are some posies
there for mamma--from Miss Graham, Louise,--you see I did get a
moment's rest."

"Yes," said his wife. She continued to gaze compassionately at the
tired man. After a moment she repeated gently, "And the dinner,
dear--?"

"No,--don't wait for me; I'll not be long. Have it brought in at once,
and--send the man into the office, please."

He stooped and kissed the children, and turning away, went into his
office and closed the door behind him.






A WORKING BASIS

BY ABBY MEGUIRE ROACH


Why she married him her friends wondered at the time. Those she made
later wondered more. Before long she caught herself wondering. Yes,
she had seen it beforehand, more or less. But she had seen other
things as well: he had developed unevenly, unexpectedly, if logically.
There had been common tastes--which grew obsolete or secondary. As the
momentum of what she believed and hoped of him ran down with them
both, he crystallized into the man he was, and no doubt virtually had
always been.

It was bad enough to have to ask for money, but to have it counted out
to you, to be questioned about it like a child, was worse.

"I don't understand," she said in the first months of their marriage.
"Are you afraid I won't be judicious, responsible? Mightn't you try
before judging?"

"Judicious? Responsible?" He pinched her cheek. (Judith was five feet
nine and sweetly sober of mien.) "There are no feminines or
diminutives of those words, my dear."

She stepped back. "But with more freedom I could manage better, Sam."

"Manage?"--jocularly. "That _is_ your long suit, isn't it? You
feel equal to managing all of us? Could even give me pointers on the
business, eh?"

"Why not?" she asked, quietly.

Sam, feet apart, hands in pockets, looked her over with the smile one
has for a dignified kitten. "I won't trouble you, my dear. I manage
this family." With his pleasantries a lower note struck--and jangled.

"But that isn't the point. I want--"

"Really? You always do. Don't bother to tell me what. If you got this
you'd be wanting something else, so what's the use of the expense
merely to change the object?" He chuckled at her baffled silence.

"I can't answer when you're like that. But--but, Sam! It isn't fair!"
Still she supposed that relevant.

However, money was not the chief thing. He could manage. Let it go.

Having properly impressed her, nothing made Sam feel larger than to
bring her a set of pearl-handled knives,--when she had wanted a dollar
for kitchen tins. His extravagances were not always generosities.
Once, after she had turned her winter-before-last suit and patched new
seats into the boy's flannel drawers, because "times were hard," he
bought a brace of blooded hunting-dogs.

Next day she opened an account at a department store.

With the promptness of the first of the month and the sureness of
death, the bill came. Sam had expressed himself unchecked before she
turned in the doorway. "If you will go over it," she said, with all
her rehearsal unable, after all, to imitate his nonchalance, "you will
find nothing unnecessary. I think there is nothing there for the
dogs."

But her cannon-ball affected him no more than a leaf an elephant; he
did not know he was hit. It was always so.

In his cool way, however, Sam had all the cumulative jealousy of the
primitive male for his long primacy. Some weeks later, when Judith
ordered an overcoat for Sam junior sent home on approval, she found
the store had been instructed to give her no credit.

She got out, with burning face and heart, without the article. Her
first impulse was to shrink from a blow.

But at table that night she recounted her experience: "The very
courteous gentleman who informed me of your predicament happened to be
a cousin of Mr. Banks, of Head and Banks. (They supply your grain, I
believe?) Mrs. Howe (isn't it R. E. Howe who is president of the
Newcomb Club?) was at my elbow. The salesgirl has Sam junior's
Sunday-school class. Doubtless it will interest them all to know you
are in such straits you can't clothe your children."

Ah? She had touched his vulnerable point? Instantly she was swept by
compunction, by impulses to make amends, to him, to their love. Their
love! That delicate wild thing she kept in a warm, moist, sheltered
place, and forbore to look at for yellowing leaves.

Like the battle of Blenheim, it was a famous victory, but what good
came of it at last? The overcoat came home, to be sure, with cap and
shoes besides. But she was too gallant to press her advantage.
Besides, she still looked for him to take a hint.

He did, after his own fashion. "You ought to see Judith here," he
laughed to a caller, "practising her kindergarten methods on me." His
imperturbability was at once a boast and a slight.

"He doesn't mean it," she apologized, later, protecting herself by
defending him. "You know how men are; the best of them a bit stupid
about some things. They don't mean to hurt you. You know it, but you
can't help crying."

"Oh, I understand!" (That any one should sympathize with her! It was
not so much her vanity that suffered as her precious regard for him,
her pride in their marriage.) "Nobody minds little things like that
against such devotion and constancy. Why, he talks of you all the
time, Judith; of your style, your housekeeping. You are his pet boast.
He says you can do more with less than anybody he ever saw." And then
Judith laughed.

They were all articles of the creed she herself repeated--and doubted
more and more. Faithful enough. He never came or went without the
customary kiss. When he had typhoid fever, no one might be near him
but her, until her exhaustion could no longer be concealed, when he
fretted about her--until he fretted himself back into high temperature
and had a relapse.

So, run down as she was, she hid it, kept up, went on alone, adding to
the score of her inevitable day of reckoning, after the old
heroic-criminal woman-way.

She had begun with ideas of their saving together for a purpose; but,
not allowed to plan, she must use every opportunity to provide against
future stricture; besides, Sam's arbitrary and unregulated spending
made her poor little economies both futile and unfair.

"I know nothing about your business. How can I tell if I spend too
much?"

"Make your mind easy; I'll keep you posted," he laughed. _He_ was
not bothering about dangerous ground.

"Doubtless,"--dryly. "But if I spend too little?"

"Not you."

He did mean it! He didn't care! The half-truth fanned the slow fire
growing within her into sudden flame. Judith turned, stammering over
the dammed rush of replies.

"My dear, my dear!" he deprecated, amused. "How easily you lose your
temper lately, every time there is a discussion of expenses! Why
excite yourself?" Why, indeed? Anger put her at a disadvantage, and
making her half wrong, half made him right. "I don't say I
particularly blame you, but you see for yourself you don't keep your
balance, and it's mistaken kindness to tempt any woman's natural
feminine weakness for luxury and display."

The retorts were so obvious they were hopeless. She stood looking at
him.

His eyebrows lifted; he shrugged his shoulders, went out, and forgot.

Why any of it, indeed? There was no bridge of speech between alien
minds. Their life was a continual game of cross-questions and silly
answers. Their natures were antipodal; he had the faults that annoyed
her most; his virtues were those least compensating.

Was her dream of influencing the children a superstition too, then?

The children! They slipped the house whenever possible; avoided their
father with an almost physical effect of dodging an expected blow;
when with him, watched his mood to forestall with hasty attention or
divert with strained wit, with timorous hilarity when he proved
complaisant. The possibilities for harm to them were numberless. She
and Sam were losing the children, and the children were losing
everything.

For years they had been a physical and mental outlet for her nature.
That love had no question of reciprocity or merit. She had always been
willing for them. Only it seemed to her all the rest of love should
come first. It occurred to her ironically how happy her marriage would
have been without her husband.

What was his love worth? It was only taxation--taxation without
representation. Had either of them any real love left?

Suddenly she stood on the brink of black emptiness. To live without
love; her whole nature, every life-habit, changed! _Oh, no, no,
no_! So the cold water sets the suicide struggling for shore.

Dear, dear! This would not do. Her nerves were getting the best of
her; she was losing her own dignity and sweetness--was on the verge of
a breakdown.

But to say so would be to invoke doctors, pointless questions, futile
drugs, and a period of acute affection from Sam--affection that took
the form chiefly of expecting it of her.

At times Judith thought of death as an escape, but she thought of no
other as being any more in her own hands; like so many people, she
quoted the Episcopal marriage-service as equal authority with the
Bible. She was too live to droop and break as some do. She had not
made herself the one armor that would have been effective--her own
shell. Friction that does not callous, forms a sore. Her love, her
utmost self, ached like an exposed nerve. She had not dreamed one's
whole being could be so alive to suffering. She must be alone, to get
a hand on herself and things again.

At table one night she wanted them all to know she was going away, for
several months perhaps, leaving her cousin Anne in charge. It was all
arranged.

The amazing innovation surprised Sam into speechlessness.

Judith had had few vacations. There had always been the babies, of
course. And Sam's consent had always been so hard to get. His first
impulse about everything was to refuse, contradict, begrudge. Then
certainly he mustn't be too easily convinced. After that he always
moped through her preparations; counted and recounted the cost, and at
the last perhaps gave her a handsome new bag when her old one was
particularly convenient, and he had supplied only half she had asked
for clothes; would hardly tell her good-by for desolate devotion;
tracked her with letters full of loneliness, ailments, discomforts.
When she had cut short her plans and hurried back, a bit quiet and
unresponsive perhaps, "How truly gracious your unselfishness is, my
dear!" he observed. "If it comes so hard to show me a little
consideration, you would really better keep doing your own way."

"I never do my own way."

"No? Whose then? I fail to recognize the brand."

"That's the trouble. I might as well stop trying."

Now, she could not delay for, nor endure, the conventional comedy.

Since he asked her no questions, she hastened to explain: "I want to
rest absolutely. Not even to write letters. You need not bother to,
either. Anne will let me know if I am needed. And if I need anything,
you will be sure to hear."

"Oh, sure." Sam was recovering.

But he couldn't think she would really go, in that way at least. He
thought he knew one good reason why not. Yet, vaguely on guard against
her capacity for surprise, he did not risk the satire of asking her
plans. To the last Judith hoped he would shame her a little by
offering the money; and against his utter disregard her indignation
rose slowly, steadily, deepening, widening, drowning out every other
feeling for him.

When, after their final breakfast, he kissed her good-by as for the
morning only, she took her jewelry and silver, mementos of his
self-indulgence in generosity, and pawned them, mailing him the
tickets from the station where she piloted herself alone.

She spent a month (in her rest-cure!), writing and destroying letters
to him. There was no alternation of moods now. Nor was she seeking a
solution of the problem; there was only one.

At last a letter seemed to do: "It cannot hurt you to read, as much as
me to write. But it must come. I can see now it has always been
coming. Things cannot go on as they are. We are unable to improve them
together. I will cast no blame. Perhaps some other woman would have
called out a different side of you, or would have minded things less.
It is enough that we do not belong together, because we are we and
cannot change. We are not only ruining each other's happiness--that is
already irrevocable,--we are ruining each other, and the children, and
their futures. It is a question of the least wrong. And I am not
coming back.

"I want the children, all of them. But if you insist, you take Sam
junior and I the girls--and the baby, of course, at least for the
present. And you shall provide for us proportionately. There is no use
pretending independence; I have given my strength and all the
accomplishments I had to you and them. And there is no sense in the
mock-heroics that I don't want your money. It isn't your money; it's
ours, everything we have. I have borne your children, and saved and
kept house and served and nursed for you and them. If you want to
divide equally now, I will take that as my share forever. But we can't
escape the fact that we have been married and have the children."

She could get an answer in two days.

But it did not come in two days, nor two weeks, nor three; while she
burned herself out waiting.

Moreover, her funds were running low. She had waves of the nausea of
defeat, fevers of the desperation of the last stand.

Then it occurred to her. Her armor had always been defensive. She had
never stooped to neutralize his alkali with acid. But there was one
weapon of offence she occasionally used. She wrote: "I am drawing on
you to-day through your First National for a hundred and fifty. You
will honor it, I think. And if I do not hear from you in a day or two
I shall have Judge Harwood call on you as my attorney."

The answer came promptly enough:--"My dear child, I couldn't make out
what had struck you, so I hoped you would just feel better after
blowing off steam and would get over your fit of nerves. Besides, I
have nothing to say except to quote yourself: 'We can't escape the
fact that we are married and have the children.' I know you too well
to be afraid of your throwing off all obligations like that. It is
impossible to fancy you airing our privacies." Bait? or a goad? Oh
yes, he counted on her "womanly qualities"--but with no idea of
masculine emulation! "If you need advice, think what either of our
mothers would say." Her mother! Judith could hear her, "His doing
wrong cannot make it right for you to," with logic so unanswerable one
forgot to question its relevance. And his! Judith held her partly
accountable; some women absolutely fostered tyranny. Their mothers,
poor things! Occasionally their fathers were different, but so
occasionally that now the times were. "This sudden mood strikes me as
very remarkable. 'After all I have done--twelve years of grind to keep
you from the brunt of the world; and now...! My dear child, do you
realize that there are husbands with violent tempers, husbands who
drink and gamble and worse?

"I honored your draft. Do not try it again. And I advise you to use it
to come home. We will have Dr. Hunter give you a tonic, and you will
find you have fewer morbid fancies occupied with your duties. I shall
look for you the end of the week." Surely Sam was moved quite out of
himself, that he had no lashes of laughter for her. But the next was
more in character: "Bridget threatens to leave. She does not work well
under Anne. The children are not manageable under her, either. Little
Judith is sallow and fretful. I suspect Anne gives her sweets between
meals. I saw a moth flying in my closet to-day...."

Judith pushed the letter away, fidgeted, yet smiled. How well they
knew each other. And they used it only to sting and bully! Surely it
could be put to better purpose. Had she tried _everything_? Had
Sam fully understood? Sometimes she thought her early excuses had hurt
too much for her to admit their truth: much of his unkindness was not
intentional, only stupid; slow sympathy, dull sensibility; he did not
suffer, nor comprehend, like a savage or a child. If the possibility
of separation was new to her, would not he never have thought of it at
all? But now, might he not see? Was not his unwonted self-defence
itself admission of new enlightenment and approachability?

She sat long in the increasing dusk. Exhausted with struggle,
loneliness was on her, crying need of the children, return to the
consideration of many things. Admitting that at times it was right to
break everything, wrong not to, it was at least the last resort. Love,
of course, was over irrevocably; but were there not some things worth
saving? Could not she and Sam find some working basis?

What had made their being together most intolerable to her was their
persistence in the religion of a vanished god in whose empty
ceremonies alone they could now take part together. Of the sacred
image nothing was left but the feet of clay. Freed of that
desecration, she could cure or endure everything else; her
obligations, moreover, would hardly conflict at all.

Looking back at the pressures of nature, society, events, Sam's
persistence, she wondered at times if, from the beginning, she had
been any more responsible for her marriage than for the color of her
hair. There were many such explanations for Sam, too. Not that they
made her like him any better, feel him any more akin. But it was true
that between the fatalities of heredity and environment that "slight
particular difference" that makes the self had but short tether for
action and reaction. Oh, she could be generous enough to him if he did
not have to be part of herself!

She got up, lit the gas, shutting out the stars, and wrote: "I am
coming back to make one more and one last effort. _Won't you_?"
If he would only try!

Sam met her with the magnanimity of forgiveness, the consciousness of
kind forgetting. Her redeemed valuables were all in place. Everything
should be the same, in spite of--And she put the back of her hand
against his lips!

When he dressed for dinner the salvage of the three balls, the spoils
of war, were piled in his bureau drawer.

Still he hoped better for the roses by her plate. She had the maid
carry them out, explaining in her absence, "No gifts, please, Sam.
Substitutes will not do any longer."

Sam played with his fork, smiling, with lips only. How shockingly she
showed suffering. Separation had made her appearance unfamiliar; he
thought the change all recent. He took pains to compliment the
immediate improvement in the pastry, to give her the servants' money
unreminded as soon as they were alone.

How characteristic! Judith thought, wearily, letting the bills lie
where he laid them.

"That's one of the things for us to settle, Sam," she said, in her new
freedom and self-respect discarding the familiar little diplomacies by
which she was used to soothe, prepare, manage, the lord of the hearth.
"I am not going to ask for money in the future, nor depend on what you
happen to give." The manner was a simple statement of fact. "You must
make me an allowance through your bookkeeper."

Sam was lounging through his cigar. "So that's it? Still?" He smiled
confidentially at the smoke, puffing it from his lower lip. "As
accurately as I can recollect, my dear, I have told you seven thousand
and three times that I am not on a salary, and don't know from month
to month what I will make."

How unchanged everything was! Her determination stiffened. "But you
know what you have made. Base it on the year before. Or have a written
statement mailed me every month, and file my signature at the bank."

Not quite unchanged; for Sam took the cigar from his mouth and turned
slowly to look at her. If he had taken her return for capitulation and
had met it according to his code, things were not fitting in. "Really,
my dear! Really! What next? Evidently I have never done you justice;
you have positive genius in the game--of monopoly; first thing,
_I'll_ be begging from _you_."

Well, why not, as fairly? and why should he think better of her than
of himself? But it was too old to go over again. For a breath she
waited to see her further way. She had not planned this as the issue,
but the moment was obviously crucial, and offered what, in
international politics already awry, would constitute a good technical
opportunity. If her mirage of regeneration, her hope of an
understanding, perhaps even her love, had flung up any last afterglow
in this home-coming, it was over now. Indeed, now it seemed an old
grief, the present but confirmation concerning a lover ten years lost
at sea. She saw the whole man now clearly, the balance of her
accusations and excuses; he had neither the modern spirit of equality,
nor the medieval quixotism of honor and chivalry; appeal merely
stirred the elemental tyranny of strength and masculinity, held as a
"divine right"; weakness tempted an instinctive cruelty, half
unconscious, half defiant.

It was Sam who spoke first, abruptly, not laughing. Sam who was never
angry, was angry now. "I never have understood you in some ways. How a
woman like you can forever bring money between us! How you got tainted
with this modern female anarchy! You seem to forget that _I_ made
the money, it is _mine_. There is bound to be discussion; I never
knew any one so determined to have everything his own way. All the
same," the defence rested its case, "it takes two to quarrel, and I
won't."

No, his defence was only admission of conscious weakness. He was
afraid--of the solution she had discarded. She did not go back to it
now. But now she saw the way, the only way, to accomplish
reconstruction.

Judith looked at him steadily. Her voice was deadly quiet. "I am sure
I have made myself quite plain. We will never discuss this again. You
can let me know in the morning which arrangement you choose."

They faced each other with level eyes.

And Sam's shifted.

He never had real nerve, she realized; they didn't--that kind. How had
she managed to love him so long?

Late that night he knocked at her door with a formal proposition:
Would that do?--dumbly. She changed a point or two: _That_ would
do, and signified good night. Sam, looking at her face, turned away
from it, hesitated, turned back, broke. Fear increased his admiration,
and, to do him justice, the fear was not wholly for conventions and
comforts; the man had certain broad moralities and loyalties. A reflex
muscular action had set in to regain what he had lost. "Judith!
Judith!" he begged.

Her raised hand stopped him. "You are too late, Sam."

"My dear, you mustn't get the idea that I don't love you still."

"Love has nothing to do with it any more. Besides, it is never any use
to talk of love without justice."

He went out, dazed and aggrieved. He had always thought they got along
as well as most people. _He_ had not been cherishing grudges.

Womanlike, having met the emergency gallantly, after it was all over
Judith collapsed. The day of reckoning for which she had so long been
running up an account was on her. But the growing assurance rallied
her, that her going away and her coming back were equally means to her
success in failure.

The reality of their marriage could not have been saved. But they had
the children; and to the children was restored much of what their
father had largely spoiled in the first place, and she nearly
forfeited in the second. For the fact was that Sam did better; the
despot is always a moral coward, and always something of the slave to
a master. Moreover, her growing invulnerability to hurt through him
set, in large measure, the attitude of the household; everybody was
more comfortable. She discounted his opinions and complaints; but, in
considering the welfare of the greatest number, she sacrificed as
little as possible his individual comforts. His interests she studied.
And for the rest, she let him go his way and went hers.

Life is a perfect equation: if something is added or subtracted,
something is subtracted or added, so long as there _is_ life.
Judith got her poise again in time, as strong natures do after any
death; with some fibres weakened past mending, gray, but calm. If his
side of her nature was stunted, she seemed to blossom all the more
richly in other ways. She loved her children in proportion as she had
suffered and worked for them. After her domestic years, like so many
women, she took fresh start, physically and mentally. Her executive
ability found public outlet. She could admit friends again. Freedom
from the corrosion of antagonism was happiness. Without the struggle
to keep that love which must ask so much of its object, she could give
Sam more of that altruism which asks nothing.






THE GLASS DOOR

BY MARY TRACY EARLE


Charlotte and Emory Blake lived at the old Blake place, on the little
plateau at the foot of the Colton hill, in a vine-covered stone
cottage. The place had belonged to old George Blake. When it came into
Emory's hands he sold it to Uncle Billy Kerr, and used the money for a
course in a school of pharmacy. Later, Charlotte, who was then
Charlotte Hastings, bought it, and, after her marriage, finished
paying for it out of its own products, while her husband talked
politics or played chess in his drug-store. It was said that when
Blake was doing either of these things he was as likely as not to keep
a customer standing a half-hour before waiting on him,--and this not
so much out of interest in his discussion or his game as from complete
lack of interest in the business of selling drugs.

North Pass correctly interpreted this general nonchalance of Blake's
as a sign that he was an unwilling partner in the matrimonial venture
he had undertaken. Indeed, it was known that the engagement had hung
fire for years through no fault of Charlotte's, and everybody had
noticed that such mildly loverlike enthusiasm for her society as Blake
had shown before he went to the school of pharmacy had disappeared
from his manner when he returned. Charlotte had told people that they
should marry as soon as he came home, yet the wedding did not come off
for two years. During this time it was noticed that although she held
her head high and was fertile in good reasons for the delay, her
girlish look left her, her features sharpened, and her speech
developed an acid reaction; it was at this time, too, that she
bargained with Uncle Billy Kerr for the old Blake place, and also
borrowed money from the old man to put up a new house. When people saw
the house going up it was generally supposed that she was preparing
either to rent it or to live in it as an old maid; but when it was
completed, to the surprise of every one, Charlotte and Blake were
married and moved in.

The morning after the wedding Blake was in his drug-store playing
chess as languidly as ever, but Charlotte spent her whole day planting
a vegetable-garden, in a mood of unreckoning exaltation such as rarely
comes to a woman of her nature, and never comes to her but once. She
had felt no such blissful security when Blake and she were first
engaged. Blake was weak. She had felt it intensely even when her
infatuation for him was too fresh to permit her to reason, and a weak
man while unmarried is peculiarly liable to changes of affection. But,
on the other hand, a weak man once safely married is completely in the
power of his wife; during the last two years of their engagement
certain illusions regarding herself and Blake had fallen from her
eyes; she had stated both those facts plainly to herself, and they had
helped her to decide upon a course of action. There had been moments
when she had despised herself for using her stronger will to coerce
Blake into the fulfilment of his engagement, but on the morning after
the wedding these moments were forgotten, and, as she hoed and raked
and planted in the brisk air and the bright spring sunshine, her whole
existence seemed uplifted by the knowledge that she and Blake at last
belonged unquestionably to each other; that every output of her
strength was for their common comfort, and would continue to be as
long as they both should live.

As the first year of married life goes, Charlotte's first year was
fairly successful. She knew Blake's faults already, and had made up
her mind to them, and if there was a frank indifference in his quiet
languor, she had made up her mind to that, too. He was never unkind,
and there were times when some fresh evidence of her devotion to him
would touch him into an appreciation that was almost responsive. And
there were other times when she would find him looking at her with an
expression which any other observer might have classed as pity, but
which she counted as tenderness. On the whole, it seemed to her that
time was bringing them together, as she had counted that it would, and
with this hope her face lost its sharp outlines.

Her first heavy chagrin was at the time of her baby's birth. When
Blake came into the room to inquire for her, and she turned down the
bed-cover to show him the little bundle at her side, a look of pain
and aversion flashed across his face, and he moved away, begging her
not to show the baby to him until it was older. On another day she
tried to make him select a name for it, and he refused.

"Call it anything you please," he said at first, but she would not let
him go at that.

"I've been thinking," she suggested, with a hesitation that was
foreign to her,--"I've been thinking of calling her for your
mother--Dorcas."

They were alone in the room, and he was sitting by her bed, but
looking away from her into the corner of the room, while she looked
anxiously at him. At her words he started, flashing a keen glance at
her. "Why should we name her that?" he asked.

There was something so sharply disturbed in his manner, and his
distaste for the idea was so evident, that Charlotte flushed in
extreme embarrassment.

"I thought you might like to," she explained.

"Well, I wouldn't,--I--I don't think the name's pretty in itself," he
declared; adding, with a great effort to speak naturally, "I'd rather
name her for you."

Charlotte's lips came together so closely that all the unpleasant
lines showed around them. "I certainly shall not name her for myself,"
she said. "You must think of some other name."

Blake got to his feet. "That's the only one I can think of," he said.
"If you don't like it, you can take some other. It's your affair, not
mine."

Charlotte's eyes flashed and then filled with tears, for she was very
weak. "If I were asking you to father some other man's child, you
couldn't act more as if you despised me," she sobbed.

He turned as he was leaving the room and gave her a long look full of
exasperation, repugnance, and despair. "You are quite mistaken," he
said. "I don't despise you. I despise myself."

For half an hour Charlotte sobbed, her hands clenched at her sides,
her tears flowing unchecked; then, quite suddenly, she was calm, and,
drying her disfigured face, she began to take account of stock. All
that she had before, she reasoned, she still had. The gains of a year
might seem to be lost in the outbreak of a moment, yet they still
existed as a solid foundation to build upon. There would be constraint
at first, but the effort of daily patience would overcome it in time;
moreover, there was the baby. Blake might refuse to look at her now,
but as she grew and acquired the irresistible graces of a healthy
babyhood he would be obliged to see and to yield to her. A man of his
nature could not live in the house with a child and not love it. She
touched the small form at her side, as if to assure herself that this
ally which she had so suffered for had not deserted her. Yes, she had
more hope now than ever before, she told herself, and her eyes shone
with a passionate tenderness, though her lips were set in a hard line.
Suddenly the line broke into a smile.

"I'll name her Hope," she said.

When Hope was two months old she began her mission, and when she had
reached six months Blake was vying with Charlotte in his devotion to
her. He even plucked up a little interest in his business; sometimes
he talked over his place with his wife, and the words which had passed
between them over the naming of the child, though unforgotten, seemed
so far in the past that Charlotte's courage strengthened with each
day. The sense of security which had marked the first months of her
married life did not return, but she could feel herself making a
strong fight against fate to hold what she had, and, if she were never
entirely certain of the issue, at least she fought with the obstinacy
which has no knowledge of yielding. Sometimes even her love for Blake
seemed to lose itself in this obstinacy, and her tenderness towards
her child seemed the only womanly sentiment left in her; but more
often her love for her husband mounted high and unmixed above the
other feelings as the tremendous, inexplicable passion of her life.

Hope's attainment of six months was marked by an unusual display of
energy on the part of Blake. The first cold weather of autumn had
come, and when the house doors were closed, Charlotte was surprised to
hear her husband declare that the sitting-room, where the baby would
spend most of her time in winter, was poorly lighted, and needed to
have a glass door substituted for the wooden one which opened on to
the front porch. Still more to her surprise, the door was delivered
from an adjoining town the next day, and on the following morning
Blake rose earlier than usual and hung it before going down to his
store. It was the first time he had lifted his hand towards the
improvement of Charlotte's house.

He whistled boyishly while he measured and fitted in the hinges, and
when it came to holding the door while the hinges were screwed in
place, he called to Charlotte. She came, with lips as usual closed
very tight, but with cheeks flushed very pink, and when the work was
finished she was so atremble that she had to sit down for a moment
before she could put breakfast on the table.

To give a reason for the delay, she kept looking at the door. "The
room, is perfect now," she said.

Blake swung the new acquisition back and forth, and latched it once or
twice to make sure that it was perfectly adjusted. When he was
satisfied he glanced at his wife.

"It will give our baby the sunlight," he said, and their eyes met for
a moment.

All that day, whenever Charlotte could bring her work into the
sitting-room, she sat facing the glass door. She was not exactly
happy; she was too strangely excited for happiness; but she was keenly
awakened and alert. Every nerve in her seemed keyed up to its ultimate
tension, and if the shadow of a cloud passed, even if a red leaf fell
outside, she looked out expectantly through the door.

It was middle afternoon when, on looking up, she saw a young woman
crossing the porch, leading a little child. Charlotte jumped to her
feet, then reseated herself and waited for the tap on the glass. The
visitors were strangers to her, and though she could not have told
why, as she sat staring at them through the door, her mouth suddenly
set into the lines of indomitable obstinacy which had grown so deep
around it in the past three years. When she finally crossed the room
to open the door, she walked slowly and deliberately, as if she had
some definite purpose in mind and meant to accomplish it.

The woman on the outside was the first to speak. "Does Mr. Emory Blake
live here?" she asked.

"He does. I am his wife. What can I do for you?" asked Charlotte.

The woman gave a little cry and drew back. "Oh no!" she said,
breathlessly.

Charlotte stood, white and stiff and silent, while the other looked
about her in a despairing helplessness. She was a frail-looking woman,
worn with fatigue and the excited emotions with which timidity spurs
itself to action. She looked as if she longed to sit down somewhere,
and as if perhaps she could have more courage seated, but Charlotte
made no motion to invite her to enter. After a while the newcomer
brought her frightened eyes back to the set face in the doorway.

"I am so sorry for you," she said, timidly. "I am his wife."

A shiver of resentment ran convulsively through Charlotte's muscles.
"You can be sorry for yourself," she said, roughly.

"But he married me while he was at the school of pharmacy," the other
cried, weakly. "I was Nettie Trent. I clerked, and I boarded where he
did, and we fell in love and married. He told me about you. You are
Charlotte Hastings, aren't you, that wanted to marry him before he
left home?"

Charlotte moved her dry lips soundlessly once or twice before she
could speak. Then her masterful spirit rose to a new task. She drew
herself up and looked down gravely, almost compassionately, upon the
woman who had been Nettie Trent.

"I was Charlotte Hastings before my marriage," she said. "I am sorry
to be the one to hurt you, but you have been cruelly treated. I was
married to Emory Blake before he left home for the school."

The smaller woman gave a little gasp and stood silent, while
Charlotte, with the fire in her veins scorching her cheeks and eyes
and almost smothering her breath, waited for her to offer some
resistance, to assert her own claim, or to ask for proof of the
statement which denied it; but Nettie said nothing, and after a moment
her gaze dropped from Charlotte's and she began to sob. Charlotte took
her by the hand and led her into the room.

Neither of them spoke for a long time. Nettie sat with her face buried
in her hands. On one side her child tugged at her dress; on the other,
little Hope slept in her cradle. Charlotte stood pale and tall,
watching all three.

At last Nettie looked up. "I suppose you think I ought to hate
him--now I've found out," she said, "but I don't; I just can't. When
we were together he was so sweet to me. I don't think he meant to harm
me. He must have thought it would come out all right somehow."

"If I were in your place," Charlotte said, slowly, "I should hate him."

Nettie wiped her eyes and drew her child up into her arms. "But what
he did was almost as bad for you as it was for me," she urged, "and
you don't hate him."

Charlotte turned suddenly and walked  to her own baby's cradle. "Oh, I
don't know," she said, in a low voice.

After a moment she came back and sat down. "I must ask you some
questions," she said, gravely. "Is this your only child?"

The young woman nodded. Her lips were quivering. "Named Dorcas," she
said, brokenly,--"for his mother."

Charlotte flushed and the lines about her lips deepened. "Does
he--provide for you?" she asked.

The other nodded once more. "He sends me money once in a while. I
wrote him not to worry when he didn't have it. I'm clerking again."

Charlotte made no comment. She was thinking how strange it was that
this other woman, who was a frail, poor-spirited thing, should be
ready to support herself and child out of love for Blake. In
Charlotte's mind, which was pitilessly clear and active, there was
room for a passing wonder at the mysterious power which so weak a man
could exert over women, even without his will. She was wondering, too,
if her own passion for him would ever rise again. At present she was
far from loving him; she felt only a bitter resentment, a desire to
punish him by holding to him, and a towering obstinacy and pride which
refused to be set at fault and put to shame. While she was boldly
examining and analyzing herself she glanced at the clock to see how
long before he could possibly return; the time was ample, and she
continued to sit silent. Presently her baby woke, and she rose and
went to it.

As she lifted it from its cradle, Nettie started up and came towards
her. Hope hid her face against her mother's neck, but after an instant
turned shyly to steal a glance at the stranger.

Nettie sat down again, trembling. "Your baby is like him," she said.

"Very like him," Charlotte answered, and as the baby nestled up to her
again, she dropped her cheek against it and tears came into her
eyes--scalding tears that seemed to sear their way up from the depths
of her heart.

Suddenly the other wife leaned forward, eagerly suspicious. "You have
no other children--_older_?" she asked.

Charlotte looked round blankly, her eyes still wet. "_Other_
children?" she echoed, but Nettie's sharpened face brought her to
herself. She wiped her eyes on Hope's dress. "I lost--a child," she
said.

"Oh," Nettie murmured, "I'm sorry I asked you. It was older than
Dorcas?"

Charlotte stood at bay, with her child strained close to her. She
nodded.

"Oh!" Nettie murmured again, in a shaken voice. She looked at
Charlotte in despairing envy. "What is this baby named?" she asked.

"This one," Charlotte answered, "we call Hope."

She seated herself and began trotting the child to a slow measure.
There were still a few questions which she wished to ask, but the
other's simple acceptance of all she said inspired her with cool
deliberation. There was plenty of time, and she wished to make no
mistake. She must be sure of her own safety, and after that she must
do anything she could for the comfort of the other woman. It would
probably be very little.

"How did you get here?" she inquired, finally. "You must have asked
somebody where Mr. Blake lived."

"No, I didn't have to ask. He'd written me he was boarding with a
woman that lived on his old place," Nettie said, "and I knew where
that was because he'd often told me all about where he grew up and
just the road he used to take from the station to the house, and I
remembered every word of it. I didn't like to go to him at his store
for fear there would be loafers around, so I came right to his house.
I thought I wouldn't mind telling the woman that I was his wife, if
she asked me any questions while I waited for him."

"You were very wise," Charlotte said, dryly.

Nettie settled back in her chair, rocking her little girl, who had
grown restless and impatient, and as she rocked she began to pour out
her heart. "You must think queer of me to sit down here with you like
this and not to be in a rush to go," she began, "but I feel like I've
got to sit still and--and kind of get my breath before I can start
out. I've been so afraid of it that it doesn't seem like I ought to be
surprised, but I tell you it pretty near kills me now I know it for
sure." She paused and stroked a stray lock of hair away from her
child's eyes. "My baby's like him, too," she said, irrelevantly. "My
baby's just as like him as yours is."

Charlotte glanced again at the clock. "How do your friends treat you?"
she asked, abruptly. "Do they believe you were really married or not?"

A bright flush sprang over Nettie's face. "They believed it at first,
of course, just the way I did," she answered, quickly, "but lately
they've been suspecting something. It was what they said made me get
uneasy. I don't distrust folks right quick myself."

"And none of them tried to make inquiries for you?"--Charlotte put the
question seriously, all her nerves tight strung.

"Oh no," Nettie said. "I don't have any family or any friends close
enough to me to take trouble like that."

"And I presume you're glad now that they didn't," Charlotte said. "In
your place I'd rather find it out for myself."

"Oh, I'd much rather," Nettie answered. "I couldn't have stood having
other people find it out, and I'm not going to give anybody that knows
me a chance to find out now. You see, I've been afraid of this so long
that I've had time to make my plans and to save up money a little.
Before I came here I gave up my place and told folks I was going to
join Mr. Blake; so I'll not go back. I'll go to New York and get work
there."

Charlotte looked at her keenly. "I suppose you're depending on Mr.
Blake to help you?" she said.

Again the color sprang into Nettie's face. "Oh no, ma'am," she
answered. "I couldn't let him help me now. I did wrong to live with
him, but I didn't know he was married, so I don't feel like one of
that kind of women; but if I was to take money from him now, I--I
shouldn't feel that I was raising my child honest."

Charlotte lifted her baby so that it hid her face. "For him to help
you would only be right," she said, from its shelter. "He owes
you--money, at least."

The other shook her head. "I couldn't bear it," she said, chokingly.
"Oh, you can't understand--nobody could understand unless she'd been
through what I have, being left before my baby came, and having people
ask me close questions, and then, little by little, losing my own
faith. You can't see why, but if I was to take money from him now, it
would make me feel my shame, and I don't want to,--I want to feel
honest."

Charlotte lowered Hope to her knee. "Perhaps I can understand that--in
a way," she said, with twitching lips.

Nettie looked into her face with a helpless, childish perception of
the suffering shown in its drawn lines. "You're so good to me--I
believe you feel 'most as bad as I do," she declared; "and if I were
you, I wouldn't say a word to anybody about my having been here.
Nobody knows it. I didn't have to ask my way. There aren't many women
would treat me the way you do, and I won't stay here any longer making
you feel bad." She rose, still holding her heavy child in her arms.
"There isn't anything more we've got to say to each other, is there?"
she asked.

"Wait a moment," Charlotte said. She, too, rose, and as she stood
looking at the other woman, so much smaller, so much weaker, so
blindly trustful, and so patient, her heart, which had sunk in shame,
rose suddenly in pity; at that moment if she had opened her lips the
truth would have escaped from them, but her stubborn will held her
lips closed.

Nettie eyed her with troubled uncertainty, but after a moment moved
towards the door.

"Well, I must go," she declared.

"Wait a moment," Charlotte said again. Her voice was so dry and
strange that after she had spoken she paused to moisten her lips. Her
limbs trembled, and in the glass door which she had opened against the
wall she could see the ashen whiteness of her face.

Nettie turned, and the two women confronted each other, each holding
her child.

Charlotte put a hand up to her throat. "I have money I could give
you," she offered. "Not his, my own."

The other shook her head. "Oh, I couldn't," she exclaimed. "Anyway, I
don't need it. I've saved up a good deal. And you've done better than
give me money; you've been kind to me." She put out her hand with a
little appealing gesture and took Charlotte's, which lay cold in it.

"You'd better go," Charlotte broke out. "You'll meet him coming home
if you wait any longer. Here; I'll tell you how to go a roundabout way."

She walked out on to the piazza and led the way down the steps and
round to the back of the house, where she stood giving short, sharp
directions, when across her hurried words came Blake's voice calling
from the front:

"Charlotte! Charlotte! Where are you and Hope?"

For the first time since they had lived together Blake had come home
before his hour.

The two women looked at each other. Charlotte pointed to the path
which hid itself quickly in the shelter of an orchard. "Run," she
whispered. "I'll keep him in the house."

But Nettie stood as if paralyzed, her eyes widening and filling with
tears. "Oh, you've been so good--mayn't I see him--mayn't I bid him
good-by?" she begged.

Charlotte lifted her voice to answer Blake. "Yes, Emory; stay where
you are; I'm bringing Hope," she called. "Hurry!" she whispered to the
other woman. "It won't do you any good to see him. Think of what he's
done. Hurry, I say!"

Nettie put her hand up to her head. "I--I can't," she murmured. She
swayed a little, and before Charlotte could reach out to catch her she
had slipped to the ground.

At the same moment Blake came out of the back door of the house. For
an instant he stared in bewilderment. Then he was at Nettie's side and
had lifted her in his arms.

Charlotte saw his face as he kissed her. A moment later she was
indoors on her knees beside her bed, with her face buried in the cover
and her hands clutching it.

A cold wind swept through the house. Front and back the doors stood
open. The sun was already low in the west and the evening promised to
be chill. Presently Charlotte rose. She closed the front door
carefully, wrapped Hope in a cloak, and, with her child on her arm,
passed out at the back.

Blake had stretched his wife on the back porch and was bending over
her. He looked up, and at sight of Charlotte's face he straightened
himself.

She paused an instant. "I'm starting to harness the horse," she said.
"You can catch the night train at Antioch if I drive fast."

He stood silent, his face working. It was as if strength were being
born in him to say something in his own defence.

"She has plans," Charlotte added. "You'd better pick up some of your
things in the house."

She passed on, and laying Hope in the bottom of the wagon, harnessed
the horse with swift, shaking hands. The sun was out of sight when she
drove back to the house. Nettie sat on the steps staring dazedly
around her. Blake was not in sight.

"Are you ready?" Charlotte called.

He came out, carrying an old handbag. At the step he hesitated.

She pointed to the back seat, where he was to sit with Nettie and the
child, and after an instant he helped them in.

The ride was long and cold. Night fell, and the stars came out in
remote, hostile legions. The children slept. Occasionally Nettie and
Blake advised together in hushed voices. Charlotte whipped the horse.

As they drew near to the end of their journey Blake leaned forward and
touched her arm.

"What about the store?" he asked.

Charlotte broke her long silence harshly. "Your stock will cover what
you owe on it, I guess."

At the station she stayed in the wagon. Blake took his wife and Dorcas
into the waiting-room and came back for his bag. Charlotte had it
ready for him, resting on the wheel.

He did not offer to take it at first, but stood in the beam from the
station window, trying to speak.

"Well?" she said.

"I guess there's not much I can say," he choked out.

For a long time she made no answer. Then her breath came with an
unexpected gasp. "It wasn't your fault--I made you do it." For a
moment more they were silent. Then she shifted the sleeping baby
towards him.

"Don't you want to kiss her?" she asked.

He bent his face to the child with a sudden passionate tenderness. As
he looked up, his wet eyes met Charlotte's, which were full of tears.

She put out her hand to him. "I guess I've been hard on you," she said.






ELIZABETH AND DAVIE

BY MURIEL CAMPBELL DYAR


When the town doctor, coming out to Turkey Ridge, had given as his
verdict that Elizabeth's one chance of life--he could not say how slim
the chance in that plain room, having within it the pleasant noise of
bees and the spring sun on the floor--lay in her going to the great
hospital in the city, it was Davie who fell to sobbing in his worn
hands.

"I'll jest die at home, Davie," she said in her quiet voice.

"You'll take the money put away for our buryin' an' go, dearie!" Davie
cried out fiercely. His gaunt frame, stooped as a scholar's, shook so
pitifully with his grief, she had not the heart to gainsay him, but
after she promised him it only shook the more.

"Why, Davie," she chided, brightly, "ain't I always been a-wantin' to
see the city streets with the hurryin' people, 'n' tall houses, 'n'
churches with towers on 'em? They ain't many folks on th' Ridge'll hev
sech a lettin'-out as mine."

"If I only had 'nough saved to go too," he mourned.

She answered him simply: "An' who'd I hev to write to me, with you
goin' 'long? It'll seem terrible nice to hear from somebody. I always
did love letters. Sence Cousin Tabby died I ain't had one."

"You won't be afeard travellin' so far by yourself?" he asked then,
awestruck. Davie had the diffidence of the untravelled. Few men ever
left the small farming district of Turkey Ridge for a journey; but if
one did so, and the trip were long, he had thereafter a bolder
bearing.

"Afeard?" She gave a little trembling laugh which would have deceived
no one but a dull old man, now smitten suddenly by sorrow. "The idee
o' my bein' afeard! They ain't a mite o' danger o' gettin' run over er
lost er nothin'--not a mite."

Under the pretext of bending to hunt for a lost pin she hid the sad
fear in her eyes--a fear of all the greater world which was beyond
Davie, from whom she had not been parted since her marriage.

But throughout the time of her preparation she went bravely. She would
herself have put in order for leaving the house kept spotless even
while her disease had crept upon her, but the news of the doctor's
words had gone up through the group of farmhouses, huddled like timid
sheep on the road, and the kindly neighbor women left their own work,
very heavy in the spring-time, to take her household burdens. In a
community where no great things ever came save two, and these two
birth and death, misfortune drew soul to soul. Because of her
gathering weakness she yielded that others should do the tasks which
had always hitherto been hers, but she could not be prevented from the
packing of the little leather trunk that had held her wedding things.
"You're jest makin' me out a foolish, lazy body," she said, her lips
seen quivering for the first time. Then, fearful lest she should seem
ungrateful for the kindness of her friends, she made haste to ask
where, in the trunk, to put her staid, coarse linen, and where her
best cap with its fine bow of lavender ribbon, and would they if they
were she take her mending-basket along in hopes there might be moments
for Davie's socks?

Many a loving offering was tucked in with her belongings to go with
her. Now blue-eyed Annie Todd knocked at the door, bringing a bunch of
healing herbs from her mother, who could not leave for reason of her
nursing baby. Then old Mr. Bayne drove into the dooryard with a pair
of knitted bedroom slippers, wrapped carefully in a newspaper. Next
Kerrenhappuch Green, perturbed in his long jaw, pottered down to fetch
the pinball which his daughter had forgotten when she came to help.
Mrs. Glegg, who had lately lost her idiot son, Benje, gave a roll of
soft flannel. Miss Panthea Potter contributed a jar of currant jam,
three years sealed, and pretended that she was not moved. The minister
copied out a verse from the Psalms and fixed it so cunningly about a
gold piece that, proud as a girl in her poverty, Elizabeth could not
refuse the gentle gift. It was he, too, possessing the advantage of a
clerkly hand, who arranged for Elizabeth's admission to the free ward
of the hospital, and wrote to his niece Mary, living by good fortune
in the city, to have a care over her while there. He told that Mary
had a kind, good-humored face, and was herself country born.

"I'll be better able to thank ye all fittenly," the white-haired old
woman said, "when I come back to ye well 'n' strong."

The last day before she was to start, all that was possible being done
for her, she and Davie were left to themselves, at the minister's
suggestion. Forty years before, Davie had brought her to the house,
yet in her soft marriage dress. The wedding journey had been the
coming up at sunset to the Ridge from her home in the valley, behind
his plough-horses, lifting their plodding hoofs as in the furrows. On
the clean straw in the back of the wagon rested her small trunk and a
hive of bees, shrouded in calico. Tied to the tail-piece was a
homesick heifer. While he unhitched the horses and placed her dowry,
she entered his door to lay off her bonnet tremulously in the
living-room.

Alone with the clumsy carpet-loom which made his winter's work, and
his tired week-day hat hanging from a peg against the wall, she had a
deep moment. Joining him on the door-step, they sat side by side
watching in silence the light die over the scanty fields handed down
to him by his father, who had grown bent and weary in wrenching a
living from them as he was aging. Neither was young; both were marked
by the swift homeliness of the hard-working; but the look on their
faces was that which falls when two have gotten an immortal youth and
beauty in each other's hearts.

It had been their custom on each succeeding spring to go, if the
anniversary ware pleasant, to sit again at evening on the door-step
with the sweetness of the straggling spice-bush upon it. Now as they
sat there a silence came upon them like that of their wedding-day.
Elizabeth broke it first.

"Davie," she whispered, "if I'd say I'd jest like to run through the
house a minute by myself, you won't think it queer?"

"No, no," answered Davie, something gripping his chest.

She went slowly, her slippers flapping back and forth on her heels.
She sought first the tidy kitchen with its scoured tins, then the
living-room with the old loom still in the corner, then the parlor.
Here she drew a long, shaken breath. Every Ridge woman loved her
parlor with an inherited devotion. Many unrecorded self-sacrifices
furnished it. Elizabeth's lay hallowed to her. It was her Place
Beautiful. There was a pale, striped paper on the sacred walls, and on
the floor an ingrain carpet, dully blue. At the windows were ruffled
white curtains--the ruffles and sheer lengths of lawn had lain long in
her dreams. The mantel-piece held a row of shells, their delicate pink
linings showing, and on either end china vases filled with sprays of
plumy grass. Above was the marriage certificate, neatly framed. On the
centre-table were sundry piteous ornaments, deeply rooted in her
affections. The chairs and the single sofa, angular and sombre, were
set about with proud precision. They had been the result of years of
careful hoarding of egg-money, and were, to Elizabeth, the achievement
of her living.

Holding on to the banister, she climbed the stairs forlornly to the
upper chambers. In her own room Davie found her by and by. She was
sitting up very straight in her rocker, a baby's long clothes on her
lap. Her expression of pain was gone, and in its stead was the strange
peace of a woman who sees her first-born. She looked up absently at
her husband.

"Melindy Ethel," her voice crooned, "was so little 'n' warm."

"You must jest lay down 'n' rest, dearie," he urged, anxiously. He
took the things from her and laid them back, one by one, in the lower
drawer of the high, glass-knobbed bureau whence she had taken them.
The thin stuff of the little, listless sleeves and yellowed skirts
clung to his roughened fingers; he freed them with gentleness.

"An' her hair would hev curled," she said, when the last piece was in.

Davie had been kneeling among his vegetables that summer-time long
since that Elizabeth had come to stand beside him in their garden,
pushing from her forehead her heavy falling hair, then dark, in the
way she had if very glad. Seeing that she had something to tell him,
and wondering at her eyes, he waited for her to speak. She did not
keep him long. For an instant her serene glance went up to the blue
sky. Then her hands stretched out to him.

"Davie," she began, "that old cradle of your ma's--" She broke off
shyly.

Davie stayed on his knees. He could not at once answer her, but could
only grope toward her blindly. Presently her touch calmed him.

"It rocks from head to foot," he quavered in joy, "'stead o' from side
to side--the motion's better for 'em."

Striving to go well through her troubled months until her hour should
come, Elizabeth smiled often at Davie, and sometimes the smile was a
tender laugh in her throat--Davie clumping excitedly over the farm about
his work; Davie bringing home from town the cautious purchase of a child's
sack, and crying out in exultation, "It's got tossels on it!" Davie
storing singular treasures in a box in the garret--seed-pods which
rattled when you shook them; scarlet wood-berries, gay and likely to
please; a tin whistle, a rubber ball, a doll with joints, and a folded
paper having written on it, "For Croup a poultis of onions and heeting
the feet"; and Davie, his importance dropped from him as a garment,
coming to put his head down against her shoulder.

"I dun'no'," he said to her, "as a man better feel too uppity 'bout
becomin' a pa. It's an awful solemn undertakin', an' the more you
think it over the solemner it gets. Seems to me it's somethin' like
playin' the fiddle. There can't jest anybody rush in an' play a real
good time on a fiddle--takes a terrible lot o' preparin' 'n' hard work
to tech them little strings to music. An' mebbe the man that can tech
'em the best is him that's always been clean 'n' honest 'n' real
grave. I'm beginnin' to feel so no 'count--why, I dun'no' a note o'
fiddle music!"

"Oh, Davie," she had comforted, "it don't seem to me that the man jest
_born_ good 'd play the sweetest, but the one who had fought for
things."

While she turned the tiny hems and ran the wonderful seams, Davie,
winter-bound, sat on the tall stool before his loom, the bobbins wound
with rags for a hit and miss. Weaving eked out a slender income. His
father's finger-tips, too, had become stained by colors of warp and
woof after the end of the pig-killing had been announced by the
children racing with the bladders through the thin snow.

On Christmas day he brought down the cradle from the garret, and wiped
its gathered dust from it with a white cloth. To please him, Elizabeth
spread it ready with the sheets and blankets. The sight of the pillow
unmanned him. "The idee o' that stove smokin' so Christmas!" he
choked. She turned to him quickly. Their seamed hands met as in that
joyous moment among the vegetables, but this time they clasped above a
dusted cradle. In view of the increased expenses before the household
they made each other no gifts; only Davie put a fir bough and a
teething-ring in his box.

Then he wove as though the clack of his shuttle were the beat of a
drum going by, then in a vast impatience, then with the bridle hanging
on the rim of the manger by the plough-horse which had a saddle gait.

The morning that he clambered, frightened, into the saddle a great
cold wave was on the Ridge, with a fierce wind continually blowing.
Smoke curled up from the chimneys to perish against the sunny sky.
Cattle left in the open crowded in the lee of the straw-stacks, their
rough flanks crawling, and in the folds the ewes, yet frail from their
travail, stood stung and still, mothering their weak-kneed lambs.
Beside the thud of the horse's hoofs toward town there was no sound on
the road save a little, dry cracking of the frost. The doctor, as he
started in his carriage for Davie's house, drew his robes closely
about him and scowled at the fierceness of the blast; but Davie,
riding far ahead, his elbows flying wildly up and down, did not know
that he had forgotten to fasten his shabby overcoat. Crouched by the
silent loom, he clutched helplessly at the hit and miss as Elizabeth
went down into that loneliest of all earth's agonies.

But from the beginning the child hung a doomed thing on her breast.
After three months they followed her up to the burying-ground, the
murmuring of its cedars never again to be wholly out of their ears.
Away from the grave Davie gave an exceedingly bitter cry--"She's
little to leave!" But Elizabeth's tears fell back in her heart unshed.
She waved her handkerchief to Melindy Ethel. "But she's brave like her
pa," she said. And Davie stiffened.

Memories of these and other days, mingled with forebodings for the
parting, were so heavy upon him that he could get no farther in the
night's devotions than the reading of the Bible chapter.

"I can't pray to-night, 'Lisbeth," he said.

Propped with pillows for the last rest before her journey, she was
still faithfully brave. "Mebbe the Lord'll jest take care o' me,
anyway, bein' as I've tried to do his ways." The old man did not know
how wistful was her speech.

In the morning she was early dressed in her decent black. To those who
came for the leave-taking she bade good-by with gentle courtesy.
Kerrenhappuch Green lent his buggy because of its comfortable seat,
but Davie drove her carefully over the six miles to the station. No
shriek of an engine's whistle disturbed the quiet of Turkey Ridge; to
go into wider ways one must needs start from the nearest town. Once
she looked back at the house, set like an ancient brown bird's nest on
the narrow fields.

The yellow-bodied stage, going every other day across the country,
brought the minister the letter from his niece with the happy tidings
of Elizabeth's safe arrival, under her guidance, at the city hospital.
The stage-driver viewed the missive with professional interest as he
delivered it. The majority of his passengers paid him monotonously in
butter or eggs for his services, his trips were tedious, and his
ideals were limited. To read and digest all postals and to conjecture
at the contents of all envelopes were his reward for handing out the
mail at the turning of the lanes. The minister jogged down instantly
to Davie's in his sulky, slapping the lines vigorously, if
ineffectually, over the back of his brown mare, which understood, with
a truly feminine insight, his perplexity before her character. Davie
dropped his hoe and ran stumbling to meet him. He read the pages in a
tremble. There was something for him from Elizabeth at the bottom of
the last one. "Dear Davie," it ran, "are you well an' lookin' jest the
same? Don't get lonesome for me. I ain't missin' you a mite."

During the period that she was resting for the operation Mary wrote
daily, and every time the letter came the minister jogged down to the
farmhouse, for the words were really from the old wife to Davie. Very
cheerful words they were for the most part. "If Davie's askin' how the
streets look, tell him I can't jest tell, for I come in the night, but
the noise is amazin'." "Tell Davie I can see a church tower from the
window, an' it's higher 'n' we ever dreamt of its bein', an' sweeter."
"Tell Davie to lay listenin' to feet goin' up and down on stones is
grand." "Tell Davie I hev seen the surgeon an' that I never thought a
great man'd be so kind. I was all in a flutter over him, but when he'd
come 'n' had seen me, whatever'd I do but tell him 'bout him 'n'
Melindy Ethel, an' the meetin'-house, an' how the road runs by in
front o' the farm. An' he said he knew, an' not to mind--as ma ust to.
Ain't it strange 'bout his knowin'?"

The letters to Elizabeth were a tremendous labor, for Davie was no
speller, and always bashful in the presence of ink. He had only little
happenings for his pen--he wrote with his tongue forming the painful
syllables about his mouth. But to her they were infinite things--the
May rose was blossomed in the garden, and a pair of robins were
nesting on a ledge of the loom on finding the room so still; the
speckled hen scratched up the pease, and the black cow's calf was
lamed; the house dog pined for her and whimpered at the doors, letting
the cats lick the edges of his dish; the neighbors had sent donations
of a loaf of rye bread, a pitcher of broth, and the half of a new
pressed cheese; Kerrenhappuch Green sat with him in the evenings, and
he, Davie, was not getting lonesome nor missing _her_ at all. But
the one blotted "'Lisbeth, 'Lisbeth," told the true tale of the empty
house.

When no letter came from Mary he toiled, white as lint, in his
potato-field. There followed two days of sick suspense; then the
minister waved to him at the gray fence-rails. So greatly did he dread
to hear the news he longed to know, he could not stir from the spot
where he stood, but waited, a strained, pathetic figure, for him to
make his way across the even furrows. On the fatherly, near-sighted
countenance, as he drew nearer, was to be seen such a shining
brightness that straightway Davie knew that she whom he loved had
issued from her trial. The two men, alike weather-beaten and seamed by
a humble work--the shepherd no less than the sheep of his flock
anxiously tilling a rocky farm,--had the reticence which is learned in
hill solitudes, but in the "Thank God, Davie," and the breaking "Yes,
sir," much was spoken.

Now Davie slackened his toil and opened all the windows of the house
to freshen the low-ceilinged rooms for Elizabeth's returning. Every
morning he picked bunches of spring flowers and arranged them in stiff
bouquets on the tables and old bureaus. He took out his Sunday suit
from the closet and rebrushed it carefully and laid it with a clean
collar and his musty tie. He began to carry himself all at once with
something of an air, and he developed a reckless and unnatural
enthusiasm about the weather; for to be darkly critical of the season
after the thaw was a local point of masculine etiquette which hitherto
he had scrupulously observed. The spring had always been in his
judgment, sympathetically received, "too terrible warm," or "pointin'
right to a late frost that'll kill everything," or, were it not
palpably a failure, "so durned nice now that the summer'll be mean."
But with the good news coming from the hospital he was ready to
declare in response to friendly greetings: "It's the beatin'est time I
ever come 'cross. Dun'no' when I hev heerd so many bluebirds or sech
chirky ones. An' the sky's wonderful an' the ground's jest right. It's
goin' to be a dreadful good year for farmin'."

There was in his mind no premonition of trouble on his receiving from
the lumbering stage an envelope directed to him in Elizabeth's own
hand. It was only that she was getting able to write to him herself.
He took it unopened up to the bench by the May rose to read its
contents at his leisure away from the stage-driver's curious gaze.
"Dear Davie," the letter said, "the city streets is so wearyin' an'
I'm comin' home. If I ain't so well as we hoped, don't mind. 'Tain't
like I was young to leave. Mary's comin' with me, for she's long been
wantin' to visit the Ridge. Could you meet me with your wagon, Davie?"

She could not tell, what she did not know, that the money for Mary's
journey had been sent to her by the minister for his old friend's
needs.

       *       *       *       *       *

The afternoon was very soft and fair when Davie met the train incoming
to town from the city. The farms on Turkey Ridge were illumined with
growing things like the faint, precious pages of a missal. Doves
fluttered on the lowly roofs. Everywhere was the calling of birds and
the smell of broken earth. The minister and Mary fell behind along the
way. Kerrenhappuch Green, caught walking westward to the creek, his
stale pockets bulged by bait, hid with a simple delicacy in the
roadside bushes from Davie's face. Only the children hastening from
school nodded to him as he passed them, nor hushed the loud clatter of
their burring tongues.

It was not for young children to be stricken by that sight upon the
road--the pair of patient horses drawing slowly homeward in the
shining of the sun a wagon fresh lined with straw, on which lay a
homely mother, smiling with old lips; and above her, on the seat,
humbly bowed in his Sunday suit, a gray-haired man whose cheeks were
wet with tears.






BARNEY DOON, BRAGGART

BY PHILIP VERRILL MIGHELS


The nine dusty citizens of Bitter Hole, having one and all proposed,
unsuccessfully, for the hand of Miss Sally Wooster, had about
concluded that Bitter Water Valley was a desert, after all, when they
finally thought to turn their attention once again to Barney Doon, the
cook.

Let it here be stated, nevertheless, there was one thing to prove that
the valley was a desert, despite the presence of Barney, and that was
the face of the country itself. One-half of that whole Nevada area was
a great white blister, forty miles long and fifteen wide, acrid with
alkali, flat, barren, and harsh as a sheet of zinc. The valley's
remaining territory was covered with gray, dry scrub, four inches
high, through which the dusty Overland stage-route was crookedly
scratched.

Bitter Hole was the station for the stage. In it flourished the nine
dusty citizens, a dusty dog, and a dusty chicken, in addition to
Barney and the buxom Miss Sally, whose father was among the citizens
enumerated. At the end of the street was a hole, or well, the waters
of which, being not precisely fatal to men and horses, had occasioned
the growth of the place, there being no other water for leagues along
the road.

Here in this land, even when Sally had scorned them, each in turn, the
men of the Hole were still agreed there could be no desolation where
Barney Doon had residence. Purely and simply they loved the little
cook for the fiery suddenness of his temper and the ingenuity of the
insults of which he was never guiltless. The sulphurous little demon
was, as the miners and teamsters estimated, "only two sizes bigger
than a full-grown jack-rabbit." What he lacked in size, however, he
more than supplied in expression of countenance. His eyes were centres
of incandescence, while the meagre supply of hair he grew bristled
redly out from beside his ears like ill-ordered spears. Indeed, such a
red-whiskered, bald-headed little parcel of fireworks as Barney was is
rarely created.

Calmly considered, it is hardly a matter for marvel that Barney had,
from time to time, accommodated every individual in the Hole with a
quarrel. Moreover, he had challenged each to mortal combat. Indeed, he
had never been known to do anything less. Barney was a challenger
first and a cook incidentally. But, ancient and modern tradition
through, there never was chronicle of actual encounter in which the
fierce little cook cut figure.

And, as a matter of fact, the men esteemed him perhaps somewhat more
for the skill and adroitness with which he invariably squirmed out of
impending engagements, than they did for all the alacrity and
pyrotechnics with which he was wont to surround himself with duelsome
entanglements. The boys well knew that if blood were unlet till the
bragging, hot little rogue of a Barney stained his record, they would
all forget the color of a wound.

It was not without some elemental enthusiasm that the camp, one
evening, extended its welcome to a mule-driver newly mustered to their
company. The sobriquet by which the man was duly introduced was
Slivers. He was swiftly appraised and as quickly assimilated, after
which there was only one process required to complete his initiation,
namely, that of preparing his mind for a "racket" with Barney Doon.

"Don't lose no time, but git right in at supper," instructed John
Tuttle, for the group. "Jest bang him with any old insult you can
think of, and leave the rest to Barney. Trot out a plain, home-made
slap at the fodder he's dishin' up, fer instance. And when he comes at
you with a challenge, don't fergit your privilege of pickin' out the
weapons--savvy?"

It chanced that the moment selected for the entertainment was most
propitious, inasmuch as Barney had that day declared his devotion to
Sally Wooster, and had duly desired her big red hand for his own, only
to hear a wild peal of laughter in reply, and to find himself boosted
bodily out of the window by the hearty young lady herself. He was not,
therefore, exactly in a mood of milk and honey.

It never had failed, and it did not fail to-night, that Barney should
conceive himself more than half insulted merely by the sight of a
stranger appearing at the board and calmly requiring the wherewithal
to satisfy a mountain appetite. Accordingly, when the miners and
teamsters all came filing in, dusty, angular, raw-looking of
countenance, Barney instantly detected the presence of Slivers among
them, and his eyes "lit up shop" without delay.

Slivers, to speak the truth, was easily seen. He was framed like a
sky-scraping building, with the girders all plainly suggested. Not
without a certain insolence of deliberation, he stared about the room
before assuming his seat, and provoked himself to a sneer of
opera-bouffe proportions.

"You're his meat already," whispered one of the men. "Set down."

Comrade Slivers thereupon proceeded to comport himself with a studied
indifference to the cook which was duly galling. In a grim silence
that all who knew him comprehended, Barney went about the table
glowering with ferocity. Edging closer and closer to Slivers, the
little man seemed itching in his ears to catch some careless word that
might, by dint of inventiveness, be construed as a personal affront.

"I can see you ain't got no cook in the camp," said Slivers, loudly,
to his neighbor, when Barney was directly behind his chair. "Has that
pizened little boy I seen a while ago been playin' keep-house with the
grub?"

"What's the matter with the grub, you scion of the wild-ass family?"
demanded Barney, exploding like a fulminate.

Slivers looked around and scowled. "Git out, you yawping brat," said
he. "You must have been losin' hair for years--one hair a day--for
everything you don't know about decent grub. Go look at yer head, and
figure out your ignorance."

Sensitive concerning the trackless Sahara which his pate presented,
Barney clapped his hand upon it instantly. He could scarcely speak,
for rage.

"You--dead lizard!" finally spurted from his safety-valve. "You
mongrel viper! Low-bred ooze, disowned and outcast, I'll spoil a grave
with your carcass for this! You jelly of cowardice, meet me to-morrow
for satisfaction, or I'll swing you about by the tongue, and hurl you
to pulp against the sty of a pig!"

Even Slivers somewhat gasped.

"Meet you?" he retorted, arising, to tower above his foeman like a
mast. "Iron me, Johnny!--if I can crawl in the hole to find you where
you're hidin' I'll make you wish for hair a mile long, to stand on
your head in your pitiful scare!"

"Oh, fie! Oh, bah!" said the cook, scanning the teamster's length with
ill-concealed awe. "Buzzard, you toy with languages. To-morrow I shall
throw tomato-cans in scorn to build your monument."

"All right," answered Slivers. "To-morrow suits me, and we'll fight it
out bareback on buckin' broncos, out in the small corral, each feller
armed with a stockin' full of rocks for a weapon."

Barney stared for a moment in consternation at the man before him. He
had previously grown accustomed to the horrors suggested by pistols,
knives, red-hot branding-irons, and even pitchforks, but rocks in a
stocking--that smacked of barbarism. Moreover, to mount on the back of
a bronco, wild or tame--the very meditation made the walls drop out of
his stomach. However, he smiled.

"Child's play!" he answered, with fine disgust. "You warty infant! No
matter, an odious child would become a more detestable reptile! Till
to-morrow, don't speak to me--don't speak to me! Or I shall cheat
myself of the morning's pastime." And with that he strode haughtily
away.

"Howlin' coyotes!" said Slivers, when he met the gaze of a dozen pair
of gleaming eyes. "Take him dose for dose he's worse than pizen! By
gar! just see if he burned any holes in my shirt."

Nearly all night long, however, little Barney lay awake, wildly
fashioning excuses to avoid that horrid duel in the morning. He had
always escaped by a margin so narrow that no precedent of the past
gave assurance of luck for the future. He was mortally afraid that at
last he had challenged such a monster of brute courage, malignity, and
strength that nothing terrestrial could avert his untimely demise.

Then in the morning the first sight that met his troubled gaze was
that of Slivers rounding up a pair of unbroken ponies, as wild as
meteors, in the field of honor, hard by the camp. Every cell in
Barney's structure was in a panic. How he managed to walk to the
water-bench to wash was more than he knew. After that there was no
retreat. The citizens of Bitter Hole surrounded him, according to
preconcerted arrangement, and began to coach him for his fight.

"Barney, you'd better have a jolt of whiskey in yer vitals," suggested
one. "Slivers is a regular expert with a stockin' of rocks."

"If I was you, Barney," said Tuttle, "I'd leave my bronco throw me
right at him. Then. I'd turn in the air and soak my heels into
Slivers's grub-basket and knock him into pieces small enough to smoke
in a cigarette."

"Barney," counselled another, "you take my advice and fight standin'
up on your hoss, so you can jump over onto Slivers's bronco and cram
your stockin' of rocks down that there mule-driver's neck and choke
him clean to death."

They were "herding" the speechless Barney toward the corral, in which
the two vicious ponies had now been confined. Slivers himself came
forward.

"Leave me see how much the little scarecrow has shrunk in the night,"
said he.

Barney's wrath was kindled by this. He opened his mouth to deliver a
broadside of verbal grape and canister, when he was suddenly
interrupted.

A shot and a yell, from down the road, startled every man in camp.
Two, three, five more shots barked in swift succession. Miss Sally
Wooster herself was drawn from the house by the fusillade.

With Comanche-like whoops, a horseman came dashing madly toward the
men, brandishing two huge revolvers as he rode.

"Skete, and drunk in the morning," said Tuttle.

A moment later the rider scattered the population as he rode his
weltering pony through the group.

"You lubbers, celebrate!" he yelled, discharging a weapon three times
in a second. "There's been a baby born at Red Shirt Canyon! We git in
the census! We git on the map! Big Matt Sullivan's wife has got a
little boy!"

"A boy!" said Sally Wooster. "Oh my!"

"Is that all?" inquired John Tuttle, on behalf of his somewhat
indignant townsmen. "Red Shirt's thirty-seven miles away. We've got
something more exciting than that right here in camp."

"Red Shirt's in this same county," protested the horseman, a trifle
crestfallen. "I thought you fellers was patriotic."

Barney Doon threw out his chest and swaggered forward.

"Patriotic?" he echoed. "Doggone us, we're the biggest patriots on the
coast! No man is a gentleman who wouldn't be a gentleman on such an
occasion as this. Skete, you've saved the life of yonder braggart,"
and he pointed to Slivers. "I couldn't be a gentleman and slay him
when a child's been born in this here county. Slivers, you can go your
way, without alarm."

"What!" demanded Tuttle. "No fight? All on account of a baby?"

"If I ever!" added Sally Wooster.

A third disgusted person queried, "What's a baby got to do with a
duel, and the kid near forty miles away?"

To this one Barney turned with pitying scorn. "You don't know how easy
it is to disturb a new-born baby," said he. "There ain't a man but me
in camp knows how to behave himself in a holy moment like this here,
and I ain't a-goin' to kill no man when a sacred thing like that has
went and happened."

"Well, durn his slippery hide!" grumbled Tuttle. "He's gittin' too
smart!"

The men were all grinning, including Slivers.

"I reckon Barney knows as much about a baby as a hop-toad knows about
arithmetic," said Wooster, winking prodigiously. "He's got us all
square beat on kids."

"I don't know about that," replied a lanky individual who had sobered
amazingly at the news from Red Shirt Canyon. "I've saw a kid or two
myself."

"That so, Moody?" said Slivers. "Well, say, maybe we could work up a
bet between you and Barney, to see which knows the most about a
youngster."

Barney broke in abruptly. "I'll bet a million dollars I know more
about children than all you cusses put together! There ain't a one of
you knows how many teeth a baby's got when he's born."

The challenge produced a solemn stillness.

"W-e-l-l, I know they don't git their eyes open for a week," asserted
Moody.

"You're clear off, first crack," retorted Barney. "It's nine days,
instead of a week."

Again the men were awed to silence.

"Yes, that's right--Barney's correct," presently admitted citizen
Wooster.

"You old ninnies!" said his daughter Sally, and she turned away to go
to the house.

"Well, anyway," said Slivers, after a brisk bit of widespread
conversation with Tuttle, "we've got a scheme. Barney wants to match
himself against the whole shebang in knowin' about a kid, and we're
goin' to fetch a young un to the Hole and leave him prove his claim."

"Not Sullivan's?" gasped Barney, suddenly overwhelmed at the prospect
of proving his erudition on an infant so tender, with a father so
brawny.

"Never mind whose," replied the teamster. "You sit quiet and look
pretty, and we'll provide the kid."

This they did. The following morning, at daylight, Tuttle and Slivers
reappeared at camp, from a pilgrimage, and the mule-driver held in his
arms a little red Indian papoose, as fat, dimpled, and pretty as a
cherub, and as frightened as a captive baby rabbit.

"Now, then," said the man, placing his charge on the floor, in the
midst of a circle of wondering citizens, "there's your kid. Never mind
where we got him--there he is. Barney takes charge of him every other
day, and the rest of us by turns in between--all that cares to enter
the race."

The news having spread, Miss Sally Wooster was among the astonished
spectators who beheld the tiny, half-naked, frightened little
chieftain-to-be, gazing timidly about him as he sat on the planks,
gripping his own little shirt as his one and only acquaintance.

"Lauk!" she said, and laughing immoderately, sped for the door.

"Sally, you ain't to help neither Barney nor us!" called Tuttle.

"Don't you worry," she answered. "It ain't no pie of mine."

The men continued to look at their "young un" in no small quandary of
helplessness.

"He's a pretty little cuss," said one of the miners, after a moment.
"I wouldn't guess him for more than a yearlin'."

Moody coughed nervously. "One of the first things to do for a child,"
he ventured, "is to git a thimble to rub on his teeth."

"That's right," said a friend. "My mother used to do that regular."

"What's the matter with putting pants on him fairly early in the
fight?" inquired the next man of wisdom.

"First thing my mother always done for us was to make us a bib,"
drawled one fidgety fellow, tentatively.

"He'd orter be told never to drink, ner chew, ner smoke, ner swear,
ner gamble, 'fore it gits too late," added a miner who carefully
eschewed all and sundry of these virtues.

"Stub-tailed idiots!" said Barney, in huge disgust.

All eyes focussed on the fiery little cook.

"Well, then," demanded Tuttle, "what is the first thing to do for a
little kid like him?"

"The first thing?" answered Barney. "The first thing is--Do you think
I'm going to tell you lop-eared galoots all I know about a baby? What
I want to know is if he's had a bite to eat?"

"What did you think we'd feed him?" asked Slivers. "Do we look like
his mother?"

"Git away, you venomous scum, and let me have him!" demanded Barney.

"Hold on," interrupted Tuttle. "The first day he goes to the feller he
picks out himself, only you come last, bein' the challenger. We'll
arrange things alphabetical. Adams, you git first shot, to find out if
you're popular with the little skeesicks."

Adams turned redder than usual, which is saying much.

"Ah--I don't know nuthin' about kids," he confessed. "Catherwood--see
what he can do."

Catherwood also proved to be modest. After him Farnham and Lane waived
their alphabetical privilege.

Moody, as nervous as a girl, approached the dumb little man on the
floor, and twisting the corner of his coat, inquired in a trembling
voice, "Does Bunny love old Goo-goo?"

The child looked up with a frightened little query in his eyes.

"I'd hate to scare him," Moody added. "I don't mind seein' how he
takes to Barney."

"Yes, give Barney a show," said Wooster.

Something had been happening to the cook. The tenseness had gone from
his usually wiry little body; his eyes were milder; a curve was
softening his mouth. Kneeling before the child, he held forth his
arms.

"Baby want to go by-by?" he said, and tenderly lifting the little man,
he bore him away, while the men looked on in silence.

Half an hour later the man who peeked through the keyhole reported
that Barney was singing the youngster to sleep. The words of the song
are not readily conveyed, but they sounded like--

  "Allonsum sum-sum bill-din,
   Allonsum sum-sum bill-din,
   Allonsum sum-sum bill-din,"

repeated times without number. Barney called it an Indian lullaby. As
sung it was equally good Cherokee, Chinese, or Russian, being Barney's
clearest recollection and interpretation of a song which his mother
once had droned.

On the third day following, Slivers, Tuttle, and others held a council
of war.

"Barney's goin' to clean up the whole works of us," said the
mule-driver, "unless we can manage to work some better combination."

"What can we do?" inquired Tuttle. "The kid sure likes him best."

"That wasn't the point. It's a game of how much we all know about a
young un as against little Barney. Now, Moody, on the square, do you
think you know as much as him?"

"He knows more than you'd think," confessed Moody. "The--the only
little kid I ever had--she died--ten months old."

"Oh."

"Well--that was hell, sure."

Some of the men puckered their lips as if to whistle, but made no
sound.

"If only we could paint Barney's face an Irish green, or do something
so's the kid would be scared to see him, we might win out yet,
perhaps," resumed Slivers, presently. "Got any ideas?"

"I don't think Barney could scare him if he tried," answered Wooster.
"Anyhow the pore little scamp ain't cried since he come."

"He ain't laughed any, either," added Moody.

There was neither a cry nor a smile that day, though Barney yearned to
hear either one of these baby sounds. The little brown captive clung
as always to his tiny shirt, and watched Barney's face with big,
brown, questioning eyes. The cook had forgotten his boast. To hold the
wee bit of babyhood against his heart, to coax him to eat, to yearn
over him, love him, fondle him--these were his passions. A fierce
parental jealousy grew in Barney's nature.

But the hour arrived when jealousy changed to a deeper emotion--to
worry. All Barney actually knew of a child came through the intuitions
of a natural father's heart, but little as this amounted to, Barney
was aware that a tiny scamp like this should eat and sleep and creep
about and crow. And the little brown "Bunny" had done not one of the
pretty baby tricks.

The fiery little cook's new concern was at first concealed. With
growing reluctance every time, he resigned the little man to Moody's
care as the "contest" required. One night, however, when the dumb, sad
bit of an Indian was with Moody, the man was aroused from his dreams
by some one's presence. It was Barney, too worried to sleep,
surreptitiously come to the tiny captive's fruit-box cradle, and
gently urging the wee bronze man to eat of some gruel prepared at that
silent hour of the darkness. He was willing that Moody should have the
credit of taking good care of the motherless baby, if only the child
could be made a little more happy. Thereafter, by night and day, the
cook was hovering about the uncomplaining little chieftain; and Moody
understood.

By some of the mystic workings of nature, Barney's love and worry
extended to Sally. Hiding her feelings from all the men, even from
Barney himself, she could not quell the upgush of emotion in her
bosom, as she snatched the little Indian once, in secret, to her
heart. Without the courage, as yet, to hear the men ridicule her
weakness, she nevertheless contrived to place a hundred little
comforting things in Barney's path, as he went his rounds of mothering
his sad little wild thing from the hills. Her heart began to ache, as
it swelled to take in the child and Barney Doon.

The men had lost all spirit of fun in the contest, even to Slivers,
who strove, however, to see it through in a bluff, rough-hearted way.

Unexpectedly all of it came to a crisis. It was early in the morning.
After a sleepless night Barney had gone in desperate parent-care to
receive his foundling back from Moody. In one keen glance he had
finally perceived what all their folly was leading to, at last.

With the dumb little chap on his arm he hastened to the dining-shed,
where all the men, save Tuttle, were awaiting breakfast.

"You brutes had no right to steal this child!" he cried out,
passionately. "He's starving! He's pining away! Look at his thin
little legs! Look at his poor little eyes--getting hollow!" Tears were
streaming from his own tired eyes as he spoke. "Slivers, you did
this!" he charged, angrily. "You tell me where you got him, or I'll
shoot you down like a dog!" He had hastened up to the teamster,
against whose very breast he thrust a pistol a foot in length.

"By God! he'd do it!" said Slivers, unmoved by the push of the loaded
weapon. "Uncock it, Barney. You'd ought to know I wouldn't harm the
kid, any quicker than you. I'd do as much as any man if we had to save
his life."

"He may not live through the day!" cried Barney. "I'm going to take
him home--back to his mother! And if you don't tell me where she is--"

"Hold on, now; I call," interrupted Slivers. "We'll see if you've got
any sand. The Injun camp is over across the desert, in Thimbleberry
Cove.... Do you reckon you've got the nerve to pack him across?"

A peculiar silence followed this announcement. Barney stood like an
animal at bay. His face became deathly white. He fully comprehended
the awfulness of that great white dead-land just outside.

Wooster broke the silence. "It looks as if the wind is going to blow
harder to-day," he said. "It's stirring up the desert some already. A
man could never get two miles out from here, unless the breeze goes
down."

Barney, with a crazed, wild look on his face, hastened away to the
kitchen.

"I'm glad he didn't take you up on that," said Moody, gazing forth
from a window. "Get on to the way the whirlwinds are kickin' up the
smoke already."

"I reckon it won't blow no worse than yesterday," replied Slivers.
"But I knowed he wouldn't tackle it anyhow. He'll be back here in a
minute, to squirm out of the game."

They drummed on the table for fifteen minutes, as they waited. A brisk
wind was blowing; the desert began to deliver up its cohorts of
dust-clouds, where powdered alkali billowed and eddied and swept
across the valley in ever-increasing volumes.

"Peek in the kitchen and see what Barney's up to now," prompted
Slivers, nudging Adams as he spoke.

"Oh, he'll be back directly," said Adams.

"Here's somebody comin' now," added Catherwood, presently. "Maybe
it's--"

"Sally," muttered Slivers, who meditated proposing for the hand of the
buxom Miss Wooster.

She came toward them almost fiercely. Her face was white. She too had
detected the change come upon the tiny Indian captive. All night she
had accused herself of neglect and heartlessness.

"Where's Barney? Where's the baby?" she demanded.

"Barney's maybe striking off for Thimbleberry Cove," answered Slivers,
smilingly. "He was running a bluff on taking the kid to its mother."

"But Tuttle told me the mother's up at Red Shirt Canyon," said the
girl.

"Of course," agreed Slivers, uneasily. "We--told him about the Cove to
test his sand."

Sally gazed at him wildly. "Then--it must have been a man--Barney!--I
saw--on the desert!" she cried, disjointedly. "They'll die! Oh no, he
wouldn't--" She ran outside to scan the fearful expanse of alkali,
with its gathering blizzard of dust.

The men, suddenly grown nervous, followed her out of the house.
Apparently there was nothing, far or wide, on the desert, save the
sweeping clouds of white, like drifting snow.

"My God! he wouldn't tackle that!" said Slivers.

"I hear some one out in the kitchen now," said Tate. "It must be him."

Sally ran to see. It was only the dog. She darted forth once more.

"Not there!" she said. "But surely Barney wouldn't--There! There!"

Her cry rang out so shrilly that even Slivers started. She was
pointing stiffly. The men all stared at the storm of dust. For one
brief second the swirling clouds were reft, revealing, far out
eastward, in the dead-land of white, a small dark object--the form of
a man.

One poignant sob was the only sound that Sally made, as she ran toward
the stable.

"Good Lord! it's him!" said Adams. "Was he heading back this way?"

"I think he was," answered Catherwood.

"He couldn't--do anything--else," stammered Slivers.

For a moment no one spoke.

"I reckon I'll just mosey over to the desert," drawled the fidgety
man. "I'd hate to have anything go wrong with Barney."

"Guess I'll go along myself," said Adams.

"Boys!" said Slivers, hoarsely, "I'm going to saddle up and git him
back! I didn't mean no harm when I told him wrong. I didn't think he'd
go. I'd ride through hell for Barney--or the little Injun, either. You
fellers know I didn't mean no harm."

He started at once to get his horse. Before he had covered half the
distance to the stable, Sally suddenly rode forth, bareback, on a
buckskin pony, and heading for the desert, spurred her bronco to a
gallop, crying to him wildly as she went.

"Sally!--Sally--I'll go!" yelled Slivers.

She seemed not to hear, but ran her pony out upon the white expanse,
where the wreathing dust seemed to swallow both herself and the animal
immediately.

Her horse, fleeing swiftly before the wind, carried Sally a mile or
two out from the camp before she reined him in. Believing Barney could
have come no farther than this, she began to search and to call.

At every turn of her head her eyes were blinded by the acrid dust. The
stuff choked her breathing; already her throat was dry. Dust and
powder and snow-of-alkali came from everywhere. It was blowing up her
sleeves. It filtered into and through her clothing. Her ears were
quickly coated; her hair was heavy.

She turned her head from side to side for a breath. The air was
thicker than smoke with dust as heavy as flour.

"Barney!" she called, from time to time, but the alkali coated her
tongue. On either side she could see for a distance of twenty feet, or
less. It seemed far less, in all that terrible drift of white.

She rode across the wind, doggedly, crying Barney's name. A nameless
hopelessness began to grow upon her. Now this way, now that, she urged
her horse. How far could Barney hear her calling? How far could he
wander? How far would she ride? There were forty miles in length and
fifteen in width of this reek of wind-driven alkali. God keep them if
ever they got more than two miles away from the Hole!

It was aimless riding, presently, but she still persisted. A sickening
conviction that Barney and the little captive would both be dead
before she could find them made her desperation unendurable. With eyes
starting hotly, with every breath seeming like a struggle for
existence, in the dust, she galloped, calling, calling, till at last
she could call no more.

Dazed, she halted her horse at last, and sat staring blindly at
nothing. The pony turned about, unheeded, and began to fight his way
against the storm, his head down between his legs.

Sally's head also came down, by instinct more than by design. She felt
past thinking. For a time she rode thus, heedlessly. Then abruptly she
clutched at the reins and drew the horse to a halt. The animal pricked
up his ears peculiarly.

Weirdly out of the wind and dust came a sound--not a moan, not a
croon, but like them both, yet a song, uncertain, apparently coming
from no definitive point. She even caught the words:

 "All on some lonesome bill-din
    The swallow makes her nest;

  All on some--lonesome bill-din
    The--swallow makes--her nest."

Sally tried to call out. She made but a croaking noise. Slipping from
her horse's back, she groped her way forward, leading the pony, and
trying to shout.

For a rod or more she battled against the driving dust, then halted as
before. Not another sound would the desert render up--only the strange
dry swishing by of the particles of stuff rasping the desert's surface
as they passed and rose.

"Barney!" she called, by a mighty effort. There was no response.

Crying now, in her anguish and plight, she led the pony this way and
that, up and down, listening, trying to force a shout through her
swollen lips. At length, in despair, she knew she could search no
more. A lifelessness of feeling was creeping upon her. Mechanically
she walked beside her pony, and it was the animal that was leading.

It seemed as if she had plodded onward thus for hours, when at length
she stumbled upon a gray little mound in the drifting alkali.

"Barney!" she said, in a voice scarcely more than a whisper. Crooning
and sobbing, she lifted him up--unconscious, but clinging to the
still, little form that was hugged to the shelter of his breast.

"Hang on--oh, hang on to the horse, dear, please," she coaxed, in all
the tender strength of a new-born love. "Barney--try--try, dear,
please. I'll be your wife--I'll do anything--if only you'll try."

She had raised him bodily to the pony's back. Stiffly as a man that
freezes he straddled the animal. He made no answer, no movement.
She feared he must be dead. She dared not look at the little papoose.
Barney's weight rested partially upon her shoulder. She tossed away
the reins.

"Go on, Sancho--go on home," she croaked to the horse, passionately.

The pony seemed to comprehend. With some faint fragrance of the waters
of Bitter Hole in his nostrils, the willing creature fought slowly,
steadily forward, against the terrible drift.

       *       *       *       *       *

John Tuttle and Henry Wooster descried a group, like a sculpture in
whitened stone endowed with life, creep strangely out from the
blizzard of alkali. A blinded horse, with head bent low, bearing on
its back a motionless man, and led by a stumbling, blinded girl,
against whose shoulder the helpless rider leaned, came with ghostlike
slowness and silence toward them.

And all day long, one by one, more men came forth, like ghosts, from
the dead-land. But the twilight had come and the wind had died away
before teamster Slivers limped from the desert. He came afoot. He had
ridden his horse to death, in his desperate quest. He could barely
see--and his hair was white, even below the coating of the dust.

Moody ran to meet him.

"Barney?--Sally?--the kid?" the teamster demanded, raucously.

"Back--and goin' to live," said Moody. "The Injuns up to Red Shirt
heard where the little feller was and was goin' on the war-trail,
sudden, but the mother came down on the stage to-day,--and got her
pretty little kid."

"Oh, God! I didn't deserve it!" said Slivers, and letting himself fall
limply to the earth, he lay with his face in the curve of his arm and
shook with emotion.






THE REPARATION

BY EMERY POTTLE


He looked up from the desk where he had been sitting for the last
hour, his head down on his arms, trying to shut out the brave, old cry
of life coming in through the open windows, pulling gently at his
heart, cheeping through the darkened room as lightly and as blithely
as the birds in the horse-chestnut tree just outside--the brave cry of
life that, somehow, for all its clamorous traditions, seemed just then
something peaceful, something that held release, freedom.

He stared about him, furtively, for an instant, as if instinctively on
his guard against an unwelcome eye. Then, presently, he smiled, and
going to a window, pushed open the blinds, leaning, with elbows on the
sill, gratefully out into the rectangular enclosure, walled in high by
houses, where the late afternoon sun glanced with uncertain warmth on
the horse-chestnut.

There was now, he told himself, no use of evading or denying it
longer; right or wrong, things had come to a point with him where
anything but the truth was unbearable; it was there, like a live thing
with him in the room, and out in the court, too,--almost as if he
could put out his hand and draw it in close to him. Freedom, that was
it. His lips made the word noiselessly, again and again, fascinated
with the sensation. "Free, free," he kept whispering, stretching out
his hands greedily, drawing in full breaths of the late September air.

"I'm glad, that's all there is to it--glad. I can't help being
glad--I've tried, too, but now, to-day, it's bound to come out. Glad!
It's like being let out of school."

That word--school--brought him back sharply. It seemed to precipitate
all the old worry in the solution that but a moment ago was so clear.
He came back hesitatingly from the window and threw himself down
before the desk again, unable to restrain something he vaguely named
his conscience from its weary accusations.

"It's an awful thing. It's true, it is. I'm a beast. I'm all wrong to
be like this. It's a terrible thing to be glad a person is--" He
shivered as he withheld the end of the sentence, though he realized
his cowardice in so withholding. "And that person your--" Again he
hesitated.

Haldane, by the desk, was a figure to make, involuntarily, demands on
one's sympathy. It seemed all his life--perhaps thirty years long--he
had been doing this in one way or another, and by no effort of his.
People had a fashion of "looking out for him." Not that he had grown
up particularly incapable or helpless; it might rather have been due
to a certain appealing gentleness of bearing, something that was the
resultant of a half-shy manner, expanding into boyish confidence
winningly; a shortish, slender figure, scarcely robust; eager,
friendly brown eyes behind his glasses; and a keen desire to be liked.
It might be seen, in the present sharp nervous play of emotion over
his face, how utterly he was unsuited to the weight of mental
discomfort,--how it fretted and galled him. That he was a gentleman,
and by nature of a morbidly just and fair disposition, only made his
present distress the more intolerable to him.

"Lord God," he muttered, hopelessly, "why, _why_ had it all to
be?" And this question might, in the end, be taken as an aimless
appeal to the Almighty to know why He had deliberately led him into a
wretchedly miserable condition of mind and left him there.

It was the day after Ida's burial--Haldane's wife's burial. A week ago
he had taken her to a city hospital, and she had died there--she and
her baby--in the night, away from Haldane. He had gone dazedly, very
conscientiously, through the dreadful, relentless activity that
follows immediately on the heels of death; there was some alleviation
in the thought that everything had been done just as _she_ would
have liked to have it. To-day the house was free of the grieving,
sickening smell of flowers; the last of the people had mercifully
fulfilled their duty to Ida and him and had gone, leaving him the
humiliation of their honest, warm-hearted words and halting phrases of
sympathy.

"Great God!" he had kept saying to himself as he listened to them, "if
you _knew_,--if you _knew_!"

At times he felt, as he thought of those friends, secretly resentful.
"If it hadn't been for them, I don't believe I," he caught himself
saying--"I'd ever have married." But again he stopped his mental train
abruptly. It was such a wearisome business, this "being fair"--he put
it so--to _her_; this conscientious erasing of self-justification
which he felt to be so unworthy. It would have been such a relief to
Haldane to be, for an hour, obliviously selfish in his estimate of his
two years of marriage with Ida.

There had been nothing, after all, remarkable in Haldane's
experience--save for him; nothing very far removed from the
commonplace. His father--a simple-hearted musician--had trained his
son in music since the days when the lad could first hold a violin
under his little chin. He had died when the boy was twenty, and
Haldane had gone on, contentedly enough and absorbed, to take his
father's place among the violins of an orchestra, and to teach music.
As he grew older his father's friends told him he was leading a
wretchedly lonely life; that he ought to marry. And at this Haldane
smiled his deprecating, affectionate smile--a smile that, somehow,
convinced his advisers in their own wisdom.

When Ida Locke came to live in a hall bedroom of the untidy
boarding-house Haldane for years had called home, it was not long
before she, too, quite unaffectedly, took to the idea that the
good-natured musician needed "looking after." And since, all her life,
she had tremendously given herself to the care of people around her,
it was no unusual experience--she sought it frankly, importantly.

It is scarcely probable that, in the beginning, any thought of
ultimate marriage entered her head. Those who knew her invariably
said, "Ida is a sensible girl." Rather, her "looking after" Haldane
took itself out in the hearty channels of dry boots, overshoes, tea of
late afternoons, candid suggestions as to proper winter underwear,
remedies for his frequent colds. This solicitude--which was, in
essence, quite maternal--made a bond between the two; this and the
fact that they both were workers--for Ida taught English in a private
school.

It is hardly necessary to elaborate their romance, if it was such,
from this point. Gradually, hastened by the awful propinquity in a
third-rate boarding-house, Haldane really came to believe--as along
the line of least resistance--in his personal incapacity and his
loneliness; gradually Ida Locke began to realize that, for the first
time, this Love she had read of and dreamed of doubtfully had become a
reality for her. She was not a little amazed and gratified at its
plain practicability--its _sensibleness_, she put it.

That she so liked him--indeed, he liked _her_ enormously, he
considered--assured Haldane in his moments of misgiving. The very
largeness in her ample effect of good looks, her genius for managing
his affairs and hers, her prim neatness of dress, her utter freedom
from any sort of weak dependence on him, her uncompromising rigidity
of moral attitude, and, above all, her _goodness_ to him--this
convinced him of her ultimate fitness to be a wife to him; and it must
be said that he had never heretofore given anything but the scantest
attention to the matter of sentimental attachments; it had not
occurred to him, definitely, that he was even likely some day to fall
splendidly in love.

So when he asked her, shyly, gently, to marry him she consented
frankly--too frankly, Haldane almost admitted. And since, in the world
as she knew it, men did not ask women to marry them unless they loved
them really, she took much for granted, and began, at once, to look
for a cheap flat.

Ida gave up her teaching when they married and went to their Harlem
flat. Indeed, she considered this her domestic right; now, after
almost a dozen years--she was older than Haldane--of instruction, she
wanted "to rest, and keep house," she told her husband.

Then, suddenly, illogically perhaps, after not more than three months
of it, Haldane knew it was all quite intolerable to him. Before the
desk to-day, Ida's desk, he saw luminously just how intolerable it had
been--these two years of marriage.

The more irritatingly unbearable, too, it was because of the
excellence of Ida's qualities--qualities he had taken humorously
before marriage, but which later he had to take seriously. He began to
hate her constant and intimate possession of his motives and tastes,
her inquiries as to what he ate for lunch, and whether he considered
his flannels quite adequate. He childishly resented her little nagging
economies--and especially because he knew they were generally
necessary. He chafed at the practical, sensible view he was argued
resolutely into on every matter. What made it hard was that Haldane
could not decently account for his revulsion of feeling toward Ida,
now she was his wife. Worse than all, he saw how lightly she held in
esteem his music--his one real love. To her it was a graceful trade to
earn a living by--nothing else. And when she finally made it out that
in his position in the orchestra he was likely never to rise much
higher, unconsciously the fiddling seemed to her rather more of a
small business. She told him he ought to be more ambitious.

One night Haldane had played to Ida--he resented so her name
Ida--parts of the score of a light opera he had been at work on for
years;--he would never play it on the boarding-house piano.

The moment was as vivid for Haldane now as it was then. He could hear
again her brisk cheerful voice when he had finished and was
waiting--more hopeful than he had ever yet been with her: "That's
_pretty_. It's funny--isn't it, dear?--to think you made it up
out of your own head. I never _could_ understand--Leonard, have
you got entirely rid of your sore throat?--Why don't you try to sell
some of your little tunes?"

The disappointment of it all, for an instant, had brought angry tears
to his eyes. He remembered now just the bitter hopelessness of feeling
how she had failed him--and the remembrance hurt anew. That night he
had seen almost clearly how it was to be with him and her in all the
years to come.

There was, in Haldane's subsequent attitude toward the question of his
marriage to Ida Locke, nothing worth the name of heroic. Indeed,
looked at from the commonplace, critical standpoint, the situation was
not so bad. It was Haldane's personal conception of it which caused
the difficulty. Probably it was his sense of fairness to _her_
which made him accept matters quietly--as he did accept them. It was
his comfort to-day, out of all the ruck of his artificial
self-reproach, that Ida had never known--as he said--how he felt
toward her.

"She never knew," he repeated often, "she never knew. She couldn't,
I'm sure. Thank God for that!"

What she had never known was, in Haldane's mind, his real idea of her
as his wife. For he had been very kind; he had patiently let her look
out for him; he had kept the fret of his heart off his tongue, and the
sulkiness of his temper off his face. What he had not succeeded in
doing, however, was to keep the hurt of his soul out of his eyes. So
they had gone on with it for the two years, with a prospect of going
on with it forever, Haldane growing daily quieter, more reserved, if
anything more gently kind, and more pathetically hopeless. With Ida it
was, rather, a large, legitimate outlet for all the sensibleness,
practicality, capable qualities, she so generously possessed. It
seemed to her, when she knew her child was coming, that she was
wonderfully reaching the culmination of womanhood and wifehood. Yet,
after all, it had been but just death for Ida.

All this was running through Haldane's brain as he sat, on the day
after his wife's burial, before her little oak desk. And the result he
had to make out of it was always the same:

"I'm glad it's over. I'm _glad_."

       *       *       *       *       *

The room seemed less burdensome when he came back to it late that
night. Oppressed with the hatefulness of his attitude of the
afternoon, Haldane had seized his hat and had fled out into the
streets. He had dined at a restaurant, a thing he had not done in
years, and had listened to a bad orchestra play cheerful tunes--tunes
that somehow livened him up, stayed comfortably in his mind
afterwards. Every one he saw seemed so happy. He assured himself that
happiness--a quiet content, at least--was to be _his_ now. Why
not? Why disguise the fact that he was really, underneath, glad? So he
smiled and lingered and sipped his coffee, feeling suddenly the
beautiful realization that he was again of the world--irresponsible,
careless. Coming back into the dull flat was not half the gloomy
effort he had fancied it was going to be. For one blessed thing, he
came when he chose. Besides, something had given him a sense of his
right, his cheerful right, to be as he liked, what he liked. Haldane
went about the tiny rooms humming gently; he played softly on the
piano some old love-songs he had composed when he was twenty--things
_she_ had never heard.

Presently he sat down, lighted a fresh cigarette, and set himself to
thinking out matters anew.

"It was a mistake, that's all," he said, at last. "And that's plain. A
mistake for me. But now it's all over and done with. There's nothing
to be got out of this endless accusing and regret over something that
couldn't be helped--helped, at least, after it was once started....
I'll always wear my hurt of it; that I know. It hurts like the devil
to think I didn't--couldn't--give her the love she ought to have had.
If there were any way--any possible way of reparation, ... but I
suppose there isn't. Nothing except to live decently and honorably--if
that's reparation. Thank God, 'tisn't as if there were any other woman
mixed up in it--I haven't got that to worry me at any rate. I wonder
whether a man gets his punishment for--but no, you can't help feeling,
and being, and loving, just as it comes. It's this dreadful
unconventionality of--not really liking--loving a person you are
supposed to love that warps your judgment. And we lie about it to
ourselves and to others till when we have to face the real truth we go
all to pieces.... But, just the same, I'd feel so much easier if there
_were_ only some way I could make it up to Ida now that she's
gone. Poor Ida, poor Ida."

Haldane's eyes strayed to the little, cheap desk again, and for a
moment the distress of the afternoon was renewed. But he resolutely
threw off the accusing mood he so feared. There was a pile of letters
lying there--letters that he had had neither the time nor the heart to
look into for the past week. He picked them up now with relief at
finding something tangible to be done. Most of them were letters of
consolation and sympathy for him from his friends and hers; the worn
phrases one can so little avoid in such missives touched him with a
sense of their dual ineffectuality. Other letters were addressed to
Ida--commonplace messages and bills which she had not been able to
open. And there was one from her mother--written evidently before she
had heard of her daughter's imminent illness and death. This last
Haldane laid aside until he had finished the others; and even then he
looked at it long and somewhat tenderly before he opened it.

"It must have come very hard to her; Ida was all she had," he
considered. "It must have been very hard." He thought of the
tear-stained, illegible letter Ida's mother had sent him after she had
had his telegram. An illness had prevented her from coming to the
funeral; and she lived so far away, somewhere in Iowa. Her heart was
bleeding for _him_, she wrote. Her own loss was almost blotted
out in the thought of _his_ terrible grief. He had never finished
it--that letter; he could not. Such words had seemed too sacred for
him to read, feeling as he did. So he had torn it up.

"Ida was very good to her mother," he reflected; "at least she was
conscientiously always trying to do her best by her, support her and
all that. She took it awfully as a duty--but she did it."

Once, after they were married, Ida had gone back, for six months, to
the private school that she might have money to send her mother in a
sudden financial stress. Haldane thought of that, too, with keen
regret that he had not been able to earn the necessary money
himself--he was ill that winter. Yes, surely, Ida had been splendid in
the matter of her mother. "It's a pity that things weren't so that
Ida's mother could have come to see us here in New York," Haldane
said, as he opened the envelope--"come before Ida died." The letter
itself was not long. When he had finished with it--and this only after
a third reading--he laid it down slowly and stared silently at the
fine old-fashioned characters.

"Great God!" he said at last, gently, "the poor old lady!"

"My dear daughter," ran the letter, "mother is so sorry to have to
tell you this now when all your thoughts and energies must be centred
on the wonderful event so soon to happen. It seems to me I've always
been calling on you for help and you have done so much. Oh, it hurts
me to have to worry and distress you now, dear.

"The truth is that Mr. Liddell is going to foreclose the mortgage on
the house. He says he cannot wait longer than a week or two. I've
tried every way to get the interest, but I can't do it. The little I
had left, your cousin George invested for me, and now he tells me--I
don't understand it at all--that it's quite lost. I know you'll say I
was foolish to let George have it, but he promised so much--and George
has been so good to me. I won't ask you and Leonard to give me a home;
that would be unfair to you both. I'm so distressed and upset. Write
me, if you can, and tell me what you think is best." And there was
more in the same distressed key.

Haldane was as near his decision, perhaps, when he laid down the
letter as hours afterward when he stumbled to bed. It was strangely
clear to him--the attitude he was to assume. Not that he did not make
a fight of it, and a sharp fight. But, after all, he knew from the
first how it was destined to end.

"I asked for my chance to make it up to her," he muttered. "Well, I've
got it, haven't I? Isn't this it? If where _she_ is she knows
to-night that I never loved her--sometimes even hated her--then she
knows that I'll try to pay it back to her in the only way I can. I'll
bring her mother here to live with me.... My God! and I wanted so the
_freedom_ of it all again, just to feel _free_.... No, this
is it--my way--I'll take it. It's what I owe Ida. I can't reason it
out logically and I dare say the world would put it straight that I
didn't have to do this--take her mother--but I will. I wouldn't feel
right about it in this life or in any next if I didn't. Yes, that's
the reparation."

Haldane's last thought before he slept that night, as it was in the
fortnight before she came, was, "What is Ida's mother like? I wonder
if--she is like--like Ida?"

       *       *       *       *       *

It had been six months--a whole winter and more--since Ida's mother
had come to live with Leonard Haldane. And altogether unexpectedly it
had been, for Haldane, quite the most beautiful winter he had ever
spent. As for Ida's mother--well, when she was alone her eyes were
constantly filling with tears--tears of thankfulness that the Lord had
sent her, in the language of her frequent prayers of gratitude, a son
to stay the declining years of her life--a son to her who had so
wanted a son all these years.

Haldane could never forget that night he had gone, with sharp
misgivings, to the station to meet Mrs. Locke. "I suppose I'm a fool,"
he had muttered, as he paced miserably up and down the draughty, smoky
enclosure where her train, already very late, was to come in. "But
it's my debt to the dead I'm going to pay." He added a moment later:
"What I shall hate most of all, what will be hardest to bear, will be
her endless sympathy. For she won't know--she'll never know--just how
it was between Ida and me."

He was to look for a "little dried-up, frightened woman in a black
bonnet, with a handkerchief in her left hand"--so Mrs. Locke had
written him. Haldane had smiled at the frank characterization--that,
somehow, didn't sound like Ida's spirit in her mother.

She was the last to come out through the iron gate. Almost he had
given her up, she had delayed so long. A little, dried-up, frightened
woman in a black bonnet--that was she. Like a tiny, stray cloud, very
nervous and out of place. Her face was white with fatigue, the
excitement of the journey, and the thought of how she should
meet--ought she to call him Leonard? And when Haldane saw her he
suddenly smiled boyishly--as if there could be such a thing as a
problem over this scared, half-tearful, ridiculously pathetic,
white-haired old woman with a black-bordered handkerchief in her
shaking left hand.

Before he considered it he had said gently, "Well, mother--"

The tears in her eyes welled over as she gasped in a whisper, "My
boy!"

So, after all, there was no awkward, conscious period of adjustment
for the two. They took up their life simply and quite as if it were no
new thing to them both--as if they had come together again after a
long separation. And it was, perhaps, in a way, just that--a coming
together of elements that had long been kept apart. "She's not like
Ida," Haldane kept saying to himself.

"You're just like a mother in a storybook; the kind you always want
when you read about them," Haldane often told her. "You know, I never
had one--one that I remember; mine died so long ago."

"And you--you're--quite my son," she would answer shyly, her voice
trembling with the joy of it. It was such a regret to her that she
hadn't Leonard's readiness of speech and the courage to break down her
reserve--for she wanted to tell him, as she said to herself, just how
she felt, just how good he was to her.

So it was a beautiful winter for them both. Naturally there was the
fact of Ida that had to be faced. That was tremendously hard at first.
He constantly felt her grieving for him, for the failure of all his
hopes, the wreck of all a man holds so precious. And there were all
the details of Ida's sickness and death to be gone over with her
mother--the things she had done just before. How she looked; the
quantity of flowers; even what she wore for her burial. Instinctively
Haldane knew how dear these matters were to her, and he went over them
faithfully, effacing his own bitterness of memory as best he might.
When Mrs. Locke hesitatingly asked him one evening if--if Ida had--had
_said_ anything--left any message for _her_, Haldane's heart
ached for her; Ida had left no message. He softened it as best he
might.

"You see, she didn't know, couldn't know, that--that she was going to
die. It was all so sudden, you know, so awfully sudden."

Mrs. Locke nodded. "Yes--I see. Poor Ida! She did so much for me
always."

After a month or so, quite unconsciously, they ceased to mention Ida.
Haldane, when he thought of it at all--and that with relief--wondered
vaguely why Ida's mother did not talk more about her. "Perhaps it's
because she doesn't want to keep hurting me," he thought it out,
"bless her!"

Gradually the intimacy between Haldane and his mother--for she was
quite that to him--grew into a relation that was as rare as it was
tender. They both felt it keenly. Their talk was all of him, his
affairs, his music. He played to her for hours in the evenings he was
not at the orchestra; when he was teaching in the mornings she would
steal into the room, and sit, sewing, in a corner, listening
gratefully to the dreary routine of his pupils' exercises. She seemed
never to tire of "being near Leonard." And always she was asking,
"Won't you play a little from _the opera_, Leonard?"

Once she said to him, with her timid smile: "It's like heaven, having
so much music all the time. Seems as if all my life I've been just
starved to death for tunes."

Haldane bent and kissed her white hair. "Well, mother," he laughed,
"it's quite a real piece of heaven to have you around the place."

"You're spoiling me," she cried; "how can I ever go back to Iowa?"

"Who said Iowa in this house?" he demanded of her. "You're to stay
always--as long as you can stand me--_always_."

"My son!" she kept murmuring after he had gone, as if she loved the
words on her lips. "He's just the kind of son I used to hope I might
have," she sighed. "I don't see--it's so strange why he's so good to
me. I'm not at all like _her_. Ida was so sensible always, and
I'm not at all--Ida always told me I couldn't take care of myself,
that I was very foolish. I don't see why Leonard is so kind to me. It
must be just because I'm her mother. Leonard must have loved her so
much, and understood her. Poor Ida!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The spring had broken through its first slender greenish film into the
freshness of its young beauty. The sense of faint, far voices
endlessly calling was in the air. Again the windows of the little flat
were opened and again the afternoon sun warmed to golden green the new
growth of leaves on the horse-chestnut in the rectangular enclosure
outside.

Haldane had never felt so splendidly the birth of new things--in
himself and in the world. All the morning he had been constantly
picking up his violin, playing what he called his
"Spring-feelings"--unrhythmic wild snatches of melody.

"God! it's good, good, _good_," he cried, throwing back his head.
"Good to have lived out of it all into this."

"Mother," he called presently, "what on earth are you doing there all
alone? Come out and play with me. You've looked over those old books
and papers, spring-cleaned your old closets, too long. If you don't
come out at once, I'll come and drag you out bodily--I will indeed."

He ran to her door in another moment, and flinging it open wide, he
called: "If you will insist on being led forth--Why, mother, what is
it? what's the matter? _What is it?_ Are you _ill_? Why--"

She sat on a low stool drawn up close to her bed. Her hands were
clasped straight out before her over a little book bound in faded
imitation red leather--a little book Haldane, on the instant, with
curious alertness, knew as one of Ida's old school note-books. On her
face was a look so bewildered, so grieved, so terror-stricken almost,
that Haldane suddenly ceased to speak. She raised her eyes to him with
the pleading of a hurt animal. For a time neither uttered a word. And
then, all at once, it seemed to Haldane as if he _knew_. His gaze
fell hesitatingly. When, at last, he spoke, it was in a very gentle
voice.

"Mother--is it anything we can talk out together--now?"

She shook her head dumbly, the tears gathering in her eyes. "Oh,
Lennie!" she whispered, finally, as if he were a little boy. "It isn't
true, is it?"

Haldane did not reply. She reached out the little red book to him
slowly. "You'd--you'd better read it. I--found it--this afternoon."

He took the book, without wonder, and went back, softly closing the
door on her. Unconsciously he sat down before the little, cheap, oak
desk--Ida's desk--and began to read. It was, perhaps, two hours
afterward when he had finished. The room was dark and very still.

"So she knew," he said, slowly. "After all, she knew. And I never
guessed." His head sank down on his arms.

It was a curious inconsistency in the mind of Ida Locke which had
prompted her to write in that red-covered note-book just what she had
written. No one would have guessed the secret strain of introspection
in her, nor guessed the impulse which led her to put into writing her
hidden life. Unless, indeed, that introspection and that impulse are
always part of the intuitions of love--yielded to or not, as may be.
The entries were scattered--as if put down when the stress of feeling
had overcome her. They ranged over the two years of their married
life. In each one she had seemed, with a startling lucidity, to have
apprehended exactly her husband's state of mind toward her. She had
written freely, baldly, without excess of sentimentality. "I know he
hates me sometimes; I see it in his eyes." Again: "He is hideously
kind." "He lives in a mental room that I can't break into." In another
place it ran: "Why is it? I am his mental equal; his superior in
education. I'm his wife and he asked me to marry him. And yet he can't
bear to have me near him. He hates me to-day." "I'm afraid," she wrote
again, "how Leonard will regard our child. If he should hate it, too.
Perhaps we shall both not live through it." And so it ran on, with
awful candor.

"I'm so sorry she had to know," Haldane sighed again and again. "And,
now, what's to be the end of it? What will Ida's mother do? Lord God,
she'll never forgive me--never."

       *       *       *       *       *

Late that night Mrs. Locke came in. Haldane had scarcely stirred from
his chair. The note-book lay open before him on the desk. He looked at
her compassionately, for now his thoughts were all for the shrinking,
hurt woman beside him. She had never before seemed so fragile, so
dependent, and yet he could not but mark in her hearing a new
resolution of forces, a dignity as of a stern decision. Haldane did
not wait for her to question.

"You will want to know," he began, wearily, "if all this written here
is true. All this Ida wrote down. You want to ask me that? It's--it's
all true, quite true." He waited, but she gave no sign. "Quite true;
I--I suppose it wouldn't be worth while for me to explain things now.
You will think I've lied to you all along. In a way, I have. No, I
suppose you don't want to hear me make futile explanations, excuses."

"If there--there is anything to be said, Leonard, you had better say
it--now," she answered, nervously, twisting her handkerchief in her
fingers.

He hesitated painfully. "Everything I might say seems to be trying to
shift the load from my shoulders on to--another's," he said, at last.
"It was a mistake--that's all. A mistake for us. Before it began--our
marriage--it was different, but afterward--She was very good to me;
looked after me and all that, but--Oh, I'm afraid I'm only hurting you
the worse by saying all this. You won't, you can't understand. Let it
be that it was all my fault. It was, it was. Believe that, please....
And I know you won't want to stay here with me any longer--after this.
I quite understand that. A man who--who felt as she wrote it all down
here--such a man you wouldn't, you couldn't--" He stopped hopelessly.
"I can't bear to have you go," he burst out, impulsively. "Where will
you go? Back there to Iowa?"

She nodded sorrowfully.

"And have no more music? And--and--oh, it's cruel. _Why_ had you
to find it out? It didn't matter anyway when it was all done with. Why
_did_ you have to know? ... And you haven't any money. You must
let me help you. Let me do that--just that. Can't you forget it all
enough for that? Surely you've liked me--for what you've liked in me,
let me help you. Great heavens, if I thought of you alone out there,
without money--_Must_ you go?"

Haldane was fast losing control of himself. With an effort he pulled
himself together and tried to smile.

"You're right to go," he said. "Right. You wouldn't want anything to
do with me now."

He looked up at her, though loath to meet her eyes. There was a
wonderful pity in her face. "Don't!" he cried, sharply, not
understanding.

"I want to say this," he broke out again, almost roughly. "I never
guessed that she knew how I felt toward her. I wasn't cruel or
beastly--I was kind. They say that's cruelty, too. I tried--my God!
how I tried!--never to let her know the truth. That's all I can say
for myself; ... you'd better go."

She was so silent that at last he faced her again. She was crying
softly, and, it appeared, without bitterness. Haldane stared at her
curiously.

"I wanted to know that--that last you said," Mrs. Locke gasped, with
difficulty. "I--I--I've been thinking it all over in my room. It's very
hard to say--please let me go on with it just as I can, I--I've said I
wanted to hear that last. But I knew it--in my heart--all the time.
I knew you couldn't be cruel to a living thing. And--and--somehow--it
changed--things. I've had such a terrible struggle all alone. I've
tried to pray over it and--oh, I'm afraid I'm very wrong and very
wicked--I almost know I am." Her voice sank to a whisper. "But--oh,
Leonard ... somehow I just seemed to feel inside me just how you felt,
just how--it was with you those two years. Oh, it's a dreadful thing
to say, isn't it? Poor Ida! She was so good to me, and yet sometimes--"
The trembling old woman's voice faltered and broke.

Haldane's eyes were full of tears. A great light was slowly breaking
for him. He dared not speak.

"Don't think I'm a wicked old woman, Leonard; I never even
guessed--till I came here--how I felt. And then you were like a
son--my son--the boy I wanted so, and--I loved the music so, and being
with you, more than anything I ever knew--it doesn't seem as if--"

Haldane put his hand on hers gently, "As if you could go away now?"

She turned to him with a little sad smile, and in her face was a sweet
dignity.

"Yes, I cannot go--now, my son."






THE YEARLY TRIBUTE

BY ROSINA HUBLEY EMMET


"For science is a cruel mistress. She exacts a yearly tribute of flesh
and blood like the dragons of ancient pagan mythology."

The eminent scientist paused momentarily here and viewed the earnest
young faces before him. In this poetic figure of speech he saw fit to
present to them the hardships of the life they had chosen to embark
upon. It was a hot June morning, and the heavy scent of syringa came
in through the high uncurtained windows of the lecture-hall. All the
students stared with reverence at this distinguished stranger, who had
come a long distance to speak to the graduating class; and one of its
members sighed deeply and turned his eyes to the window, and watched
some maple leaves moving languidly against the blue sky. The lecturer
heard his sigh, saw him fall into abstraction, realized the peculiar
character of his face; and marked him as a man who would serve to the
end, possibly becoming one of the victims of that cruel mistress.

       *       *       *       *       *

Pilchard and Swan had stopped to rest in the middle of the plaza. The
black Mexican night was falling and a few stars blossomed in the sky,
but there was no abatement in the heat which had held since sunrise;
rather, indeed, the thickness of the atmosphere seemed intensified.
The two Americans, who had spent a whole year in Mexico and become
accustomed to the climate, attempted to make themselves comfortable.
Pilchard sank to a dilapidated bench and lighted a cigarette; and
Swan, not having even sufficient spirit to smoke, stretched himself
bodily on the flat stones which paved the plaza, and placed his old
hat upon his upturned face.

Both young men seemed depressed, and without speaking they listened to
the moaning of the ocean which heaved and glistened in the distance;
and when Pilchard finally said, "So poor Murphy is gone too," and Swan
responded, "His troubles are over, poor fellow," it showed how
completely they had been absorbed in the same thought.

"And Mulligan last week," Pilchard continued, "and all the others who
went before, and Peele taken sick this afternoon. Swan, we're the only
white men left."

"And we've only got ten days left."

"Oh, I guess we can do it, so long as we're out of the swamp."

"So long as the swamp isn't in us."

They were alluding to the railroad they had come to Mexico to build.
The time-limit given in the contract would expire in ten days, and it
would be a race to get the tracks through the town and down to the new
docks in that time. Swan, whenever he thought of it, became restless,
and now he sat up with a jerk, and his old hat slipped off his face.
Even in that dim light Swan's ugliness was apparent. He measured over
six feet and was loose-jointed and ungainly; he had big flat feet, and
big bony, capable hands; and his features, which were big and bony
too, seemed in proportion to nothing but his general ungainliness.
Swan was an inventive Yankee with no background and no tradition. He
could not even claim the proverbial Connecticut farm. His people had
been dreary commercials in a middle-sized New Hampshire town, and he
had worked his way through college to fit himself for a scientific
career. His memory of his deceased parents was so colorless that it
seemed to Swan as if they had never existed, and his contacts had been
so dull, his outlook so dreary, that he had almost no conception of
beauty. His plain college room, where, by the hour, he had worked out
mathematical problems, and a grimy engine-room (which was the next
stage of his advancement), where he had stood in a greasy black shirt,
surrounded by an unceasing whir of machinery, and bossed a gang of
men--these had been the things which had substituted for him romance
and passion and life; and finally, when Pilchard, a college friend,
had persuaded him to come down to Mexico and build a railroad, he had
taken off his greasy black shirt and gone, principally because this
was such a big undertaking, and it would undoubtedly in the end lead
to something very much bigger.

The company which was causing the railroad to be built had established
large exporting-houses in San Francisco, which sent down certain
articles of merchandise to Mexico, and the railroad was designed to
transport this freight from one of the southwestern seaport towns to
the city of Mexico. The undertaking included the erection of docks
with swinging elevators to lift the freight from the vessels and
deposit it in the cars, and as the pay was very large and Pilchard was
an adventurous soul, he undertook the job when it was offered to him,
and going to the manager's office, impressed him with his boldness and
ability, and signed his name to the contracts without reading them
through; then gayly, and feeling no uneasiness, he buttoned his coat
over the neatly folded paper and went to see Swan.

Swan, in a greasy black shirt, was in the engine-room, hard at work,
and he was just about to reprimand one of the men when Pilchard came
in. Although it was early in May, a spell of precocious heat had taken
New York by the throat, and what with the whir of rapidly turning
wheels, and the smell of hot machine-oil and perspiring men, there was
something filthy and degraded about the atmosphere. Swan suddenly
realized this, although it was the only atmosphere he knew anything
about. Glancing upward, he saw a little patch of blue sky through the
top of one of the grimy windows ... a white cloud sailed past ... and
then another ... something akin to longing welled in his heart,
something like a wave of despair and hope, a desire to lift himself
into a higher and less degraded world.... He looked toward the door
and saw Pilchard, and crossing the room, he greeted him warmly and
read the contract Pilchard pulled from his pocket.

"That's a queer business," said Swan, when he had finished.

"How so?"

"Man alive, haven't you read what you've signed your name to?"

"Certainly I've read it."

"And you think you can put the job through in a year?"

"Why not?" asked Pilchard, with his "cock-sure" smile.

Swan, like every one else, was taken in by this smile, and to convince
himself he read the contract again, out loud this time, and in a
thoughtful way. Pilchard listened.

The contract guaranteed that a railroad covering two hundred and fifty
miles, between the city of Mexico and the little seaport of Zacatula,
on the Pacific Ocean, would be built and completed in one year's time,
work starting on the 25th of June. Docks and freight-elevators were
included in the work, and if the tracks were not in fit condition for
the trains to run by the date specified, every penny of the very large
pay would be forfeited by the builders. A strange contract, indeed!
Pilchard, however, as he heard it read, betrayed by no sign that he
was as much surprised as Swan.

"Well," said Swan, looking up and meeting that "cock-sure" smile, "you
think you can do it in a year?"

"I'm certain I can."

"Of course," Swan continued, not yet convinced, "it's the worst
country on earth; full of swamp and yellow fever."

"I'll run in a gang of Mexican Indians to lay the ties. They can stand
their own climate."

"But you'll have to take down some white men, too, good fellows who
know the business. You can't be the only man to do the bossing. It'd
kill you."

All this time Pilchard was closely watching Swan, and almost
unconsciously something had been growing in his mind. Swan had an
ugly, resolute face, and endurance seemed to be expressed in every
line of his body. Behind him the engine roared, and spit steam, and
ground out the produce of a great city factory; his face and hands
were grimy and covered with grease, and the black cinders around his
deep-set eyes gave him a terrible, deathly look. Pilchard saw
instantly that he must have Swan to do the work. He must take him down
to Mexico or else the railroad would never be built. Swan would come,
too, because there was a look of tragic fatigue in his deep-set eyes,
an expression of sick nausea in the lines about his mouth, that showed
how gladly he would change, how completely he had come to the end of
his hopes here; so Pilchard suggested with a careless smile that they
go down to Mexico together. "Of course," he said, "I don't say that it
mightn't be better for me to do it alone--two heads to a job, you
know, isn't always a good arrangement; but you've got a pretty mean
berth here. It'll take years for you to get a rise, and you're wasting
your youth and health shut up with this filthy gang of men. This job
of mine would push you right along, and you'll get others like it.
Better come."

Swan reflected. His work was the only thing on earth that he cared
for, and to progress in his work, to keep putting through more and
more difficult jobs, was what he had always aimed to do. But had he a
right to take advantage of Pilchard's generosity? He glanced around
the room, conscious of the incessant chattering of the different parts
of the engine, which he must keep going in order to turn out the
produce of a great city factory. He was no more here than one of the
many parts of that engine, and if some day he should be absorbed into
the midst of those whirring wheels and ground up like corn, who would
ever be the wiser?

So he went.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Had a letter from the company today," Pilchard observed, suddenly.

"That so?"

"They're going to send a fellow down from Frisco on the steamer that
touches on the 25th. Everything plays into their hands. Steamer
reaches here the day the contract expires."

"Well, that's all right."

"They request that I meet the fellow and show him around."

"That's easy, too."

Pilchard breathed smoke through his nose in his self-possessed way,
and said nothing more, until Swan suddenly broke out:

"Well, I for one won't be sorry to get out of this hole. I'll get the
job done, of course, but we've just had a terrible setback. I think
Peele's dying."

"Lord!"

"I came away from him only half an hour ago. He may last through the
night, but I doubt it. Anyhow, if he lives or dies, we're devilish
pressed for time. I'm beginning to think we'll have to work at night,
too."

"At night?"

"There's a full moon. Here she comes now." Swan looked at the full
moon, which, as the darkness increased, grew in radiance.

Pilchard breathed more smoke through his nose, then said with a sigh:
"That's hard luck, Swan. I'm sorry."

"Hey?"

"And yet it's a lucky thing that you're as strong as you are. It's a
lucky thing you haven't got the responsibilities at home that I have."

"I don't see what you mean."

"Why, you know I'm engaged! I'm as good as married. That poor girl's
got everything ready for the wedding. You met her that day last year
you came up to Maine before we left New York."

"Yes, I met her."

"And you remember how much she thought of me?" Pilchard spoke slowly.
It was impossible to tell why he did so. Was it because he did not
care to discuss the woman he loved with an outsider like Swan, or was
it because he was going on tiptoe, because he wondered what he must
say next, because he was waiting, hoping that something unexpected
would develop?

Swan, however, dropped the question of Pilchard's marriage.

"You mean, I suppose, that you won't work at night."

"I can't. I'm not well enough."

Swan grunted and sighed and stretched all his limbs, shaking his great
shoulders as if he were trying to shake out the ague. Then he cleared
his throat again and turned to Pilchard.

"See here, Pilchard, it's time we came to some understanding."

"Understanding?" Pilchard queried in a surprised voice.

"Yes, about this job. About the pay--m--not so much the pay as the
credit. This job ought to give a man a name. It's been a big piece of
engineering and devilish hard work to put it through. I've planned the
whole thing and watched every stroke of what's been done, and I
deserve at least half the credit, if not all."

Swan spoke in a brutal, masterful way. Perhaps he realized as he did
so how completely the acknowledgment of his services depended on
Pilchard's generosity. Pilchard alone had signed the contract, and
Swan's existence was no more to the company than the existence of the
other workmen. Moreover, the eleven mechanics they had brought down
had all been carried off by fever, and there was no one else who, in
case of necessity, could testify to the splendid work Swan had done,
practically alone. All this was in Pilchard's mind as well as Swan's,
and all this suddenly showed Pilchard how completely Swan was in his
power. He must play a careful game.

"Why, what the devil do you mean?" he asked, speaking rather angrily.

"What do I mean? I mean that this is all too unbusinesslike. It's too
vague. I'm risking my life to put this business through, and I want to
get what I deserve. It's the biggest thing I've ever done, and I won't
do it for nothing."

"For nothing? Man alive, you're almost accusing me of dishonesty! I
told you when we started out that I'd give you half the pay. If I'd
ever supposed you didn't trust my word I'd have had it drawn up on
paper. And as for the credit, you deserve it all, and you'll get it
all ... and that's all."

Pilchard ended with a self-conscious laugh, and got up to go indoors
and take a few drinks before he went to bed. He stood for a moment,
uncertainly, before Swan, wondering with a strange distrust, which
lately had been growing upon him, what Swan really thought. Swan was
so silent and reserved, and he worked with such unflinching constancy,
that Pilchard often felt as if he too must be developing some plan. It
was fortunate, he told himself, that there were only ten days more.
His nerves could not have held out much longer; but after he had
filled himself with several drinks and was sitting in gauzy pajamas
beside an open window, things began to look brighter. Ten days might
develop unheard-of things. To work all night on the borders of a swamp
in this rainy season, which is almost certain death for a white
man--Pilchard closed his eyes and peacefully slept....

Swan continued to sit on the bench, and throwing back his head, looked
at the sky. A full moon swung above him, huge and tropical and red,
seeming to garnish the black depths that lay behind it and that great
black mouth that opened immeasurably into the west. All his actual
surroundings faded away, and, as is often the case with men at these
moments, he thought of a woman that he had seen once and had never
forgotten.

That cool summer day just a year ago that he had spent on the coast of
Maine, whither he had gone to see Pilchard about some final
arrangements for their journey to Mexico--Pilchard had introduced him
to the girl he was going to marry, and it had somehow happened that he
and she had taken a short walk together along a cliff where some pines
were growing, and which looked forlornly enough across the solitary
ocean. Nothing but the most commonplace words had passed between them;
they had talked of Pilchard and his enterprise, and had stopped to
look at the view, and had gazed out over the rolling waves. He had
scarcely dared look at his companion, but once he had helped her over
some rocks, and he remembered that her foot had slipped, and for an
instant her body had swayed against his. He remembered, too, that she
had pale cheeks and dreamy eyes, and a slim hand laden with rings that
held back her skirts. This slight experience had made a changed man of
him. New senses existed for him, new hopes for the future that turned
him dizzy, a splendid and deeper insight into life. The sordid
realities of his life no longer claimed all his thoughts; they were
beautified by rare and exquisite dreams, and by repetitions of that
strange welling of hope and despair which had come to him in the grimy
engine-room. After all, there were things in the world other than
engines and boilers and steel tracks; there were plenty of uses for
him besides calculating and experimenting and bossing a lot of filthy
men. He, too, could serve and wait and hope and ... die!

       *       *       *       *       *

Swan spent the remainder of that night with Peele, and as the sick man
was still alive at sunrise, and Swan was obliged to oversee the men,
he swallowed some coffee and went off, leaving Pilchard in charge.
About noon Pilchard came out to him with a white face.

"What's the matter?" Swan asked, full of apprehension.

"Peele died before you'd been gone an hour."

"We must see to having him buried at once."

"He's underground already."

"Where we'll all be if we stay much longer."

"Where I feel as if I ought to be," Pilchard groaned.

"What d'ye mean?"

"I mean that I'm about ready to give up. If it wasn't for you I would
give up. I'm as weak as water. I just saw Peele die, and that finished
me. Ugh! It was awful!"

And Pilchard, who certainly was pale, drew a flask from his pocket and
took a long drink. He seemed to drink to his own weakness. He seemed
to glory in the fact that he had given up, and that he knew Swan never
would.

Swan realized this and looked wearily across the swamp they had just
covered. It was all his work. A narrow mound of solid earth ran back
as far as eye could reach, and on it two shining steel rails glittered
in the blazing sun. On either side lay wet, poisonous ground covered
with deadly growths and exuding fearful odors and devitalizing forces
which even the heat could not dissipate. In that noonday light which
burned and burned and made no impression on the moisture, Swan's face
was wilted like a white flower which is dead and turning yellow. His
eyes, too, were like things once living and now dead. The muscles
around his mouth twitched like electric wire.

"It isn't possible for me to finish it alone," he told himself. He
knew that he could finish the job by working both night and day, but
could he stand the strain? Had he, after all, a stronger physique than
any other white man had ever had before? He leaned far back as if he
were trying to fold himself up, and then bent forward in the same
manner, trying, with a desperation like death, to relieve the weakness
that was numbing his limbs. He suddenly felt dizzy as he looked at the
hot distance where some big leaves were waving--dizzy as he knew that
he must fail.

"By God!" he exclaimed, striking the pile of dirt. "By God! I'll do it!"

Pilchard put on his hat and smiled. He had been waiting for this. "If
you say you will, I bet you will!" he told Swan. "That's why you'll
always come out ahead." As he said this he looked intently at Swan,
who was still sitting on the pile of dirt. He noticed for the first
time the peculiar look in his eyes and the trembling of his whole
body.

Swan sat silent. He saw the dark perspiring bodies of the Indians who
were laying ties, and his lifelong ambition to be a great engineer
suddenly presented itself to him in the old strong unemotional way.

"For science is a cruel mistress. She exacts her yearly tribute of
flesh and blood like the dragons of ancient pagan mythology."

This had been said by an eminent scientist who had addressed his
graduating class. Swan had heard it then and remembered it now. He
clearly remembered that hot June morning ten years ago. Some young
maple leaves had made a lovely pattern on the blue northern sky
outside the uncurtained windows of the lecture-hall. He remembered
that he had looked through the window and vowed that he would never
give up.

He organized two bands of men, one to work by moonlight and one by
sunlight; but it was necessary for him to overlook them both, day and
night, so it happened that there were just two hours in the
twenty-four when he could find any rest. This was when the daily
tropical storm broke, late in the afternoon, and all the workmen
scampered for shelter. Swan crawled into a shanty the men had put up
to hold their tools, and wrapping himself in a blanket, slept until
the storm was over. That is to say, for three or four times he slept,
but gradually he found it impossible to get any rest, and nobody knew
the agonies he endured fighting off the fever, which he felt had
marked him for its own. He never looked forward longer than twelve
hours, thinking always that the next day would decide his fate, and
the next day never did. "If I can keep it off till to-morrow, I guess
it won't come back," he repeated, mechanically, standing in the
moonlight and dosing himself and bossing the men. But in the morning
there was never any abatement in those deadly symptoms which told him
that the period of incubation would soon be over; and it almost seemed
to him as if his cruel mistress was saving him in some miraculous way
to complete her work, for it was not until the evening of the ninth
day, when the railroad was finished and the last man paid off, that
his temperature rose to fever-heat, his pulse quickened, and his
tongue became congested, and this demon of the tropical swamp claimed
him for its own.

Early on the morning of the 25th, a Pacific mail-steamer touched at
the little port of Zacatula, and a man was put off who came down from
San Francisco to do business for the company in the event of the
railroad not being completed. He was greatly astonished when Pilchard
showed him that the last day's work had been done.

"Then," said the agent, mopping his perspiring bald head, "we may say
that you've carried out the contract to the letter, to the very
minute. You say you only paid off the men last night?"

"Yes," answered Pilchard, with his engaging smile, and casting a
possessive glance down the front of his white trousers. "And it was an
awful rush to get the job done." But in spite of Pilchard's sleek
figure and social smile, he looked pale that morning. The hot sunlight
that bathed the end of the dock met no responsive glow in his cheeks.

The agent hung his handkerchief over the top of a post to dry it, and
looked more closely at his companion. "Anything the matter?" he asked,
kindly. "You certainly haven't lost anything on the job?"

"No--no." Pilchard brought out that ever-ready smile that was so
delightful. "But it's about time to go home. This is a terrible
climate. We've lost every white man that came down, eleven all told,
except myself and--and--one other, who's dying over in that shed now.
Maybe--maybe--he's dead--" Pilchard jerked with his thumb towards a
shanty just where the docks joined the land....

       *       *       *       *       *

In this rude shanty, knocked together by the workmen to hold their
tools, on a heap of sacks and blankets, Swan lay as he had dropped the
night before. Pilchard had found him there, and the full moon coming
in at the wide opening had revealed a fearful sight--Swan in the
throes of terrific fever, his face scarlet, his eyes ferrety and
congested, and his swollen tongue lolling between his lips. When he
saw Pilchard he asked in a strange voice for water. Pilchard brought
him some and felt his forehead. It seemed on fire.

"Pilchard," began Swan, in a deliberate voice, as if he were trying to
fight off the delirium, "the swamp got into me, after all. I've taken
the fever."

Pilchard, appalled by the terrible sight before him, and the things it
suggested, which he could not help but see, leaned against the rude
wall, and for once his self-possession deserted him. "Swan," he
faltered, "Swan--for God's sake--"

"Hush," Swan interposed, in that same deliberate voice. "Don't lose
your head. I'm keeping mine. Am I talking sense?"

"Yes, yes, Swan. Perfectly correctly."

"Then I'll tell you what to do." Swan spoke more and more slowly as
the fire mounted to his brain and besieged it. "There's every symptom
of fever. You can't deny that."

"Symptoms, Swan? I don't see any. You're worn out, poor fellow. That's
all."

"Then what's this?" Swan opened his mouth and showed his scarlet
tongue. "And this?" He tore open the breast of his shirt and showed
the congested condition of his skin. "But I'll fight death as I fought
the fever! I'm not going to die. There's too much for me to do in the
world! I'll be a great engineer. I'll make her proud. I vowed it when
we looked out over the waves and I wanted to take her in my arms. See
here!" and suddenly seizing a pickaxe from the ground beside him, he
swung it around his head and sent it whizzing past Pilchard's ear, out
through the opening of the shanty. "I've got my muscle and I've got my
brain and I'll keep my life. I deserve to live. I deserve it as
payment for putting the job through. I'll keep my wife here, too, here
in the engine-room, with the pines behind us, and I can look after the
men then. Who's that leaning against the wall? Pilchard? Poor fool!
Why did you boast you were the only man who had ever loved a woman?"

"Me boast! Heaven forbid," faltered Pilchard.

"Then," shouted Swan, suddenly sitting up and striking out with both
arms, "take these things away. All these little black things that are
pouring over me. It's a regular shower. It must be a whole city. No!
No! They're sparks! They're fire! They burn! They burn! Take the
wheels away from me! They're grinding me like corn--oh, Lord! it's
heavy, it's heavy! There, there! It crushes me! Now, now it's over.
This is--death--" And he sank back, oppressed by a sudden, and
overwhelming load of oblivion.

Swan grew worse toward morning, and though the disease had only
attacked him at sunset the night before, so rapid and terrible were
its onslaughts that by the time the sun rose a complete physical
collapse had occurred. His pulse had fallen below normal, and his skin
assumed a strange yellow hue, the color of a lemon, and in these signs
and the constant hiccough which convulsed the death-stricken frame
Pilchard guessed properly what the termination must be. The end would
come easily. Swan had ceased to suffer.

When light crept gray and silent into the shanty, Pilchard stood and
looked at Swan's prostrate form. No sound came to them but the gentle
lapping of the waves. Sober as a dove Day hovered in the sky, and that
solemn change which is Death was somewhere near, hiding and waiting;
and Pilchard and Death and the breaking Day were for one second alone.
And Pilchard was overwhelmed with terror. Some spectre had seized him,
and he could not shake it off. He looked once more at the dying man,
at his closed eyes and his still body, momentarily convulsed by the
final signs of life, like a great piece of machinery when the steam
power is gradually running down. Then he turned and broke away, to
take a bath and to take a drink and then go to meet the steamer from
San Francisco....

       *       *       *       *       *

"Eleven? You don't say. Fever, I suppose?"

"Yes. We tackled three swamps on our way down from Mexico."

"That so? Well, it's worth some sacrifice. It's a good job. I wouldn't
'a' undertaken it myself."

"I wouldn't do it again."

They walked down the dock....

Swan opened his eyes and looked through the wide opening of the shanty
out to where the blazing sun struck the hot water of the little
harbor. He hardly remembered where he was. Oh yes! He must get up and
go down-town. In a minute, when he was fully awake. And he closed his
eyes again and heard the accustomed whir of machinery, and knew that
he was in the engine-room. One of the workmen needed to be spoken to;
he was the filthiest of the lot, and Swan was the only man who could
control him. Suddenly Swan opened his eyes again and saw that this
same workman had entered the shanty and was standing beside him. He
instantly recognized the man's greasy black shirt.

"For science is a cruel mistress," the man said. "She exacts her
yearly tribute of flesh and blood."

But, singularly enough, these words meant something entirely
different. Swan looked curiously at the workman and saw that he too
was really somebody else. The man smiled and, leaning over, gently
raised him up, and for the first time in his life Swan felt himself
encircled by a woman's arms, and he tasted a strange, delicious joy
awakening deep within him that knowledge of reciprocal love which
slumbers in the heart of every man.

"And you did it all for me," she said.

"Did what?" he asked her.

"Built the road?"

"Yes," he whispered, closing his eyes again, filled with this new
strange joy.

"And now we'll go home together to the North, where the maple leaves
make a lovely pattern against the blue sky."

He knew nothing for a minute, and then she spoke again:

"Well, it's a good job. I'll see that you get pushed along. The
company 'll have plenty more work; big pay, too. This business has
made your name. You're a wonderful fellow! You say you worked night as
well as day?"

"For eight days, yes."

It was Pilchard's voice. He was talking to another man. They were
leaning heavily against the rough wall of Swan's shanty. A horrible
sensation came over the sick man, that sensation experienced by men
who emerge from some unnatural mental condition, who are recalled by
one sentence, often by one word, which acts like a key and opens again
to their terrified vision the horrible realities of actual life. Swan
raised his arms to bring that woman's face close to his, but he could
not find it. He opened his eyes, and tears of weakness watered his
cheeks. He was alone in the hovel knocked together by the men to hold
their tools, and the work for which he had given his life was being
claimed outside by another man....

The agent leaned against the side of the shanty, gazing reflectively
at his steamer, which was anchored half a mile from shore. "I'm going
clear round to New York. You'd better get aboard and come with me," he
proposed to Pilchard, to whom he had taken a fancy. "Good Lord!" he
suddenly shouted, leaping forward. "Is this the shed where you said a
workman was dying of fever? Let's get out quick or we'll take the
infection."

But Pilchard, pale as death, put up a warning hand. "Yes, let's clear
out--let's get to sea before I go crazy! But--but--don't speak so
loud. _He may hear_!"

He had heard every word. His faculties, numb with death, sprang
instantly into life. He leaped to his feet and left the shanty,
momentarily endowed with his full strength, and facing the two men,
spoke three times: "My work! My work! My work!" His eyes were on
Pilchard all the time, and that look pierced like a sword; it
penetrated to the very foundations of his being....

       *       *       *       *       *

Pilchard caught the body as it fell and lowered it to the ground, and
then looked at the agent with a scared face to see how much he knew.
The agent had leaped still farther away, and now was crouching, livid
with fear, before this man whose last words had been words of
delirium. No, he knew nothing. Pilchard alone knew the extent of his
own deceit, which dead lips could never disclose. He alone knew of
that half-formed idea he had not dared to mature, which had come to
him a year ago when he looked at Swan's resolute face in the
engine-room; and he alone in all the world could ever know of the
terror which had possessed him at daybreak in the shanty when he had
turned in a panic and run away--from what? ...






A MATTER OF RIVALRY

BY OCTAVE THANET


It was the fifth afternoon of St. Kunagunda's fair. An interlude of
semi-rest had come between the clearing up last night's debris of
crowd and traffic, which had filled the morning, and the renewed crowd
and traffic that would come with the lamps. The tired elderly women in
charge of the supper had sunk into chairs before their clean linen and
dazzling white stone-china dishes and fresh bunches of lilacs. The
pretty young girls at the "fancy table" were laughing and prattling
rather loudly with two amiable young men who had been tacking
home-made lace handkerchiefs and embroidered "art centres" in the
vacant spaces left on the pink cambric wall by the departure of last
night's purchases. A comely matron kept guard simultaneously over the
useful but not perilously alluring wares of the "household table" and
the adjacent temptations of the flower-stand and the candy-booth. The
last was indeed fair to see, having a magnificent pyramid of pop-corn
balls and entrancing heaps of bright-colored home-made French candy;
and round and round its delights prowled a chubby and wistful boy,
with hands in his penniless pockets, waiting for the chancellor of the
exchequer.

Across the hall, the walls whereof were lavishly decked with red,
white, and blue festoons of cambric, and had the green and gold of
Erin's flag intertwined with the yellow and black of Germany, stood a
table which had been the centre of interest for four nights, but which
now was entirely deserted. There was no glory of color or pomp of
bedizenment about it; nothing more taking to the eye than a ballot-box
and a small show-case (the contents of the latter draped in newspapers
at the present) and a neatly lettered sign above a blackboard, to one
side. The sign simply demanded, "Vote Here!" The blackboard in less
trim script announced that "For most popular business man" Mr. Timothy
G. Finnerty had 305 votes, and three or four other candidates so few
that there was no interest in deciphering the chalk figures; and that
"For most popular young lady" Miss Norah Murray had 842 votes, and
Miss Freda Berglund had 603. At intervals some one of the score of
people in the hall would saunter up to the show-case or to the
blackboard, to peer into the one or to study the figures on the
other--although, really, there was no one in the hall who did not know
every line on the board, and who had not seen both the gold watch and
the gold-headed cane of the show-case. Two women came from different
quarters of the room at the same instant to look at the blackboard.
One was a comely dame in a silken gown that rustled and glittered with
jet. She had just entered the hall, and was a little flushed with the
climb up the stairs. The other was a stunted, wiry little Irish woman
in black weeds of ancient make. She caught sight of the one in silk
attire and paused. The first-comer also paused. Her color deepened;
her head erected itself more proudly on her shoulders. Then she
continued her progress, halting, with a dignified and elegant air,
before the blackboard. The little Irish woman tossed her own head and
appeared about to follow; however, her intention changed at a few
words from the guardian of the apron table. She inclined her head, and
with a glance of scorn at the silken back passed on over to the aprons
and quilts.

The matrons at the supper-table had viewed the incident with interest.
A little sigh of relief or regret rippled about the board.

"'Tis a great pity, that's sure," said one.

"I was there when they had the words," said another. "Mrs. Conner was
saying this voting business was all wrong--"

"Well, sure she ain't far out of the way, with this time," interjected
a voice; "bad blood more'n in this instance it's raised; the whole
town's taking sides on it, and there was two fights yesterday. Why
didn't they jest raffle the watch off decent and peaceable?"

"There's some objects to raffling."

"There's some objects to drinking tea an' coffee, they're so bigoted!
In a raffle there's nobody pays more'n their quarter, or maybe a
dollar or two--"

"And that's it. Look at the power o' money we're gettin', Mrs. O'Brien
dear! We'd _niver_ 'a' got nigh on to four hundred dollars for a
gold watch rafflin'; and well you know it!"

"Maybe," agreed Mrs. O'Brien, grimly, "but neither would we have got
fightin' out of the church and fightin' in it; nor Pat Barnes be
having his head broke. 'Twas hurted awful bad he was. His own mother
told me; and she said Fritz Miller was sick in bed from it; Pat paid
him well for talkin' down ould Ireland; and poor Terry Flanagin, he
lost his job at the saw-mill for maddin' the boss that's Dutch, and
infidel Dutch at that; and there's quarrels on ivery side, God forgive
'em! They talk of it at the stores, and they talk of it at the saloon,
where they do be going too often to talk it; and 'tis a shame an' a
disgrace, down to that saloon the dirty Dutchman--"

"_Whisht_!" three or four mouths puckered in warning, and Mrs.
O'Brien caught the smouldering gaze of a flaxen-haired woman in very
full black skirts and black basque of an antique cut, who had but now
approached the group; with her race's nimbleness of wit she added,
"Sure there's dirty Germans and there's dirty Irish."

"Dere is," agreed the new-comer, with displeasing alacrity, "und some
is in _dis_ parish und dis sodality. I vas seen dem viping dishes
mit a newsbaber. Dot's so. Yesterday night."

An electric thrill ran through the circle, and two matrons, suddenly
very red, answered at once:

"Would you have us wipe them on our _handkerchiefs_? The towels
were all gone!"

"'Twas the awful crowd did it; an' 'twas only some saucers for the
ice-cream."

Mrs. O'Brien waved her hands, very clean, not very shapely, and worn
by many an honest day's toil, persuading and pleading for peace at
once. "Sure," says she, "if you'd wurrk at fairs you'd know that you
can't be doing things like you'd do them at home; and 'twas only for a
minit they wiped the saucers with the paper napkins, clean tishy-paper
napkins, Mrs. Orendorf; 'twas only two or three saucers got wiped with
the newspaper, because the napkins was give out and they was shrieking
and clamoring for saucers; and they're _terrible_, them young
girls! waving their hands and jumpin' an' squealin'. 'Me first, Mrs.
O'Brien!' 'It's _my_ turn, Mrs. O'Brien!' 'Oh, Mrs. O'Brien, wait
on _me_. I've got six people haven't had a bite in half an hour;
and they're so cross!' Till your mind's goin'! No doubt we're makin'
money, but I'm for a smaller crowd an' more good falein'."

"It's for der voting dey kooms," grumbled the German woman, only half
pacified. "Dot vas bad mistake haf dot votin'. Vot vas dot dirty
Deutchman you call him do dot make you so mad?"

"Oh, it wasn't so _much_"--Mrs. O'Brien was still bent on
peace--"he jist telephoned to the next door an' got the returns, as he
called them, and had 'em posted up in his saloon. An' if they was
daughters of mine--I 'ain't got anny daughters, praise God! for since
I seen the way these waiters go on, I'm misdoubtin' I niver could
manage thim--but if they was daughters of mine, 'twould be the sorry
day for me whin they'd their names posted up in a saloon!"

"Meine fader in der old country kept a saloon," said the German woman,
with extreme dryness of accent, "und does you mean to say vun vurd
against Freda Berglund?"

"No, indade," cried Mrs. O'Brien.

"And do _you_ mean to say one word against Norah Murray?" a bolder
partisan on the Celtic side struck in, with a determined air. Three or
four voices murmured assent.

The German stood her ground. "I nefer seen her till yesterday"--thus
without committing direct assault on the Murray supporters she avoided
concession; "all I know of her is dot she nefer haf dot gold vatch!"

"Then you know more than _we_ do. Norah's ahead, and she'll be
_more_ ahead this evening," retorted a Murray voter; "there's
plenty more money to spend for old Ireland--ain't there, ladies?"

"Whisht!" called the peace-maker, in her turn. "Ain't it easy to see
how Mrs. Conner and Mrs. Finn come to words and hard falein' when
we're nigh that same ourselves, we that determined to kape out of the
worry? They are both awful nice, pretty young ladies, and I'm sorry
such a question come up between them; and 'tis _dreadful_,
O'Brien says, the way the young men was spinding their money for Norah
last night. Sure, an' it is that. 'Tis all a bad thing; I think that
like Mrs. Conner."

Mrs. Orendorf was unable to adjust her mental view to the varying
argument; she cast a sullen and puzzled eye on the amiable Irish
woman, and said, grimly:

"It isn't joost yoong mans vot kan spend money. Freda don't have got
no yoong mans, 'cause her Schatz vent to der var und die py der fever
in Florida--"

"Sure he did that!" cried Mrs. O'Brien, "an' 'twas a fine man an' a
fine carpenter he was. Aw, the poor girl! I mind how she looked the
day Company E marched out of town, him turnin' his eyes up sidewises,
an' her white as paper but a-smilin'!"

"God pity her!" chimed in another matron, with the ready response to
sympathy of the Celt. There was a little murmur of assent. Mrs.
Orendorf's swelling crest fell a little; her tone was softer.

"But Freda got a fader, a goot man, _too_ goot and kind; he say
he vunt haf his dochter look down on like she don't got no friends. He
go and mortgage his farm, und he got drie--tree hunterd dollar"--she
tapped the sum off her palm with solemn deliberation--"und he svear he
vill in der votin' all, all spend, an' sie git dot vatch. _Ach
Himmel! er ist verruckt!_ He say he got his pension and he got der
insure on his life, und he 'ain't got nobody 'cept Freda, und he vunt
haf Freda look down on. Und _sie_ don't know. Mans don't can talk
mit him; he git mad. He git mad at _me_ 'cause I talk. _Dot's_ vat
der fine votin' do!"

A little gasp from the audience meant more than agreement; their eyes
ran to Mrs. O'Brien, who faced the German and could see what they saw;
then back of Mrs. Orendorf to the crimson face of a young girl. Mutely
they signalled consternation.

But the young girl did not speak; she walked away quickly, not turning
her head as she passed the voting-booth. She was a pretty girl, with
fresh skin, the whiter and fresher against her abundant silky black
hair and black-lashed violet eyes. She carried her dainty head a
little haughtily, but her soft eyes had a wistful sweetness. Her big
flowered hat and her white gown, brightened by blue ribbons, were as
fresh as her skin and became her rich beauty. She walked with the
natural light grace often seen in girls of her race, whatever their
class. No one could watch the winsome little figure pass and not feel
the charm of youth and frank innocence and immeasurable hopes. More
than one pair of elderly eyes that had seen the glory and freshness of
the dream fade followed it kindly and with a pensive pride.

"Ain't she pretty and slim!" sighed a stout lady in silk (Mrs. Conner,
the most important supporter of the parish, no less), "and think of me
having a waist as little as hers when I was married! But I wish she
hadn't let them drag her into this voting business, for it has caused
trouble."

"Norah's as good and sweet's she's pretty," another elderly woman
replied. "Just to think of that young thing supporting her mother and
educating her brother for a priest with only those pretty little
hands! But she won't be doing it long if the boys can one of them get
their way. And what will we do for a dress-maker then? We never
_did_ have such a stylish one!"

"That's so," Mrs. Conner agreed, cordially; "she's the only one I ever
went to didn't make me look fleshier than I am. But I say it is all
the more shame to make that innocent young creature talked about and
fought over, and have jokes made in the saloon and at the stores, and
quarrels outside the parish and in it, too."

"I guess it has gone farther than we thought," said the other. "Look!
there's Father Kelly and the Vicar-General; they're looking at the
blackboard. I wish I could hear what they are saying."

Norah, indeed, was the only person who did not look at the two quiet
gentlemen before the blackboard, curiously, and wonder the same, since
the voting-booth had become a firebrand menacing the peace of the
parish. Norah was too busy with her own thoughts even to see them; she
only wanted to get past her wellwishers and be alone with her
perplexities. If she did not see her spiritual guides, they saw her,
and Father Kelly's tired face brightened. "You really can't blame the
boys," he said, smiling; "and she's as good a daughter and sister, and
as good a girl, too, as ever stepped."

The Vicar-General smiled faintly, but his eyes were absent. The parish
at Clover Hill was the newest in the diocese--a feeble folk struggling
to build a church, or rather help build it, and holding its first
bazar. There were no rich people of their faith--unless one except the
Conners, who owned the saw-mill and were well-to-do--not even many
poor to club their mites; more disheartening yet, the parish roll held
about an equal proportion of Irish and German names. The Vicar-General
and the Bishop shook their heads at the yoking of the two races; but
there was no church nearer than Father Kelly's, five miles away, and
Father Kelly was not young, and his own great parish growing all the
time; so the parish was made, and a young American priest, who had
more sense than always goes with burning enthusiasm, was sent to guide
the souls at Clover Hill and keep the peace. He kept it until the
fair, when in an evil hour he consented to the voting-booth. He
expected--they all expected--that the excitement would focus on the
gold-headed cane, and that Mr. Michael Conner would lead the poll,
although the popular Finnerty might give him a pretty race for his
honors; the gold watch was but an incidental attraction to please the
young people and attract outsiders; nor was there any suggestion of
names. Alas! Michael Conner, a blunt man, dubbed the voting scheme a
"d--- weather-breeder," and would not give the use of his name; hence
there was a walkaway for Finnerty; and somehow, before any of the
elders quite realized how it began, the Irish girl and the German girl
were unconsciously setting the whole town by the ears, and imported
voters from Father Kelly's were joyously mixing in the fight.

"There's no question about the _need_ of stopping it," said the
Vicar-General, continuing his own train of thought aloud, "but how are
we to do it? The feeling is a perfect dynamite factory now, and the
least stumble on our part will bring an explosion. If we tried to give
them the money back--and you know women have a tight grip on money--we
shouldn't know where to give it. Positively we're like the family
of the poor fellow who had the fit--one doctor said it would kill him
to bring him to his senses, and the other said he would die if they
didn't!"

"And Father Martin safe in his bed with pneumonia!" groaned Father
Kelly.

Norah had found her progress barred by new-comers, and she had fled
back to avoid them. Her cheeks reddened again, and the tears burned
her eyelids; she went past too fast for more than a hurried
salutation, at which Father Kelly shook his head. "That's the girl,
isn't it?" said the Vicar-General. "I'm afraid the situation is a
little too much for her, too; she looks excited."

"Not a bit, not a bit," cried Father Kelly, undaunted; "she's a bit
impulsive, but she's got good sense."

"She wears too much jewelry."

Norah did not hear this; she was out of the hall, speeding back to
Mrs. Conner's gown that awaited her finishing touches. Her mother, a
little creature with sweet temper that made amends for an entire lack
of energy, was rocking over some bastings, sawing the air with her
forefinger as she discoursed on the weighty splendor of the gold watch
and chain, ending in gush of parental complacency, "And Norah says
it'll be as much mine 's hers!"

Norah could hear her chirping on, happily, while she laid away her hat
in the bandbox and girt herself with a protecting apron.

The talk turned her cold. "It ain't only for myself I want it," she
declared to an invisible suggester, "though I _do_ want something
real. I never had a real gold chain, or even a real gold breastpin, in
my life--or a ring. Oh, I did want one!" She looked scornfully at the
gay prism gleaming from her pretty fingers (fingers as daintily kept
as any lady's); they had flashed like rubies and sapphires and
diamonds from the white velvet drifts of the show-case in the great
department store where she bought them when she went to the city; but
now they were cheapened and dimmed by her memories of the "real"
watch. She peeled them roughly from her hands.

She had no morsel of news ready for the hungry ears awaiting her. To
her mother's questions she answered briefly that the only thing she
heard was that Freda Berglund would have a great number of new votes
in the evening.

Mrs. Murray tossed back a confident: _"Let_ her! I know some boys
that's going to go this night, with a hundred dollars in their pockets
each of 'em. Let her bring on her votes, I say. It's a good cause gits
the money. But it's you'll be wearin' the watch next Sunday, and not
Freda Berglund!"

Norah bit her lip. She was not used to silence, but she sewed silently
(Norah, who was so sweet-tempered that she had been known to work a
whole day with a machine that skipped stitches, never getting cross,
and stopping four times to wrestle with the bobbin before she subdued
it). Her mother did not know what to make of her. Her own nickering
complaints of Norah's "glumness" sank into dumb anxiety. She stole
timid glances at the bowed black head and the frowning black brows;
after a glance she would sigh, a prolonged, patient sigh. There are
times when a sigh is to strained nerves like a blast of hot air on a
burn. Norah jumped up and ran away from her own irritation before it
exploded. She made a pretext of looking at her skirt (which was new)
in the parlor cheval-glass; but in the parlor, behind the door, she
did not give a glance to the picture in the mirror. The "pire glass,"
as Mrs. Murray called it, was a relic of the family's better days when
Norah's father was alive and kept a grocery-store and owned a horse
and wagon; its florid frame of black-walnut etched with gilt, its tall
mirror, very little marred by water-spots on the back, long had been
reverently admired by Norah; it showed that the family had "had
things"; but she passed it without a glance, just as she passed the
cabinet organ decked in flowered plush which she had bought with her
own savings. Never until that day had she stood in the parlor without
a sensation of pleasure over its fresh paint and paper and the many
gilt frames on the wall; but to-day she went, unnoting, to the crayon
picture of a man, and looked through tears at a plain, smiling, kindly
face.

"I wish you hadn't died," was all she said; but the tears rolled down
her cheeks and her frame shook with sobs that she forced to be
noiseless. At last she dried her wet cheeks and tossed her head. "I
don't see that _I_ need do _anything_," she muttered, while
she hurried round the house outside, in order that she might reach the
bedroom and efface the traces of her weeping. "I'm a great fool to
think of doing anything," she declared. "I didn't put myself up, and I
won't put myself down--and disappoint mother and all my friends. It's
none of my business." Therewith she assumed a light and cheerful air,
which she carried securely through the remainder of the afternoon.

       *       *       *       *       *

The fifth evening of St. Kunagunda's fair opened with a stifling
crowd. Protestants, Catholics, and Germans who never had seen the
interior of an American church jostled the buyers at the booths, and
the faithful dutifully ate turkey and cold rolls for the fifth time at
the supper-tables. The outsiders did not linger at the booths; they
were come to vote or to witness the voting, and their jests and
comments buzzed noisily above the talk. Every moment the note of the
buzz grew more hostile. More than a few ears were tingling; at every
turn there were scowls and sullen eyes and ugly smiles. The matrons'
cheeks were burning; their eyes flashed; every now and again one of
their voices shrilled defiantly above the hoarse hum of the crowd. The
young Irish girls were laughing, enjoying the excitement, and admiring
the young men flaunting their banknotes with the swing of their
father's shillalahs. The young German girls curled their lips and
whispered together. There was a significant herding of the contending
races apart, while the visiting Anglo-Saxons wore an air of safe and
dispassionate enjoyment, such as pertains of right to the boy on the
fence waiting for the fight.

Norah Murray had a circle of young men about her, who laughed
rapturously at her sallies. She wore her chain and a new rhinestone
brooch and all her rings. She looked very handsome with her flushed
cheeks and bright eyes. She raised her voice to be heard above the
din. Mrs. Murray's new bonnet nodded its red roses and black ostrich
tips among the lace handkerchiefs and embroidery of the fancy
table--she being enthroned on the step-ladder for lack of other
seat--and her delighted eyes ran from her daughter to the voting
blackboard. She waved a spangled fan and smiled buoyantly at every
familiar face, whether turned towards her in recognition or not. Mrs.
O'Brien, who had slipped away from the kitchen to be sure the lamps
were not smoking, stopped a moment beside her. Mrs. O'Brien looked
tired and worried when she let her own smile of greeting slip from her
face. A tinge of the same expression was on Father Kelly's kind old
countenance, but the Vicar-General's features were as inscrutable as a
doctor's. He had made a genial procession through the room,
distributing the merited praise at each booth, and appreciably
softening the atmosphere by his presence. He halted opposite Norah's
party. Father Kelly's gaze grew anxious. "I mind me," said he--"I mind
me of the child when her father died--not six she was--holding her
mother's hand, not weeping herself, the creature, just stroking her
mother's hand and petting her; and holding the baby, the one that's
off to the seminary now. Her father was an honest man. He failed once,
and then paid every dollar with interest--an _honest_ man. I mind
me of little Norah at her first communion--"

The Vicar-General smiled. "Kelly, you're a good fellow," said he, not
removing his glance from Norah's excited face.

"She'll come out all right, all right," said Father Kelly, with the
hammer-like gesture of his right fist which his congregation knew well
for a storm signal. "She's a good girl. This is no fault of hers, this
foolish contraption to make money; I'm one with Conner, there; but the
girls aren't to blame. Freda's a good girl, too. That's she coming."

The German heroine of this miniature Nibelungenlied was tall and
slender, fair haired and fair faced. Her face wore a placid air; she
looked perfectly serene and had assumed unconsciousness as a garment;
she did not talk, only faintly smiled in return to the greetings that
met her on every side. To right and left, before and behind her,
walked her two aunts and her two neighbors, women of substance and
dignity. They walled her about as might a body-guard, sending
eye-blinks of defiance at the hilarious young Irishmen. Mrs. Orendorf,
of the guard, went the length of twisting her head for a final glare
of disapproval at Norah, in passing. Norah laughed. "I used to know
Freda Burglund last week," said she, "but I guess she has forgotten
me."

"She's too busy with the blackboard, doing arithmetic," joked one of
the young men.

"You ought to see old Fritz!" cried another; "he's clean off his base.
He's mortgaged his farm to Nichols. Nichols didn't want to lend, but
he would have the money."

"Well, I guess we'll give him a run for his pile."

"He's mortgaged his farm!" said a third young man; when his voiced
sounded, the very slightest of movements of Norah's head betrayed that
she listened.

"I'd mortgage two farms if I had them," was the gallant comment from
the first man, "if Miss Norah needed votes."

The third man felt the rustle of every dollar he had, drawn out of the
bank that morning, and now bulging his waistcoat-pocket in company
with a bit of ribbon that had dropped from Norah's hair; but it was
easier for him to make money than talk; he was ready to push the last
of it over the voting-table for Norah, but he wasn't ready of tongue;
he put his big honest hands in his pocket, and lest he should glower
too openly at the fluent blade, sent his eyes after Freda Berglund's
yellow head and fine shoulders. Norah could see him. She stiffened.

"I don't think it very nice of her to _let_ her father mortgage
his farm," said a fourth partisan of Norah's; "he'd better buy her a
watch out and out; you can get a good one for ten dollars. She'd ought
to stop the old man. Her mother would if she were alive."

"Fritz ain't so easy headed off," said the third man. "Miss Freda is a
very nice young lady; I don't believe she knows about it."

He kept his eyes on the yellow head, this unfortunate bungler, who had
been in love with Norah since he had worn knickerbockers, and Norah
held her own head higher in the air. And she let Mr. Williamson, the
new book-keeper at Conner's (he who would have mortgaged two farms for
her), take her to the ice-cream table, leaving the bungling lover
(christened Patrick Maurice, his surname being Barnes), to jostle
dismally over to the apron table, where Freda was.

Norah laughed at Mr. Williamson's jokes, and asked him questions about
the business college from which he had recently been graduated, and
was the picture of soft animation and pleasure; and the while her
heart was like lead, and she hated Freda Berglund. Sitting at the
table she heard snatches of talk, all tinctured by the strong
excitement of the evening. "I can't help it if they do quarrel," she
thought, angrily, answering her own accusation; not even to herself
did she say that she hated Freda.

Her eyes wandered a second over the hall; they saw the Vicar-General's
pale, handsome face, a half-head taller than Father Kelly's good gray
head; they saw a square-jawed, black-haired, determined, smiling young
man behind the ballot-box turning his eyes from Pat Barnes to an
elderly man who held up his hand, waving a roll of bills.

"Ah, I see Berglund has arrived," said Williamson. "You are going to
do a lot to build the church, Miss Norah."

Berglund was rather a short man; his hair was gray; he limped from the
old wound received at Shiloh. Something clutched at Norah's heart as
she looked at him. Williamson made some trivial joke; she did not hear
it; she was hearing over again the words of the German woman to Mrs.
O'Brien that afternoon. Impulsively she sprang to her feet. "Will you
excuse me, Mr. Williamson?" she exclaimed. "I have to go to the
voting-booth one moment." She went so swiftly that Williamson had much
ado to keep pace with her, besides overpaying the waitress in his
hurry. Father Kelly swallowed a groan of dismay at the fresh strain on
his faith when he perceived her beckoning a ring-laden hand at the
custodian of votes; and the Vicar-General involuntarily frowned. They
both with one accord pushed up to the table--to the visible relief of
the young man behind it. "I don't know what to do," he confided to
Father Kelly, before the latter could ask the question quivering on
his tongue--"I don't know what to do. Miss Murray wants me not to take
in any more money 'til I hear from her again. She'll be back. And
here's old Berglund wants three hundred and fifty dollars' worth for
Miss Freda, and here's Barnes with a big bunch for Miss Murray, trying
to scare off the old man. What'll I do, Father?"

"I guess you better not do anything," said Father Kelly, with a
twinkle in his eye. "Norah Murray is apt to have a good reason for her
asking. Shut the booth down, and _I'll_ take charge while you go
off for a cup of coffee."

The Vicar-General nodded approval.

"Well, just's you say, Father," said the young man; "it's kind of
unprecedented."

"What do you suppose it means?" puzzled the Vicar-General, in an
undertone, as the vote-taker disappeared; and the crowd fell back a
little on Father Kelly's bland announcement that Mr. Duffy had been
called off for a few minutes, and there would be a recess in voting.

"'Tis beyond _me_," said Father Kelly, "but watch the girl; she's
gone straight to Freda Berglund. There, they're talking; they're going
off together with Mrs. Orendorf. I can't give a guess, but she's a
good girl. I'm hopeful."

Norah had indeed gone straight to Freda Berglund. She addressed her in
so low a voice that only Freda and Mrs. Orendorf, bending across
Freda's shoulders at that instant, the better to cheapen a darning-bag
for stockings, could hear her words. "I want to see you, Freda," she
said. "Won't you and Mrs. Orendorf come away somewhere so we can talk?
I have got something important to say."

"I--don't--know," faltered Freda.

"I want Mrs. O'Brien, too," said Norah, firmly. "It's all right;
you'll think it all right, Mrs. Orendorf. Come, come; don't you see
those men who have been drinking? Don't you hear them? Don't you see
Mrs. Finn, who used to think there was nobody like Mrs. Conner,
looking the other way so's not to see her? Can't you hear the
quarrelling all round? They've stopped voting, but they haven't
stopped quarrelling. Come!"

Although she had dropped her voice, the listeners were so close that
they caught snatches of the sentences, and craned their necks forward
and hushed their own talk to listen. Mrs. Orendorf was not of a nimble
habit of thought; but she felt the electric impetus of the Irish girl;
besides, was _she_ not bidden? Could she not protect Freda from
the machinations of the enemy?

"Dot's so, Freda," she concluded, stolidly. "Koom den, der only blace
vere we can talk py uns is dot coal-closet wo is der eggstry ice-cream
freezer. Koom. I see Meezis O'Breen."

Amid a startling pause, every eye questioning them, the three picked
up Mrs. O'Brien and sought the coal-closet. Then Norah turned. In the
dim light her face shone whitely. Her full melodious voice shook the
least in the world with haste and excitement. "We've got to stop
this," said she, "and I know how. Freda, I am going to withdraw my
name. I wish to Heaven I never had let them put it on. You may have
the watch."

Freda's tall figure was only an outline in the shadow; they could not
see her face; but the outline wavered backward. Her voice was stiff
and cold.

"I don't think that's fair. You have more votes than I have."

Mrs. O'Brien opened her lips and shut them tightly. It was so dark no
one saw her, or Mrs. Orendorf, as she sat on the freezer gulping down
inaudible opinions regarding Norah's sanity.

"I sha'n't have," retorted Norah, impatiently, "when your father
spends all his money that he mortgaged his farm--"

_"What!"_ cried Freda.

"She not know; ve keep it von her," muttered Mrs. Orendorf. "Fritz
make me promise not to tell."

"Well, he didn't make _me_," said Norah. "_I'll_ tell. He
raised the money, and he was trying to buy the votes, and I saw him. I
haven't any father. I can't remember anything of my father except his
leading me about when I was a little thing by the finger, and how kind
his voice was; but I miss him--I miss him all the time; I know he was
a good man, and loved me; and he'd have done anything for me, just as
your father is doing; and I couldn't have borne it to have him, and I
was sure you couldn't, either. Freda, it's all wrong, this spending
more money than they can afford on us; I've felt it all along. Now
let's stop it. The church has got enough."

"Is it true about papa?" said Freda, in German.

"_Ach Himmel_! Yes, my child. Dost thou not know thy father yet?
For all he seems still and stern, thou art more than all the world to
him." Mrs. Orendorf spoke in the same tongue; her other listeners
could not understand it, but they marvelled over the soft change in
her voice.

"It's true enough, Miss Freda," said Mrs. O'Brien, gently. "And maybe
you're in the right of it, Norah darling, though 'tis a bit hard to
give in; but, yes, I'm sure you're right."

"You _are_ right," said Freda, "and it's all been wrong, all
wrong. But I've got to see my father first. Please come with me."

As Norah had led them in the first place, Freda led them by an equally
potent although entirely different force now; it was Norah's turn to
follow, blindly.

A hush everywhere in their wake betrayed that a consciousness of their
conference and its importance was in the air. Freda was pale, Norah's
cheeks burned, but neither girl looked to the right or the left; and
both the matrons following avoided their friends' curiosity by a
soldierly "eyes front." Freda walked up to her father, who looked up,
not altogether pleased, at her light touch on his arm.

"This is no place for thee, my child," said he; something in her face
made his voice gentler than common. She looked, he thought, dimly, as
she had looked when they got the news about Otto.

"I _have_ to say something," said Freda.

"You beples stand back!" commanded Mrs. Orendorf, with a backward
impulse of her elbows.

"Yes, you stand back, ladies and gentlemen, please," begged Mrs.
O'Brien, smiling; "'twill all be explained to yous." Only Norah stood
her ground; and Pat Barnes kept in the front rank of the bystanders.

"What is it?" growled Berglund, bristling at the circle of faces much
readier for peace than war.

"She wants to give the watch to me," explained Freda, rapidly
repeating almost word for word Norah's offer. As she spoke suspicion
wrinkled the corners of old Fritz's eyes.

"Maypi sie know sie vill git peten," he muttered, loud enough for
Norah to hear. Then, as he saw her color turn, his hard face softened.
"No," he said, clearly, "it don't be _dot_; dot Pat Barnes got
his pocket full of moneys; no, sie is a goot schild, und her fader he
vas a goot mans; sie haf a hard dime mit no fader to look oudt for
her." He turned to Norah, whose swimming eyes met his full. Pat Barnes
tried to cough down his emotion and made a strange squeak; but nobody
smiled; the crowded hall was curiously still as Fritz limped up to
Norah. "No, ve don't can take it off you; can ve, Freda?" said he.

Freda slipped her hand into her father's arm. "No, Norah," she said.
"I withdraw my name. And I'm prouder to have my father than all the
watches in the world!"

"Sure, you're right there, mavourneen," cried Mrs. O'Brien. "Whisht,
all of you! These blessid children have got the way out of all this
mess; they're better Christians than anny of us." Mrs. Orendorf
frowned fiercely, reached for her handkerchief, and wiped her face.

Father Kelly felt it time for his own word, and stepped into the
circle. A sentence or two from Mrs. O'Brien made the quick-witted old
Irishman master of the incident.

"As I understand it," his full, rich, Celtic tones purred, "'tis the
feeling of both these young ladies that there is hard feeling and
strife and wasteful spending of money coming out of what was meant to
be a good-natured contest for the good of the church; but this
disputing, this spending, are neither for the good of the church nor
the glory of God--far from it--God forgive us our weakness. So both
these young ladies withdrew their names. We have cause to be proud of
them both, as they surely have cause to be proud of the loyalty of
their friends." (Irrepressible applause.) "And the kindest thing their
friends can do is to shake hands all around." (A voice--in point of
fact, the voice of the widow Murray: "But what will the sodality do
with the watch?") "The watch is the property of the parish." Here
Father Kelly paused, his persuasive argument rolling back on himself;
_he didn't_ know what to do with the watch. It was too perilous
to run the risk of new discords over it. The priest cast a distress
rocket in a look at the Vicar-General; but the Vicar-General
perfidiously smiled and looked away.

Up spoke Norah, her sweet voice not quite steady, her cheeks
crimson--but they all heard her: "It's a large gold watch. Why can't
we give it to Father Kelly?"

The Vicar-General's lifted hand stilled the shout that rose.

"Why not?" called he. "Father Kelly is not a young lady, but he is
popular."

And Father Kelly, putting both hands over his blushes, ran away from
the frantic roar of applause and laughter. The Vicar-General pursued
him to say:

"You were right, Kelly; she _is_ a good girl--and a wise one!"

Perhaps the only person in the hall who was not either shouting or
screaming, according to sex, was Norah's mother; and the cloud on her
face lightened when she saw Norah coming to her on Pat Barnes's arm
and Pat's face aglow.

Freda saw them too; she slipped her hand into her father's arm.

"_Liebchen_!" said he, stroking it with his rough fingers, "I
will get thee a watch some day, never fear!"

But it was not the thought of a watch that made Freda's heart lighter
than for many a day. "I don't want a watch," said she. "Oh, I'm sorry
for Norah, who can't even remember about her father!"

THE END




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