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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Stories of a Western Town, by Octave Thanet
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Stories of a Western Town
+
+Author: Octave Thanet
+
+Posting Date: January 10, 2009 [EBook #2949]
+Release Date: December, 2001
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STORIES OF A WESTERN TOWN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judy Boss
+
+
+
+
+
+STORIES OF A WESTERN TOWN
+
+By Octave Thanet
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+The Besetment of Kurt Lieders
+
+The Face of Failure
+
+Tommy and Thomas
+
+Mother Emeritus
+
+An Assisted Providence
+
+Harry Lossing
+
+
+
+
+
+THE BESETMENT OF KURT LIEDERS
+
+
+A SILVER rime glistened all down the street.
+
+There was a drabble of dead leaves on the sidewalk which was of wood,
+and on the roadway which was of macadam and stiff mud. The wind blew
+sharply, for it was a December day and only six in the morning. Nor were
+the houses high enough to furnish any independent bulwark; they were
+low, wooden dwellings, the tallest a bare two stories in height, the
+majority only one story. But they were in good painting and repair,
+and most of them had a homely gayety of geraniums or bouvardias in
+the windows. The house on the corner was the tall house. It occupied a
+larger yard than its neighbors; and there were lace curtains tied with
+blue ribbons for the windows in the right hand front room. The door of
+this house swung back with a crash, and a woman darted out. She ran at
+the top of her speed to the little yellow house farther down the street.
+Her blue calico gown clung about her stout figure and fluttered behind
+her, revealing her blue woollen stockings and felt slippers. Her gray
+head was bare. As she ran tears rolled down her cheeks and she wrung her
+hands.
+
+"Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh, lieber Herr Je!" One near would have heard her sob, in
+too distracted agitation to heed the motorneer of the passing street-car
+who stared after her at the risk of his car, or the tousled heads behind
+a few curtains. She did not stop until she almost fell against the door
+of the yellow house. Her frantic knocking was answered by a young woman
+in a light and artless costume of a quilted petticoat and a red flannel
+sack.
+
+"Oh, gracious goodness! Mrs. Lieders!" cried she.
+
+Thekla Lieders rather staggered than walked into the room and fell back
+on the black haircloth sofa.
+
+"There, there, there," said the young woman while she patted the broad
+shoulders heaving between sobs and short breath, "what is it? The house
+aint afire?"
+
+"Oh, no, oh, Mrs. Olsen, he has done it again!" She wailed in sobs, like
+a child.
+
+"Done it? Done what?" exclaimed Mrs. Olsen, then her face paled. "Oh, my
+gracious, you DON'T mean he's killed himself------"
+
+"Yes, he's killed himself, again."
+
+"And he's dead?" asked the other in an awed tone.
+
+Mrs. Lieders gulped down her tears. "Oh, not so bad as that, I cut him
+down, he was up in the garret and I sus--suspected him and I run up
+and--oh, he was there, a choking, and he was so mad! He swore at me
+and--he kicked me when I--I says: 'Kurt, what are you doing of? Hold
+on till I git a knife,' I says--for his hands was just dangling at his
+side; and he says nottings cause he couldn't, he was most gone, and I
+knowed I wouldn't have time to git no knife but I saw it was a rope was
+pretty bad worn and so--so I just run and jumped and ketched it in my
+hands, and being I'm so fleshy it couldn't stand no more and it broke!
+And, oh! he--he kicked me when I was try to come near to git the rope
+off his neck; and so soon like he could git his breath he swore at
+me----"
+
+"And you a helping of him! Just listen to that!" cried the hearer
+indignantly.
+
+"So I come here for to git you and Mr. Olsen to help me git him down
+stairs, 'cause he is too heavy for me to lift, and he is so mad he won't
+walk down himself."
+
+"Yes, yes, of course. I'll call Carl. Carl! dost thou hear? come! But
+did you dare to leave him Mrs. Lieders?" Part of the time she spoke
+in English, part of the time in her own tongue, gliding from one to
+another, and neither party observing the transition.
+
+Mrs. Lieders wiped her eyes, saying: "Oh, yes, Danke schon, I aint
+afraid 'cause I tied him with the rope, righd good, so he don't got no
+chance to move. He was make faces at me all the time I tied him." At the
+remembrance, the tears welled anew.
+
+Mrs. Olsen, a little bright tinted woman with a nose too small for her
+big blue eyes and chubby cheeks, quivered with indignant sympathy.
+
+"Well, I did nefer hear of sooch a mean acting man!" seemed to her the
+most natural expression; but the wife fired, at once.
+
+"No, he is not a mean man," she cried, "no, Freda Olsen, he is not a
+mean man at all! There aint nowhere a better man than my man; and Carl
+Olsen, he knows that. Kurt, he always buys a whole ham and a whole
+barrel of flour, and never less than a dollar of sugar at a time! And he
+never gits drunk nor he never gives me any bad talk. It was only he got
+this wanting to kill himself on him, sometimes."
+
+"Well, I guess I'll go put on my things," said Mrs. Olsen, wisely
+declining to defend her position. "You set right still and warm
+yourself, and we'll be back in a minute."
+
+Indeed, it was hardly more than that time before both Carl Olsen, who
+worked in the same furniture factory as Kurt Lieders, and was a comely
+and after-witted giant, appeared with Mrs. Olsen ready for the street.
+
+He nodded at Mrs. Lieders and made a gurgling noise in his throat,
+expected to convey sympathy. Then, he coughed and said that he was
+ready, and they started.
+
+Feeling further expression demanded, Mrs. Olsen asked: "How many times
+has he done it, Mrs. Lieders?"
+
+Mrs. Lieders was trotting along, her anxious eyes on the house in the
+distance, especially on the garret windows. "Three times," she answered,
+not removing her eyes; "onct he tooked Rough on Rats and I found it out
+and I put some apple butter in the place of it, and he kept wondering
+and wondering how he didn't feel notings, and after awhile I got him off
+the notion, that time. He wasn't mad at me; he just said: 'Well, I do it
+some other time. You see!' but he promised to wait till I got the spring
+house cleaning over, so he could shake the carpets for me; and by and
+by he got feeling better. He was mad at the boss and that made him
+feel bad. The next time it was the same, that time he jumped into the
+cistern----"
+
+"Yes, I know," said Olsen, with a half grin, "I pulled him out."
+
+"It was the razor he wanted," the wife continued, "and when he come home
+and says he was going to leave the shop and he aint never going back
+there, and gets out his razor and sharps it, I knowed what that meant
+and I told him I got to have some bluing and wouldn't he go and get it?
+and he says, 'You won't git another husband run so free on your errands,
+Thekla,' and I says I don't want none; and when he was gone I hid the
+razor and he couldn't find it, but that didn't mad him, he didn't say
+notings; and when I went to git the supper he walked out in the yard and
+jumped into the cistern, and I heard the splash and looked in and there
+he was trying to git his head under, and I called, 'For the Lord's sake,
+papa! For the Lord's sake!' just like that. And I fished for him with
+the pole that stood there and he was sorry and caught hold of it and
+give in, and I rested the pole agin the side cause I wasn't strong
+enough to h'ist him out; and he held on whilest I run for help----"
+
+"And I got the ladder and he clum out," said the giant with another grin
+of recollection, "he was awful wet!"
+
+"That was a month ago," said the wife, solemnly.
+
+"He sharped the razor onct," said Mrs. Lieders, "but he said it was
+for to shave him, and I got him to promise to let the barber shave him
+sometime, instead. Here, Mrs. Olsen, you go righd in, the door aint
+locked."
+
+By this time they were at the house door. They passed in and ascended
+the stairs to the second story, then climbed a narrow, ladder-like
+flight to the garret. Involuntarily they had paused to listen at the
+foot of the stairs, but it was very quiet, not a sound of movement, not
+so much as the sigh of a man breathing. The wife turned pale and put
+both her shaking hands on her heart.
+
+"Guess he's trying to scare us by keeping quiet!" said Olsen,
+cheerfully, and he stumbled up the stairs, in advance. "Thunder!" he
+exclaimed, on the last stair, "well, we aint any too quick."
+
+In fact Carl had nearly fallen over the master of the house, that
+enterprising self-destroyer having contrived, pinioned as he was, to
+roll over to the very brink of the stair well, with the plain intent to
+break his neck by plunging headlong.
+
+In the dim light all that they could see was a small, old man whose
+white hair was strung in wisps over his purple face, whose deep set eyes
+glared like the eyes of a rat in a trap, and whose very elbows and knees
+expressed in their cramps the fury of an outraged soul. When he saw the
+new-comers he shut his eyes and his jaws.
+
+"Well, Mr. Lieders," said Olsen, mildly, "I guess you better git
+down-stairs. Kin I help you up?"
+
+"No," said Lieders.
+
+"Will I give you an arm to lean on?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Won't you go at all, Mr. Lieders?"
+
+"No."
+
+Olsen shook his head. "I hate to trouble you, Mr. Lieders," said he in
+his slow, undecided tones, "please excuse me," with which he gathered up
+the little man into his strong arms and slung him over his shoulders, as
+easily as he would sling a sack of meal. It was a vent for Mrs. Olsen's
+bubbling indignation to make a dive for Lieders's heels and hold them,
+while Carl backed down-stairs. But Lieders did not make the least
+resistance. He allowed them to carry him into the room indicated by
+his wife, and to lay him bound on the plump feather bed. It was not his
+bedroom but the sacred "spare room," and the bed was part of its luxury.
+Thekla ran in, first, to remove the embroidered pillow shams and the
+dazzling, silken "crazy quilt" that was her choicest possession.
+
+Safely in the bed, Lieders opened his eyes and looked from one face to
+the other, his lip curling. "You can't keep me this way all the time. I
+can do it in spite of you," said he.
+
+"Well, I think you had ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mr. Lieders!"
+Mrs. Olsen burst out, in a tremble between wrath and exertion, shaking
+her little, plump fist at him.
+
+But the placid Carl only nodded, as in sympathy, saying, "Well, I am
+sorry you feel so bad, Mr. Lieders. I guess we got to go now."
+
+Mrs. Olsen looked as if she would have liked to exhort Lieders further;
+but she shrugged her shoulders and followed her husband in silence.
+
+"I wished you'd stay to breakfast, now you're here," Thekla urged out of
+her imperious hospitality; had Kurt been lying there dead, the next meal
+must have been offered, just the same. "I know, you aint got time to git
+Mr. Olsen his breakfast, Freda, before he has got to go to the shops,
+and my tea-kettle is boiling now, and the coffee'll be ready--I GUESS
+you had better stay."
+
+But Mrs. Olsen seconded her husband's denial, and there was nothing
+left Thekla but to see them to the door. No sooner did she return than
+Lieders spoke. "Aint you going to take off them ropes?" said he.
+
+"Not till you promise you won't do it."
+
+Silence. Thekla, brushing a few tears from her eyes, scrutinized the
+ropes again, before she walked heavily out of the room. She turned the
+key in the door.
+
+Directly a savory steam floated through the hall and pierced the cracks
+about the door; then Thekla's footsteps returned; they echoed over the
+uncarpeted boards.
+
+She had brought his breakfast, cooked with the best of her homely skill.
+The pork chops that he liked had been fried, there was a napkin on the
+tray, and the coffee was in the best gilt cup and saucer.
+
+"Here's your breakfast, papa," said she, trying to smile.
+
+"I don't want no breakfast," said he.
+
+She waited, holding the tray, and wistfully eying him.
+
+"Take it 'way," said he, "I won't touch it if you stand till doomsday,
+lessen you untie me!"
+
+"I'll untie your arm, papa, one arm; you kin eat that way."
+
+"Not lessen you untie all of me, I won't touch a bite."
+
+"You know why I won't untie you, papa."
+
+"Starving will kill as dead as hanging," was Lieders's orphic response
+to this.
+
+Thekla sighed and went away, leaving the tray on the table. It may be
+that she hoped the sight of food might stir his stomach to rebel against
+his dogged will; if so she was disappointed; half an hour went by during
+which the statue under the bedclothes remained without so much as a
+quiver.
+
+Then the old woman returned. "Aint you awful cramped and stiff, papa?"
+
+"Yes," said the statue.
+
+"Will you promise not to do yourself a mischief, if I untie you?"
+
+"No."
+
+Thekla groaned, while the tears started to her red eyelids. "But you'll
+git awful tired and it will hurt you if you don't get the ropes off,
+soon, papa!"
+
+"I know that!"
+
+He closed his eyes again, to be the less hindered from dropping back
+into his distempered musings. Thekla took a seat by his side and sat
+silent as he. Slowly the natural pallor returned to the high forehead
+and sharp features. They were delicate features and there was an air of
+refinement, of thought, about Lieders's whole person, as different
+as possible from the robust comeliness of his wife. With its keen
+sensitive-ness and its undefined melancholy it was a dreamer's face. One
+meets such faces, sometimes, in incongruous places and wonders what they
+mean. In fact, Kurt Lieders, head cabinet maker in the furniture factory
+of Lossing & Co., was an artist. He was, also, an incomparable artisan
+and the most exacting foreman in the shops. Thirty years ago he had
+first taken wages from the senior Lossing. He had watched a modest
+industry climb up to a great business, nor was he all at sea in his own
+estimate of his share in the firm's success. Lieders's workmanship had
+an honesty, an infinite patience of detail, a daring skill of design
+that came to be sought and commanded its own price. The Lossing "art
+furniture" did not slander the name. No sculptor ever wrought his soul
+into marble with a more unflinching conscience or a purer joy in his
+work than this wood-carver dreaming over sideboards and bedsteads.
+Unluckily, Lieders had the wrong side of the gift as well as the right;
+was full of whims and crotchets, and as unpractical as the Christian
+martyrs. He openly defied expense, and he would have no trifling with
+the laws of art. To make after orders was an insult to Kurt. He made
+what was best for the customer; if the latter had not the sense to see
+it he was a fool and a pig, and some one else should work for him, not
+Kurt Lieders, BEGEHR!
+
+Young Lossing had learned the business practically. He was taught the
+details by his father's best workman; and a mighty hard and strict
+master the best workman proved! Lossing did not dream that the crabbed
+old tyrant who rarely praised him, who made him go over, for the
+twentieth time, any imperfect piece of work, who exacted all the artisan
+virtues to the last inch, was secretly proud of him. Yet, in fact, the
+thread of romance in Lieders's prosaic life was his idolatry of the
+Lossing Manufacturing Co. It is hard to tell whether it was the Lossings
+or that intangible quantity, the firm, the business, that he worshipped.
+Worship he did, however, the one or the other, perhaps the both of them,
+though in the peevish and erratic manner of the savage who sometimes
+grovels to his idols and sometimes kicks them.
+
+Nobody guessed what a blow it was to Kurt when, a year ago, the elder
+Lossing had died. Even his wife did not connect his sullen melancholy
+and his gibes at the younger generation, with the crape on Harry
+Lossing's hat. He would not go to the funeral, but worked savagely, all
+alone by himself, in the shop, the whole afternoon--breaking down at
+last at the sight of a carved panel over which Lossing and he had once
+disputed. The desolate loneliness of the old came to him when his old
+master was gone. He loved the young man, but the old man was of his own
+generation; he had "known how things ought to be and he could understand
+without talking." Lieders began to be on the lookout for signs of waning
+consideration, to watch his own eyes and hands, drearily wondering when
+they would begin to play him false; at the same time because he was
+unhappy he was ten times as exacting and peremptory and critical with
+the younger workmen, and ten times as insolently independent with the
+young master. Often enough, Lossing was exasperated to the point of
+taking the old man at his word and telling him to go if he would, but
+every time the chain of long habit, a real respect for such faithful
+service, and a keen admiration for Kurt's matchless skill in his craft,
+had held him back. He prided himself on keeping his word; for that
+reason he was warier of using it. So he would compromise by giving the
+domineering old fellow a "good, stiff rowing." Once, he coupled this
+with a threat, if they could not get along decently they would better
+part! Lieders had answered not a word; he had given Lossing a queer
+glance and turned on his heel. He went home and bought some poison on
+the way. "The old man is gone and the young feller don't want the old
+crank round, no more," he said to himself. "Thekla, I guess I make her
+troubles, too; I'll git out!"
+
+That was the beginning of his tampering with suicide. Thekla, who did
+not have the same opinion of the "trouble," had interfered. He had
+married Thekla to have someone to keep a warm fireside for him, but she
+was an ignorant creature who never could be made to understand about
+carving. He felt sorry for her when the baby died, the only child they
+ever had; he was sorrier than he expected to be on his own account, too,
+for it was an ugly little creature, only four days old, and very red and
+wrinkled; but he never thought of confiding his own griefs or trials
+to her. Now, it made him angry to have that stupid Thekla keep him in
+a world where he did not wish to stay. If the next day Lossing had not
+remembered how his father valued Lieders, and made an excuse to half
+apologize to him, I fear Thekla's stratagems would have done little
+good.
+
+The next experience was cut out of the same piece of cloth. He had
+relented, he had allowed his wife to save him; but he was angry in
+secret. Then came the day when open disobedience to Lossing's orders had
+snapped the last thread of Harry's patience. To Lieders's aggrieved "If
+you ain't satisfied with my work, Mr. Lossing, I kin quit," the answer
+had come instantly, "Very well, Lieders, I'm sorry to lose you, but we
+can't have two bosses here: you can go to the desk." And when Lieders in
+a blind stab of temper had growled a prophecy that Lossing would regret
+it, Lossing had stabbed in turn: "Maybe, but it will be a cold day when
+I ask you to come back." And he had gone off without so much as a word
+of regret. The old workman had packed up his tools, the pet tools that
+no one was ever permitted to touch, and crammed his arms into his coat
+and walked out of the place where he had worked so long, not a man
+saying a word. Lieders didn't reflect that they knew nothing of the
+quarrel. He glowered at them and went away sore at heart. We make a
+great mistake when we suppose that it is only the affectionate
+that desire affection; sulky and ill-conditioned souls often have a
+passionate longing for the very feelings that they repel. Lieders was a
+womanish, sensitive creature under the surly mask, and he was cut to the
+quick by his comrades' apathy. "There ain't no place for old men in this
+world," he thought, "there's them boys I done my best to make do a good
+job, and some of 'em I've worked overtime to help; and not one of 'em
+has got as much as a good-by in him for me!"
+
+But he did not think of going to poor Thekla for comfort, he went to
+his grim dreams. "I git my property all straight for Thekla, and then
+I quit," said he. Perhaps he gave himself a reprieve unconsciously,
+thinking that something might happen to save him from himself. Nothing
+happened. None of the "boys" came to see him, except Carl Olsen, the
+very stupidest man in the shop, who put Lieders beside himself fifty
+times a day. The other men were sorry that Lieders had gone, having a
+genuine workman's admiration for his skill, and a sort of underground
+liking for the unreasonable old man because he was so absolutely honest
+and "a fellow could always tell where to find him." But they were shy,
+they were afraid he would take their pity in bad part, they "waited a
+while."
+
+Carl, honest soul, stood about in Lieders's workshop, kicking the
+shavings with his heels for half an hour, and grinned sheepishly,
+and was told what a worthless, scamping, bragging lot the "boys" at
+Lossing's were, and said he guessed he had got to go home now; and so
+departed, unwitting that his presence had been a consolation. Mrs. Olsen
+asked Carl what Lieders said; Carl answered simply, "Say, Freda, that
+man feels terrible bad."
+
+Meanwhile Thekla seemed easily satisfied. She made no outcry as Lieders
+had dreaded, over his leaving the shop.
+
+"Well, then, papa, you don't need git up so early in the morning no
+more, if you aint going to the shop," was her only comment; and Lieders
+despised the mind of woman more than ever.
+
+But that evening, while Lieders was down town (occupied, had she known
+it, with a codicil to his will), she went over to the Olsens and found
+out all Carl could tell her about the trouble in the shop. And it was
+she that made the excuse of marketing to go out the next day, that
+she might see the rich widow on the hill who was talking about a china
+closet, and Judge Trevor, who had asked the price of a mantel, and Mr.
+Martin, who had looked at sideboards (all this information came from
+honest Carl); and who proposed to them that they order such furniture
+of the best cabinet-maker in the country, now setting up on his own
+account. He, simple as a baby for all his doggedness, thought that
+they came because of his fame as a workman, and felt a glow of pride,
+particularly as (having been prepared by the wife, who said, "You see it
+don't make so much difference with my Kurt 'bout de prize, if so he can
+get the furniture like he wants it, and he always know of the best in
+the old country") they all were duly humble. He accepted a few orders
+and went to work with a will; he would show them what the old man
+could do. But it was only a temporary gleam; in a little while he grew
+homesick for the shop, for the sawdust floor and the familiar smell
+of oil, and the picture of Lossing flitting in and out. He missed the
+careless young workmen at whom he had grumbled, he missed the whir of
+machinery, and the consciousness of rush and hurry accented by the cars
+on the track outside. In short, he missed the feeling of being part of
+a great whole. At home, in his cosey little improvised shop, there was
+none to dispute him, but there was none to obey him either. He grew
+deathly tired of it all. He got into the habit of walking around the
+shops at night, prowling about his old haunts like a cat. Once the night
+watchman saw him. The next day there was a second watchman engaged.
+And Olsen told him very kindly, meaning only to warn him, that he was
+suspected to be there for no good purpose. Lieders confirmed a lurking
+suspicion of the good Carl's own, by the clouding of his face. Yet he
+would have chopped his hand off rather than have lifted it against the
+shop.
+
+That was Tuesday night, this was Wednesday morning.
+
+The memory of it all, the cruel sense of injustice, returned with such
+poignant force that Lieders groaned aloud.
+
+Instantly, Thekla was bending over him. He did not know whether to laugh
+at her or to swear, for she began fumbling at the ropes, half sobbing.
+"Yes, I knowed they was hurting you, papa; I'm going to loose one arm.
+Then I put it back again and loose the other. Please don't be bad!"
+
+He made no resistance and she was as good as her word. She unbound and
+bound him in sections, as it were; he watching her with a morose smile.
+
+Then she left the room, but only to return with some hot coffee.
+Lieders twisted his head away. "No," said he, "I don't eat none of that
+breakfast, not if you make fresh coffee all the morning; I feel like I
+don't eat never no more on earth."
+
+Thekla knew that the obstinate nature that she tempted was proof against
+temptation; if Kurt chose to starve, starve he would with food at his
+elbow.
+
+"Oh, papa," she cried, helplessly, "what IS the matter with you?"
+
+"Just dying is the matter with me, Thekla. If I can't die one way I kin
+another. Now Thekla, I want you to quit crying and listen. After I'm
+gone you go to the boss, young Mr. Lossing--but I always called him
+Harry because he learned his trade of me, Thekla, but he don't think of
+that now--and you tell him old Lieders that worked for him thirty years
+is dead, but he didn't hold no hard feelings, he knowed he done wrong
+'bout that mantel. Mind you tell him."
+
+"Yes, papa," said Thekla, which was a surprise to Kurt; he had dreaded
+a weak flood of tears and protestations. But there were no tears, no
+protestations, only a long look at him and a contraction of the eyebrows
+as if Thekla were trying to think of something that eluded her. She
+placed the coffee on the tray beside the other breakfast. For a while
+the room was very still. Lieders could not see the look of resolve that
+finally smoothed the perplexed lines out of his wife's kind, simple old
+face. She rose. "Kurt," she said, "I don't guess you remember this is
+our wedding-day; it was this day, eighteen year we was married."
+
+"So!" said Lieders, "well, I was a bad bargain to you, Thekla; after
+you nursed your father that was a cripple for twenty years, I thought it
+would be easy with me; but I was a bad bargain."
+
+"The Lord knows best about that," said Thekla, simply, "be it how it
+be, you are the only man I ever had or will have, and I don't like you
+starve yourself. Papa, say you don't kill yourself, to-day, and dat you
+will eat your breakfast!"
+
+"Yes," Lieders repeated in German, "a bad bargain for thee, that is
+sure. But thou hast been a good bargain for me. Here! I promise. Not
+this day. Give me the coffee."
+
+He had seasons, all the morning, of wondering over his meekness, and
+his agreement to be tied up again, at night. But still, what did a
+day matter? a man humors women's notions; and starving was so tedious.
+Between whiles he elaborated a scheme to attain his end. How easy to
+outwit the silly Thekla! His eyes shone, as he hid the little, sharp
+knife up his cuff. "Let her tie me!" says Lieders, "I keep my word.
+To-morrow I be out of this. He won't git a man like me, pretty soon!"
+
+Thekla went about her daily tasks, with her every-day air; but, now and
+again, that same pucker of thought returned to her forehead; and, more
+than once, Lieders saw her stand over some dish, poising her spoon in
+air, too abstracted to notice his cynical observation.
+
+The dinner was more elaborate than common, and Thekla had broached a
+bottle of her currant wine. She gravely drank Lieders's health. "And
+many good days, papa," she said.
+
+Lieders felt a queer movement of pity. After the table was cleared,
+he helped his wife to wash and wipe the dishes as his custom was of a
+Sunday or holiday. He wiped dishes as he did everything, neatly, slowly,
+with a careful deliberation. Not until the dishes were put away and the
+couple were seated, did Thekla speak.
+
+"Kurt," she said, "I got to talk to you."
+
+An inarticulate groan and a glance at the door from Lieders. "I just got
+to, papa. It aint righd for you to do the way you been doing for so long
+time; efery little whiles you try to kill yourself; no, papa, that aint
+righd!"
+
+Kurt, who had gotten out his pencils and compasses and other drawing
+tools, grunted: "I got to look at my work, Thekla, now; I am too busy to
+talk."
+
+"No, Kurt, no, papa"--the hands holding the blue apron that she was
+embroidering with white linen began to tremble; Lieders had not the
+least idea what a strain it was on this reticent, slow of speech woman
+who had stood in awe of him for eighteen years, to discuss the horror
+of her life; but he could not help marking her agitation. She went on,
+desperately: "Yes, papa, I got to talk it oud with you. You had ought
+to listen, 'cause I always been a good wife to you and nefer refused you
+notings. No."
+
+"Well, I aint saying I done it 'cause you been bad to me; everybody
+knows we aint had no trouble."
+
+"But everybody what don't know us, when they read how you tried to kill
+yourself in the papers, they think it was me. That always is so. And now
+I never can any more sleep nights, for you is always maybe git up and
+do something to yourself. So now, I got to talk to you, papa. Papa, how
+could you done so?"
+
+Lieders twisted his feet under the rungs of his chair; he opened his
+mouth, but only to shut it again with a click of his teeth.
+
+"I got my mind made up, papa. I tought and I tought. I know WHY you done
+it; you done it 'cause you and the boss was mad at each other. The boss
+hadn't no righd to let you go------"
+
+"Yes, he had, I madded him first; I was a fool. Of course I knowed more
+than him 'bout the work, but I hadn't no right to go against him. The
+boss is all right."
+
+"Yes, papa, I got my mind made up"--like most sluggish spirits there was
+an immense momentum about Thekla's mind, once get it fairly started it
+was not to be diverted--"you never killed yourself before you used to
+git mad at the boss. You was afraid he would send you away; and now you
+have sent yourself away you don't want to live, 'cause you do not know
+how you can git along without the shop. But you want to get back, you
+want to get back more as you want to kill yourself. Yes, papa, I know,
+I know where you did used to go, nights. Now"--she changed her speech
+unconsciously to the tongue of her youth--"it is not fair, it is not
+fair to me that thou shouldst treat me like that, thou dost belong to
+me, also; so I say, my Kurt, wilt thou make a bargain with me? If I
+shall get thee back thy place wilt thou promise me never to kill thyself
+any more?"
+
+Lieders had not once looked up at her during the slow, difficult
+sentences with their half choked articulation; but he was experiencing
+some strange emotions, and one of them was a novel respect for his wife.
+All he said was: "'Taint no use talking. I won't never ask him to take
+me back, once."
+
+"Well, you aint asking of him. _I_ ask him. I try to git you back,
+once!"
+
+"I tell you, it aint no use; I know the boss, he aint going to be
+letting womans talk him over; no, he's a good man, he knows how to work
+his business himself!"
+
+"But would you promise me, Kurt?"
+
+Lieders's eyes blurred with a mild and dreamy mist; he sighed softly.
+"Thekla, you can't see how it is. It is like you are tied up, if I don't
+can do that; if I can then it is always that I am free, free to go, free
+to stay. And for you, Thekla, it is the same."
+
+Thekla's mild eyes flashed. "I don't believe you would like it so you
+wake up in the morning and find ME hanging up in the kitchen by the
+clothes-line!"
+
+Lieders had the air of one considering deeply. Then he gave Thekla one
+of the surprises of her life; he rose from his chair, he walked in his
+shuffling, unheeled slippers across the room to where the old woman sat;
+he put one arm on the back of the chair and stiffly bent over her and
+kissed her.
+
+"Lieber Herr Je!" gasped Thekla.
+
+"Then I shall go, too, pretty quick, that is all, mamma," said he.
+
+Thekla wiped her eyes. A little pause fell between them, and in it they
+may have both remembered vanished, half-forgotten days when life had
+looked differently to them, when they had never thought to sit by
+their own fireside and discuss suicide. The husband spoke first; with
+a reluctant, half-shamed smile, "Thekla, I tell you what, I make the
+bargain with you; you git me back that place, I don't do it again, 'less
+you let me; you don't git me back that place, you don't say notings to
+me."
+
+The apron dropped from the withered, brown hands to the floor. Again
+there was silence; but not for long; ghastly as was the alternative, the
+proposal offered a chance to escape from the terror that was sapping her
+heart.
+
+"How long will you give me, papa?" said she.
+
+"I give you a week," said he.
+
+Thekla rose and went to the door; as she opened it a fierce gust of wind
+slashed her like a knife, and Lieders exclaimed, fretfully, "what you
+opening that door for, Thekla, letting in the wind? I'm so cold, now,
+right by the fire, I most can't draw. We got to keep a fire in the
+base-burner good, all night, or the plants will freeze."
+
+Thekla said confusedly that something sounded like a cat crying. "And
+you talking like that it frightened me; maybe I was wrong to make such
+bargains------"
+
+"Then don't make it," said Lieders, curtly, "I aint asking you."
+
+But Thekla drew a long breath and straightened herself, saying, "Yes, I
+make it, papa, I make it."
+
+"Well, put another stick of wood in the stove, will you, now you are
+up?" said Lieders, shrugging his shoulders, "or I'll freeze in spite of
+you! It seems to me it grows colder every minute."
+
+But all that day he was unusually gentle with Thekla. He talked of his
+youth and the struggles of the early days of the firm; he related a
+dozen tales of young Lossing, all illustrating some admirable trait that
+he certainly had not praised at the time. Never had he so opened his
+heart in regard to his own ideals of art, his own ambitions. And Thekla
+listened, not always comprehending but always sympathizing; she was
+almost like a comrade, Kurt thought afterward.
+
+The next morning, he was surprised to have her appear equipped for the
+street, although it was bitterly cold. She wore her garb of ceremony, a
+black alpaca gown, with a white crocheted collar neatly turned over the
+long black, broadcloth cloak in which she had taken pride for the last
+five years; and her quilted black silk bonnet was on her gray head. When
+she put up her foot to don her warm overshoes Kurt saw that the stout
+ankles were encased in white stockings. This was the last touch.
+"Gracious, Thekla," cried Kurt, "are you going to market this day? It is
+the coldest day this winter!"
+
+"Oh, I don't mind," replied Thekla, nervously. Then she had wrapped a
+scarf about her and gone out while he was getting into his own coat, and
+conning a proffer to go in her stead.
+
+"Oh, well, Thekla she aint such a fool like she looks!" he observed to
+the cat, "say, pussy, WAS it you out yestiddy?"
+
+The cat only blinked her yellow eyes and purred. She knew that she had
+not been out, last night. Not any better than her mistress, however, who
+at this moment was hailing a street-car.
+
+The street-car did not land her anywhere near a market; it whirled her
+past the lines of low wooden houses into the big brick shops with their
+arched windows and terra-cotta ornaments that showed the ambitious
+architecture of a growing Western town, past these into mills and
+factories and smoke-stained chimneys. Here, she stopped. An acquaintance
+would hardly have recognized her, her ruddy cheeks had grown so pale.
+But she trotted on to the great building on the corner from whence came
+a low, incessant buzz. She went into the first door and ran against Carl
+Olsen. "Carl, I got to see Mr. Lossing," said she breathlessly.
+
+"There ain't noding----"
+
+"No, Gott sei dank', but I got to see him."
+
+It was not Carl's way to ask questions; he promptly showed her the
+office and she entered. She had not seen young Harry Lossing half a
+dozen times; and, now, her anxious eyes wandered from one dapper figure
+at the high desks, to another, until Lossing advanced to her.
+
+He was a handsome young man, she thought, and he had kind eyes, but they
+hardened at her first timid sentence: "I am Mrs. Lieders, I come about
+my man----"
+
+"Will you walk in here, Mrs. Lieders?" said Lossing. His voice was like
+the ice on the window-panes.
+
+She followed him into a little room. He shut the door.
+
+Declining the chair that he pushed toward her she stood in the centre of
+the room, looking at him with the pleading eyes of a child.
+
+"Mr. Lossing, will you please save my Kurt from killing himself?"
+
+"What do you mean?" Lossing's voice had not thawed.
+
+"It is for you that he will kill himself, Mr. Lossing. This is the dird
+time he has done it. It is because he is so lonesome now, your father is
+died and he thinks that you forget, and he has worked so hard for you,
+but he thinks that you forget. He was never tell me till yesterday; and
+then--it was--it was because I would not let him hang himself----"
+
+"Hang himself?" stammered Lossing, "you don't mean----"
+
+"Yes, he was hang himself, but I cut him, no I broke him down," said
+Thekla, accurate in all the disorder of her spirits; and forthwith, with
+many tremors, but clearly, she told the story of Kurt's despair. She
+told, as Lieders never would have known how to tell, even had his pride
+let him, all the man's devotion for the business, all his personal
+attachment to the firm; she told of his gloom after the elder Lossing
+died, "for he was think there was no one in this town such good man
+and so smart like your fader, Mr. Lossing, no, and he would set all
+the evening and try to draw and make the lines all wrong, and, then, he
+would drow the papers in the fire and go and walk outside and he say, 'I
+can't do nothing righd no more now the old man's died; they don't have
+no use for me at the shop, pretty quick!' and that make him feel awful
+bad!" She told of his homesick wanderings about the shops by night;
+"but he was better as a watchman, he wouldn't hurt it for the world! He
+telled me how you was hide his dinner-pail onct for a joke, and put in a
+piece of your pie, and how you climbed on the roof with the hose when
+it was afire. And he telled me if he shall die I shall tell you that
+he ain't got no hard feelings, but you didn't know how that mantel had
+ought to be, so he done it right the other way, but he hadn't no righd
+to talk to you like he done, nohow, and you was all righd to send him
+away, but you might a shaked hands, and none of the boys never said
+nothing nor none of them never come to see him, 'cept Carl Olsen, and
+that make him feel awful bad, too! And when he feels so bad he don't no
+more want to live, so I make him promise if I git him back he never try
+to kill himself again. Oh, Mr. Lossing, please don't let my man die!"
+
+Bewildered and more touched than he cared to feel, himself, Lossing
+still made a feeble stand for discipline. "I don't see how Lieders can
+expect me to take him back again," he began.
+
+"He aint expecting you, Mr. Lossing, it's ME!"
+
+"But didn't Lieders tell you I told him I would never take him back?"
+
+"No, sir, no, Mr. Lossing, it was not that, it was you said it would
+be a cold day that you would take him back; and it was git so cold
+yesterday, so I think, 'Now it would be a cold day to-morrow and Mr.
+Lossing he can take Kurt back.' And it IS the most coldest day this
+year!"
+
+Lossing burst into a laugh, perhaps he was glad to have the Western
+sense of humor come to the rescue of his compassion. "Well, it was a
+cold day for you to come all this way for nothing," said he. "You go
+home and tell Lieders to report to-morrow."
+
+Kurt's manner of receiving the news was characteristic. He snorted
+in disgust: "Well, I did think he had more sand than to give in to a
+woman!" But after he heard the whole story he chuckled: "Yes, it was
+that way he said, and he must do like he said; but that was a funny way
+you done, Thekla. Say, mamma, yesterday, was you look out for the cat or
+to find how cold it been?"
+
+"Never you mind, papa," said Thekla, "you remember what you promised if
+I git you back?"
+
+Lieders's eyes grew dull; he flung his arms out, with a long sigh. "No,
+I don't forget, I will keep my promise, but--it is like the handcuffs,
+Thekla, it is like the handcuffs!" In a second, however, he added, in a
+changed tone, "But thou art a kind jailer, mamma, more like a comrade.
+And no, it was not fair to thee--I know that now, Thekla."
+
+
+
+
+THE FACE OF FAILURE
+
+AFTER the week's shower the low Iowa hills looked vividly green. At the
+base of the first range of hills the Blackhawk road winds from the city
+to the prairie. From its starting-point, just outside the city limits,
+the wayfarer may catch bird's-eye glimpses of the city, the vast river
+that the Iowans love, and the three bridges tying three towns to the
+island arsenal. But at one's elbow spreads Cavendish's melon farm.
+Cavendish's melon farm it still is, in current phrase, although
+Cavendish, whose memory is honored by lovers of the cantaloupe melon,
+long ago departed to raise melons for larger markets; and still a
+weather-beaten sign creaks from a post announcing to the world that "the
+celebrated Cavendish Melons are for Sale here!" To-day the melon-vines
+were softly shaded by rain-drops. A pleasant sight they made, spreading
+for acres in front of the green-houses where mushrooms and early
+vegetables strove to outwit the seasons, and before the brown cottage
+in which Cavendish had begun a successful career. The black roof-tree
+of the cottage sagged in the middle, and the weather-boarding was dingy
+with the streaky dinginess of old paint that has never had enough oil.
+The fences, too, were unpainted and rudely patched. Nevertheless a
+second glance told one that there were no gaps in them, that the farm
+machines kept their bright colors well under cover, and that the garden
+rows were beautifully straight and clean. An old white horse switched
+its sleek sides with its long tail and drooped its untrammelled neck in
+front of the gate. The wagon to which it was harnessed was new and had
+just been washed. Near the gate stood a girl and boy who seemed to be
+mutually studying each other's person. Decidedly the girl's slim, light
+figure in its dainty frock repaid one's eyes for their trouble; and her
+face, with its brilliant violet eyes, its full, soft chin, its curling
+auburn hair and delicate tints, was charming; but her brother's look
+was anything but approving. His lip curled and his small gray eyes grew
+smaller under his scowling brows.
+
+"Is THAT your best suit?" said the girl.
+
+"Yes, it is; and it's GOING to be for one while," said the boy.
+
+It was a suit of the cotton mixture that looks like wool when it is new,
+and cuts a figure on the counters of every dealer in cheap ready-made
+clothing. It had been Tim Powell's best attire for a year; perhaps he
+had not been careful enough of it, and that was why it no longer cared
+even to imitate wool; it was faded to the hue of a clay bank, it was
+threadbare, the trousers bagged at the knees, the jacket bagged at the
+elbows, the pockets bulged flabbily from sheer force of habit, although
+there was nothing in them.
+
+"I thought you were to have a new suit," said the girl. "Uncle told me
+himself he was going to buy you one yesterday when you went to town."
+
+"I wouldn't have asked him to buy me anything yesterday for more'n a
+suit of clothes."
+
+"Why?" The girl opened her eyes. "Didn't he do anything with the lawyer?
+Is that why you are both so glum this morning?"
+
+"No, he didn't. The lawyer says the woman that owns the mortgage has got
+to have the money. And it's due next week."
+
+The girl grew pale all over her pretty rosy cheeks; her eyes filled with
+tears as she gasped, "Oh, how hateful of her, when she promised----"
+
+"She never promised nothing, Eve; it ain't been hers for more than three
+months. Sloan, that used to have it, died, and left his property to be
+divided up between his nieces; and the mortgage is her share. See?"
+
+"I don't care, it's just as mean. Mr. Sloan promised."
+
+"No, he didn't; he jest said if Uncle was behind he wouldn't press him;
+and he did let Uncle get behind with the interest two times and never
+kicked. But he died; and now the woman, she wants her money!"
+
+"I think it is mean and cruel of her to turn us out! Uncle says
+mortgages are wicked anyhow, and I believe him!"
+
+"I guess he couldn't have bought this place if he didn't give a mortgage
+on it. And he'd have had enough to pay cash, too, if Richards hadn't
+begged him so to lend it to him."
+
+"When is Richards going to pay him?"
+
+"It come due three months ago; Richards ain't never paid up the interest
+even, and now he says he's got to have the mortgage extended for three
+years; anyhow for two."
+
+"But don't he KNOW we've got to pay our own mortgage? How can we help
+HIM? I wish Uncle would sell him out!"
+
+The boy gave her the superior smile of the masculine creature. "I
+suppose," he remarked with elaborate irony, "that he's like Uncle and
+you; he thinks mortgages are wicked."
+
+"And just as like as not Uncle won't want to go to the carnival," Eve
+went on, her eyes filling again.
+
+Tim gazed at her, scowling and sneering; but she was absorbed in dreams
+and hopes with which as yet his boyish mind had no point of contact.
+
+"All the girls in the A class were going to go to see the fireworks
+together, and George Dean and some of the boys were going to take us,
+and we were going to have tea at May Arlington's house, and I was to
+stay all night;"--this came in a half sob. "I think it is just too mean!
+I never have any good times!"
+
+"Oh, yes, you do, sis, lots! Uncle always gits you everything you want.
+And he feels terrible bad when I--when he knows he can't afford to git
+something you want----"
+
+"I know well enough who tells him we can't afford things!"
+
+"Well, do you want us to git things we can't afford? I ain't never
+advised him except the best I knew how. I told him Richards was a
+blow-hard, and I told him those Alliance grocery folks he bought such a
+lot of truck of would skin him, and they did; those canned things they
+sold him was all musty, and they said there wasn't any freight on 'em,
+and he had to pay freight and a fancy price besides; and I don't believe
+they had any more to do with the Alliance than our cow!"
+
+"Uncle always believes everything. He always is so sure things are going
+to turn out just splendid; and they don't--only just middling; and then
+he loses a lot of money."
+
+"But he is an awful good man," said the boy, musingly.
+
+"I don't believe in being so good you can't make money. I don't want
+always to be poor and despised, and have the other girls have prettier
+clothes than me!"
+
+"I guess you can be pretty good and yet make money, if you are sharp
+enough. Of course you got to be sharper to be good and make money than
+you got to be, to be mean and make money."
+
+"Well, I know one thing, that Uncle ain't EVER going to make money.
+He----" The last word shrivelled on her lips, which puckered into a
+confused smile at the warning frown of her brother. The man that they
+were discussing had come round to them past the henhouse. How much had
+he overheard?
+
+He didn't seem angry, anyhow. He called: "Well, Evy, ready?" and Eve was
+glad to run into the house for her hat without looking at him. It was a
+relief that she must sit on the back seat where she need not face Uncle
+Nelson. Tim sat in front; but Tim was so stupid he wouldn't mind.
+
+Nor did he; it was Nelson Forrest that stole furtive glances at the
+lad's profile, the knitted brows, the freckled cheeks, the undecided
+nose, and firm mouth.
+
+The boyish shoulders slouched forward at the same angle as that of the
+fifty-year-old shoulders beside him. Nelson, through long following of
+the plough, had lost the erect carriage painfully acquired in the army.
+He was a handsome man, whose fresh-colored skin gave him a perpetual
+appearance of having just washed his face. The features were long and
+delicate. The brown eyes had a liquid softness like the eyes of a woman.
+In general the countenance was alertly intelligent; he looked younger
+than his years; but this afternoon the lines about his mouth and in his
+brows warranted every gray hair of his pointed short beard. There was a
+reason. Nelson was having one of those searing flashes of insight that
+do come occasionally to the most blindly hopeful souls. Nelson had hoped
+all his life. He hoped for himself, he hoped for the whole human race.
+He served the abstraction that he called "PROgress" with unflinching and
+unquestioning loyalty. Every new scheme of increasing happiness by force
+found a helper, a fighter, and a giver in him; by turns he had been
+an Abolitionist, a Fourierist, a Socialist, a Greenbacker, a Farmers'
+Alliance man. Disappointment always was followed hard on its heels by a
+brand-new confidence. Progress ruled his farm as well as his politics;
+he bought the newest implements and subscribed trustfully to four
+agricultural papers; but being a born lover of the ground, a vein of
+saving doubt did assert itself sometimes in his work; and, on the whole,
+as a farmer he was successful. But his success never ventured outside
+his farm gates. At buying or selling, at a bargain in any form, the
+fourteen-year-old Tim was better than Nelson with his fifty years'
+experience of a wicked and bargaining world.
+
+Was that any part of the reason, he wondered to-day, why at the end of
+thirty years of unflinching toil and honesty, he found himself with
+a vast budget of experience in the ruinous loaning of money, with a
+mortgage on the farm of a friend, and a mortgage on his own farm likely
+to be foreclosed? Perhaps it might have been better to stay in Henry
+County. He had paid for his farm at last. He had known a good moment,
+too, that day he drove away from the lawyer's with the cancelled
+mortgage in his pocket and Tim hopping up and down on the seat for
+joy. But the next day Richards--just to give him the chance of a good
+thing--had brought out that Maine man who wanted to buy him out. He was
+anxious to put the money down for the new farm, to have no whip-lash of
+debt forever whistling about his ears as he ploughed, ready to sting did
+he stumble in the furrows; and Tim was more anxious than he; but--there
+was Richards! Richards was a neighbor who thought as he did about Henry
+George and Spiritualism, and belonged to the Farmers' Alliance, and
+had lent Nelson all the works of Henry George that he (Richards) could
+borrow. Richards was in deep trouble. He had lost his wife; he might
+lose his farm. He appealed to Nelson, for the sake of old friendship,
+to save him. And Nelson could not resist; so, two thousand of the
+thirty-four hundred dollars that the Maine man paid went to Richards,
+the latter swearing by all that is holy, to pay his friend off in full
+at the end of the year. There was money coming to him from his dead
+wife's estate, but it was tied up in the courts. Nelson would not listen
+to Tim's prophecies of evil. But he was a little dashed when Richards
+paid neither interest nor principal at the year's end, although he gave
+reasons of weight; and he experienced veritable consternation when the
+renewed mortgage ran its course and still Richards could not pay. The
+money from his wife's estate had been used to improve his farm (Nelson
+knew how rundown everything was), his new wife was sickly and "didn't
+seem to take hold," there had been a disastrous hail-storm--but
+why rehearse the calamities? they focussed on one sentence: it was
+impossible to pay.
+
+Then Nelson, who had been restfully counting on the money from Richards
+for his own debt, bestirred himself, only to find his patient creditor
+gone and a woman in his stead who must have her money. He wrote
+again--sorely against his will--begging Richards to raise the money
+somehow. Richards's answer was in his pocket, for he wore the best black
+broadcloth in which he had done honor to the lawyer, yesterday. Richards
+plainly was wounded; but he explained in detail to Nelson how he
+(Nelson) could borrow money of the banks on his farm and pay Miss Brown.
+There was no bank where Richards could borrow money; and he begged
+Nelson not to drive his wife and little children from their cherished
+home. Nelson choked over the pathos when he read the letter to Tim; but
+Tim only grunted a wish that HE had the handling of that feller. And the
+lawyer was as little moved as Tim. Miss Brown needed the money, he said.
+The banks were not disposed to lend just at present; money, it appeared,
+was "tight;" so, in the end, Nelson drove home with the face of Failure
+staring at him between his horses' ears.
+
+There was only one way. Should he make Richards suffer or suffer
+himself? Did a man have to grind other people or be ground himself?
+Meanwhile they had reached the town. The stir of a festival was in the
+air. On every side bunting streamed in the breeze or was draped across
+brick or wood. Arches spanned some of the streets, with inscriptions of
+welcome on them, and swarms of colored lanterns glittered against the
+sunlight almost as gayly as they would show when they should be lighted
+at night. Little children ran about waving flags. Grocery wagons and
+butchers' wagons trotted by with a flash of flags dangling from the
+horses' harness. The streets were filled with people in their holiday
+clothes. Everybody smiled. The shopkeepers answered questions and went
+out on the sidewalks to direct strangers. From one window hung a banner
+inviting visitors to enter and get a list of hotels and boarding-houses.
+The crowd was entirely good-humored and waited outside restaurants,
+bandying jokes with true Western philosophy. At times the wagons made
+a temporary blockade in the street, but no one grumbled. Bands of music
+paraded past them, the escort for visitors of especial consideration.
+In a window belonging, the sign above declared, to the Business Men's
+Association, stood a huge doll clad in blue satin, on which was painted
+a device of Neptune sailing down the Mississippi amid a storm of
+fireworks. The doll stood in a boat arched about with lantern-decked
+hoops, and while Nelson halted, unable to proceed, he could hear
+the voluble explanation of the proud citizen who was interpreting to
+strangers.
+
+This, Nelson thought, was success. Here were the successful men. The man
+who had failed looked at them. Eve roused him by a shrill cry, "There
+they are. There's May and the girls. Let me out quick, Uncle!"
+
+He stopped the horse and jumped out himself to help her. It was the
+first time since she came under his roof that she had been away from it
+all night. He cleared his throat for some advice on behavior. "Mind and
+be respectful to Mrs. Arlington. Say yes, ma'am, and no, ma'am----" He
+got no further, for Eve gave him a hasty kiss and the crowd brushed her
+away.
+
+"All she thinks of is wearing fine clothes and going with the fellers!"
+said her brother, disdainfully. "If I had to be born a girl, I wouldn't
+be born at all!"
+
+"Maybe if you despise girls so, you'll be born a girl the next time,"
+said Nelson. "Some folks thinks that's how it happens with us."
+
+"Do YOU, Uncle?" asked Tim, running his mind forebodingly over the
+possible business results of such a belief. "S'posing he shouldn't be
+willing to sell the pigs to be killed, 'cause they might be some friends
+of his!" he reflected, with a rising tide of consternation. Nelson
+smiled rather sadly. He said, in another tone: "Tim, I've thought so
+many things, that now I've about given up thinking. All I can do is to
+live along the best way I know how and help the world move the best I'm
+able."
+
+"You bet _I_ ain't going to help the world move," said the boy; "I'm
+going to look out for myself!"
+
+"Then my training of you has turned out pretty badly, if that's the way
+you feel."
+
+A little shiver passed over the lad's sullen face; he flushed until he
+lost his freckles in the red veil and burst out passionately: "Well, I
+got eyes, ain't I? I ain't going to be bad, or drink, or steal, or do
+things to git put in the penitentiary; but I ain't going to let folks
+walk all over me like you do; no, sir!"
+
+Nelson did not answer; in his heart he thought that he had failed with
+the children, too; and he relapsed into that dismal study of the face of
+Failure.
+
+He had come to the city to show Tim the sights, and, therefore, though
+like a man in a dream, he drove conscientiously about the gay streets,
+pointing out whatever he thought might interest the boy, and generally
+discovering that Tim had the new information by heart already. All
+the while a question pounded itself, like the beat of the heart of an
+engine, through the noise and the talk: "Shall I give up Richards or be
+turned out myself?"
+
+When the afternoon sunlight waned he put up the horse at a modest little
+stable where farmers were allowed to bring their own provender. The
+charges were of the smallest and the place neat and weather-tight,
+but it had been a long time before Nelson could be induced to use it,
+because there was a higher-priced stable kept by an ex-farmer and
+member of the Farmers' Alliance. Only the fact that the keeper of the
+low-priced stable was a poor orphan girl, struggling to earn an honest
+livelihood, had moved him.
+
+They had supper at a restaurant of Tim's discovery, small, specklessly
+tidy, and as unexacting of the pocket as the stable. It was an excellent
+supper. But Nelson had no appetite; in spite of an almost childish
+capacity for being diverted, he could attend to nothing but the question
+always in his ears: "Richards or me--which?"
+
+Until it should be time for the spectacle they walked down the hill,
+and watched the crowds gradually blacken every inch of the river-banks.
+Already the swarms of lanterns were beginning to bloom out in the dusk.
+Strains of music throbbed through the air, adding a poignant touch to
+the excitement vibrating in all the faces and voices about them. Even
+the stolid Tim felt the contagion. He walked with a jaunty step and
+assaulted a tune himself. "I tell you, Uncle," says Tim, "it's nice of
+these folks to be getting up all this show, and giving it for nothing!"
+
+"Do you think so?" says Nelson. "You don't love your book as I wish
+you did; but I guess you remember about the ancient Romans, and how the
+great, rich Romans used to spend enormous sums in games and shows that
+they let the people in free to--well, what for? Was it to learn them
+anything or to make them happy? Oh, no, it was to keep down the spirit
+of liberty, Son, it was to make them content to be slaves! And so it
+is here. These merchants and capitalists are only looking out for
+themselves, trying to keep labor down and not let it know how oppressed
+it is, trying to get people here from everywhere to show what a fine
+city they have and get their money."
+
+"Well, 'TIS a fine town," Tim burst in, "a boss town! And they ain't
+gouging folks a little bit. None of the hotels or the restaurants
+have put up their prices one cent. Look what a dandy supper we got for
+twenty-five cents! And ain't the boy at Lumley's grocery given me two
+tickets to set on the steamboat? There's nothing mean about this town!"
+
+Nelson made no remark; but he thought, for the fiftieth time, that his
+farm was too near the city. Tim was picking up all the city boys' false
+pride as well as their slang. Unconscious Tim resumed his tune. He knew
+that it was "Annie Rooney" if no one else did, and he mangled the notes
+with appropriate exhilaration.
+
+Now, the river was as busy as the land, lights swimming hither and
+thither; steamboats with ropes of tiny stars bespangling their dark bulk
+and a white electric glare in the bow, low boats with lights that sent
+wavering spear-heads into the shadow beneath. The bridge was a blazing
+barbed fence of fire, and beyond the bridge, at the point of the island,
+lay a glittering multitude of lights, a fairy fleet with miniature sails
+outlined in flame as if by jewels.
+
+Nelson followed Tim. The crowds, the ceaseless clatter of tongues and
+jar of wheels, depressed the man, who hardly knew which way to dodge
+the multitudinous perils of the thoroughfare; but Tim used his elbows to
+such good purpose that they were out of the levee, on the steamboat, and
+settling themselves in two comfortable chairs in a coign of vantage on
+deck, that commanded the best obtainable view of the pageant, before
+Nelson had gathered his wits together enough to plan a path out of the
+crush.
+
+"I sized up this place from the shore," Tim sighed complacently, drawing
+a long breath of relief; "only jest two chairs, so we won't be crowded."
+
+Obediently, Nelson took his chair. His head sank on his thin chest.
+Richards or himself, which should he sacrifice? So the weary old
+question droned through his brain. He felt a tap on his shoulder. The
+man who roused him was an acquaintance, and he stood smiling in the
+attitude of a man about to ask a favor, while the expectant half-smile
+of the lady on his arm hinted at the nature of the favor. Would Mr.
+Forrest be so kind?--there seemed to be no more seats. Before Mr.
+Forrest could be kind Tim had yielded his own chair and was off,
+wriggling among the crowd in search of another place.
+
+"Smart boy, that youngster of yours," said the man; "he'll make his way
+in the world, he can push. Well, Miss Alma, let me make you acquainted
+with Mr. Forrest. I know you will be well entertained by him. So, if
+you'll excuse me, I'll get back and help my wife wrestle with the kids.
+They have been trying to see which will fall overboard first ever since
+we came on deck!"
+
+Under the leeway of this pleasantry he bowed and retired. Nelson turned
+with determined politeness to the lady. He was sorry that she had come,
+she looking to him a very fine lady indeed, with her black silk gown,
+her shining black ornaments, and her bright black eyes. She was not
+young, but handsome in Nelson's judgment, although of a haughty bearing.
+"Maybe she is the principal of the High School," thought he. "Martin has
+her for a boarder, and he said she was very particular about her melons
+being cold!"
+
+But however formidable a personage, the lady must be entertained.
+
+"I expect you are a resident of the city, ma'am?" said Nelson.
+
+"Yes, I was born here." She smiled, a smile that revealed a little break
+in the curve of her cheek, not exactly a dimple, but like one.
+
+"I don't know when I have seen such a fine appearing lady," thought
+Nelson. He responded: "Well, I wasn't born here; but I come when I was
+a little shaver of ten and stayed till I was eighteen, when I went to
+Kansas to help fight the border ruffians. I went to school here in the
+Warren Street school-house."
+
+"So did I, as long as I went anywhere to school. I had to go to work
+when I was twelve."
+
+Nelson's amazement took shape before his courtesy had a chance to
+control it. "I didn't suppose you ever did any work in your life!" cried
+he.
+
+"I guess I haven't done much else. Father died when I was twelve and the
+oldest of five, the next only eight--Polly, that came between Eb and me,
+died--naturally I had to work. I was a nurse-girl by the day, first; and
+I never shall forget how kind the woman was to me. She gave me so much
+dinner I never needed to eat any breakfast, which was a help."
+
+"You poor little thing! I'm afraid you went hungry sometimes."
+Immediately he marvelled at his familiar speech, but she did not seem to
+resent it.
+
+"No, not so often," she said, musingly; "but I used often and often
+to wish I could carry some of the nice things home to mother and the
+babies. After a while she would give me a cookey or a piece of bread
+and butter for lunch; that I could take home. I don't suppose I'll often
+have more pleasure than I used to have then, seeing little Eb waiting
+for sister; and the baby and mother----" She stopped abruptly, to
+continue, in an instant, with a kind of laugh; "I am never likely to
+feel so important again as I did then, either. It was great to have
+mother consulting me, as if I had been grown up. I felt like I had the
+weight of the nation on my shoulders, I assure you."
+
+"And have you always worked since? You are not working out now?" with a
+glance at her shining gown.
+
+"Oh, no, not for a long time. I learned to be a cook. I was a good cook,
+too, if I say it myself. I worked for the Lossings for four years. I am
+not a bit ashamed of being a hired girl, for I was as good a one as
+I knew how. It was Mrs. Lossing that first lent me books; and Harry
+Lossing, who is head of the firm now, got Ebenezer into the works.
+Ebenezer is shipping-clerk with a good salary and stock in the concern;
+and Ralph is there, learning the trade. I went to the business-college
+and learned book-keeping, and afterward I learned typewriting and
+shorthand. I have been working for the firm for fourteen years. We
+have educated the girls. Milly is married, and Kitty goes to the
+boarding-school, here."
+
+"Then you haven't been married yourself?"
+
+"What time did I have to think of being married? I had the family on my
+mind, and looking after them."
+
+"That was more fortunate for your family than it was for my sex,"
+said Nelson, gallantly. He accompanied the compliment by a glance of
+admiration, extinguished in an eye-flash, for the white radiance that
+had bathed the deck suddenly vanished.
+
+"Now you will see a lovely sight," said the woman, deigning no reply to
+his tribute; "listen! That is the signal."
+
+The air was shaken with the boom of cannon. Once, twice, thrice.
+Directly the boat-whistles took up the roar, making a hideous din. The
+fleet had moved. Spouting rockets and Roman candles, which painted above
+it a kaleidoscopic archway of fire, welcomed by answering javelins of
+light and red and orange and blue and green flares from the shore; the
+fleet bombarded the bridge, escorted Neptune in his car, manoeuvred and
+massed and charged on the blazing city with a many-hued shower of flame.
+
+After the boats, silently, softly, floated the battalions of lanterns,
+so close to the water that they seemed flaming water-lilies, while the
+dusky mirror repeated and inverted their splendor.
+
+"They're shingles, you know," explained Nelson's companion, "with
+lanterns on them; but aren't they pretty?"
+
+"Yes, they are! I wish you had not told me. It is like a fairy story!"
+
+"Ain't it? But we aren't through; there's more to come. Beautiful
+fireworks!"
+
+The fireworks, however, were slow of coming. They could see the barge
+from which they were to be sent; they could watch the movements of the
+men in white oil-cloth who moved in a ghostly fashion about the barge;
+they could hear the tap of hammers; but nothing came of it all.
+
+They sat in the darkness, waiting; and there came to Nelson a strange
+sensation of being alone and apart from all the breathing world with
+this woman. He did not perceive that Tim had quietly returned with a box
+which did very well for a seat, and was sitting with his knees against
+the chair-rungs. He seemed to be somehow outside of all the tumult and
+the spectacle. It was the vainglorying triumph of this world. He was the
+soul outside, the soul that had missed its triumph. In his perplexity
+and loneliness he felt an overwhelming longing for sympathy; neither did
+it strike Nelson, who believed in all sorts of occult influences, that
+his confidence in a stranger was unwarranted. He would have told you
+that his "psychic instincts" never played him false, although really
+they were traitors from their astral cradles to their astral graves.
+
+He said in a hesitating way: "You must excuse me being kinder dull; I've
+got some serious business on my mind and I can't help thinking of it."
+
+"Is that so? Well, I know how that is; I have often stayed awake nights
+worrying about things. Lest I shouldn't suit and all that--especially
+after mother took sick."
+
+"I s'pose you had to give up and nurse her then?"
+
+"That was what Ebenezer and Ralph were for having me do; but mother--my
+mother always had so much sense--mother says, 'No, Alma, you've got a
+good place and a chance in life, you sha'n't give it up. We'll hire a
+girl. I ain't never lonesome except evenings, and then you will be home.
+I should jest want to die,' she says, 'if I thought I kept you in a kind
+of prison like by my being sick--now, just when you are getting on
+so well.' There never WAS a woman like my mother!" Her voice shook a
+little, and Nelson asked gently:
+
+"Ain't your mother living now?"
+
+"No, she died last year." She added, after a little silence, "I somehow
+can't get used to being lonesome."
+
+"It IS hard," said Nelson. "I lost my wife three years ago."
+
+"That's hard, too."
+
+"My goodness! I guess it is. And it's hardest when trouble comes on a
+man and he can't go nowhere for advice."
+
+"Yes, that's so, too. But--have you any children?"
+
+"Yes, ma'am; that is, they ain't my own children. Lizzie and I never had
+any; but these two we took and they are most like my own. The girl is
+eighteen and the boy rising of fourteen."
+
+"They must be a comfort to you; but they are considerable of a
+responsibility, too."
+
+"Yes, ma'am," he sighed softly to himself. "Sometimes I feel I haven't
+done the right way by them, though I've tried. Not that they ain't
+good children, for they are--no better anywhere. Tim, he will work from
+morning till night, and never need to urge him; and he never gives me a
+promise he don't keep it, no ma'am, never did since he was a little
+mite of a lad. And he is a kind boy, too, always good to the beasts; and
+while he may speak up a little short to his sister, he saves her many a
+step. He doesn't take to his studies quite as I would like to have him,
+but he has a wonderful head for business. There is splendid stuff in Tim
+if it could only be worked right."
+
+While Nelson spoke, Tim was hunching his shoulders forward in the
+darkness, listening with the whole of two sharp ears. His face worked in
+spite of him, and he gave an inarticulate snort.
+
+"Well," the woman said, "I think that speaks well for Tim. Why should
+you be worried about him?"
+
+"I am afraid he is getting to love money and worldly success too well,
+and that is what I fear for the girl, too. You see, she is so pretty,
+and the idols of the tribe and the market, as Bacon calls them, are
+strong with the young."
+
+"Yes, that's so," the woman assented vaguely, not at all sure what
+either Bacon or his idols might be. "Are the children relations of
+yours?"
+
+"No, ma'am; it was like this: When I was up in Henry County there came
+a photographic artist to the village near us, and pitched his tent and
+took tintypes in his wagon. He had his wife and his two children with
+him. The poor woman fell ill and died; so we took the two children.
+My wife was willing; she was a wonderfully good woman, member of the
+Methodist church till she died. I--I am not a church member myself,
+ma'am; I passed through that stage of spiritual development a long
+while ago." He gave a wistful glance at his companion's dimly outlined
+profile. "But I never tried to disturb her faith; it made HER happy."
+
+"Oh, I don't think it is any good fooling with other people's
+religions," said the woman, easily. "It is just like trying to talk
+folks out of drinking; nobody knows what is right for anybody else's
+soul any more than they do what is good for anybody else's stomach!"
+
+"Yes, ma'am. You put things very clearly."
+
+"I guess it is because you understand so quickly. But you were
+saying------"
+
+"That's all the story. We took the children, and their father was killed
+by the cars the next year, poor man; and so we have done the best we
+could ever since by them."
+
+"I should say you had done very well by them."
+
+"No, ma'am; I haven't done very well somehow by anyone, myself included,
+though God knows I've tried hard enough!"
+
+Then followed the silence natural after such a confession when the
+listener does not know the speaker well enough to parry abasement by
+denial.
+
+"I am impressed," said Nelson, simply, "to talk with you frankly. It
+isn't polite to bother strangers with your troubles, but I am impressed
+that you won't mind."
+
+"Oh, no, I won't mind."
+
+It was not extravagant sympathy; but Nelson thought how kind her voice
+sounded, and what a musical voice it was. Most people would have called
+it rather sharp.
+
+He told her--with surprisingly little egotism, as the keen listener
+noted--the story of his life; the struggle of his boyhood; his random
+self-education; his years in the army (he had criticised his superior
+officers, thereby losing the promotion that was coming for bravery in
+the field); his marriage (apparently he had married his wife because
+another man had jilted her); his wrestle with nature (whose pranks
+included a cyclone) on a frontier farm that he eventually lost, having
+put all his savings into a "Greenback" newspaper, and being thus swamped
+with debt; his final slow success in paying for his Iowa farm; and his
+purchase of the new farm, with its resulting disaster. "I've farmed in
+Kansas," he said, "in Nebraska, in Dakota, in Iowa. I was willing to
+go wherever the land promised. It always seemed like I was going to
+succeed, but somehow I never did. The world ain't fixed right for the
+workers, I take it. A man who has spent thirty years in hard, honest
+toil oughtn't to be staring ruin in the face like I am to-day. They
+won't let it be so when we have the single tax and when we farmers send
+our own men instead of city lawyers, to the Legislature and halls of
+Congress. Sometimes I think it's the world that's wrong and sometimes I
+think it's me!"
+
+The reply came in crisp and assured accents, which were the strongest
+contrast to Nelson's soft, undecided pipe: "Seems to me in this last
+case the one most to blame is neither you nor the world at large, but
+this man Richards, who is asking YOU to pay for HIS farm. And I notice
+you don't seem to consider your creditor in this business. How do you
+know she don't need the money? Look at me, for instance; I'm in some
+financial difficulty myself. I have a mortgage for two thousand dollars,
+and that mortgage--for which good value was given, mind you--falls due
+this month. I want the money. I want it bad. I have a chance to put
+my money into stock at the factory. I know all about the investment;
+I haven't worked there all these years and not know how the business
+stands. It is a chance to make a fortune. I ain't likely to ever have
+another like it; and it won't wait for me to make up my mind forever,
+either. Isn't it hard on me, too?"
+
+"Lord knows it is, ma'am," said Nelson, despondently; "it is hard on
+us all! Sometimes I don't see the end of it all. A vast social
+revolution----"
+
+"Social fiddlesticks! I beg your pardon, Mr. Forrest, but it puts me out
+of patience to have people expecting to be allowed to make every mortal
+kind of fools of themselves and then have 'a social revolution' jump in
+to slue off the consequences. Let us understand each other. Who do you
+suppose I am?"
+
+"Miss--Miss Almer, ain't it?"
+
+"It's Alma Brown, Mr. Forrest. I saw you coming on the boat and I made
+Mr. Martin fetch me over to you. I told him not to say my name, because
+I wanted a good plain talk with you. Well, I've had it. Things are
+just about where I thought they were, and I told Mr. Lossing so. But I
+couldn't be sure. You must have thought me a funny kind of woman to be
+telling you all those things about myself."
+
+Nelson, who had changed color half a dozen times in the darkness, sighed
+before he said: "No, ma'am; I only thought how good you were to tell me.
+I hoped maybe you were impressed to trust me as I was to trust you."
+
+Being so dark Nelson could not see the queer expression on her face as
+she slowly shook her head. She was thinking: "If I ever saw a babe in
+arms trying to do business! How did HE ever pay for a farm?" She said:
+"Well, I did it on purpose; I wanted you to know I wasn't a cruel
+aristocrat, but a woman that had worked as hard as yourself. Now, why
+shouldn't you help me and yourself instead of helping Richards? You have
+confidence in me, you say. Well, show it. I'll give you your mortgage
+for your mortgage on Richards's farm. Come, can't you trust Richards to
+me? You think it over."
+
+The hiss of a rocket hurled her words into space. The fireworks had
+begun. Miss Brown looked at them and watched Nelson at the same time.
+As a good business woman who was also a good citizen, having subscribed
+five dollars to the carnival, she did not propose to lose the worth
+of her money; neither did she intend to lose a chance to do business.
+Perhaps there was an obscurer and more complex motive lurking in some
+stray corner of that queer garret, a woman's mind. Such motives--aimless
+softenings of the heart, unprofitable diversions of the fancy--will seep
+unconsciously through the toughest business principles of woman.
+
+She was puzzled by the look of exaltation on Nelson's features,
+illumined as they were by the uncanny light. If the fool man had not
+forgotten all his troubles just to see a few fireworks! No, he was not
+that kind of a fool; maybe--and she almost laughed aloud in her pleasure
+over her own insight--maybe it all made him think of the war, where
+he had been so brave. "He was a regular hero in the war," Miss Brown
+concluded, "and he certainly is a perfect gentleman; what a pity he
+hasn't got any sense!"
+
+She had guessed aright, although she had not guessed deep enough in
+regard to Nelson. He watched the great wheels of light, he watched the
+river aflame with Greek fire, then, with a shiver, he watched the bombs
+bursting into myriads of flowers, into fizzing snakes, into fields of
+burning gold, into showers of jewels that made the night splendid for
+a second and faded. They were not fireworks to him; they were a magical
+phantasmagoria that renewed the incoherent and violent emotions of his
+youth; again he was in the chaos of the battle, or he was dreaming by
+his camp-fire, or he was pacing his lonely round on guard. His heart
+leaped again with the old glow, the wonderful, beautiful worship of
+Liberty that can do no wrong. He seemed to hear a thousand voices
+chanting:
+
+"In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, As He died
+to make men holy, let us die to make men free!"
+
+
+His turbid musings cleared--or they seemed to him to clear--under the
+strong reaction of his imagination and his memories. It was all over,
+the dream and the glory thereof. The splendid young soldier was an
+elderly, ruined man. But one thing was left: he could be true to his
+flag.
+
+"A poor soldier, but enlisted for the war," says Nelson, squaring his
+shoulders, with a lump in his throat and his eyes brimming. "I know by
+the way it hurts me to think of refusing her that it's a temptation to
+wrong-doing. No, I can't save myself by sacrificing a brother soldier
+for humanity. She is just as kind as she can be, but women don't
+understand business; she wouldn't make allowance for Richards."
+
+He felt a hand on his shoulder; it was Martin apologizing for hurrying
+Miss Brown; but the baby was fretting and----
+
+"I'm sorry--yes--well, I wish you didn't have to go!" Nelson began; but
+a hoarse treble rose from under his elbows: "Say, Mr. Martin, Uncle and
+me can take Miss Brown home."
+
+"If you will allow me the pleasure," said Nelson, with the touch of
+courtliness that showed through his homespun ways.
+
+"Well, I WOULD like to see the hundred bombs bursting at once and Vulcan
+at his forge!" said Miss Brown.
+
+Thus the matter arranged itself. Tim waited with the lady while Nelson
+went for the horse, nor was it until afterward that Miss Brown wondered
+why the lad did not go instead of the man. But Tim had his own reasons.
+No sooner was Nelson out of earshot than he began: "Say, Miss Brown, I
+can tell you something."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"That Richards is no good; but you can't get Uncle to see it. At least
+it will take time. If you'll help me we can get him round in time. Won't
+you please not sell us out for six months and give me a show? I'll see
+you get your interest and your money, too."
+
+"You?" Miss Brown involuntarily took a business attitude, with her arms
+akimbo, and eyed the boy.
+
+"Yes, ma'am, me. I ain't so very old, but I know all about the business.
+I got all the figures down--how much we raise and what we got last year.
+I can fetch them to you so you can see. He is a good farmer, and he will
+catch on to the melons pretty quick. We'll do better next year, and I'll
+try to keep him from belonging to things and spending money; and if he
+won't lend to anybody or start in raising a new kind of crop just when
+we get the melons going, he will make money sure. He is awful good and
+honest. All the trouble with him is he needs somebody to take care
+of him. If Aunt Lizzie had been alive he never would have lent that
+dead-beat Richards that money. He ought to get married."
+
+Miss Brown did not feel called on to say anything. Tim continued in a
+judicial way: "He is awful good and kind, always gets up in the morning
+to make the fire if I have got something else to do; and he'd think
+everything his wife did was the best in the world; and if he had
+somebody to take care of him he'd make money. I don't suppose YOU would
+think of it?" This last in an insinuating tone, with evident anxiety.
+
+"Well, I never!" said Miss Brown.
+
+Whether she was more offended or amused she couldn't tell; and she stood
+staring at him by the electric light. To her amazement the hard little
+face began to twitch. "I didn't mean to mad you," Tim grunted, with a
+quiver in his rough voice. "I've been listening to every word you
+said, and I thought you were so sensible you'd talk over things without
+nonsense. Of course I knew he'd have to come and see you Saturday
+nights, and take you buggy riding, and take you to the theatre, and
+all such things--first. But I thought we could sorter fix it up between
+ourselves. I've taken care of him ever since Aunt Lizzie died, and I did
+my best he shouldn't lend that money, but I couldn't help it; and I
+did keep him from marrying a widow woman with eight children, who kept
+telling him how much her poor fatherless children needed a man; and I
+never did see anybody I was willing--before--and it's--it's so lonesome
+without Aunt Lizzie!" He choked and frowned. Poor Tim, who had sold so
+many melons to women and seen so much of back doors and kitchen humors
+that he held the sex very cheap, he did not realize how hard he would
+find it to talk of the one woman who had been kind to him! He turned red
+with shame over his own weakness.
+
+"You poor little chap!" cried Miss Brown; "you poor little sharp,
+innocent chap!" The hand she laid on his shoulder patted it as she went
+on: "Never mind, if I can't marry your uncle, I can help you take care
+of him. You're a real nice boy, and I'm not mad; don't you think it.
+There's your uncle now."
+
+Nelson found her so gentle that he began to have qualms lest his
+carefully prepared speech should hurt her feelings. But there was no
+help for it now. "I have thought over your kind offer to me, ma'am,"
+said he, humbly, "and I got a proposition to make to you. It is your
+honest due to have your farm, yes, ma'am. Well, I know a man would like
+to buy it; I'll sell it to him, and pay you your money."
+
+"But that wasn't my proposal."
+
+"I know it, ma'am. I honor you for your kindness; but I can't risk
+what--what might be another person's idea of duty about Richards. Our
+consciences ain't all equally enlightened, you know."
+
+Miss Brown did not answer a word.
+
+They drove along the streets where the lanterns were fading. Tim grew
+uneasy, she was silent so long. On the brow of the hill she indicated a
+side street and told them to stop the horse before a little brown house.
+One of the windows was a dim square of red.
+
+"It isn't quite so lonesome coming home to a light," said Miss Brown.
+
+As Nelson cramped the wheel to jump out to help her from the vehicle,
+the light from the electric arc fell full on his handsome face and
+showed her the look of compassion and admiration, there.
+
+"Wait one moment," she said, detaining him with one firm hand. "I've got
+something to say to you. Let Richards go for the present; all I ask of
+you about him is that you will do nothing until we can find out if he
+is so bad off. But, Mr. Forrest, I can do better for you about that
+mortgage. Mr. Lossing will take it for three years for a relative of his
+and pay me the money. I told him the story."
+
+"And YOU will get the money all right?"
+
+"Just the same. I was only trying to help you a little by the other way,
+and I failed. Never mind."
+
+"I can't tell you how you make me feel," said Nelson.
+
+"Please let him bring you some melons to-morrow and make a stagger at
+it, though," said Tim.
+
+"Can I?" Nelson's eyes shone.
+
+"If you want to," said Miss Brown. She laughed; but in a moment she
+smiled.
+
+All the way home Nelson saw the same face of Failure between the old
+mare's white ears; but its grim lineaments were softened by a smile, a
+smile like Miss Brown's.
+
+
+
+
+TOMMY AND THOMAS
+
+IT was while Harry Lossing was at the High School that Mrs. Carriswood
+first saw Tommy Fitzmaurice. He was not much to see, a long lad of
+sixteen who had outgrown his jackets and was not yet grown to his ears.
+
+At this period Mrs. Fitzmaurice was his barber, and she, having been too
+rash with the shears in one place, had snipped off the rest of his curly
+black locks "to match;" until he showed a perfect convict's poll, giving
+his ears all the better chance, and bringing out the rather square
+contour of his jaws to advantage. He had the true Irish-Norman face; a
+skin of fine texture, fair and freckled, high cheekbones, straight nose,
+and wide blue eyes that looked to be drawn with ink, because of their
+sharply pencilled brows and long, thick, black lashes. But the
+feature that Mrs. Carriswood noticed was Tommy's mouth, a flexible and
+delicately cut mouth, of which the lips moved lightly in speaking and
+seldom were quite in repose.
+
+"The genuine Irish orator's mouth," thought Mrs. Carriswood.
+
+Tommy, however, was not a finished orator, and Mrs. Carriswood herself
+deigned to help him with his graduating oration; Tommy delivering the
+aforesaid oration from memory, on the stage of the Grand Opera House,
+to a warm-hearted and perspiring audience of his towns-people, amid
+tremendous applause and not the slightest prod-dings of conscience.
+
+Really the speech deserved the applause; Mrs. Carriswood, who had heard
+half the eloquence of the world, spent three evenings on it; and she has
+a good memory.
+
+Her part in the affair always amused her; though, in fact, it came to
+pass easily. She had the great fortune of the family. Being a widow with
+no children, and the time not being come when philanthropy beckons on
+the right hand and on the left to free-handed women, Mrs. Carriswood
+travelled. As she expressed it, she was searching the globe for a
+perfect climate. "Not that I in the least expect to find it," said she,
+cheerfully, "but I like to vary my disappointments; when I get worn out
+being frozen, winters, I go somewhere to be soaked." She was on her way
+to California this time, with her English maid, who gave the Lossing
+domestics many a jolly moment by her inextinguishable panic about red
+Indians. Mrs. Derry supposed these savages to be lurking on the prairie
+outside every Western town; and almost fainted when she did chance
+to turn the corner upon three Kickapoo Indians, splendid in paint and
+feathers, and peacefully vending the "Famous Kickapoo Sagwa." She had
+others of the artless notions of the travelling English, and I fear that
+they were encouraged not only by the cook, the "second girl," and the
+man-of-all-work, but by Harry and his chum, Tommy; I know she used to
+tell how she saw tame buffalo "roosting" on the streets, "w'ich they do
+look that like common cows a body couldn't tell 'em hapart!"
+
+She had a great opinion of Tommy, a mystery to her mistress for a long
+time, until one day it leaked out that Tommy "and Master Harry, too,"
+had told her that Tommy's great-grandfather was a lord in the old
+country.
+
+"The family seem to have sunk in the world since, Derry," was Mrs.
+Carriswood's single remark, as she smiled to herself. After Derry was
+dismissed she picked up a letter, written that day to a friend of hers,
+and read some passages about Harry and Tommy, smiling again.
+
+"Harry"--one may look over her pretty shoulder without impertinence, in
+a story--"Harry," she wrote, "is a boy that I long to steal. Just the
+kind of boy we have both wanted, Sarah--frank, happy, affectionate. I
+must tell you something about him. It came out by accident. He has the
+Western business instincts, and what do you suppose he did? He actually
+started a wee shop of his own in the corner of the yard (really it is
+a surprisingly pretty place, and they are quite civilized in the house,
+gas, hot water, steam heat, all most comfortable), and sold 'pop' and
+candy and cakes to the boys. He made so much money that he proposed a
+partnership to the cook and the setting up a little booth in the 'county
+fair,' which is like our rural cattle shows, you know. The cook (a
+superior person who borrows books from Mrs. Lossing, but seems very
+decent and respectful notwithstanding, and broils game to perfection.
+And SUCH game as we have here, Sarah!)--well, the cook made him
+cream-cakes, sandwiches, tarts, and candy, and Harry honorably bought
+all the provisions with his profits from the first venture. You will
+open your eyes at his father permitting such a thing, but Henry Lossing
+is a thorough Westerner in some ways, and he looks on it all as a joke.
+'Might show the boy how to do business,' he says.
+
+"Well, they had a ravishing display, so Alma, the cook, and William, the
+man, assured me--per Derry. All the sadder its fate; for alas! a gang
+of rowdy boys fell upon Harry, and while he was busy fighting half of
+them--he is as plucky as his uncle, the general--the other half looted
+the beautiful stock in trade! They would have despoiled our poor little
+merchant entirely but for the opportune arrival of a schoolmate who
+is mightily respected by the rowdies. He knocked one of them down and
+shouted after the others that he would give every one of them a good
+thrashing if they did not bring the plunder back; and as he is known to
+be a lad of his word for good or evil, actually the scamps did return
+most of the booty, which the two boys brushed off and sold, as far as it
+went (!) The consequence of the fray has been that Harry is unboundedly
+grateful to this Tommy Fitzmaurice, and is at present coaching him on
+his graduating oration. Fitzmaurice has studied hard and won honors, and
+wants to make a show with his oration, to please his father. 'You see,'
+says Harry, 'Tommy's father has saved money and is spending it all on
+Tommy, so's he can be educated. He needs Tommy in the business real
+bad, but he won't let him come in; he keeps him at school, and he thinks
+everything of his getting the valedictory, and Tommy, he worked nights
+studying to get it.' When I asked what was the father's business, Harry
+grew a bit confused. 'Well, he kept a saloon; but'--Harry hastened to
+explain--'it was a very nice saloon, never any trouble with the police
+there; why, Tommy knew every man on the force. And they keep good
+liquors, too,' said Harry, earnestly; 'throw away all the beer left in
+the glasses.' 'What else would they do with it?' asked innocent I. 'Why,
+keep it in a bucket,' said Harry, solemnly, 'and then slip the glass
+under the counter and half fill out of the bucket, then hold it under
+the keg LOW, so's the foam will come; that's a trick of the trade, you
+know. Tommy says his father would SCORN that!' There is a vista opened,
+isn't there? I was rather shocked at such associates for Harry, and told
+his mother. Did she think it a good idea to have such a boy coming to
+the house? a saloon-keeper's son? She did not laugh, as I half expected,
+but answered quite seriously that she had been looking up Tommy, that
+he was very much attached to Harry, and that she did not think he would
+teach him anything bad. He has, I find myself, notions of honor, though
+they are rather the code of the street. And he picks up things quickly.
+Once he came to tea. It was amusing to see how he glued his eyes on
+Harry and kept time with his motions. He used his fork quite properly,
+only as Harry is a left-handed little fellow, the right-handed Thomas
+had the more difficulty.
+
+"He is taking such vast pains with his 'oration' that I felt moved to
+help him. The subject is 'The Triumph of Democracy,' and Tommy civilly
+explained that 'democracy' did not mean the Democratic party, but 'just
+only a government where all the poor folks can get their rights and can
+vote.'
+
+"The oration was the kind of spread-eagle thing you might expect; I
+can see that Tommy has formed himself on the orators of his father's
+respectable saloon. What he said in comment interested me more. 'Sure, I
+guess it is the best government, ma'am, though, of course, I got to make
+it out that way, anyhow. But we come from Ireland, and there they got
+the other kind, and me granny, she starved in the famine time, she did
+that--with the fever. Me father walked twenty mile to the Sackville's
+place, where they gave him some meal, though he wasn't one of their
+tenants; yes, and the lady told him how he would be cooking it. I never
+will forget that lady!'
+
+"I saw a dramatic opportunity: would Tommy be willing to tell that story
+in his speech? He looked at me with an odd look--or so I imagined it!
+'Why not?' says he; 'I'd as soon as not tell it to anyone of them, and
+why not to them all together?' Well, why not, when you come to think
+of it? So we have got it into the speech; and I, I myself, Sarah, am
+drilling young Demos-thenes, and he is so apt a scholar that I find
+myself rather pleasantly employed." Having read her letter, Mrs.
+Carriswood hesitated a second and then added Derry's information at
+the bottom of the page. "I suppose the lordly ancestor was one of King
+James's creation--see Macaulay, somewhere in the second volume. I dare
+say there is a drop or two of good blood in the boy. He has the manners
+of a gentleman--but I don't know that I ever saw an Irishman, no matter
+how low in the social scale, who hadn't."
+
+Thus it happened that Tommy's valedictory scored a success that is a
+tradition of the High School, and came to be printed in both the city
+papers; copies of which journals Tommy's mother has preserved sacredly
+to this day; and I have no doubt, could one find them, they would be
+found wrapped around a yellow photograph of the "A Class" of 1870: eight
+pretty girls in white, smiling among five solemn boys in black, and
+Tommy himself, as the valedictorian, occupying the centre of the picture
+in his new suit of broadcloth, with a rose in his buttonhole and his
+hair cut by a professional barber for the occasion.
+
+It was the story of the famine that really captured the audience; and
+Tommy told it well, with the true Irish fire, in a beautiful voice.
+
+In the front seat of the parquette a little old man in a wrinkled black
+broadcloth, with a bald head and a fringe of whisker under his long
+chin, and a meek little woman, in a red Paisley shawl, wept and laughed
+by turns. They had taken the deepest interest in every essay and every
+speech. The old man clapped his large hands (which were encased in
+loose, black kid gloves) with unflagging vigor. He wore a pair of heavy
+boots, the soles of which made a noble thud on the floor.
+
+"Ain't it wonderful the like of them young craters can talk like that!"
+he cried; "shure, Molly, that young lady who'd the essay--where is
+it?"--a huge black forefinger travelled down the page--"'_Music, The
+Turkish Patrol_,' No--though that's grand, that piece; I'll be spakin'
+wid Professor Von Keinmitz to bring it when we've the opening. Here
+'tis, Molly: '_Tin, Essay. The Darkest Night Brings Out the Stars,
+Miss Mamie Odenheimer_.' Thrue for you, mavourneen! And the sintiments,
+wasn't they illigant? and the lan-gwidge was as foine as Pat Ronan's
+speeches or Father--whist! will ye look at the flowers that shlip of a
+gyirl's gitting! Count 'em, will ye?"
+
+"Fourteen bouquets and wan basket," says the little woman, "and Mamie
+Odenheimer, she got seventeen bouquets and two baskets and a sign.
+Well," she looked anxious, but smiled, "I know of siven bouquets Tommy
+will git for sure. And that's not countin' what Harry Lossing will do
+for him. Hiven bless the good heart of him!"
+
+"Well, I kin count four for him on wan seat," says the man, with a nod
+of his head toward the gay heap in the woman's lap, "barrin' I ain't
+on-vaygled into flinging some of thim to the young ladies!"
+
+Harry Lossing, in the seat behind with his mother and Mrs. Carriswood,
+giggled at this and whispered in the latter lady's ear, "That's Tommy's
+father and mother. My, aren't they excited, though! And Tommy's white's
+a sheet--for fear he'll disappoint them, you know. He has said his piece
+over twice to me, to-day, he's so scared lest he'll forget. I've got it
+in my pocket, and I'm going behind when it's his turn, to prompt him.
+Did you see me winking at him? it sort of cheers him up."
+
+He was almost as keen over the floral procession as the Fitzmaurices
+themselves. The Lossing garden had been stripped to the last bud, and
+levies made on the asparagus-bed, into the bargain, and Mrs. Lossing and
+Alma and Mrs. Carriswood and Derry and Susy Lossing had made bouquets
+and baskets and wreaths, and Harry had distributed them among friends
+in different parts of the house. I say Harry, but, complimented by Mrs.
+Carriswood, he admitted ingenuously that it was Tommy's idea.
+
+"Tommy thought they would make more show that way," says Harry, "and
+they are all on the middle aisle, so his father and mother can see them;
+Tim O'Halloran has got one for him, too, and Mrs. Macillarney, and she's
+got some splendid pinies. Picked every last one. They'll make a show!"
+
+But Harry knew nothing of the most magnificent of his friend's trophies
+until it undulated gloriously down the aisle, above the heads of two
+men, white satin ribbons flying, tinfoil shining--an enormous horseshoe
+of roses and mignonette!
+
+The parents were both on their feet to crane their necks after it, as it
+passed them amid the plaudits.
+
+"Oh, it was YOU, Cousin Margaret; I know it was you," cried Harry.
+
+He took the ladies over to the Fitzmaurices the minute that the diplomas
+were given; and, directly, Tommy joined them, attended by two admiring
+followers laden with the trophies. Mrs. O'Halloran and Mrs. Macillarney
+and divers of the friends, both male and female, joined the circle.
+Tommy held quite a little court. He shook hands with all the ladies,
+beginning with Mrs. Carriswood (who certainly never had found herself
+before in such a company, jammed between Alderman McGinnis's resplendent
+new tweeds and Mrs. Macillarney's calico); he affectionately embraced
+his mother, and he allowed himself to be embraced by Mrs. Macillarney
+and Mrs. O'Halloran, while Patrick Fitzmaurice shook hands with the
+alderman.
+
+"Here's the lady that helped me on me piece, father; she's the lady
+that sent me the horseshoe, mother. Like to make you acquainted with me
+father and me mother. Mr. and Mrs. Fitzmaurice, Mrs. Carriswood."
+
+In these words, Tommy, blushing and happy, presented his happy parents.
+
+"Sure, I'm proud to meet you, ma'am," said Fitzmaurice, bowing, while
+his wife courtesied and wiped her eyes.
+
+They were very grateful, but they were more grateful for the flowers
+than for the oratorical drilling. No doubt they thought that their Tommy
+could have done as well in any case; but the splendid horseshoe was
+another matter!
+
+Ten years passed before Mrs. Carriswood saw her pupil again. During
+those years the town had increased and prospered; so had the Lossing Art
+Furniture Works. It was after Harry Lossing had disappointed his father.
+This is not saying that he had done anything out of the way; he had
+simply declined to be the fourth Harry Lossing on the rolls of Harvard
+College. Instead, he proposed to enter the business and to begin by
+learning his own trade. He was so industrious, he kept at it with such
+energy that his first convert was his father--no, I am wrong, Mrs.
+Carriswood was the first; Mrs. Lossing was not a convert, SHE had
+believed in Harry from the beginning. But all this was years before Mrs.
+Carriswood's visit.
+
+Another of Master Harry's notions was his belief in the necessity of his
+"meddling"--so his father put it--in the affairs of the town, the state,
+and the nation, as well as those of the Lossing furniture company. But,
+though he was pleased to make rather cynical fun of his son's
+political enthusiasm, esteeming it in a sense a diverting and therefore
+reprehensible pursuit for a business man, the elder Lossing had a
+sneaking pride in it, all the same. He liked to bring out Harry's
+political shrewdness.
+
+"Fancy, Margaret," says he, "whom do you think Harry has brought over
+to our side now? The shrewdest ward politician in the town--why, you saw
+him when he was a boy--Tommy Fitzmaurice."
+
+Then Mrs. Carriswood remembered; she asked, amused, how was Tommy and
+where was he?
+
+"Tommy? Oh, he went to the State university; the old man was bound to
+send him, and he was more dutiful than some sons. He was graduated with
+honors, and came back to a large, ready-made justice court's practice.
+Of course he drifted into criminal practice; but he has made a fine
+income out of that, and is the shrewdest, some folks say the least
+scrupulous, political manager in the county. And so, Harry, you have
+persuaded him to cast in his lot with the party of principle, have you?
+and he is packing the primaries?"
+
+"I see nothing dishonest in our trying to get our friends out to vote at
+the primaries, sir."
+
+"Of course not, but he may not stop there. However, I want Bailey
+elected, and I am glad he will work for us; what's his price?"
+
+Harry blushed a little. "I believe he would like to be city attorney,
+sir," said he; and Mr. Lossing laughed.
+
+"Would he make a bad one?" asked Mrs. Carriswood.
+
+"He would make the best kind of a one," replied Harry, with youthful
+fervor; "he's a ward politician and all that, I know; but he has it in
+him to be an uncommon deal more! And I say, sir, do you know that he
+and the old man will take twenty-five thousand of the stock at par if we
+turn ourselves into a corporation?"
+
+"How about this new license measure? won't that bear a little bit hard
+on the old man?" This from Mr. Lossing, who was biting his cigar in deep
+thought.
+
+"That will not prevent his doing his duty; why, the old man for very
+pride will be the first to obey the law. You'll SEE!"
+
+Six months later they did see, since it was mostly due to Fitzmaurice's
+efforts that the reform candidate was elected; as a consequence, Tommy
+became prosecuting attorney; and, to the amazement of the critics, made
+the best prosecuting attorney that the city had ever known.
+
+It was during the campaign that Mrs. Carriswood met him. Her
+goddaughter, daughter of the friend to whom years ago she described
+Tommy, was with her. This time Mrs. Carriswood had recently added
+Florida to her disappointments in climates, and was back, as she told
+Mrs. Lossing, "with a real sense of relief in a climate that was too bad
+to make any pretensions."
+
+She had brought Miss Van Harlem to see the shops. It may be that she
+would not have been averse to Harry Lossing's growing interested in
+young Margaret. She had seen a great deal of Harry while he was East at
+school, and he remained her first favorite, while Margaret was as good
+as she was pretty, and had half a million of dollars in her own right.
+They had seen Harry, and he was showing them through the different
+buildings or "shops," when a man entered who greeted him cordially, and
+whom he presented to Mrs. Carriswood. It was Tommy Fitzmaurice, grown
+into a handsome young man. He brought his heels together and made the
+ladies a solemn bow. "Pleased to meet you, ladies; how do you like the
+West?" said Tommy.
+
+His black locks curled about his ears, which seemed rather small now;
+he had a good nose and a mobile, clean-shaven face. His hands were very
+white and soft, and the rim of linen above them was dazzling. His black
+frock-coat was buttoned snugly about his slim waist. He brushed his face
+with a fine silk handkerchief, and thereby diffused the fragrance of the
+best imported cologne among the odors of wood and turpentine. A diamond
+pin sparkled from his neckscarf. The truth is, he knew that the visitors
+were coming and had made a state toilet. "He looks half like an actor
+and half like a clergyman, and he IS all a politician," thought Mrs.
+Carriswood; "I don't think I shall like him any more." While she
+thought, she was inclining her slender neck toward him, and the gentlest
+interest and pleasure beamed out of her beautiful, dark eyes.
+
+"We like the West, but _I_ have liked it for ten years; this is not my
+first visit," said Mrs. Carriswood.
+
+"I have reason to be glad for that, madam. I never made another speech
+so good."
+
+He had remembered her; she laughed. "I had thought that you would
+forget."
+
+"How could I, when you have not changed at all?"
+
+"But you have," says Mrs. Carriswood, hardly knowing whether to show the
+young man his place or not.
+
+"Yes, ma'am, naturally. But I have not learned how to make a speech
+yet."
+
+"Ah, but you make very good ones, Harry tells me."
+
+"Much obliged, Harry. No, ma'am, Harry is a nice boy; but he doesn't
+know. I know there is a lot to learn, and I guess a lot to unlearn; and
+I feel all outside; I don't even know how to get at it. I have wished a
+thousand times that I could talk with the lady who taught me to speak in
+the first place." He walked on by her side, talking eagerly. "You don't
+know how many times I have felt I would give most anything for the
+opportunity of just seeing you and talking with you; those things you
+said to me I always remembered." He had a hundred questions evidently
+stinging his tongue. And some of them seemed to Mrs. Carriswood very
+apposite.
+
+"I'm on the outside of such a lot of things," says he. "When I first
+began to suspect that I was on the outside was when I went to the
+High School, and sometimes I was invited to Harry's; that was my first
+acquaintance with cultivated society. You can't learn manners from
+books, ma'am. I learned them at Harry's. That is,"--he colored and
+laughed,--"I learned SOME. There's plenty left, I know. Then, I went to
+the University. Some of the boys came from homes like Harry's, and
+some of the professors there used to ask us to their houses; and I saw
+engravings and oil paintings, and heard the conversation of persons of
+culture. All this only makes me know enough to KNOW I am outside. I can
+see the same thing with the lawyers, too. There is a set of them that
+are after another kind of things; that think themselves above me and my
+sort of fellows. You know all the talk about this being a free and equal
+country. That's the tallest kind of humbug, madam! It is that. There are
+sets, one above another, everywhere; big bugs and little bugs, if you
+will excuse the expression. And you can't influence the big ones without
+knowing how they feel. A fellow can't be poking in the dark in a speech
+or anywhere else. Now, these fellows here, they go into politics,
+sometimes; and there, I tell you, we come the nearest to a fair
+field and no favor! It is the best fellow gets the prize there--the
+sharpest-witted, the nerviest, and stanchest. Oh, talk of machine
+politics! all the soft chaps who ain't willing to get up early in the
+morning, or to go out in the wet, THEY howl about the primaries and
+corruption; let them get up and clean the primaries instead of holding
+their noses! Those fellows, I'm not nice enough for them, but I can beat
+them every time. They make a monstrous racket in the newspapers, but
+when election comes on they can't touch side, edge, or bottom!"
+
+Discoursing in this fashion, with digressions to Harry in regard to the
+machines, the furniture, and the sales, that showed Mrs. Carriswood that
+he meant to keep an eye on his twenty odd thousand dollars, he strolled
+at her side. To Miss Van Harlem he scarcely said three words. In fact,
+he said exactly three words, uttered as Miss Margaret's silken skirts
+swung too near a pot of varnish. They were "Look out, miss!" and at the
+same second, Tommy (who was in advance, with really no call to know of
+the danger), turned on his heel and whisked the skirts away, turning
+back to pick up the sentence he had dropped.
+
+Tommy told Harry that Miss Van Harlem was a very handsome lady, but
+haughty-looking. Then he talked for half an hour about the cleverness of
+Mrs. Carriswood.
+
+"I am inclined to think Tommy will rise." (Mrs. Carriswood was
+describing the interview to her cousin, the next day.) "What do
+you think he said to me last of all? 'How,' said he, 'does a man, a
+gentleman'--it had a touch of the pathetic, don't you know, the little
+hesitation he made on the word--'how does he show his gratitude to a
+lady who has done him a great service?' 'Young or old?' I said. 'Oh, a
+married lady,' he said, 'very much admired, who has been everywhere.'
+Wasn't that clever of him? I told him that a man usually sent a few
+flowers. You saw the basket to-day--evidently regardless of expense. And
+fancy, there was a card, a card with a gilt edge and his name written on
+it."
+
+"The card was his mother's. She has visiting cards, now, and pays visits
+once a year in a livery carriage. Poor Mrs. Fitzmaurice, she is always
+so scared; and she is such a good soul! Tommy is very good to her."
+
+"How about the father? Does he still keep that 'nice' saloon?"
+
+"Yes; but he talks of retiring. They are not poor at all, and Tommy is
+their only child; the others died. It is hard on the old man to retire,
+for he isn't so very old in fact, but if he once is convinced that
+his calling stands in the way of Tommy's career, he won't hesitate a
+second."
+
+"Poor people," said Mrs. Carriswood; "do you know, Grace, I can see
+Tommy's future; he will grow to be a boss, a political boss. He will
+become rich by keeping your streets always being cleaned--which means
+never clean--and giving you the worst fire department and police to be
+obtained for money; and, by and by, a grateful machine will make him
+mayor, or send him to the Legislature, very likely to Congress, where he
+will misrepresent the honest State of Iowa. Then he will bloom out in a
+social way, and marry a gentlewoman, and they will snub the old people
+who are so proud of him."
+
+"Well, we shall see," said Mrs. Lossing; "I think better things of
+Tommy. So does Harry."
+
+Part of the prophecy was to be speedily fulfilled. Two years later, the
+Honorable Thomas Fitzmaurice was elected mayor of his city, elected by
+the reform party, on account of his eminent services--and because he was
+the only man in sight who had the ghost of a chance of winning. Harry's
+version was: "Tommy jests at his new principles, but that is simply
+because he doesn't comprehend what they are. He laughs at reform in the
+abstract; but every concrete, practical reform he is as anxious as I or
+anybody to bring about. And he will get them here, too."
+
+He was as good as his word; he gave the city an admirable
+administration, with neither fear nor favor. Some of the "boys" still
+clung to him; these, according to Harry, were the better "boys," who
+had the seeds of good in them and only needed opportunity and a leader.
+Tommy did not flag in zeal; rather, as the time went on and he soared
+out of the criminal courts into big civil cases involving property,
+he grew up to the level of his admirers' praises. "Tommy," wrote Mr.
+Lossing, presently, "is beginning to take himself seriously. He has been
+told so often that he is a young lion of reform, that he begins to study
+the role in dead earnest. I don't talk this way to Harry, who believes
+in him and is training him for the representative for our district. What
+harm? Verily, his is the faith that will move mountains. Besides, Tommy
+is now rich; he must be worth a hundred thousand dollars, which makes a
+man of wealth in these parts. It is time for him to be respectable."
+
+Notwithstanding this preparation, Mrs. Carriswood (then giving
+Washington the benefit of her doubts of climate) was surprised one day
+to receive a perfectly correct visiting card whereon was engraved, "Mr.
+Thomas Sackville Fitzmaurice, M.C."
+
+The young lady who was with her lifted her brilliant hazel eyes and half
+smiled. "Is it the droll young man we met once at Mrs. Lossing's? Pray
+see him, Aunt Margaret," said Miss Van Harlem.
+
+Mrs. Carriswood shrugged her shoulders and ordered the man to show him
+up.
+
+There entered, in the wake of the butler, a distinguished-looking
+personage who held out his hand with a perfect copy of the bow that
+she saw forty times a day. "He is taking himself very seriously," she
+sighed; "he is precisely like anybody else!" And she felt her interest
+snuffed out by Tommy's correctness. But, directly, she changed her mind;
+the unfailing charm of his race asserted itself in Tommy; she decided
+that he was a delightful, original young man, and in ten minutes they
+were talking in the same odd confidence that had always marked their
+relation.
+
+"How perfectly you are gotten up! Are you INSIDE, now?"
+
+"Ah, do you remember that?" said he; "that's awfully good of you. Which
+is so fortunate as to please you, my clothes or my deportment?"
+
+"Both. They are very good. Where did you get them, Tommy? I shall take
+the privilege of my age and call you Tommy."
+
+"Thank you. The clothes? Oh, I asked Harry for the proper thing, and he
+recommended a tailor. I think Harry gave me the manners, too."
+
+"And your new principles?" She could not resist this little fling.
+
+"I owe a great deal in that way to Harry, also," answered he, with
+gravity.
+
+Gone were the days of sarcastic ridicule, of visionary politics.
+Tommy talked of the civil service in the tone of Harry himself. He was
+actually eloquent.
+
+"Why, Aunt Margaret, he is a remarkable young man," exclaimed Miss Van
+Harlem; "his honesty and enthusiasm are refreshing in this pessimist
+place. I hope he will come again. Did you notice what lovely eyes he
+has?"
+
+Before long it was not pure good-nature that caused Mrs. Carriswood to
+ask Fitzmaurice to her house. He was known as a rising young man, One
+met him at the best houses; yet he was a prodigious worker, and had made
+his mark in committees, before the celebrated speech that sent him into
+all the newspaper columns, or that stubborn and infinitely versatile
+fight against odds which inspired the artist of PUCK.
+
+Tommy bore the cartoon to Mrs. Carriswood, beaming. She had not seen
+that light in his face since the memorable June afternoon in the
+Opera-house. He sent the paper to his mother, who vowed the picture "did
+not favor Tommy at all, at all. Sure Tommy never had such a red nose!"
+The old man, however, went to his ex-saloon, and sat in state all the
+morning, showing Tommy's funny picture.
+
+It was about this time that Mrs. Carriswood observed something that took
+her breath away: Tommy Fitzmaurice had the presumption to be attentive
+to my lady's goddaughter, Miss Van Harlem. Nor was this the worst; there
+were indications that Miss Van Harlem, who had refused the noble names
+and titles of two or three continental nobles, and the noble name
+unaccompanied by a title of the younger son of an English earl, without
+mentioning the half-dozen "nice" American claimants--Miss Van Harlem was
+not angry.
+
+The day this staggering blow fell on her, Mrs. Carriswood was in her
+dressing-room, peacefully watching Derry unpack a box from Paris, in
+anticipation of a state dinner. And Miss Van Harlem, in a bewitching
+wrapper, sat on the lounge and admired. Upon this scene of feminine
+peace and happiness enter the Destroyer, in the shape of a note from
+Tommy Fitzmaurice! Were they going on Beatoun's little excursion to
+Alexandria? If they were, he would move heaven and earth to put off a
+committee meeting, in order to join them. By the way, he was to get the
+floor for his speech that afternoon. Wouldn't Mrs. Carriswood come to
+inspire him? Perhaps Miss Van Harlem would not be bored by a little of
+it.
+
+It was a well-worded note; as Mrs. Carriswood read it she realized
+for the first time how completely Tommy was acclimated in society. She
+remembered his plaint years ago, and his awe of "oil paintings" and
+"people of culture;" and she laughed half-sadly as she passed the note
+over to Miss Van Harlem.
+
+"I presume it is the Alexandria excursion that the Beatouns were talking
+about yesterday," she said, languidly. "He wants to show that young
+Irishman that we have a mild flavor of antiquity, ourselves. We are to
+see Alexandria and have a real old Virginian dinner, including one
+of the famous Beatoun hams and some of the '69 Chateau Yquem and the
+sacred '47 port. I suppose he will have the four-in-hand buckboard.
+'A small party '--that will mean the Honorable Basil Sackville, Mrs.
+Beatoun, Lilly Denning, probably one of the Cabinet girls, Colonel
+Turner, and that young Russian Beatoun is so fond of, Tommy
+Fitzmaurice------"
+
+"Why do you always call Mr. Fitzmaurice Tommy?"--this interruption comes
+with a slight rise of color from young Margaret.
+
+"Everybody calls him Tommy in his own town; a politician as popular as
+he with the boys is naturally Tommy or Jerry or Billy. They slap him on
+the back or sit with an arm around his neck and concoct the ways to rule
+us."
+
+"I don't think anyone slaps Mr. Fitzmaurice on the back and calls him
+Tommy, NOW," says Margaret, with a little access of dignity.
+
+"I dare say his poor old father and mother don't venture on that
+liberty; I wish you had seen them----"
+
+"He has told me about them," says Margaret.
+
+And Mrs. Carriswood's dismay was such that for a second she simply
+gasped. Were things so far along that such confessions were made?
+Tommy must be very confident to venture; it was shrewd, very shrewd,
+to forestall Mrs. Carriswood's sure revelations--oh, Tommy was not a
+politician for nothing!
+
+"Besides," Margaret went on, with the same note of repressed feeling in
+her voice, "his is a good family, if they have decayed; his ancestor was
+Lord Fitzmaurice in King James's time."
+
+"She takes HIM seriously too!" thought Mrs. Carriswood, with
+inexpressible consternation; "what SHALL I say to her mother?"
+
+Strange to say, perhaps, considering that she was so frankly a woman of
+the world, her stub-bornest objection to Tommy was not an objection of
+expediency. She had insensibly grown to take his success for granted,
+like the rest of the Washington world; he would be a governor, a
+senator, he might be--anything! And he was perfectly presentable, now;
+no, it would be on the whole an investment in the future that would pay
+well enough; his parents would be awkward, but they were old people, not
+likely to be too much _en evidence_.
+
+Mrs. Carriswood, while not overjoyed, would not feel crushed by such a
+match, but she did view what she regarded as Tommy's moral instability,
+with a dubious and fearful eye. He was earnest enough for his new
+principles now; but what warrant was there of his sincerity? Margaret
+and her mother were high-minded women. It was the gallant knight of her
+party and her political faith that the girl admired, the valiant fight,
+not the triumph! No mere soldier of fortune, no matter how successful
+or how brilliant, could win her; if Tommy were the mercenary, not the
+knight, no worldly glory could compensate his wife.
+
+Wherefore, after a bad quarter of an hour reflecting on these things,
+Mrs. Carriswood went to the Capitol, resolved to take her goddaughter
+away. She would not withdraw her acceptance of the Beatouns' invitation,
+no; let the Iowa congressman have every opportunity to display his
+social shortcomings in contrast with the accomplished Russian, and Jack
+Turner, the most elegant man in the army; the next day would be time
+enough for a telegram and a sudden flitting. Yet in the midst of her
+plans for Tommy's discomfiture she was assailed by a queer regret and
+reluctance. Tommy's fascination had affected even a professional critic
+of life; he had been so amusing, so willing, so trusting, so useful,
+that her chill interest had warmed into liking. She felt a moving of
+the heart as the handsome black head arose, and the first notes of that
+resonant, thrilling voice swelled above the din on the floor.
+
+It was the day of his great speech, the speech that made him, it was
+said.
+
+As Mrs. Carriswood sank back, turning a little in an instinctive effort
+to repulse her own sympathy, she was aware of the presence near her
+of an elderly man and woman. The old man wore a shining silk hat and
+shining new black clothes. His expansive shirt-bosom was very white, but
+not glossy, and rumpled in places; and his collar was of the spiked and
+antique pattern known as a "dickey." His wrinkled, red face was edged by
+a white fringe of whisker. He wore large gold-bowed spectacles, and his
+jaws worked incessantly.
+
+The woman was a little, mild, wrinkled creature, with an anxious blue
+eye and snowy hair, smoothed down over her ears, under her fine bonnet.
+She was richly dressed, but her silks and velvets ill suited the
+season. Had she seen them anywhere else, Mrs. Carriswood might not
+have recognized them; but there, with Tommy before them, both of them
+feverishly absorbed in Tommy, she recognized them at a glance. She had
+a twinge of pity, watching the old faces pale and kindle. With the first
+rustle of applause, she saw the old father slip his hand into the
+old mother's. They sat well behind a pillar; and however excited they
+became, they never so lost themselves as to lean in front of their
+shield. This, also, she noticed. The speech over, the woman wiped her
+eyes. The old man joined in the tumult of applause that swept over the
+galleries, but the old woman pulled his arm, evidently feeling that it
+was not decent for them to applaud. She sat rigid, with red cheeks and
+her eyes brimming; he was swaying and clapping and laughing in a roar of
+delight. But it was he that drew her away, finally, while she fain would
+have lingered to look at Tommy receiving congratulations below.
+
+"Poor things," said Mrs. Carriswood, "I do believe they haven't let him
+know that they are here." And she remembered how she had pitied them
+for this very possibility of humiliation years before. But she did not
+pursue the adventure, and some obscure motive prevented her speaking of
+it to Miss Van Harlem.
+
+Did Tommy's parents tell Tommy? If they did, Tommy made no sign. The
+morning found him with the others, in a beautiful white flannel suit,
+with a silk shirt and a red silk sash, looking handsomer than any man of
+the party. He took the congratulations of the company modestly. Either
+he was not much puffed up, or he had the art of concealment.
+
+They saw Alexandria in a conscientious fashion, for the benefit of the
+guest of the day. He was a modest young fellow with a nose rather too
+large for his face, a long upper lip, and frank blue eyes. He made
+himself agreeable to one of the Cabinet girls, on the front seat, while
+Tommy, just behind him, had Miss Van Harlem and bliss for his portion.
+
+The old streets, the toppling roofs, the musty warehouses, the uneven
+pavement, all pleased the young creatures out in the sunshine. They made
+merry over the ancient ball-room, where Washington had asked a far-away
+ancestress of Beatoun to dance; and they decorously walked through the
+old church.
+
+IT happened in the church. Mrs. Carriswood was behind the others; so she
+saw them come in, the same little old couple of the Capitol.
+
+In the chancel, Beatoun was explaining; beside Beatoun shone a curly
+black head that they knew.
+
+Mrs. Carriswood sat in one of the high old pews. Through a crack she
+could look into the next pew; and there they stood. She heard the old
+man: "Whist, Molly, let's be getting out of this! HE is here with all
+his grand friends. Don't let us be interrupting him."
+
+The old woman's voice was so like Tommy's that it made Mrs. Carriswood
+start. Very softly she spoke: "I only want to look at him a minute, Pat,
+jest a minute. I ain't seen him for so long."
+
+"And is it any longer for you than for me?" retorted the husband. "Ye
+know what ye promised if I'd be taking you here, unbeknownst. Don't look
+his way! Look like ye was a stranger to him. Don't let us be mortifying
+him wid our country ways. Like as not 'tis the prisidint, himself, he
+is colloguein' wid, this blessed minute. Shtep back and be a stranger to
+him, woman!"
+
+A stranger to him, his own mother! But she stepped back; she turned her
+patient face. Then--Tommy saw her.
+
+A wave of red flushed all over his face. He took two steps down the
+aisle, and caught the little figure in his arms.
+
+"Why, mother?" he cried, "why, mother, where did you drop from?"
+
+And before Mrs. Carriswood could speak she saw him step back and push
+young Sackville forward, crying, "This is my father, this is the boy
+that knew your grandmother."
+
+He did it so easily; he was so entirely unaffected, so perfectly
+unconscious, that there was nothing at all embarrassing for anyone. Even
+the Cabinet girl, with a grandmother in very humble life, who must be
+kept in the background, could not feel disconcerted.
+
+For this happy result Mrs. Carriswood owns a share of the credit. She
+advanced on the first pause, and claimed acquaintanceship with the
+Fitzmaurices. The story of their last meeting and Tommy's first triumph
+in oratory came, of course; the famous horseshoe received due mention;
+and Tommy described with much humor his terror of the stage. From the
+speech to its most effective passage was a natural transition; equally
+natural the transition to Tommy's grandmother, the Irish famine, and the
+benevolence of Lady Sackville.
+
+Everybody was interested, and it was Sackville himself, who brought the
+Fitzmaurices' noble ancestors, the apocryphal Viscounts Fitzmaurice of
+King James's creation, on to the carpet.
+
+He was entirely serious. "My grandmother told me of your
+great-grandfather, Lord Fitzmaurice; she saw him ride to hounds once,
+when she was a little girl. They say he was the boldest rider in
+Ireland, and a renowned duellist too. King James gave the title to his
+grandfather, didn't he? and the countryside kept it, if it was given
+rather too late in the day to be useful. I am glad you have restored the
+family fortunes, Mr. Fitzmaurice."
+
+The Cabinet girl looked on Tommy with respect, and Miss Van Harlem
+blushed like an angel.
+
+"All is lost," said Mrs. Carriswood to herself; yet she smiled. Going
+home, she found a word for Tommy's ear. The old Virginian dinner had
+been most successful. The Fitzmaurices (who had been almost forced into
+the banquet by Beatoun's imperious hospitality) were not a wet blanket
+in the least. Patrick Fitzmaurice, brogue and all, was an Irish
+gentleman without a flaw. He blossomed out into a modest wag; and told
+two or three comic stories as acceptably as he was used to tell them to
+a very different circle--only, carrying a fresher flavor of wit to this
+circle, perhaps, it enjoyed them more. Mrs. Fitzmaurice looked scared
+and ate almost nothing, with the greatest propriety, and her fork in her
+left hand. Yet even she thawed under Miss Van Harlem's attentions and
+gentle Mrs. Beatoun's tact, and the winning ways of the last Beatoun
+baby. She took this absent cherub to her heart with such undissembled
+warmth that its mother ever since has called her "a sweet, funny little
+old lady."
+
+They were both (Patrick and his wife) quite unassuming and retiring,
+and no urging could dissuade them from parting with the company at the
+tavern door.
+
+"My word, Tommy, your mother and I can git home by ourselves," whispered
+honest Patrick; "we've not exceeded--if the wines WERE good. I never
+exceeded in my life, God take the glory!"
+
+But he embraced Tommy so affectionately in parting that I confess Mrs.
+Carriswood had suspicions. Yet, surely, it is more likely that his brain
+was--let us not say TURNED, but just a wee bit TILTED, by the joy and
+triumph of the occasion rather than by Beatoun's port or champagne.
+
+But Mrs. Carriswood's word had nothing to do with Tommy's parents,
+ostensibly, though, in truth, it had everything to do. She said: "Will
+you dine with us to-morrow, quite _en famille_, Thomas?"
+
+"I ought to tell you, I suppose, that I find your house a pretty
+dangerous paradise, Mrs. Carriswood," says Tommy.
+
+"And I find you a most dangerous angel, Thomas; but--you see I ask you!"
+
+"Thank you," answers Tommy, in a different tone; "you've always been
+an angel to me. What I owe to you and Harry Lossing--well, I can't
+talk about it. But see here, Mrs. Carriswood, you always have called me
+Tommy; now you say Thomas; why this state?"
+
+"I think you have won your brevet, Thomas."
+
+He looked puzzled, and she liked him the better that he should not make
+enough of his conduct to understand her; but, though she has called him
+Tommy often since, he keeps the brevet in her thoughts. In fact, Mrs.
+Carriswood is beginning to take the Honorable Thomas Fitzmaurice and his
+place in the world seriously, herself.
+
+
+
+
+MOTHER EMERITUS
+
+THE Louders lived on the second floor, at the head of the stairs, in the
+Lossing Building. There is a restaurant to the right; and a new doctor,
+every six months, who is every kind of a healer except "regular," keeps
+the permanent boarders in gossip, to the left; two or three dressmakers,
+a dentist, and a diamond merchant up-stairs, one flight; and half a
+dozen families and a dozen single tenants higher--so you see the Louders
+had plenty of neighbors. In fact, the multitude of the neighbors is one
+cause of my story.
+
+Tilly Louder came home from the Lossing factory (where she is a
+typewriter) one February afternoon. As she turned the corner, she was
+face to the river, which is not so full of shipping in winter that one
+cannot see the steel-blue glint of the water. Back of her the brick
+paved street climbed the hill, under a shapeless arch of trees. The
+remorseless pencil of a railway has drawn black lines at the foot of
+the hill; and, all day and all night, slender red bars rise and sink
+in their black sockets, to the accompaniment of the outcry of tortured
+steam. All day, if not all night, the crooked pole slips up and down the
+trolley wire, as the yellow cars rattle, and flash, and clang a spiteful
+little bell, that sounds like a soprano bark, over the crossings.
+
+It is customary in the Lossing Building to say, "We are so handy to the
+cars." The street is a handsome street, not free from dingy old brick
+boxes of stores below the railway, but fast replacing them with fairer
+structures. The Lossing Building has the wide arches, the recessed
+doors, the balconies and the colonnades of modern business architecture.
+The occupants are very proud of the balconies, in particular; and,
+summer days, these will be a mass of greenery and bright tints. To-day,
+it was so warm, February day though it was, that some of the potted
+plants were sunning themselves outside the windows.
+
+Tilly could see them if she craned her neck. There were some bouvardias
+and fuchsias of her mother's among them.
+
+"It IS a pretty building," said Tilly; and, for some reason, she
+frowned.
+
+She was a young woman, but not a very young woman. Her figure was slim,
+and she looked better in loose waists than in tightly fitted gowns. She
+wore a dark green gown with a black jacket, and a scarlet shirt-waist
+underneath. Her face was long, with square chin and high cheek-bones,
+and thin, firm lips; yet she was comely, because of her lustrous black
+hair, her clear, gray eyes, and her charming, fair skin. She had another
+gift: everything about her was daintily neat; at first glance one said,
+"Here is a person who has spent pains, if not money, on her toilet."
+
+By this time Tilly was entering the Lossing Building. Half-way up the
+stairway a hand plucked her skirts. The hand belonged to a tired-faced
+woman in black, on whose breast glittered a little crowd of pins and
+threaded needles, like the insignia of an Order of Toil.
+
+"Please excuse me, Miss Tilly," said the woman, at the same time
+presenting a flat package in brown paper, "but WILL you give this
+pattern back to your mother. I am so very much obliged. I don't know how
+I WOULD git along without your mother, Tilly."
+
+"I'll give the pattern to her," said Tilly, and she pursued her way.
+
+Not very far. A stout woman and a thin young man, with long, wavy, red
+hair, awaited her on the landing. The woman held a plate of cake which
+she thrust at Tilly the instant they were on the same level, saying:
+"The cake was just splendid, tell your mother; it's a lovely recipe, and
+will you tell her to take this, and see how well I succeeded?"
+
+"And--ah--Miss Louder," said the man, as the stout woman rustled away,
+"here are some _Banner of Lights;_ I think she'd be interested in some
+of the articles on the true principles of the inspirational
+faith----" Tilly placed the bundle of newspapers at the base of her
+load--"and--and, I wish you'd tell your dear mother that, under the
+angels, her mustard plaster really saved my life."
+
+"I'll tell her," said Tilly.
+
+She had advanced a little space before a young girl in a bright blue
+silk gown flung a radiant presence between her and the door. "Oh,
+Miss Tilly," she murmured, blushing, "will you just give your mother
+this?--it's--it's Jim's photograph. You tell her it's ALL right; and SHE
+was exactly right, and _I_ was wrong. She'll understand."
+
+Tilly, with a look of resignation, accepted a stiff package done up in
+white tissue paper. She had now only three steps to take: she took two,
+only two, for--"Miss Tilly, PLEASE!" a voice pealed around the corner,
+while a flushed and breathless young woman, with a large baby toppling
+over her lean shoulder, staggered into view. "My!" she panted, "ain't it
+tiresome lugging a child! I missed the car, of course, coming home
+from ma's. Oh, say, Tilly, your mother was so good, she said she'd tend
+Blossom next time I went to the doctor's, and----"
+
+"I'll take the baby," said Tilly. She hoisted the infant on to her own
+shoulder with her right arm. "Perhaps you'll be so kind's to turn the
+handle of the door," said she in a slightly caustic tone, "as I haven't
+got any hands left. Please shut it, too."
+
+As the young mother opened the door, Tilly entered the parlor. For a
+second she stood and stared grimly about her. The furniture of the room
+was old-fashioned but in the best repair. There was a cabinet organ in
+one corner. A crayon portrait of Tilly's father (killed in the civil
+war) glared out of a florid gilt frame. Perhaps it was the fault of the
+portrait, but he had a peevish frown. There were two other portraits of
+him, large ghastly gray tintypes in oval frames of rosewood, obscurely
+suggesting coffins. In these he looked distinctly sullen. He was
+represented in uniform (being a lieutenant of volunteers), and the
+artist had conscientiously gilded his buttons until, as Mrs. Louder
+was wont to observe, "It most made you want to cut them off with the
+scissors." There were other tintypes and a flock of photographs in the
+room. What Mrs. Louder named "a throw" decorated each framed picture and
+each chair. The largest arm-chair was drawn up to a table covered with
+books and magazines: in the chair sat Mrs. Louder, reading.
+
+At Tilly's entrance she started and turned her head, and then one could
+see that the tears were streaming down her cheeks.
+
+"Now, MOTHER!" exploded Tilly. Kicking the door open, she marched into
+the bed-chamber. An indignant sweep of one arm sent the miscellany of
+gifts into a rocking-chair; an indignant curve of the other landed the
+baby on the bed. Tilly turned on her mother. "Now, mother, what did
+you promise--HUSH! will you?" (The latter part of the sentence a fierce
+"ASIDE" to the infant on the bed.) In a second Mrs. Louder's arms were
+encircling him, and she was soothing him on her broad shoulder, where I
+know not how many babies have found comfort.
+
+Jane Louder was a tall woman--tall and portly. She had a massive repose
+about her, a kind of soft dignity; and a stranger would not guess how
+tender was her heart. Deprecatingly she looked up at her only child,
+standing in judgment over her. Her eyes were fine still, though they had
+sparkled and wept for more than half a century. They were not gray, like
+Tilly's, but a deep violet, with black eyelashes and eyebrows. Black,
+once, had been the hair under the widow's cap, now streaked with
+silver; but Jane Louder's skin was fresh and daintily tinted like her
+daughter's, for all its fine wrinkles. Her voice when she spoke was
+mellow and slow, with a nervous vibration of apology. "Never mind,
+dear," she said, "I was just reading 'bout the Russians."
+
+"I KNEW it! You promised me you wouldn't cry about the Russians any
+more."
+
+"I know, Tilly, but Alma Brown lent this to me, herself. There's a
+beautiful article in it about 'The Horrors of Hunger.' It would make
+your heart ache! I wish you would read it, Tilly."
+
+"No, thank you. I don't care to have my heart ache. I'm not going to
+read any more horrors about the Russians, or hear them either, if I can
+help it. I have to write Mr. Lossing's letters about them, and that's
+enough. I've given all I can afford, and you've given more than you can
+afford; and I helped get up the subscription at the shops. I've done all
+I could; and now I ain't going to have my feelings harrowed up any more,
+when it won't do me nor the Russians a mite of good."
+
+"But I cayn't HELP it, Tilly. I cayn't take any comfort in my meals,
+thinking of that awful black bread the poor children starve rather than
+eat; and, Tilly, they ain't so dirty as some folks think! I read in a
+magazine how they have GOT to bathe twice a week by their religion; and
+there's a bath-house in every village. Tilly, do you know how much money
+they've raised here?"
+
+"Over three thousand. This town is the greatest town for giving--give
+to the cholera down South, give to Johnstown, give to Grinnell, give to
+cyclones, give to fires. _The Freeman_ always starts up a subscription,
+and Mr. Bayard runs the thing, and Mr. Lossing always gives. Mother,
+I tell you HE makes them hustle when he takes hold. He's the chairman
+here, and he has township chairmen appointed for every township. He's
+so popular they start in to oblige him, and then, someway, he makes them
+all interested. I must tell you of a funny letter he had to-day from
+a Captain Ferguson, out at Baxter. He's a rich farmer with lots of
+influence and a great worker, Mr. Lossing says. But this is 'most word
+for word what he wrote: 'Dear Sir: I am sorry for the Russians, but my
+wife is down with the la grippe, and I can't get a hired girl; so I have
+to stay with her. If you'll get me a hired girl, I'll get you a lot of
+money for the Russians.'"
+
+"Did he git a girl? I mean Mr. Lossing."
+
+"No, ma'am. He said he'd try if it was the city, but it was easier
+finding gold-mines than girls that would go into the country. See here,
+I'm forgetting your presents. Mother, you look real dragged and--queer!"
+
+"It's nothing; jist a thought kinder struck me 'bout--'bout that girl."
+
+Tilly was sorting out the parcels and explaining them; at the end of her
+task her mind harked back to an old grievance. "Mother," said she, "I've
+been thinking for a long time, and I've made up my mind."
+
+"Yes, dearie." Mrs. Louder's eyes grew troubled. She knew something of
+the quality of Tilly's mind, which resembled her father's in a peculiar
+immobility. Once let her decision run into any mould (be it whatsoever
+it might), and let it stiffen, there was no chance, any more than with
+other iron things, of its bending.
+
+"Positively I could hardly get up the stairs today," said Tilly--she was
+putting her jacket and hat away in her orderly fashion; of necessity
+her back was to Mrs. Louder--"there was such a raft of people wanting to
+send stuff and messages to you. You are just working yourself to death;
+and, mother, I am convinced we have _got to move!_"
+
+Mrs. Louder dropped into a chair and gasped. The baby, who had fallen
+asleep, stirred uneasily. It was not a pretty child; its face was heavy,
+its little cheeks were roughened by the wind, its lower lip sagged,
+its chin creased into the semblance of a fat old man's. But Jane Louder
+gazed down on it with infinite compassion. She stroked its head as she
+spoke.
+
+"Tilly," said she, "I've been in this block, Mrs. Carleton and me, ever
+since it was built; and, some way, between us we've managed to keep
+the run of all the folks in it; at least when they were in any trouble.
+We've worked together like sisters. She's 'Piscopal, and I guess I'm
+Unitarian; but never a word between us. We tended the Willardses through
+diphtheria and the Hopkinses through small-pox, and we steamed and
+fumigated the rooms together. It was her first found out the Dillses
+were letting that twelve-year-old child run the gasoline stove, and
+she threatened to tell Mr. Lossing, and they begged off; and when it
+exploded we put it out together, with flour out of her flour-barrel, for
+the poor, shiftless things hadn't half a sack full of their own; and her
+and me, we took half the care of that little neglected Ellis baby that
+was always sitting down in the sticky fly-paper, poor innocent child.
+He's took the valedictory at the High School, Tilly, now. No, Tilly, I
+couldn't bring myself to leave this building, where I've married them,
+and buried them, and born them, you may say, being with so many of their
+mothers; I feel like they was all my children. Don't ASK me."
+
+Tilly's head went upward and backward with a little dilatation of the
+nostrils. "Now, mother," said she in a voice of determined gentleness,
+"just listen to me. Would I ask you to do anything that wouldn't be for
+your happiness? I have found a real pretty house up on Fifteenth Street;
+and we'll keep house together, just as cosey; and have a woman come to
+wash and iron and scrub, so it won't be a bit hard; and be right on the
+street-cars; and you won't have to drudge helping Mrs. Carleton extra
+times with her restaurant."
+
+"But, Tilly," eagerly interrupted Mrs. Louder, "you know I dearly love
+to cook, and she PAYS me. I couldn't feel right to take any of the
+pension money, or the little property your father left me, away from
+the house expenses; but what I earn myself, it is SUCH a comfort to give
+away out of THAT."
+
+Tilly ran over and kissed the agitated face. "You dear, generous
+mother!" cried she, "I'LL give you all the money you want to spend or
+give. I got another rise in my salary of five a month. Don't you worry."
+
+"You ain't thinking of doing anything right away, Tilly?"
+
+"Don't you think it's best done and over with, after we've decided,
+mother? You have worked so hard all your life I want to give you some
+ease and peace now."
+
+"But, Tilly, I love to work; I wouldn't be happy to do nothing, and I'd
+get so fleshy!"
+
+Tilly only laughed. She did not crave the show of authority. Let her
+but have her own way, she would never flaunt her victories. She was
+imperious, but she was not arrogant. For months she had been pondering
+how to give her mother an easier life; and she set the table for supper,
+in a filial glow of satisfaction, never dreaming that her mother, in the
+kitchen, was keeping her head turned from the stove lest she should cry
+into the fried ham and stewed potatoes. But, at a sudden thought, Jane
+Louder laid her big spoon down to wipe her eyes.
+
+"Here you are, Jane Louder"--thus she addressed herself--"mourning
+and grieving to leave your friends and be laid aside for a useless old
+woman, and jist be taken care of, and you clean forgetting the chance
+the Lord gives you to help more'n you ever helped in your life! For
+shame!"
+
+A smile of exaltation, of lofty resolution, erased the worry lines on
+her face. "Why, it might be to save twenty lives," said she; but in the
+very speaking of the words a sharp pain wrenched her heart again, and
+she caught up the baby from the floor, where he sat in a wall of chairs,
+and sobbed over him: "Oh, how can I go away when I got to go for good so
+soon? I want every minnit!"
+
+She never thought of disputing Tilly's wishes. "It's only fair," said
+Jane. "She's lived here all these years to please me, and now I ought to
+be willing to go to please her."
+
+Neither did she for a moment hope to change Tilly's determination.
+"She was the settest baby ever was," thought poor Jane, tossing on her
+pillow, in the night watches, "and it's grown with every inch of her!"
+
+But in the morning she surprised her daughter. "Tilly," said she at the
+breakfast-table, "Tilly, I got something I must do, and I don't want you
+to oppose me."
+
+"Good gracious, ma!" said Tilly; "as if I ever opposed you!"
+
+"You know how bad I have been feeling about the poor Russians------"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"And how I've wished and wished I could do something--something to
+COUNT? I never could, Tilly, because I ain't got the money or the
+intellect; but s'posing I could do it for somebody else, like this
+Captain Ferguson who could do so much if he just could get a hired girl
+to take care of his wife. Well, I do know how to cook and to keep a
+house neat and to do for the sick----"
+
+Tilly could restrain herself no longer; her voice rose to a shout of
+dismay--"Mother Louder, you AIN'T thinking of going to be the Ferguson's
+_hired girl!_"
+
+"Not their hired girl, Tilly; just their help, so as he can work for
+those poor starving creatures." Jane strangled a sob in her throat.
+Tilly, in a kind of stupor of bewilderment, frowned at her plate. Then
+her clouded face cleared. If Mrs. Louder had surprised her daughter, her
+daughter repaid the surprise. "Well, if you feel that way, mother," said
+she, "I won't say a word; and I'll ask Mr. Lossing to explain to the
+Fergusons and fix everything. He will."
+
+"You're real good, Tilly."
+
+"And while you're gone I guess it will be a good plan to move and git
+settled----"
+
+For some reason Tilly's throat felt dry, she lifted her cup. She did not
+intend to look across the table, but her eyes escaped her. She set the
+coffee down untasted. The clock was slow, she muttered; and she left the
+room.
+
+Jane Louder remained in her place, with the same pale face, staring at
+the table-cloth.
+
+"It don't seem like I COULD go, now," she thought dully to herself; "the
+time's so awful short, I don't s'pose Maria Carleton can git up to see
+me more'n once or twice a month, busy as she is! I got so to depend on
+seeing her every day. A sister couldn't be kinder! I don't see how I am
+going to bear it. And to go away, beforehand----"
+
+For a long while she sat, her face hardly changing. At last, when she
+did push her chair away, her lips were tightly closed. She spoke to the
+little pile of books lying on the table in the corner. "I cayn't--these
+are my own and you are strangers!" She walked across the room to take up
+the same magazine which Tilly had found her reading the day before.
+When she began reading she looked stern--poor Jane, she was steeling her
+heart--but in a little while she was sniffing and blowing her nose.
+With a groan she flung the book aside. "It's no use, I would feel like a
+murderer if I don't go!" said she.
+
+She did go. Harry Lossing made all the arrangements. Tilly was
+satisfied. But, then, Tilly had not heard Harry's remark to his mother:
+"Alma says Miss Louder is trying to make the old lady move against her
+will. I dare say it would be better to give the young woman a chance to
+miss her mother and take a little quiet think."
+
+Tilly saw her mother off on the train to Baxter, the Fergusons' station.
+Being a provident, far-sighted, and also inexperienced traveller, she
+had allowed a full half-hour for preliminary passages at arms with the
+railway officials; and, as the train happened to be an hour late, she
+found herself with time to spare, even after she had exhausted the
+catalogue of possible deceptions and catastrophes by rail. During the
+silence that followed her last warning, she sat mentally keeping tally
+on her fingers. "Confidence men"--Tilly began with the thumb--"Never
+give anybody her check. Never lend anybody money. Never write her
+name to anything. Don't get out till conductor tells her. In case of
+accident, telegraph me, and keep in the middle of the car, off the
+trucks. Not take care of anybody's baby while she goes off for a minute.
+Not take care of babies at all. Or children. Not talk to strangers--good
+gracious!"
+
+Tilly felt a movement of impatience; there, after all her cautions,
+there was her mother helping an old woman, an utterly strange old woman,
+to pile a bird-cage on a bandbox surmounting a bag. The old woman was
+clad in a black alpaca frock, made with the voluminous draperies of
+years ago, but with the uncreased folds and the brilliant gloss of a
+new gown. She wore a bonnet of a singular shape, unknown to fashion, but
+made out of good velvet. Beneath the bonnet (which was large) appeared
+a little, round, agitated old face, with bobbing white curls and white
+teeth set a little apart in the mouth, a defect that brought a kind of
+palpitating frankness into the expression.
+
+"Now, who HAS mother picked up now?" thought Tilly. "Well, praise be,
+she hasn't a baby, anyhow!"
+
+She could hear the talk between the two; for the old woman being deaf,
+Mrs. Louder elevated her voice, and the old woman, herself, spoke in a
+high, thin pipe that somehow reminded Tilly of a lost lamb.
+
+"That's just so," said Mrs. Louder, "a body cayn't help worrying over a
+sick child, especially if they're away from you."
+
+"Solon and Minnie wouldn't tell me," bleated the other woman, "they knew
+I'd worry. Kinder hurt me they should keep things from me; but they
+hate to have me upset. They are awful good children. But I suspicioned
+something when Alonzo kept writing. Minnie, she wouldn't tell me, but
+I pinned her down and it come out, Eliza had the grip bad. And, then,
+nothing would do but I must go to her--why, Mrs. Louder, she's my child!
+But they wouldn't hark to it. 'Fraid to have me travel alone----"
+
+"I guess they take awful good care of you," said Mrs. Louder; and she
+sighed.
+
+"Yes, ma'am, awful." She, too, sighed.
+
+As she talked her eyes were darting about the room, eagerly fixed on
+every new arrival.
+
+"Are you expecting anyone, Mrs. Higbee?" said Jane. They seemed, at
+least, to know each other by name, thought Tilly; it was amazing the
+number of people mother did know!
+
+"No," said Mrs. Higbee, "I--I--fact is, I'm kinder frightened. I--fact
+is, Mrs. Louder, I guess I'll tell you, though I don't know you very
+well; but I've known about you so long--I run away and didn't tell
+'em. I just couldn't stay way from Liza. And I took the bird--for the
+children; and it's my bird, and I was 'fraid Minnie would forget to feed
+it and it would be lonesome. My children are awful kind good children,
+but they don't understand. And if Solon sees me he will want me to go
+back. I know I'm dretful foolish; and Solon and Minnie will make me see
+I am. There won't be no good reason for me to go, and I'll have to stay;
+and I feel as if I should FLY--Oh, massy sakes! there's Solon coming
+down the street----"
+
+She ran a few steps in half a dozen ways, then fluttered back to her bag
+and her cage.
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Louder, drawing herself up to her full height, "you
+SHALL go if you want to."
+
+"Solon will find me, he'll know the bird-cage! Oh, dear! Oh, dear!"
+
+Then a most unexpected helper stepped upon the stage. What is the
+mysterious instinct of rebellion to authority that, nine cases out of
+ten, sends us to the aid of a fugitive? Tilly, the unconscious despot of
+her own mother, promptly aided and abetted Solon's rebel mother in her
+flight.
+
+"Not if _I_ carry it," said she, snatching up the bird-cage; "run inside
+that den where they sell refreshments; he'll see ME and go somewhere
+else."
+
+It fell out precisely as she planned. They heard Solon demanding a lady
+with a bird-cage of the agent; they heard the agent's reply, given with
+official indifference, "There she is, inside." Directly, Solon, a small
+man with an anxious mien, ran into the waiting-room, flung a glance of
+disappointment at Tilly, and ran out again.
+
+Tilly went to her client. "Did he look like he was anxious?" was the
+mother's greeting. "Oh, I just know he and Minnie will be hunting me
+everywhere. Maybe I had better go home, 'stead of to Baxter."
+
+"No, you hadn't," said Tilly, with decision. "Mother's going to Baxter,
+too, and if you like, minnit you're safely off, I'll go tell your
+folks."
+
+"You're real kind, I'd be ever so much obliged. And you don't mind your
+ma travelling alone? ain't that nice for her!" She seemed much cheered
+by the prospect of company and warmed into confidences.
+
+"I am kinder lonesome, sometimes, that's a fact," said she, "and I
+kinder wish I lived in a block or a flat like your ma. You see, Minnie
+teaches in the public school and she's away all day, and she don't like
+to have me make company of the hired girl, though she's a real nice
+girl. And there ain't nothing for me to do, and I feel like I wasn't no
+use any more in the world. I remember that's what our old minister
+in Ohio said once. He was a real nice old man; and they HAD thought
+everything of him in the parish; but he got old and his sermons were
+long; and so they got a young man for assistant; and they made HIM a
+_pastor americus_, they called it--some sort of Latin. Folks did say
+the young feller was stuck up and snubbed the old man; anyhow, he never
+preached after young Lisbon come; and only made the first prayers. But
+when the old folks would ask him to preach some of the old sermons
+they had liked, he only would say, 'No, friends, I know more about my
+sermons, now.' He didn't live very long, and I always kinder fancied
+being a AMERICUS killed him. And some days I git to feeling like I was a
+kinder AMERICUS myself."
+
+"That ain't fair to your children," said Tilly; "you ought to let them
+know how you feel. Then they'd act different."
+
+"Oh, I don't know, I don't know. You see, miss, they're so sure they
+know better'n me. Say, Mrs. Louder, be you going to visit relatives in
+Baxter?"
+
+"No, ma'am, I'm going to take care of a sick lady," said Jane, "it's
+kinder queer. Her name's Ferguson, her----"
+
+"For the land's sake!" screamed Mrs. Higbee, "why, that's my 'Liza!" She
+was in a flutter of surprise and delight, and so absorbed was Tilly in
+getting her and her unwieldy luggage into the car, that Jane's daughter
+forgot to kiss her mother good-by.
+
+"Put your arm in QUICK," she yelled, as Jane essayed to kiss her hand
+through the window; "don't EVER put your arm or your head out of a
+train!"--the train moved away--"I do hope she'll remember what I told
+her, and not lend anybody money, or come home lugging somebody else's
+baby!"
+
+With such reflections, and an ugly sensation of loneliness creeping over
+her, Tilly went to assure Miss Minnie Higbee of her mother's safety. She
+described her reception to Harry Lossing and Alma, later. "She really
+seemed kinder mad at me," says Tilly, "seemed to think I was interfering
+somehow. And she hadn't any business to feel that way, for SHE didn't
+know how I'd fooled her brother with that bird-cage. I guess the poor
+old lady daren't call her soul her own. I'd hate to have my mother that
+way--so 'fraid of me. MY mother shall go where she pleases, and stay
+where she pleases, and DO as she pleases."
+
+"That makes me think," says Alma, "I heard you were going to move."
+
+"Yes, we are. Mother is working too hard. She knows everybody in the
+building, and they call on her all the time; and I think the easiest way
+out is just to move."
+
+Alma and Mr. Lossing exchanged glances. There is an Arabian legend of
+an angel whose trade it is to decipher the language of faces. This angel
+must have perceived that Alma's eyes said, with the courage of a second
+in a duel, "Go on, now is the time!" and that Harry's answered, with
+masculine pusillanimity, "I don't like to!"
+
+But he spoke. "Very likely your mother does sometimes work too hard,"
+said he. "But don't you think it would be harder for her not to work?
+Why, she must have been in the building ever since my father bought
+it; and she's been a janitor and a fire inspector and a doctor and a
+ministering angel combined! That is why we never raised the rent to you
+when we improved the building, and raised it on the others. My father
+told me your mother was the best paying tenant he ever had. And don't
+you remember how, when I used to come with him, when I was a little boy,
+she used to take me in her room while he went the rounds? She was always
+doing good to everybody, the same way. She has a heart as big as the
+Mississippi, and I assure you, Miss Louder, you won't make her happy,
+but miserable, if you try to dam up its channel. She has often told me
+that she loved the building and all the people in it. They all love her.
+I HOPE, Miss Louder, you'll think of those things before you decide. She
+is so unselfish that she would go in a minute if she thought it would
+make you happier." The angel aforesaid, during this speech (which Harry
+delivered with great energy and feeling), must have had all his wits
+busy on Tilly's impassive features; but he could read ardent approval,
+succeeded by indignation, on Alma's countenance, at his first glance.
+The indignation came when Tilly spoke. She said: "Thank you, Mr.
+Lossing, you're very kind, I'm sure"--Harry softly kicked the
+wastebasket under the desk--"but I guess it's best for us to go. I've
+been thinking about it for six months, and I know it will be a hard
+struggle for mother to go; but in a little while she will be glad
+she went. It's only for her sake I am doing it; it ain't an easy or a
+pleasant thing for me to do, either----" As Tilly stopped her voice was
+unsteady, and the rare tears shone in her eyes.
+
+"What's best for her is the only question, of course," said Alma,
+helping Harry off the field.
+
+In a few days Tilly received a long letter from her mother. Mr. Ferguson
+was doing wonders for the Russians; the family were all very kind to her
+and "nice folks" and easily pleased. ("Of COURSE they're pleased with
+mother's cooking; what would they be made of if they weren't!" cried
+Tilly.) It was wonderful how much help Mrs. Higbee was about the house,
+and how happy it made her. Mrs. Ferguson had seemed real glad to see
+her, and that made her happy. And then, maybe it helped a little, her
+(Jane Louder's) telling Mrs. Ferguson ("accidental like") how Tilly
+treated her, never trying to boss her, and letting her travel alone.
+Perhaps, if Mrs. Ferguson kept on improving, they might let her come
+home next week. And the letter ended:
+
+
+"I will be so glad if they do, for I want to see you so bad, dear
+daughter, and I want to see the old home once more before we leave. I
+guess the house you tell me about will be very nice and convenient. I
+do thank you, dear daughter, for being so nice and considerate about the
+Russians. Give my love to Mrs. Carleton and all of them; and if little
+Bobby Green hasn't missed school since I left, give him a nickel,
+please; and please give that medical student on the fifth floor--I
+forget his name--the stockings I mended. They are in the first drawer of
+the walnut bureau. Good-by, my dear, good daughter.
+
+"MOTHER, JANE M. LOUDER."
+
+
+When Tilly read the letter she was surrounded by wall-paper and carpet
+samples. Her eyes grew moist before she laid it down; but she set her
+mouth more firmly.
+
+"It is an awful short time, but I've just got to hurry and have it over
+before she comes," said she.
+
+Next week Jane returned. She was on the train, waiting in her seat in
+the car, when Captain Ferguson handed her Tilly's last letter, which had
+lain in the post-office for three days.
+
+It was very short:
+
+
+"DEAR MOTHER: I shall be very glad indeed to see you. I have a surprise
+which I hope will be pleasant for you; anyhow, I truly have meant it for
+your happiness.
+
+"Your affectionate daughter,
+
+"M. E. LOUDER."
+
+
+There must have been, despite her shrewd sense, an obtuse streak in
+Tilly, else she would never have written that letter. Jane read it
+twice. The paper rattled in her hands. "Tilly has moved while I was
+gone," she said; "I never shall live in the block again." She dropped
+her veil over her face. She sat very quietly in her seat; but the
+conductor who came for her ticket watched her sharply, she seemed so
+dazed by his demand and was so long in finding the ticket.
+
+The train rumbled and hissed through darkening cornfields, into
+scattered yellow lights of low houses, into angles of white light of
+street-arcs and shop-windows, into the red and blue lights dancing
+before the engines in the station.
+
+"Mother!" cried Tilly's voice.
+
+Jane let her and Harry Lossing take all her bundles and lift her out of
+the car. Whether she spoke a word she could not tell. She did rouse a
+little at the vision of the Lossing carriage glittering at the street
+corner; but she had not the sense to thank Harry Lossing, who placed her
+in the carriage and lifted his hat in farewell.
+
+"What's he doing all that for, Tilly?" cried she; "there ain't--there
+ain't nobody dead--Maria Carleton------" She stared at Tilly wildly.
+
+Tilly was oddly moved, though she tried to speak lightly. "No, no, there
+ain't nothing wrong, at all. It's because you've done so much for the
+Russians--and other folks! Now, ma, I'm going to be mysterious. You must
+shut your eyes and shut your mouth until I tell you. That's a dear ma."
+
+It was vaguely comforting to have Tilly so affectionate. "I'm a wicked,
+ungrateful woman to be so wretched," thought Jane; "I'll never let Tilly
+know how I felt."
+
+In a surprisingly short time the carriage stopped. "Now, ma," said
+Tilly.
+
+A great blaze of light seemed all about Jane Louder. There were the dear
+familiar windows of the Lossing block.
+
+"Come up-stairs, ma," said Tilly.
+
+She followed like one in a dream; and like one in a dream she was pushed
+into her own old parlor. The old parlor, but not quite the old parlor;
+hung with new wall-paper, shining with new paint, soft under her feet
+with a new carpet, it looked to Jane Louder like fairyland.
+
+"Oh, Tilly," she gasped; "oh, Tilly, ain't you moved?"
+
+"No, nor we ain't going to move, ma--that's the surprise! I took the
+money I'd saved for moving, for the new carpet and new dishes; and the
+Lossings they papered and painted. I was SO 'fraid we couldn't get done
+in time. Alma and all the boarders are coming in pretty soon to
+welcome you, and they've all chipped in for a little banquet at Mrs.
+Carleton's--why, mother, you're crying! Mother, you didn't really think
+I'd move when it made you feel so bad? I know I'm set and stubborn,
+and I didn't take it well when Mr. Lossing talked to me; but the more I
+thought it over, the more I seemed to myself like that hateful Minnie.
+Oh, mother, I ain't, am I? You shall do just exactly as you like all the
+days of your life!"
+
+
+
+
+AN ASSISTED PROVIDENCE
+
+IT was the Christmas turkeys that should be held responsible. Every year
+the Lossings give each head of a family in their employ, and each
+lad helping to support his mother, a turkey at Christmastide. As the
+business has grown, so has the number of turkeys, until it is now
+well up in the hundreds, and requires a special contract. Harry, one
+Christmas, some two years ago, bought the turkeys at so good a bargain
+that he felt the natural reaction in an impulse to extravagance. In
+the very flood-tide of the money-spending yearnings, he chanced to
+pass Deacon Hurst's stables and to see two Saint Bernard puppies, of
+elephantine size but of the tenderest age, gambolling on the sidewalk
+before the office. Deacon Hurst, I should explain, is no more a deacon
+than I am; he is a livery-stable keeper, very honest, a keen and solemn
+sportsman, and withal of a staid demeanor and a habitual garb of black.
+Now you know as well as I any reason for his nickname.
+
+Deacon Hurst is fond of the dog as well as of that noble animal the
+horse (he has three copies of "Black Beauty" in his stable, which would
+do an incalculable amount of good if they were ever read!); and he
+usually has half a dozen dogs of his own, with pedigrees long enough
+for a poor gentlewoman in a New England village. He told Harry that the
+Saint Bernards were grandsons of Sir Bevidere, the "finest dog of his
+time in the world, sir;" that they were perfectly marked and very
+large for their age (which Harry found it easy to believe of the young
+giants), and that they were "ridiculous, sir, at the figger of two
+hundred and fifty!" (which Harry did not believe so readily); and, after
+Harry had admired and studied the dogs for the space of half an hour,
+he dropped the price, in a kind of spasm of generosity, to two hundred
+dollars. Harry was tempted to close the bargain on the spot, hot-headed,
+but he decided to wait and prepare his mother for such a large addition
+to the stable.
+
+The more he dwelt on the subject the more he longed to buy the dogs.
+
+In fact, a time comes to every healthy man when he wants a dog, just
+as a time comes when he wants a wife; and Harry's dog was dead.
+By consequence, Harry was in the state of sensitive affection and
+desolation to which a promising new object makes the most moving appeal.
+The departed dog (Bruce by name) had been a Saint Bernard; and Deacon
+Hurst found one of the puppies to have so much the expression of
+countenance of the late Bruce that he named him Bruce on the spot--a
+little before Harry joined the group. Harry did not at first recognize
+this resemblance, but he grew to see it; and, combined with the dog's
+affectionate disposition, it softened his heart. By the time he told his
+mother he was come to quoting Hurst's adjectives as his own.
+
+"Beauties, mother," says Harry, with sparkling eyes; "the markings are
+perfect--couldn't be better; and their heads are shaped just right!
+You can't get such watch-dogs in the world! And, for all their enormous
+strength, gentle as a lamb to women and children! And, mother, one of
+them looks like Bruce!"
+
+"I suppose they would want to be housedogs," says Mrs. Lossing, a little
+dubiously, but looking fondly at Harry's handsome face; "you know,
+somehow, all our dogs, no matter how properly they start in a kennel,
+end by being so hurt if we keep them there that they come into the
+house. And they are so large, it is like having a pet lion about."
+
+"These dogs, mother, shall never put a paw in the house."
+
+"Well, I hope just as I get fond of them they will not have the
+distemper and die!" said Mrs. Lossing; which speech Harry rightly took
+for the white flag of surrender.
+
+That evening he went to find Hurst and clinch the bargain. As it
+happened, Hurst was away, driving an especially important political
+personage to an especially important political council. The day
+following was a Sunday; but, by this time, Harry was so bent upon
+obtaining the dogs that he had it in mind to go to Hurst's house for
+them in the afternoon. When Harry wants anything, from Saint Bernards to
+purity in politics, he wants it with an irresistible impetus! If he
+did wrong, his error was linked to its own punishment. But this is
+anticipating, if not presuming; I prefer to leave Harry Lossing's
+experience to paint its own moral without pushing. The event that
+happened next was Harry's pulling out his check-book and beginning to
+write a check, remarking, with a slight drooping of his eyelids, "Best
+catch the deacon's generosity on the fly, or it may make a home run!"
+
+Then he let the pen fall on the blotter, for he had remembered the
+day. After an instant's hesitation he took a couple of hundred-dollar
+bank-notes out of a drawer (I think they were gifts for his two sisters
+on Christmas day, for he is a generous brother; and most likely there
+would be some small domestic joke about engravings to go with them);
+these he placed in the right-hand pocket of his waistcoat. In his
+left-hand waistcoat pocket were two five-dollar notes.
+
+Harry was now arrayed for church. He was a figure to please any woman's
+eye, thought his mother, as she walked beside him, and gloried silently
+in his six feet of health and muscle and dainty cleanliness. He was in a
+most amiable mood, what with the Saint Bernards and the season. As they
+approached the cathedral close, Harry, not for the first time, admired
+the pure Gothic lines of the cathedral, and the soft blending of grays
+in the stone with the warmer hues of the brown network of Virginia
+creeper that still fluttered, a remnant of the crimson adornings of
+autumn. Beyond were the bare, square outlines of the old college, with
+a wooden cupola perched on the roof, like a little hat on a fat man,
+the dull-red tints of the professors' houses, and the withered lawns and
+bare trees. The turrets and balconies and arched windows of the boys'
+school displayed a red background for a troop of gray uniforms and
+blazing buttons; the boys were forming to march to church. Opposite the
+boys' school stood the modest square brick house that had served the
+first bishop of the diocese during laborious years. Now it was the
+dean's residence. Facing it, just as you approached the cathedral, the
+street curved into a half-circle on either side, and in the centre the
+granite soldier on his shaft looked over the city that would honor him.
+Harry saw the tall figure of the dean come out of his gate, the long
+black skirts of his cassock fluttering under the wind of his big steps.
+Beside him skipped and ran, to keep step with him, a little man in
+ill-fitting black, of whose appearance, thus viewed from the rear, one
+could only observe stooping shoulders and iron-gray hair that curled at
+the ends.
+
+"He must be the poor missionary who built his church himself," Mrs.
+Lossing observed; "he is not much of a preacher, the dean said, but he
+is a great worker and a good pastor."
+
+"So much the better for his people, and the worse for us!" says Harry,
+cheerfully.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Naturally. We shall get the poor sermon and they will get the good
+pastoring!"
+
+Then Harry caught sight of a woman's frock and a profile that he knew,
+and thought no more of the preacher, whoever he might be.
+
+But he was in the chancel in plain view, after the procession of
+choir-boys had taken their seats. He was an elderly man with thin
+cheeks and a large nose. He had one of those great, orotund voices that
+occasionally roll out of little men, and he read the service with a
+misjudged effort to fill the building. The building happened to have
+peculiarly fine acoustic properties; but the unfortunate man roared like
+him of Bashan. There was nothing of the customary ecclesiastical dignity
+and monotony about his articulation; indeed, it grew plain and plainer
+to Harry that he must have "come over" from some franker and more
+emotional denomination. It seemed quite out of keeping with his homely
+manner and crumpled surplice that this particular reader should intone.
+Intone, nevertheless, he did; and as badly as mortal man well could! It
+was not so much that his voice or his ear went wrong; he would have had
+a musical voice of the heavy sort, had he not bellowed; neither did his
+ear betray him; the trouble seemed to be that he could not decide when
+to begin; now he began too early, and again, with a startled air, he
+began too late, as if he had forgotten.
+
+"I hope he will not preach," thought Harry, who was absorbed in a rapt
+contemplation of his sweetheart's back hair. He came back from a tender
+revery (by way of a little detour into the furniture business and the
+establishment that a man of his income could afford) to the church and
+the preacher and his own sins, to find the strange clergyman in the
+pulpit, plainly frightened, and bawling more loudly than ever under the
+influence of fear. He preached a sermon of wearisome platitudes; making
+up for lack of thought by repetition, and shouting himself red in the
+face to express earnestness. "Fourth-class Methodist effort," thought
+the listener in the Lossing pew, stroking his fair mustache, "with
+Episcopal decorations! That man used to be a Methodist minister, and
+he was brought into the fold by a high-churchman. Poor fellow, the
+Methodist church polity has a place for such fellows as he; but he is a
+stray sheep with us. He doesn't half catch on to the motions; yet I'll
+warrant he is proud of that sermon, and his wife thinks it one of the
+great efforts of the century." Here Harry took a short rest from the
+sermon, to contemplate the amazing moral phenomenon: how robust can be a
+wife's faith in a commonplace husband!
+
+"Now, this man," reflected Harry, growing interested in his own fancies,
+"this man never can have LIVED! He doesn't know what it is to suffer, he
+has only vegetated! Doubtless, in a prosaic way, he loves his wife
+and children; but can a fellow who talks like him have any delicate
+sympathies or any romance about him? He looks honest; I think he is a
+right good fellow and works like a soldier; but to be so stupid as he
+is, ought to HURT!"
+
+Harry felt a whimsical moving of sympathy towards the preacher. He
+wondered why he continually made gestures with the left arm, never with
+his right.
+
+"It gives a one-sided effect to his eloquence," said he. But he thought
+that he understood when an unguarded movement revealed a rent which had
+been a mended place in the surplice.
+
+"Poor fellow," said Harry. He recalled how, as a boy, he had gone to a
+fancy-dress ball in Continental smallclothes, so small that he had been
+strictly cautioned by his mother and sisters not to bow except with the
+greatest care, lest he rend his magnificence and reveal that it was too
+tight to allow an inch of underclothing. The stockings, in particular,
+had been short, and his sister had providently sewed them on to the
+knee-breeches, and to guard against accidents still further, had pinned
+as well as sewed, the pins causing Harry much anguish.
+
+"Poor fellow!" said Harry again, "I wonder is HE pinned somewhere? I
+feel like giving him a lift; he is so prosy it isn't likely anyone else
+will feel moved to help."
+
+Thus it came about that when the dean announced that the alms this day
+would be given to the parish of our friend who had just addressed us;
+and the plate paused before the Lossing pew, Harry slipped his hand into
+his waistcoat pocket after those two five-dollar notes.
+
+I should explain that Harry being a naturally left-handed boy, who has
+laboriously taught himself the use of his right hand, it is a family
+joke that he is like the inhabitants of Nineveh, who could not
+tell their right hand from their left. But Harry himself has always
+maintained that he can tell as well as the next man.
+
+Out drifted the flock of choir-boys singing, "For thee, oh dear, dear
+country," and presently, following them, out drifted the congregation;
+among the crowd the girl that Harry loved, not so quickly that he had
+not time for a look and a smile (just tinged with rose); and because she
+was so sweet, so good, so altogether adorable, and because she had not
+only smiled but blushed, and, unobserved, he had touched the fur of her
+jacket, the young man walked on air.
+
+He did not remember the Saint Bernards until after the early Sunday
+dinner, and during the after-dinner cigar. He was sitting in the
+library, before some blazing logs, at peace with all the world. To him,
+thus, came his mother and announced that the dean and "that man who
+preached this morning, you know," were waiting in the other room.
+
+"They seem excited," said she, "and talk about your munificence. What
+HAVE you been doing?"
+
+"Appear to make a great deal of fuss over ten dollars," said Harry,
+lightly, as he sauntered out of the door.
+
+The dean greeted him with something almost like confusion in his
+cordiality; he introduced his companion as the Rev. Mr. Gilling.
+
+"Mr. Gilling could not feel easy until he had----"
+
+"Made sure about there being no mistake," interrupted Mr. Gilling;
+"I--the sum was so great------"
+
+A ghastly suspicion shot like a fever-flush over Harry's mind. Could it
+be possible? There were the two other bills; could he have given one of
+them? Given that howling dervish a hundred dollars? The thought was too
+awful!
+
+"It was really not enough for you to trouble yourself," he said; "I dare
+say you are thanking the wrong man." He felt he must say something.
+
+To his surprise the dean colored, while the other clergyman answered, in
+all simplicity:
+
+"No, sir, no, sir. I know very well. The only other bill, except
+dollars, on the plate, the dean here gave, and the warden remembers that
+you put in two notes--I"--he grew quite pale--"I can't help thinking you
+maybe intended to put in only ONE!" His voice broke, he tried to control
+it. "The sum is so VERY large!" quavered he.
+
+"I have given him BOTH bills, two hundred dollars!" thought Harry. He
+sat down. He was accustomed to read men's faces, and plainly as ever
+he had read, he could read the signs of distress and conflict on the
+prosaic, dull features before him.
+
+"I INTENDED to put in two bills," said he. Gilling gave a little
+gasp--so little, only a quick ear could have caught it; but Harry's
+ear is quick. He twisted one leg around the other, a further sign of
+deliverance of mind.
+
+"Well, sir, well, Mr. Lossing," he remarked, clearing his throat,
+"I cannot express to you properly the--the appreciation I have of
+your--your PRINCELY gift!" (Harry changed a groan into a cough and tried
+to smile.) "I would like to ask you, however, HOW you would like it to
+be divided. There are a number of worthy causes: the furnishing of the
+church, which is in charge of the Ladies' Aid Society; they are very
+hard workers, the ladies of our church. And there is the Altar Guild,
+which has the keeping of the altar in order. They are mostly young
+girls, and they used to wash my things--I mean the vestments"
+(blushing)--"but they--they were so young they were not careful, and my
+wife thought she had best wash the--vestments herself, but she
+allowed them to laundry the other--ah, things." There was the same
+discursiveness in his talk as in his sermon, Harry thought; and the
+same uneasy restlessness of manner. "Then, we give to--various causes,
+and--and there is, also, my own salary----"
+
+"That is what it was intended for," said Harry. "I hope the two hundred
+dollars will be of some use to you, and then, indirectly, it will help
+your church."
+
+Harry surprised a queer glance from the dean's brown eyes; there was
+both humor and a something else that was solemn enough in it. The dean
+had believed that there was a mistake.
+
+"All of it! To ME!" cried Gilling.
+
+"All of it. To YOU," Harry replied, dryly. He was conscious of the
+dean's gaze upon him. "I had a sudden impulse," said he, "and I gave it;
+that is all."
+
+The tears rose to the clergyman's eyes; he tried to wink them away, then
+he tried to brush them away with a quick rub of his fingers, then he
+sprang up and walked to the window, his back to Harry. Directly he was
+facing the young man again, and speaking.
+
+"You must excuse me, Mr. Lossing; since my sickness a little thing
+upsets me."
+
+"Mr. Gilling had diphtheria last spring," the dean struck in, "there was
+an epidemic of diphtheria, in Matin's Junction; Mr. Gilling really saved
+the place; but his wife and he both contracted the disease, and his wife
+nearly died."
+
+Harry remembered some story that he had heard at the time--his eyes
+began to light up as they do when he is moved.
+
+"Why, YOU are the man that made them disinfect their houses," cried he,
+"and invented a little oven or something to steam mattresses and things.
+You are the man that nursed them and buried them when the undertaker
+died. You digged graves with your own hands--I say, I should like to
+shake hands with you!"
+
+Gilling shook hands, submissively, but looking bewildered.
+
+He cleared his throat. "Would you mind, Mr. Lossing, if I took up your
+time so far as to tell you what so overcame me?"
+
+"I should be glad----"
+
+"You see, sir, my wife was the daughter of the Episcopal minister--I
+mean the rector, at the town--well, it wasn't a town, it was two or
+three towns off in Shelby County where I had my circuit. You may be
+surprised, sir, to know that I was once a Methodist minister."
+
+"Is it possible?" said Harry.
+
+"Yes, sir. Her father--my wife's, I mean--was about as high a churchman
+as he could be, and be married. He induced me to join our communion; and
+very soon after I was married. I hope, Mr. Lossing, you'll come and see
+us some time, and see my wife. She--are you married?"
+
+"I am not so fortunate."
+
+"A good wife cometh from the Lord, sir, SURE! I thought I appreciated
+mine, but I guess I didn't. She had two things she wanted, and one I
+did want myself; but the other--I couldn't seem to bring my mind to it,
+no--anyhow! We hadn't any children but one that died four years ago,
+a little baby. Ever since she died my wife has had a longing to have
+a stained-glass window, with the picture, you know, of Christ blessing
+little children, put into our little church. In Memoriam, you know.
+Seems as if, now we've lost the baby, we think all the more of the
+church. Maybe she was a sort of idol to us. Yes, sir, that's one thing
+my wife fairly longed for. We've saved our money, what we COULD save;
+there are so many calls; during the sickness, last winter, the sick
+needed so many things, and it didn't seem right for us to neglect them
+just for our baby's window; and--the money went. The other thing was
+different. My wife has got it into her head I have a fine voice. And
+she's higher church than I am; so she has always wanted me to INTONE. I
+told her I'd look like a fool intoning, and there's no mistake about
+it, I DO! But she couldn't see it that way. It was 'most the only point
+wherein we differed; and last spring, when she was so sick, and I didn't
+know but I'd lose her, it was dreadful to me to think how I'd
+crossed her. So, Mr. Lossing, when she got well I promised her, for a
+thank-offering, I'd intone. And I have ever since. My people know me so
+well, and we've been through so much together, that they didn't make any
+fuss--though they are not high--fact is, I'm not high myself. But they
+were kind and considerate, and I got on pretty well at home; but when
+I came to rise up in that great edifice, before that cultured and
+intellectual audience, so finely dressed, it did seem to me I could NOT
+do it! I was sorely tempted to break my promise. I was, for a fact." He
+drew a long breath. "I just had to pray for grace, or I never would have
+pulled through. I had the sermon my wife likes best with me; but I know
+it lacks--it lacks--it isn't what you need! I was dreadfully scared and
+I felt miserable when I got up to preach it--and then to think that you
+were--but it is the Lord's doing and marvellous in our eyes! I don't
+know what Maggie will say when I tell her we can get the window. The
+best she hoped was I'd bring back enough so the church could pay me
+eighteen dollars they owe on my salary. And now--it's wonderful! Why,
+Mr. Lossing, I've been thinking so much and wanting so to get that
+window for her, that, hearing the dean wanted some car-pentering done, I
+thought maybe, as I'm a fair carpenter--that was my trade once, sir--I'd
+ask him to let ME do the job. I was aware there is nothing in our
+rules--I mean our canons--to prevent me, and nobody need know I was the
+rector of Matin's Junction, because I would come just in my overalls.
+There is a cheap place where I could lodge, and I could feed myself for
+almost nothing, living is so cheap. I was praying about that, too.
+Now, your noble generosity will enable me to donate what they owe on my
+salary, and get the window too!"
+
+"Take my advice," said Harry, "donate nothing. Say nothing about this
+gift; I will take care of the warden, and I can answer for the dean."
+
+"Yes," said the dean, "on the whole, Gilling, you would better say
+nothing, I think; Mr. Lossing is more afraid of a reputation for
+generosity than of the small-pox."
+
+The older man looked at Harry with glistening eyes of admiration; with
+what Christian virtues of humility he was endowing that embarrassed
+young man, it is painful to imagine.
+
+The dean's eyes twinkled above his handkerchief, which hid his mouth, as
+he rose to make his farewells. He shook hands, warmly. "God bless you,
+Harry," said he. Gilling, too, wrung Harry's hands; he was seeking some
+parting word of gratitude, but he could only choke out, "I hope you will
+get MARRIED some time, Mr. Lossing, then you'll understand."
+
+"Well," said Harry, as the door closed, and he flung out his arms and
+his chest in a huge sigh, "I do believe it was better than the puppies!"
+
+
+
+
+HARRY LOSSING
+
+THE note-book of Mr. Horatio Armorer, president of our street railways,
+contained a page of interest to some people in our town, on the occasion
+of his last visit.
+
+He wrote it while the train creaked over the river, and the porter of
+his Pullman car was brushing all the dust that had been distributed on
+the passengers' clothing, into the main aisle.
+
+If you had seen him writing it (with a stubby little pencil that he
+occasionally brightened with the tip of his tongue), you would not have
+dreamed him to be more profoundly disturbed than he had been in years.
+Nor would the page itself have much enlightened you.
+
+      "_See abt road M-- D--        See L
+        See E & M tea-set
+        See abt L_."
+
+
+Translated into long-hand, this reads: "See about the street-car road,
+Marston (the superintendent) and Dane (the lawyer). See Lossing, see
+Esther and Maggie, and remember about tea-set. See about Lossing."
+
+His memoranda written, he slipped the book in his pocket, reflecting
+cynically, "There's habit! I've no need of writing that. It's not
+pleasant enough to forget!"
+
+Thirty odd years ago, Horatio Armorer--they called him 'Raish, then--had
+left the town to seek his fortune in Chicago. It was his daydream to
+wrestle a hundred thousand dollars out of the world's tight fists, and
+return to live in pomp on Brady Street hill! He should drive a buggy
+with two horses, and his wife should keep two girls. Long ago, the
+hundred thousand limit had been reached and passed, next the million;
+and still he did not return. His father, the Presbyterian minister, left
+his parish, or, to be exact, was gently propelled out of his parish by
+the disaffected; the family had a new home; and the son, struggling to
+help them out of his scanty resources, went to the new parish and not
+to the old. He grew rich, he established his brothers and sisters in
+prosperity, he erected costly monuments and a memorial church to his
+parents (they were beyond any other gifts from him); he married, and
+lavished his money on three daughters; but the home of his youth neither
+saw him nor his money until Margaret Ellis bought a house on Brady
+Street, far up town, where she could have all the grass that she wanted.
+Mrs. Ellis was a widow and rich. Not a millionaire like her brother, but
+the possessor of a handsome property.
+
+She was the best-natured woman in the world, and never guessed how hard
+her neighbors found it to forgive her for always calling their town of
+thirty thousand souls, "the country." She said that she had pined for
+years to live in the country, and have horses, and a Jersey cow and
+chickens, and "a neat pig." All of which modest cravings she gratified
+on her little estate; and the gardener was often seen with a scowl and
+the garden hose, keeping the pig neat.
+
+It was later that Mr. Armorer had bought the street railways, they
+having had a troublous history and being for sale cheap. Nobody that
+knows Armorer as a business man would back his sentiment by so much
+as an old shoe; yet it was sentiment, and not a good bargain, that had
+enticed the financier. Once engaged, the instincts of a shrewd trader
+prompted him to turn it into a good bargain, anyhow. His fancy was
+pleased by a vision of a return to the home of his childhood and his
+struggling youth, as a greater personage than his hopes had ever dared
+promise.
+
+But, in the event, there was little enough gratification for his vanity.
+Not since his wife's death had he been so harassed and anxious; for he
+came not in order to view his new property, but because his sister
+had written him her suspicions that Harry Lossing wanted to marry his
+youngest daughter.
+
+Armorer arrived in the early dawn. Early as it was, a handsome victoria,
+with horses sleeker of skin and harness heavier and brighter than one
+is used to meet outside the great cities, had been in waiting for twenty
+minutes; while for that space of time a pretty girl had paced up and
+down the platform. The keenest observer among the crowd, airing its meek
+impatience on the platform, did not detect any sign of anxiety in her
+behavior. She walked erect, with a step that left a clean-cut footprint
+in the dust, as girls are trained to walk nowadays. Her tailor-made
+gown of fine blue serge had not a wrinkle. It was so simple that only
+a fashionable woman could guess anywhere near the awful sum total which
+that plain skirt, that short jacket, and that severe waistcoat had once
+made on a ruled sheet of paper. When she turned her face toward the low,
+red station-house and the people, it looked gentle, and the least in the
+world sad. She had one of those clear olive skins that easily grow pale;
+it was pale to-day. Her black hair was fine as spun silk; the coil under
+her hat-brim shone as she moved. The fine hair, the soft, transparent
+skin, and the beautiful marking of her brows were responsible for an air
+of fragile daintiness in her person, just as her almond-shaped,
+liquid dark eyes and unsmiling mouth made her look sad. It was a most
+attractive face, in all its moods; sometimes it was a beautiful face;
+yet it did not have a single perfect feature except the mouth, which--at
+least so Harry Lossing told his mother--might have been stolen from the
+Venus of Milo. Even the mouth, some critics called too small for her
+nose; but it is as easy to call her nose too large for her mouth.
+
+The instant she turned her back on the bustle of the station, all the
+lines in her face seemed to waver and the eyes to brighten. Finally,
+when the train rolled up to the platform and a young-looking elderly man
+swung himself nimbly off the steps, the color flared up in her cheeks,
+only to sink as suddenly; like a candle flame in a gust of wind.
+
+Mr. Armorer put his two arms and his umbrella and travelling-bag about
+the charming shape in blue, at the same time exclaiming, "You're a good
+girl to come out so early, Essie! How's Aunt Meg?"
+
+"Oh, very well. She would have come too, but she hasn't come back from
+training."
+
+"Training?"
+
+"Yes, dear, she has a regular trainer, like John L. Sullivan, you know.
+She drives out to the park with Eliza and me, and walks and runs races,
+and does gymnastics. She has lost ten pounds."
+
+Armorer wagged his head with a grin: "I dare say. I thought so when you
+began. Meg is always moaning and groaning because she isn't a sylph!
+She will make her cook's life a burden for about two months and lose ten
+pounds, and then she will revel in ice-cream! Last time, she was raving
+about Dr. Salisbury and living on beefsteak sausages, spending a fortune
+starving herself."
+
+"She had Dr. Salisbury's pamphlet; but Cardigan told her it was a long
+way out; so she said she hated to have it do no one any good, and she
+gave it to Maria, one of the maids, who is always fretting because she
+is so thin."
+
+"But the thing was to cure fat people!"
+
+"Precisely." Esther laughed a little low laugh, at which her father's
+eyes shone; "but you see she told Maria to exactly reverse the advice
+and eat everything that was injurious to stout people, and it would be
+just right for her."
+
+"I perceive," said Armorer, dryly; "very ingenious and feminine scheme.
+But who is Cardigan?"
+
+"Shuey Cardigan? He is the trainer. He is a fireman in a furniture shop,
+now; but he used to be the boxing teacher for some Harvard men; and he
+was a distinguished pugilist, once. He said to me, modestly, 'I don't
+suppose you will have seen my name in the _Police Gazette_, miss?' But
+he really is a very sober, decent man, notwithstanding."
+
+"Your Aunt Meg always was picking up queer birds! Pray, who introduced
+this decent pugilist?"
+
+Esther was getting into the carriage; her face was turned from him, but
+he could see the pink deepen in her ear and the oval of her cheek. She
+answered that it was a friend of theirs, Mr. Lossing. As if the name had
+struck them both dumb, neither spoke for a few moments. Armorer bit a
+sigh in two. "Essie," said he, "I guess it is no use to side-track the
+subject. You know why I came here, don't you?"
+
+"Aunt Meg told me what she wrote to you."
+
+"I knew she would. She had compunctions of conscience letting him hang
+round you, until she told me; and then she had awful gripes because she
+had told, and had to confess to YOU!"
+
+He continued in a different tone: "Essie, I have missed your mother
+a long while, and nobody knows how that kind of missing hurts; but it
+seems to me I never missed her as I do to-day. I need her to advise me
+about you, Essie. It is like this: I don't want to be a stern parent
+any more than you want to elope on a rope ladder. We have got to look
+at this thing together, my dear little girl, and try to--to trust each
+other."
+
+"Don't you think, papa," said Esther, smiling rather tremulously, "that
+we would better wait, before we have all these solemn preparations,
+until we know surely whether Mr. Lossing wants me?"
+
+"Don't you know surely?"
+
+"He has never said anything of--of that--kind."
+
+"Oh, he is in love with you fast enough," growled Armorer; but a smile
+of intense relief brightened his face. "Now, you see, my dear, all I
+know about this young man, except that he wants my daughter--which you
+will admit is not likely to prejudice me in his favor--is that he is
+mayor of this town and has a furniture store----"
+
+"A manufactory; it is a very large business!"
+
+"All right, manufactory, then; all the same he is not a brilliant match
+for my daughter, not such a husband as your sisters have." Esther's lip
+quivered and her color rose again; but she did not speak. "Still I will
+say that I think a fellow who can make his own fortune is better than
+a man with twice that fortune made for him. My dear, if Lossing has the
+right stuff in him and he is a real good fellow, I shan't make you go
+into a decline by objecting; but you see it is a big shock to me, and
+you must let me get used to it, and let me size the young man up in my
+own way. There is another thing, Esther; I am going to Europe Thursday,
+that will give me just a day in Chicago if I go to-morrow, and I wish
+you would come with me. Will you mind?"
+
+Either she changed her seat or she started at the proposal. But how
+could she say that she wanted to stay in America with a man who had not
+said a formal word of love to her? "I can get ready, I think, papa,"
+said Esther.
+
+They drove on. He felt a crawling pain in his heart, for he loved his
+daughter Esther as he had loved no other child of his; and he knew that
+he had hurt her. Naturally, he grew the more angry at the impertinent
+young man who was the cause of the flitting; for the whole European plan
+had been cooked up since the receipt of Mrs. Ellis's letter. They were
+on the very street down which he used to walk (for it takes the line of
+the hills) when he was a poor boy, a struggling, ferociously ambitious
+young man. He looked at the changed rows of buildings, and other
+thoughts came uppermost for a moment. "It was here father's church used
+to stand; it's gone, now," he said. "It was a wood church, painted a
+kind of gray; mother had a bonnet the same color, and she used to say
+she matched the church. I bought it with the very first money I earned.
+Part of it came from weeding, and the weather was warm, and I can feel
+the way my back would sting and creak, now! I would want to stop, often,
+but I thought of mother in church with that bonnet, and I kept on!
+There's the place where Seeds, the grocer that used to trust us, had
+his store; it was his children had the scarlet fever, and mother went
+to nurse them. My! but how dismal it was at home! We always got more
+whippings when mother was away. Your grandfather was a good man, too
+honest for this world, and he loved every one of his seven children;
+but he brought us up to fear him and the Lord. We feared him the most,
+because the Lord couldn't whip us! He never whipped us when we did
+anything, but waited until next day, that he might not punish in anger;
+so we had all the night to anticipate it. Did I ever tell you of the
+time he caught me in a lie? I was lame for a week after it. He never
+caught me in another lie."
+
+"I think he was cruel; I can't help it, papa," cried Esther, with whom
+this was an old argument, "still it did good, that time!"
+
+"Oh, no, he wasn't cruel, my dear," said Armorer, with a queer smile
+that seemed to take only one-half of his face, not answering the last
+words; "he was too sure of his interpretation of the Scripture, that was
+all. Why, that man just slaved to educate us children; he'd have gone
+to the stake rejoicing to have made sure that we should be saved. And of
+the whole seven only one is a church member. Is that the road?"
+
+They could see a car swinging past, on a parallel street, its bent pole
+hitching along the trolley-wire.
+
+
+"Pretty scrubby-looking cars," commented Armorer; "but get our new
+ordinance through the council, we can save enough to afford some fine
+new cars. Has Lossing said anything to you about the ordinance and our
+petition to be allowed to leave off the conductors?"
+
+"He hasn't said anything, but I read about it in the papers. Is it so
+very important that it should be passed?"
+
+"Saving money is always important, my dear," said Armorer, seriously.
+
+The horses turned again. They were now opposite a fair lawn and a
+house of wood and stone built after the old colonial pattern, as modern
+architects see it. Esther pointed, saying:
+
+"Aunt Meg's, papa; isn't it pretty?"
+
+"Very handsome, very fine," said the financier, who knew nothing about
+architecture, except its exceeding expense. "Esther, I've a notion; if
+that young man of yours has brains and is fond of you he ought to be
+able to get my ordinance through his little eight by ten city council.
+There is our chance to see what stuff he is made of!"
+
+"Oh, he has a great deal of influence," said Esther; "he can do it,
+unless--unless he thinks the ordinance would be bad for the city, you
+know."
+
+"Confound the modern way of educating girls!" thought Armorer. "Now, it
+would have been enough for Esther's mother to know that anything was for
+my interests; it wouldn't have to help all out-doors, too!"
+
+But instead of enlarging on this point, he went into a sketch of the
+improvements the road could make with the money saved by the change,
+and was waxing eloquent when a lady of a pleasant and comely face, and a
+trig though not slender figure, advanced to greet them.
+
+
+It was after breakfast (and the scene was the neat pig's pen, where
+Armorer was displaying his ignorance of swine) that he found his first
+chance to talk with his sister alone. "Oh, first, Sis," said he, "about
+your birthday, to-day; I telegraphed to Tiffany's for that silver
+service, you know, that you liked, so you needn't think there's a
+mistake when it comes."
+
+"Oh, 'Raish, that gorgeous thing! I must kiss you, if Daniel does see
+me!"
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said Armorer, hastily, and began to talk of
+the pig. Suddenly, without looking up, he dropped into the pig-pen the
+remark: "I'm very much obliged to you for writing me, Meg."
+
+"I don't know whether to feel more like a virtuous sister or a villanous
+aunt," sighed Mrs. Ellis; "things seemed to be getting on so rapidly
+that it didn't seem right, Esther visiting me and all, not to give you a
+hint; still, I am sure that nothing has been said, and it is horrid for
+Esther, perfectly HORRID, discussing her proposals that haven't been
+proposed!"
+
+"I don't want them ever to be proposed," said Armorer, gloomily.
+
+"I know you always said you didn't want Esther to marry; but I thought
+if she fell in love with the right man--we know that marriage is a very
+happy estate, sometimes, Horatio!" She sighed again. In her case it
+was only the memory of happiness, for Colonel Ellis had been dead these
+twelve years; but his widow mourned him still.
+
+"If you marry the right one, maybe," answered Armorer, grudgingly;
+"but see here, Meg, Esther is different from the other girls; they got
+married when Jenny was alive to look after them, and I knew the men, and
+they were both big matches, you know. Then, too, I was so busy making
+money while the other girls grew up that I hadn't time to get real well
+acquainted with them. I don't think they ever kissed me, except when I
+gave them a check. But Esther and I----" he drummed with his fingers on
+the boards, his thin, keen face wearing a look that would have amazed
+his business acquaintances--"you remember when her mother died, Meg?
+Only fifteen, and how she took hold of things! And we have been together
+ever since, and she makes me think of her grandmother and her mother
+both. She's never had a wish I knew that I haven't granted--why, d----
+it! I've bought my clothes to please her----"
+
+"That's why you are become so well-dressed, Horatio; I wondered how you
+came to spruce up so!" interrupted Mrs. Ellis.
+
+"It has been so blamed lonesome whenever she went to visit you, but yet
+I wouldn't say a word because I knew what a good time she had; but if I
+had known that there was a confounded, long-legged, sniffy young idiot
+all that while trying to steal my daughter away from me!" In an access
+of wrath at the idea Armorer wrenched off the picket that he clutched,
+at which he laughed and stuck his hands in his pockets.
+
+"Why, Meg, the papers and magazines are always howling that women won't
+marry," cried he, with a fresh sense of grievance; "now, two of my girls
+have married, that's enough; there was no reason for me to expect any
+more of them would! There isn't one d---- bit of need for Esther to
+marry!"
+
+"But if she loves the young fellow and he loves her, won't you let them
+be happy?"
+
+"He won't make her happy."
+
+"He is a very good fellow, truly and really, 'Raish. And he comes of a
+good family----"
+
+"I don't care for his family; and as to his being moral and all that, I
+know several young fellows that could skin him alive in a bargain
+that are moral as you please. I have been a moral man, myself. But the
+trouble with this Lossing (I told Esther I didn't know anything about
+him, but I do), the trouble with him is that he is chock full of all
+kinds of principles! Just as father was. Don't you remember how he lost
+parish after parish because he couldn't smooth over the big men in them?
+Lossing is every bit as pig-headed. I am not going to have my daughter
+lead the kind of life my mother did. I want a son-in-law who ain't going
+to think himself so much better than I am, and be rowing me for my way
+of doing business. If Esther MUST marry I'd like her to marry a man with
+a head on him that I can take into business, and who will be willing to
+live with the old man. This Lossing has got his notions of making a sort
+of Highland chief affair of the labor question, and we should get along
+about as well as the Kilkenny cats!"
+
+Mrs. Ellis knew more than Esther about Armorer's business methods,
+having the advantage of her husband's point of view; and Colonel Ellis
+had kept the army standard of honor as well as the army ignorance of
+business. To counterbalance, she knew more than anyone alive what a good
+son and brother Horatio had always been. But she could not restrain a
+smile at the picture of the partnership.
+
+"Precisely, you see yourself," said Armorer. "Meg"--hesitating--"you
+don't suppose it would be any use to offer Esther a cool hundred
+thousand to promise to bounce this young fellow?"
+
+"Horatio, NO!" cried Mrs. Ellis, tossing her pretty gray head
+indignantly; "you'd insult her!"
+
+"Take it the same way, eh? Well, perhaps; Essie has high-toned notions.
+That's all right, it is the thing for women. Mother had them too. Look
+here, Meg, I'll tell you, I want to see if this young fellow has ANY
+sense! We have an ordinance that we want passed. If he will get his
+council to pass it, that will show he can put his grand theories into
+his pockets sometimes; and I will give him a show with Esther. If he
+doesn't care enough for my girl to oblige her father, even if he doesn't
+please a lot of carping roosters that want the earth for their town and
+would like a street railway to be run to accommodate them and lose money
+for the stockholders, well, then, you can't blame me if I don't want
+him! Now, will you do one thing for me, Meg, to help me out? I don't
+want Lossing to persuade Esther to commit herself; you know how, when
+she was a little mite, if Esther gave her word she kept it. I want
+you to promise me you won't let Esther be alone one second with young
+Lossing. She is going to-morrow, but there's your whist-party to-night;
+I suppose he's coming? And I want you to promise you won't let him have
+our address. If he treats me square, he won't need to ask you for it.
+Well?"
+
+He buttoned up his coat and folded his arms, waiting.
+
+Mrs. Ellis's sympathy had gone out to the young people as naturally as
+water runs down hill; for she is of a romantic temperament, though she
+doesn't dare to be weighed. But she remembered the silver service, the
+coffee-pot, the tea-pot, the tray for spoons, the creamer, the hot-water
+kettle, the sugar-bowl, all on a rich salver, splendid, dazzling; what
+rank ingratitude it would be to oppose her generous brother! Rather
+sadly she answered, but she did answer: "I'll do that much for you,
+'Raish, but I feel we're risking Esther's happiness, and I can only keep
+the letter of my promise."
+
+"That's all I ask, my dear," said Armorer, taking out a little shabby
+note-book from his breast-pocket, and scratching out a line. The line
+effaced read:
+
+"_See E & M tea-set_."
+
+
+"The silver service was a good muzzle," he thought. He went away for
+an interview with the corporation lawyer and the superintendent of the
+road, leaving Mrs. Ellis in a distraction of conscience that made her
+the wonder of her servants that morning, during all the preparations for
+the whist-party. She might have felt more remorseful had she guessed
+her brother's real plan. He knew enough of Lossing to be assured that
+he would not yield about the ordinance, which he firmly believed to be
+a dangerous one for the city. He expected, he counted on the mayor's
+refusing his proffers. He hoped that Esther would feel the sympathy
+which women give, without question generally, to the business plans of
+those near and dear to them, taking it for granted that the plans are
+right because they will advantage those so near and dear. That was the
+beautiful and proper way that Jenny had always reasoned; why should
+Jenny's daughter do otherwise? When Harry Lossing should oppose
+her father and refuse to please him and to win her, mustn't any
+high-spirited woman feel hurt? Certainly she must; and he would take
+care to whisk her off to Europe before the young man had a chance to
+make his peace! "Yes, sir," says Armorer, to his only confidant, "you
+never were a domestic conspirator before, Horatio, but you have got it
+down fine! You would do for Gaboriau"--Gaboriau's novels being the only
+fiction that ever Armorer read. Nevertheless, his conscience pricked
+him almost as sharply as his sister's pricked her. Consciences are queer
+things; like certain crustaceans, they grow shells in spots; and, proof
+against moral artillery in one part, they may be soft as a baby's cheek
+in another. Armorer's conscience had two sides, business and domestic;
+people abused him for a business buccaneer, at the same time his private
+life was pure, and he was a most tender husband and father. He had never
+deceived Esther before in her life. Once he had ridden all night in a
+freight-car to keep a promise that he had made the child. It hurt him to
+be hoodwinking her now. But he was too angry and too frightened to cry
+back.
+
+The interview with the lawyer did not take any long time, but he spent
+two hours with the superintendent of the road, who pronounced him "a
+little nice fellow with no airs about him. Asked a power of questions
+about Harry Lossing; guess there is something in that story about
+Lossing going to marry his daughter!"
+
+Marston drove him to Lossing's office and left him there.
+
+He was on the ground, and Marston lifting the whip to touch the horse,
+when he asked: "Say, before you go--is there any danger in leaving off
+the conductors?"
+
+Marston was raised on mules, and he could not overcome a vehement
+distrust of electricity. "Well," said he, "I guess you want the cold
+facts. The children are almighty thick down on Third Street, and
+children are always trying to see how near they can come to being
+killed, you know, sir; and then, the old women like to come and stand on
+the track and ask questions of the motorneer on the other track, so that
+the car coming down has a chance to catch 'em. The two together keep the
+conductors on the jump!"
+
+"Is that so?" said Armorer, musingly; "well, I guess you'd better close
+with that insurance man and get the papers made out before we run the
+new way."
+
+"If we ever do run!" muttered the superintendent to himself as he drove
+away.
+
+Armorer ran his sharp eye over the buildings of the Lossing Art
+Furniture Manufacturing Company, from the ugly square brick box that was
+the nucleus--the egg, so to speak--from which the great concern had been
+hatched, to the handsome new structures with their great arched windows
+and red mortar. "Pretty property, very pretty property," thought
+Armorer; "wonder if that story Marston tells is true!" The story was to
+the effect that a few weeks before his last sickness the older Lossing
+had taken his son to look at the buildings, and said, "Harry, this will
+all be yours before long. It is a comfort to me to think that every
+workman I have is the better, not the worse, off for my owning it;
+there's no blood or dirt on my money; and I leave it to you to keep it
+clean and to take care of the men as well as the business."
+
+"Now, wasn't he a d---- fool!" said Armorer, cheerfully, taking out his
+note-book to mark.
+
+"_See abt road M--D--_"
+
+
+And he went in. Harry greeted him with exceeding cordiality and a fine
+blush. Armorer explained that he had come to speak to him about the
+proposed street-car ordinances; he (Armorer) always liked to deal with
+principals and without formality; now, couldn't they come, representing
+the city and the company, to some satisfactory compromise? Thereupon
+he plunged into the statistics of the earnings and expenses of the road
+(with the aid of his note-book), and made the absolute necessity of
+retrenchment plain. Meanwhile, as he talked he studied the attentive
+listener before him; and Harry, on his part, made quite as good use of
+his eyes. Armorer saw a tall, athletic, fair young man, very carefully,
+almost foppishly dressed, with bright, steady blue eyes and a firm chin,
+but a smile under his mustache like a child's; it was so sunny and so
+quick. Harry saw a neat little figure in a perfectly fitting gray
+check travelling suit, with a rose in the buttonhole of the coat lapel.
+Armorer wore no jewellery except a gold ring on the little finger of his
+right hand, from which he had taken the glove the better to write. Harry
+knew that it was his dead wife's wedding-ring; and noticed it with
+a little moving of the heart. The face that he saw was pale but not
+sickly, delicate and keen. A silky brown mustache shot with gray and
+a Van-dyke beard hid either the strength or the weakness of mouth and
+chin. He looked at Harry with almond-shaped, pensive dark eyes, so like
+the eyes that had shone on Harry's waking and sleeping dreams for months
+that the young fellow felt his heart rise again. Armorer ended by asking
+Harry (in his most winning manner) to help him pull the ordinance out of
+the fire. "It would be," he said, impressively, "a favor he should not
+forget!"
+
+"And you must know, Mr. Armorer," said Harry, in a dismal tone at which
+the president chuckled within, "that there is no man whose favor I would
+do so much to win!"
+
+"Well, here's your chance!" said Armorer.
+
+Harry swung round in his chair, his clinched fists on his knee. He was
+frowning with eagerness, and his eyes were like blue steel.
+
+"See here, Mr. Armorer," said he, "I am frank with you. I want to please
+you, because I want to ask you to let me marry your daughter. But I
+CAN'T please you, because I am mayor of this town, and I don't dare to
+let you dismiss the conductors. I don't DARE, that's the point. We have
+had four children killed on this road since electricity was put in."
+
+"We have had forty killed on one street railway I know; what of it? Do
+you want to give up electricity because it kills children?"
+
+"No, but look here! the conductors lessen the risk. A lady I know,
+only yesterday, had a little boy going from the kindergarten home, nice
+little fellow only five years old----"
+
+"She ought to have sent a nurse with a child five years old, a baby!"
+cried Armorer, warmly.
+
+"That lady," answered Harry, quietly, "goes without any servant at all
+in order to keep her two children at the kindergarten; and the boy's
+elder sister was ill at home. The boy got on the car, and when he got
+off at the crossing above his house, he started to run across; the other
+train-car was coming, the little fellow didn't notice, and ran to cross;
+he stumbled and fell right in the path of the coming car!"
+
+"Where was the conductor? He didn't seem much good!"
+
+"They had left off the conductor on that line."
+
+"Well, did they run over the boy? Why haven't I been informed of the
+accident?"
+
+"There was no accident. A man on the front platform saw the boy fall,
+made a flying leap off the moving car, fell, but scrambled up and pulled
+the boy off the track. It was sickening; I thought we were both gone!"
+
+"Oh, you were the man?"
+
+"I was the man; and don't you see, Mr. Armorer, why I feel strongly on
+the subject? If the conductor had been on, there wouldn't have been any
+occasion for any accident."
+
+"Well, sir, you may be assured that we will take precautions against
+any such accidents. It is more for our interest than anyone's to guard
+against them. And I have explained to you the necessity of cutting down
+our expense list."
+
+"That is just it, you think you have to risk our lives to cut down
+expenses; but we get all the risk and none of the benefits. I can't see
+my way clear to helping you, sir; I wish I could."
+
+"Then there is nothing more to say, Mr. Lossing," said Armorer, coldly.
+"I'm sorry a mere sentiment that has no real foundation should stand in
+the way of our arranging a deal that would be for the advantage of both
+the city and our road." He rose.
+
+Harry rose also, but lifted his hand to arrest the financier. "Pardon
+me, there is something else; I wouldn't mention it, but I hear you
+are going to leave to-morrow and go abroad with--Miss Armorer. I am
+conscious I haven't introduced myself very favorably, by refusing you a
+favor when I want to ask the greatest one possible; but I hope, sir, you
+will not think the less of a man because he is not willing to sacrifice
+the interests of the people who trust him, to please ANYONE. I--I hope
+you will not object to my asking Miss Armorer to marry me," concluded
+Harry, very hot and shaky, and forgetting the beginning of his sentences
+before he came to the end.
+
+"Does my daughter love you, do I understand, Mr. Lossing?"
+
+"I don't know, sir. I wish I did."
+
+"Well, Mr. Lossing," said Armorer, wishing that something in the young
+man's confusion would not remind him of the awful moment when he asked
+old Forrester for his Jenny, "I am afraid I can do nothing for you. If
+you have too nice a conscience to oblige me, I am afraid it will be too
+nice to let you get on in the world. Good-morning."
+
+"Stop a minute," said Harry; "if it is only my ability to get on in the
+world that is the trouble, I think------"
+
+"It is your love for my daughter," said Armorer; "if you don't love her
+enough to give up a sentimental notion for her, to win her, I don't see
+but you must lose her, I bid you good-morning, sir."
+
+"Not quite yet, sir"--Harry jumped before the door; "you give me the
+alternative of being what I call dishonorable or losing the woman I
+love!" He pronounced the last word with a little effort and his lips
+closed sharply as his teeth shut under them. "Well, I decline the
+alternative. I shall try to do my duty and get the wife I want, BOTH."
+
+"Well, you give me fair warning, don't you?" said Armorer.
+
+Harry held out his hand, saying, "I am sorry that I detained you. I
+didn't mean to be rude." There was something boyish and simple about the
+action and the tone, and Armorer laughed. As Harry attended him through
+the outer office to the door, he complimented the shops.
+
+"Miss Armorer and Mrs. Ellis have promised to give me the pleasure of
+showing them to them this afternoon," said Harry; "can't I show them and
+part of our city to you, also? It has changed a good deal since you left
+it."
+
+The remark threw Armorer off his balance; for a rejected suitor this
+young man certainly kept an even mind. But he had all the helplessness
+of the average American with regard to his daughter's amusements. The
+humor in the situation took him; and it cannot be denied that he began
+to have a vivid curiosity about Harry. In less time than it takes to
+read it, his mind had swung round the circle of these various points of
+view, and he had blandly accepted Harry's invitation. But he mopped a
+warm and furrowed brow, outside, and drew a prodigious sigh as he opened
+the note-book in his hand and crossed out, "_See L._" "That young fellow
+ain't all conscience," said he, "not by a long shot."
+
+He found Mrs. Ellis very apologetic about the Lossing engagement. It was
+made through the telephone; Esther had been anxious to have her father
+meet Lossing; Lossing was to drive them there, and later show Mr.
+Armorer the town.
+
+"Mr. Lossing is a very clever young man, very," said Armorer, gravely,
+as he went out to smoke his cigar after luncheon. He wished he had
+stayed, however, when he returned to find that a visitor had called, and
+that this visitor was the mother of the little boy that Harry Lossing
+had saved from the car. The two women gave him the accident in full, and
+were lavish of harrowing detail, including the mother's feelings. "So
+you see, 'Raish," urged Mrs. Ellis, timidly, "there is some reason for
+opposition to the ordinance."
+
+Esther's cheeks were red and her eyes shone, but she had not spoken. Her
+father put his arm around her waist and kissed her hair. "And what did
+you say, Essie," he asked, gently, "to all the criticisms?"
+
+"I told her I thought you would find some way to protect the children
+even if the conductors were taken off; you didn't enjoy the slaughter of
+children any more than anyone else."
+
+"I guess we can fix it. Here is your young man."
+
+Harry drove a pair of spirited horses. He drove well, and looked both
+handsome and happy.
+
+"Did you know that lady--the mother of the boy that wasn't run over--was
+coming to see my sister?" said Armorer, on the way.
+
+"I did," said Harry, "I sent her; I thought she could explain the reason
+why I shall have to oppose the bill, better than I."
+
+Armorer made no reply.
+
+At the shops he kept his eye on the young man. Harry seemed to know
+most of his workmen, and had a nod or a word for all the older men. He
+stopped several moments to talk with one old German who complained of
+everything, but looked after Harry with a smile, nodding his head. "That
+man, Lieders, is our best workman; you can't get any better work in the
+country," said he. "I want you to see an armoire that he has carved, it
+is up in our exhibition room."
+
+Armorer said, "You seem to get on very well with your working people,
+Mr. Lossing."
+
+"I think we generally get on well with them, and they do well
+themselves, in these Western towns. For one thing, we haven't much
+organization to fight, and for another thing, the individual workman has
+a better chance to rise. That man Lieders, whom you saw, is worth a good
+many thousand dollars; my father invested his savings for him."
+
+"You are one of the philanthropists, aren't you, Mr. Lossing, who are
+trying to elevate the laboring classes?"
+
+"Not a bit of it, sir. I shall never try to elevate the laboring
+classes; it is too big a contract. But I try as hard as I know how to
+have every man who has worked for Harry Lossing the better for it. I
+don't concern myself with any other laboring men."
+
+Just then a murmur of exclamations came from Mrs. Ellis and Esther, whom
+the superintendent was piloting through the shops. "Oh, no, it is too
+heavy; oh, don't do it, Mr. Cardigan!" "Oh, we can see it perfectly well
+from here! PLEASE don't, you will break yourself somewhere!" Mrs. Ellis
+shrieked this; but the shrieks turned to a murmur of admiration as a
+huge carved sideboard came bobbing and wobbling, like an intoxicated
+piece of furniture in a haunted house, toward the two gentlewomen.
+Immediately, a short but powerfully built man, whose red face beamed
+above his dusty shoulders like a full moon with a mustache, emerged, and
+waved his hand at the sideboard.
+
+"I could tackle the two of them, begging your pardon, ladies."
+
+"That's Cardigan," explained Harry, "Miss Armorer may have told you
+about him. Oh, SHUEY!"
+
+Cardigan approached and was presented. He brought both his heels
+together and bowed solemnly, bending his head at the same time.
+
+"Pleased to meet you, sir," said Shuey. Then he assumed an attitude of
+military attention.
+
+"Take us up in the elevator, will you, Shuey?" said Harry. "Step in, Mr.
+Armorer, please, we will go and see the reproductions of the antique; we
+have a room upstairs."
+
+Mr. Armorer stepped in, Shuey following; and then, before Harry could
+enter it, the elevator shot upward and--stuck!
+
+"What's the matter?" cried Armorer.
+
+Shuey was tugging at the wire rope. He called, in tones that seemed to
+come from a panting chest: "Take a pull at it yourself, sir! Can you
+move it?"
+
+Armorer grasped the rope viciously; Shuey was on the seat pulling from
+above. "We're stuck, sir, fast!"
+
+"Can't you get down either?"
+
+"Divil a bit, saving your presence, sir. Do ye think like the
+water-works could be busted?"
+
+"Can't you make somebody hear?" panted Armorer.
+
+"Well, you see there's a deal of noise of the machinery," said Shuey,
+scratching his chin with a thoughtful air, "and they expect we've gone
+up!"
+
+"Best try, anyhow. This infernal machine may take a notion to drop!"
+said Armorer.
+
+"And that's true, too," acquiesced Shuey. Forthwith he did lift up his
+voice in a loud wailing: "OH--H, Jimmy! OH--H, Jimmy Ryan!"
+
+Jimmy might have been in Chicago for any response he made; though
+Armorer shouted with Shuey; and at every pause the whir of the machinery
+mocked the shouters. Indescribable moans and gurgles, with a continuous
+malignant hiss, floated up to them from the rebel steam below, as from
+a volcano considering eruption. "They'll be bound to need the elevator
+some time, if they don't need US, and that's one comfort!" said Shuey,
+philosophically.
+
+"Don't you think if we pulled on her we could get her up to the next
+floor, by degrees? Now then!"
+
+Armorer gave a dash and Shuey let out his muscles in a giant tug. The
+elevator responded by an astonishing leap that carried them past three
+or four floors!
+
+"Stop her! stop her!" bawled Shuey; but in spite of Armorer's pulling
+himself purple in the face, the elevator did not stop until it bumped
+with a crash against the joists of the roof.
+
+"Well, do you suppose we're stuck HERE?" growled Armorer.
+
+"Well, sir, I'll try. Say, don't be exerting yourself violent. It
+strikes me she's for all the world like the wimmen,--in exthremes, sir,
+in exthremes! And it wouldn't be noways so pleasant to go riproaring
+that gait down cellar! Slow and easy, sir, let me manage her. Hi! she's
+working."
+
+In fact, by slow degrees and much puffing, Shuey got the erratic box to
+the next floor, where, disregarding Shuey's protestations that he could
+"make her mind," Mr. Armorer got out, and they left the elevator to its
+fate. It was a long way, through many rooms, downstairs. Shuey would
+have beguiled the way by describing the rooms, but Armorer was in a
+raging hurry and urged his guide over the ground. Once they were delayed
+by a bundle of stuff in front of a door; and after Shuey had laboriously
+rolled the great roll away, he made a misstep and tumbled over, rolling
+it back, to a tittering accompaniment from the sewing-girls in the room.
+But he picked himself up in perfect good temper and kicked the roll ten
+yards. "Girls is silly things," said the philosopher Shuey, "but being
+born that way it ain't to be expected otherwise!"
+
+He had the friendly freedom of his class in the West. He praised Mrs.
+Ellis's gymnastics, and urged Armorer to stay over a morning train and
+see a "real pretty boxing match" between Mr. Lossing and himself.
+
+"Oh, he boxes too, does he?" said Armorer.
+
+"And why on earth would he groan-like?" wondered Shuey to himself. "He
+does that, sir," he continued aloud; "didn't Mrs. Ellis ever tell you
+about the time at the circus? She was there herself, with three children
+she borrowed and an unreasonable gyurl, with a terrible big screech in
+her and no sense. Yes, sir, Mr. Lossing he is mighty cliver with his
+hands! There come a yell of 'Lion loose! lion loose!' at that circus,
+just as the folks was all crowding out at the end of it, and them that
+had gone into the menagerie tent came a-tumbling and howling back, and
+them that was in the circus tent waiting for the concert (which never
+ain't worth waiting for, between you and me!) was a-scrambling off them
+seats, making a noise like thunder; and all fighting and pushing and
+bellowing to get out! I was there with my wife and making for the seats
+that the fools quit, so's to get under and crawl out under the canvas,
+when I see Mrs. Ellis holding two of the children, and that fool
+girl let the other go and I grabbed it. 'Oh, save the baby! save one,
+anyhow,' cries my wife--the woman is a tinder-hearted crechure! And just
+then I seen an old lady tumble over on the benches, with her gray hair
+stringing out of her black bonnet. The crowd was WILD, hitting and
+screaming and not caring for anything, and I see a big jack of a man
+come plunging down right spang on that old lady! His foot was right
+in the air over her face! Lord, it turned me sick. I yelled. But that
+minnit I seen an arm shoot out and that fellow shot off as slick! it was
+Mr. Lossing. He parted that crowd, hitting right and left, and he got
+up to us and hauled a child from Mrs. Ellis and put it on the seats,
+all the while shouting: 'Keep your seats! it's all right! it's all over!
+stand back!' I turned and floored a feller that was too pressing, and
+hollered it was all right too. And some more people hollered too. You
+see, there is just a minnit at such times when it is a toss up whether
+folks will quiet down and begin to laugh, or get scared into wild beasts
+and crush and kill each other. And Mr. Lossing he caught the minnit!
+The circus folks came up and the police, and it was all over. WELL, just
+look here, sir; there's our folks coming out of the elevator!"
+
+They were just landing; and Mrs. Ellis wanted to know where he had gone.
+
+"We run away from ye, shure," said Shuey, grinning; and he related the
+adventure. Armorer fell back with Mrs. Ellis. "Did you stay with Esther
+every minute?" said he. Mrs. Ellis nodded. She opened her lips to
+speak, then closed them and walked ahead to Harry Lossing. Armorer
+looked--suspicion of a dozen kinds gnawing him and insinuating that the
+three all seemed agitated--from Harry to Esther, and then to Shuey. But
+he kept his thoughts to himself and was very agreeable the remainder of
+the afternoon.
+
+He heard Harry tell Mrs. Ellis that the city council would meet that
+evening; before, however, Armorer could feel exultant he added, "but may
+I come late?"
+
+"He is certainly the coolest beggar," Armorer snarled, "but he is sharp
+as a nigger's razor, confound him!"
+
+Naturally this remark was a confidential one to himself.
+
+He thought it more times than one during the evening, and by consequence
+played trumps with equal disregard of the laws of the noble game of
+whist and his partner's feelings. He found a few, a very few, elderly
+people who remembered his parent, and they will never believe ill of
+Horatio Armorer, who talked so simply and with so much feeling of
+old times, and who is going to give a memorial window in the new
+Presbyterian church. He was beginning to think with some interest of
+supper, the usual dinner of the family having been sacrificed to the
+demands of state; then he saw Harry Lossing. The young mayor's blond
+head was bowing before his sister's black velvet. He caught Armorer's
+eye and followed him out to the lawn and the shadows and the gay
+lanterns. He looked animated. Evening dress was becoming to him. "One of
+my daughters married a prince, but I am hanged if he looked it like this
+fellow," thought Armorer; "but then he was only an Italian. I suppose
+the council did not pass the ordinance? your committee reported against
+it?" he said quite amicably to Harry.
+
+"I wish you could understand how much pain it has given me to oppose
+you, Mr. Armorer," said Harry, blushing.
+
+"I don't doubt it, under the circumstances, Mr. Lossing." Armorer spoke
+with suave politeness, but there was a cynical gleam in his eye.
+
+"But Esther understands," says Harry.
+
+"Esther!" repeats Armorer, with an indescribable intonation. "You spoke
+to her this afternoon? For a man with such high-toned ideas as you
+carry, I think you took a pretty mean advantage of your guests!"
+
+"You will remember I gave you fair warning, Mr. Armorer."
+
+"It was while I was in the elevator, of course. I guessed it was a
+put-up job; how did you manage it?"
+
+Harry smiled outright; he is one who cannot keep either his dog or his
+joke tied up. "It was Shuey did it," said he; "he pulled the opposite
+way from you, and he has tremendous strength; but he says you were a
+handful for him."
+
+"You seem to have taken the town into your confidence," said Armorer,
+bitterly, though he had a sneaking inclination to laugh himself; "do you
+need all your workmen to help you court your girl?"
+
+"I'd take the whole United States into my confidence rather than lose
+her, sir," answered Harry, steadily.
+
+Armorer turned on his heel abruptly; it was to conceal a smile. "How
+about my sister? did you propose before her? But I don't suppose a
+little thing like that would stop you."
+
+"I had to speak; Miss Armorer goes away tomorrow. Mrs. Ellis was kind
+enough to put her fingers in her ears and turn her back."
+
+"And what did my daughter say?"
+
+"I asked her only to give me the chance to show her how I loved her, and
+she has. God bless her! I don't pretend I'm worthy of her, Mr. Armorer,
+but I have lived a decent life, and I'll try hard to live a better one
+for her trust in me."
+
+"I'm glad there is one thing on which we are agreed," jeered Armorer,
+"but you are more modest than you were this noon. I think it was
+considerably like bragging, sending that woman to tell of your heroic
+feats!"
+
+"Oh, I can brag when it is necessary," said Harry, serenely; "what would
+the West be but for bragging?"
+
+"And what do you intend to do if I take your girl to Europe?"
+
+"Europe is not very far," said Harry.
+
+Armorer was a quick thinker, but he had never thought more quickly in
+his life. This young fellow had beaten him. There was no doubt of it. He
+might have principles, but he declined to let his principles hamper him.
+There was something about Harry's waving aside defeat so lightly, and
+so swiftly snatching at every chance to forward his will, that accorded
+with Armorer's own temperament.
+
+"Tell me, Mr. Armorer," said Harry, suddenly; "in my place wouldn't you
+have done the same thing?"
+
+Armorer no longer checked his sense of humor. "No, Mr. Lossing," he
+answered, sedately, "I should have respected the old gentleman's wishes
+and voted any way he pleased." He held out his hand. "I guess Esther
+thinks you are the coming young man of the century; and to be honest,
+I like you a great deal better than I expected to this morning. I'm not
+cut out for a cruel father, Mr. Lossing; for one thing, I haven't the
+time for it; for another thing, I can't bear to have my little girl cry.
+I guess I shall have to go to Europe without Esther. Shall we go in to
+the ladies now?"
+
+Harry wrung the president's hand, crying that he should never regret his
+kindness.
+
+"See that Esther never regrets it, that will be better," said Armorer,
+with a touch of real and deep feeling. Then, as Harry sprang up the
+steps like a boy, he took out the note-book, and smiling a smile in
+which many emotions were blended, he ran a black line through
+
+"_See abt L._"
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Stories of a Western Town, by Octave Thanet
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