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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Life at High Tide, by Various
+
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+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: Life at High Tide
+       Harper's Novelettes
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: January, 2005 [EBook #7362]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on April 21, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE AT HIGH TIDE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Sandra Bannatyne,
+David Garcia and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+LIFE AT HIGH TIDE
+
+Harper's Novelettes
+
+Edited By
+
+William Dean Howells and Henry Mills Alden
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+THE IMMEDIATE JEWEL ........ MARGARET DELAND
+
+"AND ANGELS CAME ........... ANNE O'HAGAN
+
+KEEPERS OF A CHARGE ........ GRACE ELLERY CHANNING
+
+A WORKING BASIS ............ ABBY MEGUIRE ROACH
+
+THE GLASS DOOR ............. MARY TRACY EARLE
+
+ELIZABETH AND DAVIE ........ MURIEL CAMPBELL DYAR
+
+BARNEY DOON, BRAGGART ...... PHILIP VERRILL MIGHELS
+
+THE REPARATION ............. EMERY POTTLE
+
+THE YEARLY TRIBUTE ......... ROSINA HUBLEY EMMET
+
+A MATTER OF RIVALRY ........ OCTAVE THANET
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+  There is a tide in the affairs of men
+  Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.
+
+
+Thus the poet--and poetry, of the old order at least, always waiting
+upon great events, has found in the high-tide flotations of masterful
+heroes to fortune themes most flatteringly responsive to its own high
+tension.
+
+The writer of fiction has no such afflatus, no such high pitch of
+life, as to outward circumstance, in his representation of it, as
+the poet has; and therefore his may seem to the academic critic the
+lesser art--but it is nearer to the realities of common human existence.
+He deals with plain men and women, and the un-majestic moments of their
+lives.
+
+"Life at High Tide"--the title selected for this little volume of
+short stories, and having a real significance for each of them, which
+the reader may find out for himself--does not reflect the poet's
+meaning, and, least of all, its easy optimism. In every one of these
+stories is presented a critical moment in one individual life--
+sometimes, as in "The Glass Door" and in "Elizabeth and Davie,"
+in two lives; but it leads not to or away from fortune--it simply
+discloses character; also, in situations like those so vividly
+depicted in "Keepers of a Charge" and "A Yearly Tribute," the tense
+strain of modern circumstance. In all these real instances there are
+luminous points of idealism--of an idealism implicit but translucent.
+
+The authors here represented have won exceptional distinction as
+short-story writers, and the examples given of their work not only are
+typical of the best periodical fiction of a very recent period--all
+of them having been published within five years--but illustrate
+the distinctive features, as unprecedented in quality as they are
+diversified in character, which mark the extreme advance in this
+field of literature.
+
+H. M. A.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE IMMEDIATE JEWEL
+
+BY MARGARET DELAND
+
+  "_Good name, in man and woman, dear my lord,
+   Is_ the immediate jewel of their souls."
+                               --_Othello_.
+
+
+I
+
+
+When James Graham, carpenter, enlisted, it was with the assurance that
+if he lost his life his grateful country would provide for his widow.
+He did lose it, and Mrs. Graham received, in exchange for a husband
+and his small earnings, the sum of $12 a month. But when you own your
+own very little house, with a dooryard for chickens (and such stray
+dogs and cats as quarter themselves upon you), and enough grass for a
+cow, and a friendly neighbor to remember your potato-barrel, why, you
+can get along--somehow. In Lizzie Graham's case nobody knew just how,
+because she was not one of the confidential kind. But certainly there
+were days in winter when the house was chilly, and months when fresh
+meat was unknown, and years when a new dress was not thought of. This
+state of things is not remarkable, taken in connection with an income
+of $144 a year, and a New England village where people all do their
+own work, so that a woman has no chance to hire out.
+
+All the same, Mrs. Graham was not an object of charity. Had she been
+that, she would have been promptly sent to the Poor Farm. No sentimental
+consideration of a grateful country would have moved Jonesville to
+philanthropy; it sent its paupers to the Poor Farm with prompt common
+sense.
+
+When Jonesville's old school-teacher, Mr. Nathaniel May, came wandering
+back from the great world, quite penniless, almost blind, and with a
+faint mist across his pleasant mind, Jonesville saw nothing for him
+but the Poor Farm.... Nathaniel had been away from home for many years;
+rumors came back, occasionally, that he was going to make his fortune
+by some patent, and Jonesville said that if he did it would be a good
+thing for the town, for Nathaniel wasn't one to forget his friends.
+"He'll give us a library," said Jonesville, grinning; "Nat was a great
+un for books." However, Jonesville was still without its library, when,
+one August day, the stage dropped a gentle, forlorn figure at the door
+of Dyer's Hotel.
+
+"I'm Nat May," he said; "well, it's good to get home!"
+
+He brought with him, as the sum of his possessions, a dilapidated
+leather hand-bag full of strange wheels and little reflectors, and
+small, scratched lenses; the poor clothes upon his back; and
+twenty-four cents in his pocket. He walked hesitatingly, with one
+hand outstretched to feel his way, for he was nearly blind; but he
+recognized old friends by their voices, and was full of simple joy
+at meeting them.
+
+"I have a very wonderful invention," he said, in his eager voice, his
+blind eyes wide and luminous; "and very valuable. But I have not been
+financially successful, so far. I shall be, of course. But in the
+city no one seemed willing to wait for payment for my board, so the
+authorities advised me to come home; and, in fact, assisted me to do
+so. But when I finish my invention, I shall have ample means."
+
+Jonesville, lounging on the porch of Dyer's Hotel, grinned, and said,
+"That's all right, Nat; you'll be a rich man one of these days!" And
+then it tapped its forehead significantly, and whispered, "Too bad!"
+and added (with ill-concealed pleasure at finding new misfortune to
+talk about) that the Selectmen had told Mr. Dean, the superintendent,
+that he could call at Dyer's Hotel--to which Nathaniel, peacefully
+and pennilessly, had drifted--and take him out to the Farm.
+
+"Sam Dyer says he'll keep him till next week," Mrs. Butterfield told
+Lizzie Graham; "but, course, he can't just let him set down at the
+hotel for the rest of his natural life. And Nat May would do it,
+you know."
+
+"I believe he would," Lizzie Graham admitted; "he was always kind of
+simple that way, willin' to take and willin' to give. Don't you mind
+how he used to be always sharin' anything he had? James used to say
+Nat never knowed his own things belonged to him."
+
+"Folks like that don't never get rich," Mrs. Butterfield said; "but
+there! you like 'em."
+
+The two women were walking down a stony hillside, each with a lard-pail
+full of blueberries. It was a hot August afternoon; a northwest wind,
+harsh and dry, tore fiercely across the scrub-pines and twinkling
+birches of the sun-baked pastures. Lizzie Graham held on to her
+sun-bonnet, and stopped in a scrap of shade under a meagre oak to
+get breath.
+
+"My! I don't like wind," she said, laughing.
+
+"Let's set down a while," Mrs. Butterfield suggested.
+
+"I'd just as leaves," Lizzie said, and took off her blue sunbonnet and
+fanned herself. She was a pretty woman still, though she was nearly
+fifty; her hair was russet red, and blew about her forehead in little
+curls; her eyes, brown like a brook in shady places, and kind. It was
+a mild face, but not weak. Below them the valley shimmered in the
+heat; the grass was hot and brittle underfoot; popples bent and twisted
+in a scorching wind, and a soft, dark glitter of movement ran through
+the pines on the opposite hillside.
+
+"The Farm ain't got a mite of shade round it," Lizzie said; "just sets
+there at the crossroads and bakes."
+
+"You was always great for trees," Mrs. Butterfield said; "your house
+is too dark for my taste. If I was you, I'd cut down that biggest
+ellum."
+
+"Cut it down! Well, I suppose you'll laugh, but them trees are real
+kind o' friends. There! I knowed you'd laugh; but I wouldn't cut down
+a tree any more 'an I'd--I don't know what!"
+
+"They do darken."
+
+"Some. But only in summer; and then you want 'em to. And the Poor Farm
+ain't got a scrap of shade!--I wonder if he feels it, bein' sent there?"
+
+"I ain't seen, him, but Josh, told me he was terrible broke up over it.
+Told me he just set and wrung his hands when Hiram Wells told him he'd
+got to go. Josh said it was real pitiful. But what can you do? He's
+'bout blind; and he ain't just right, either."
+
+"How ain't he just right?"
+
+"Well, you know, Nathaniel was always one of the dreamin' kind; a real
+good man, but he wa'n't like folks."
+
+Lizzie nodded.
+
+"And if you remember, he was all the time inventin' things. Well, now
+he's got set that he can invent a machine so as you can see the dead.
+I mean spirits. Well, of course he's crazy. Josh says he's crazy as a
+bluefish. But what's troublin' him now is that he can't finish his
+machine. He says that if he goes to the Farm, what with him bein'
+blindish and not able to do for himself, that his glasses and
+wheels--and dear knows what all that he's got for ghost-seein'--will
+get all smashed up. An' I guess he's 'bout right. They're terrible
+crowded, Mis' Dean says. Nat allows that if he could stay at Dyer's,
+or some place, a couple of months, where he could work, quiet, he'd
+make so much money that he'd pay his board ten times over. Crazy. But
+then, I can't help bein' sorry for him. Some folks don't mind the
+troubles of crazy folks, but I don't know why they ain't as hard to
+bear as sensible folks' troubles."
+
+"Harder maybe," Lizzie said.
+
+"Josh said he just set and wrung his hands together, and he says to
+Hiram Wells, he says, 'Gimme a month--and I'll finish it. For the
+sake,' he says, 'of the blessed dead.' Gave you goose-flesh, Josh
+said."
+
+"You can see that he believes in his machine."
+
+"Oh, he's just as sure as he's alive!"
+
+"But why can't he finish it at the Farm? I guess Mis' Dean would give
+him a closet to keep it in."
+
+"Closet? Mercy! He's got it all spread out on a table in his room at
+the hotel. Them loafers go up and look at it, and bust right out
+laughin'. Josh says it's all little wheels and lookin'-glasses, and
+they got to be balanced just  so. Mis' Dean ain't got a spot he could
+have for ten minutes at a time."
+
+They were silent for a few minutes, and then Lizzie Graham said: "Does
+he feel bad at bein' a pauper? The Mays was always respectable. Old
+Mis' May was real proud."
+
+Mrs. Butterfield ruminated: "Well, he don't like it, course. But he
+said (you know he's crazy)--'I am nothin',' he says, 'and my pride is
+less than nothin'. But for the sake of the poor Dead, grant me time,'
+he says. Ain't it pitiful? Almost makes you feel like lettin' him
+wait. But what's the use?"
+
+Lizzie Graham nodded. "But there's people would pay money for one of
+them machines--if it worked."
+
+"That's what he said; he said he'd make a pile of money. But he didn't
+care about that, except then he could pay board to Dyer, if Dyer'd let
+him stay."
+
+"An' won't he?"
+
+"No; and I don't see as he has any call to, any more 'an you or me."
+
+Lizzie Graham plucked at the dry grass at her side. "That's so.
+'Tain't one person's chore more 'an another's. But--there! If this
+wa'n't Jonesville, I believe I'd let him stay with me till he finishes
+up his machine."
+
+"Why, Lizzie Graham!" cried Mrs. Butterfield, "what you talkin' about?
+You couldn't do it--you. You ain't got to spare, in the first place.
+And anyway, him an unmarried man, and you a widow woman! Besides,
+he'll never finish it."
+
+Lizzie's face reddened angrily. "Guess I could have a visitor as well
+as anybody."
+
+"Oh, I didn't mean you wouldn't be a good provider," Mrs. Butterfield
+said, turning red herself. "I meant folks would talk."
+
+"Folks could find something better to talk about," Lizzie said;
+"Jonesville is just nothin' but a nest o' real mean, lyin' gossip!"
+
+"Well, that's so," Mrs. Butterfield agreed, placidly.
+
+Lizzie Graham put on her sunbonnet. "Better be gettin' along," she
+said.
+
+Mrs. Butterfield rose ponderously. "And they'd say you was a
+spiritualist, too; they'd say you took him to get his ghost-machine
+made."
+
+"That's just what I would do," the other answered, sharply. "I ain't a
+mite of a spiritualist, and I don't believe in ghosts; but I believe
+in bein' kind."
+
+"I believe in keepin' a good name," Mrs. Butterfield said, dryly.
+
+They went on down the windy pasture slope in silence; the mullein
+candles blossomed shoulder-high, and from underfoot came the warm,
+aromatic scent of sweet-fern. Once they stopped for some more
+blueberries, with a desultory word about the heat; then they picked
+their way around juniper-bushes, and over great knees of granite, hot
+and slippery, and through low, sweet thickets of bay. At the foot of
+the hill the shadows were stretching across the road, and the wind was
+flagging.
+
+"My, ain't the shade good?" Lizzie said, when they stopped under her
+great elm; "I couldn't bear to live where there wa'n't trees."
+
+"There's always shade on one side or another of the Poor Farm,
+anyway," Mrs. Butterfield said, "'cept at noon. And then he could set
+indoors. It won't be anything so bad, Lizzie. Now don't you get to
+worryin' 'bout him;--I know you, Lizzie Graham!" she ended, her eyes
+twinkling.
+
+Lizzie took off her sunbonnet again and fanned herself; she looked at
+her old neighbor anxiously.
+
+"Say, now, Mis' Butterfield, honest: do you think folks would talk?"
+
+"If you took Nat in and kep' him? Course they would! You know they
+would; you know this here town. And no wonder they'd talk. You're a
+nice-appearin' woman, Lizzie, yet. No; I ain't one to flatter; you
+_be_. And ain't he a man? and a likely man, too, for all he's
+crazy. Course they'd talk! Now, Lizzie, don't you get to figgerin' on
+this. It's just like you! How many cats have you got on your hands
+now? I bet you're feedin' that lame dog yet."
+
+Mrs. Graham laughed, but would not say.
+
+"Nat will get along at the Farm real good, after he gets used to it,"
+Mrs. Butterfield went on, coaxingly; "Dean ain't hard. And Mis' Dean's
+many a time told me what a good table they set."
+
+"'Tain't the victuals that would trouble Nat May."
+
+"Well, Lizzie, now you promise me you won't think anything more about
+him visitin' you?" Mrs. Butterfield looked at her anxiously.
+
+"I guess Jonesville knows me, after I've lived here all my life!"
+Lizzie said, evasively.
+
+"Knows you?" Mrs. Butterfield said; "what's that got to do with it?
+You know Jonesville; that's more to the point."
+
+"It's a mean place!" Lizzie said, angrily.
+
+"I'm not sayin' it ain't," Mrs. Butterfield agreed. "Well, Lizzie,
+you're good, but you ain't real sensible," she ended, affectionately.
+
+Lizzie laughed, and swung her gate shut. She stood leaning on it a
+minute, looking after Mrs. Butterfield laboriously climbing the hill,
+until the road between its walls of rusty hazel-bushes and its fringe
+of joepye-weed and goldenrod turned to the left and the stout, kindly
+figure disappeared. The great elm moved softly overhead, and Lizzie
+glanced up through its branches, all hung with feathery twigs, at the
+deep August sky.
+
+"Jonesville's never talked about _me_!" she said to herself,
+proudly. "I mayn't be wealthy, but I got a good name. Course it
+wouldn't do to take Nat; but my! ain't it a poor planet where you
+can't do a kind act?"
+
+
+II
+
+
+Nathaniel May sat in his darkness, brooding over his machine. Since it
+had been definitely arranged that he was to go to the Poor Farm, he
+did not care how soon he went; there was no need, he  told Dyer, to
+keep him for the few days which had been promised.
+
+"I had thought," he said, patiently, "that some one would take me in
+and help me finish my machine--for the certain profit that I could
+promise them. But nobody seems to believe in me," he ended.
+
+"Oh, folks believe in you, all right, Mr. May," Dyer told him; "but
+they don't believe in your machine. See?"
+
+Nathaniel's face darkened. "Blind--blind!" he said.
+
+"How did it come on you?" Dyer asked, sympathetically.
+
+"I was not speaking of myself," Nathaniel told him, hopelessly.
+
+There was really no doubt that the poor, gentle mind had staggered
+under the weight of hope; but it was hardly more than a deepening of
+old vagueness, an intensity of absorbed thought upon unpractical
+things. The line between sanity and insanity is sometimes a very faint
+one; no one can quite dare to say just when it has been crossed. But
+this mild creature had crossed it somewhere in the beginning of his
+certainty that he was going to give the world the means of seeing the
+unseen. That this great gift should be flung into oblivion, all for
+the want, as he believed, of a little time, broke his poor heart. When
+Lizzie Graham came to see him, she found him sitting in his twilight,
+his elbows on his knees, his head in his long, thin hands. On one
+hollow cheek there was a glistening wet streak. He put up a forlornly
+trembling hand and wiped it away when he heard her voice.
+
+"Yes; yes, I do recognize it, ma'am," he said; "I can tell voices
+better than I used to be able to tell faces. You are Jim Graham's
+wife? Yes; yes, Lizzie Graham. Have you heard about me, Lizzie? I am
+not going to finish my machine. I am to be sent to the Farm."
+
+"Yes, I heard," she said.
+
+They were in the big, bare office of the hotel. The August sunshine
+lay dim upon the dingy window-panes; the walls, stained by years of
+smoke and grime, were hidden by yellowing advertisements of reapers
+and horse liniments; in the centre was a dirty iron stove. A poor,
+gaunt room, but a haven to Nathaniel May, awaiting the end of hope.
+
+"I heard," Lizzie Graham said; she leaned forward and stroked his
+hand. "But maybe you can finish it at the Farm, Nathaniel?"
+
+"No," he said, sadly; "no; I know what it's like at the Farm. There is
+no room there for anything but bodies. No time for anything but
+Death."
+
+"How long would it take you to put it together?" she asked; and Dyer,
+who was lounging across his counter, shook his head at her, warningly.
+
+"There ain't nothin' to it, Mrs. Graham," he said, under his breath;
+"he's--" He tapped his forehead significantly.
+
+"Oh, man!" Nathaniel cried out, passionately, "you don't know what you
+say! Are the souls of the departed 'nothing'? I have it in my
+hand--right here in my hand, Lizzie Graham--to give the world the gift
+of sight. And they won't give me a crust of bread and a roof over my
+head till I can offer it to them!"
+
+"Couldn't somebody put it together for you?" she asked, the tears in
+her eyes. "I would try, Nathaniel;--you could explain it to me; I
+could come and see you every day, and you could tell me."
+
+His face brightened into a smile. "No, kind woman. Only I can do it. I
+can't see very clearly, but there is a glimmer of light, enough to get
+it together. But it would take at least two months; at least two
+months. The doctor said the light would last, perhaps, three months.
+Then I shall be blind. But if I could give eyes to the blind world
+before I go into the dark, what matter? What matter, I say?" he cried,
+brokenly.
+
+Lizzie was silent. Dyer shook his head, and tapped his forehead again;
+then he lounged out from behind his counter, and settled himself in
+one of the armchairs outside the office door.
+
+Nathaniel dropped his head upon his breast, and sunk back into his
+dreams. The office was very still, except for two bluebottle flies
+butting against the ceiling and buzzing up and down the window-panes.
+A hot wind wandered in and flapped a mowing-machine poster on the
+wall; then dropped, and the room was still again, except that leaf
+shadows moved across the square of sunshine on the bare boards by the
+open door. When Lizzie got up to go, he did not hear her kind good-by
+until she repeated it, touching his shoulder with her friendly hand.
+Then he said, hastily, with a faint frown: "Good-by. Good-by." And
+sank again into his daze of disappointment.
+
+Lizzie wiped her eyes furtively before she went out upon the hotel
+porch; there Dyer, balancing comfortably on two legs of his chair,
+detained her with drawling gossip until Hiram Wells came up, and,
+lounging against a zinc-sheathed bar between two hitching-posts, added
+his opinion upon Nathaniel May's affairs.
+
+"Well, Lizzie, seen any ghosts?" he began.
+
+"I seen somebody that'll be a ghost pretty soon if you send him off to
+the Farm," Lizzie said, sharply.
+
+"Well," Hiram said, "I don't see what's to be done--'less some nice,
+likely woman comes along and marries him."
+
+Dyer snickered. Lizzie turned very red, and started home down the
+elm-shaded street. When she reached her little gray house under its
+big tree, she went first into the cow-barn--a crumbling lean-to with a
+sagging roof--to see if a sick dog which had found shelter there was
+comfortable. It seemed to Lizzie that his bleared eyes should be
+washed; and she did this before she went through her kitchen into a
+shed-room where she slept. There she sat down in hurried and frowning
+preoccupation, resting her elbows on her knees and staring blankly at
+the braided mat on the floor. As she sat there her face reddened; and
+once she laughed, nervously. "An' me 'most fifty!" she said to
+herself....
+
+The next morning she went to see Nathaniel again.
+
+He was up-stairs in a little hot room under the sloping eaves. He was
+bending over, straining his poor eyes close to some small wheels and
+bands and reflectors arranged on a shaky table. He welcomed her
+eagerly, and with all the excitement of conviction plunged at once
+into an explanation of his principle. Then suddenly conviction broke
+into despair: "I am not to be allowed to finish it!" He gave a quick
+sob, like a child. He had forgotten Lizzie's presence.
+
+"Nathaniel," she said, and paused; then began again: "Nathaniel--"
+
+"Who is here? Oh yes: Lizzie Graham. Kind woman; kind woman."
+
+"Nathaniel, you know I ain't got means; I'm real poor,--"
+
+"Are you?" he said, with instant concern. "I am sorry. If I could help
+you--if I had anything of my own--or if they will let me finish my
+machine; then I shall have all the money I want, and I will help you;
+I will give you all you need. I will give to all who ask!" he said,
+joyfully; then again, abruptly: "But no; but no; I am not allowed to
+finish it."
+
+"Nathaniel, what I was going to say was--I am real poor. I got James's
+pension, and our house out on the upper road;--do you mind it--a mite
+of a house, with a big elm right by the gate? And woods on the other
+side of the road? Real shady and pleasant. And I got eight hens and a
+cow;--well, she'll come in in September, and I'll have real good milk
+all winter. Maybe this time I could raise the calf, if it's a heifer.
+Generally I sell it; but if you--well, it might pay to raise it,
+if--we--" Lizzie stammered with embarrassment.
+
+Nathaniel had forgotten her again; his head had fallen forward on his
+breast, and he sighed heavily.
+
+"You see, I _am_ poor," Lizzie said; "you wouldn't have comforts."
+
+Nathaniel was silent.
+
+Lizzie laughed, nervously. "Well? Seems queer; but--will you?"
+
+Nathaniel, waking from his troubled dream, said, patiently: "What did
+you say? I ask your pardon; I was not listening."
+
+"Why," Lizzie said, her face very red, "I was just saying--if--if you
+didn't mind getting married, Nathaniel, you could come and live with me?"
+
+"Married?" he said, vacantly. "To whom?"
+
+"Me," she said.
+
+Nathaniel turned toward her in astonishment. "Married!" he repeated.
+
+"If you lived with me, you could finish the machine; there's an attic
+over my house; I guess it's big enough. Only, we'd _have_ to be
+married, I'm afraid. Jonesville is a mean place, Nathaniel. We'd have
+to be married. But you could finish the machine."
+
+He stood up, trembling, the tears suddenly running down his face.
+_"Finish it?"_ he said, in a whisper. "Oh, you are not deceiving
+me? You would not deceive me?"
+
+"I don't see why you couldn't finish it," she told him, kindly. "But,
+Nathaniel, mind, I am poor. You wouldn't get as good victuals even as
+you would at the Farm. And you'd have to marry me, or folks would talk
+about me. But you could finish your machine."
+
+Nathaniel lifted his dim eyes to heaven.
+
+
+III
+
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Butterfield, "I suppose you know your own business.
+But my goodness sakes alive!"
+
+"I just thought I'd tell you," Lizzie said.
+
+"But, Lizzie Graham! you ain't got the means."
+
+"I can feed him."
+
+"There's his clothes; why, my land--"
+
+"I told Hiram Wells that if the town would see to his clothes, I'd do
+the rest. They'd have to clothe him if he went to the Farm."
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Butterfield, "I never in all my born days--Lizzie,
+now _don't_. My goodness,--I--I ain't got no words! Why, his
+victuals--"
+
+"He ain't hearty. Sam Dyer told me he wa'n't hearty."
+
+"Well, then, Sam Dyer had better feed him, 'stid o' puttin' it onto
+you!"
+
+Lizzie was silent. Then she said, with a short sigh, "Course if I
+could 'a' just taken him in an' kep' him--but you said folks would
+talk--"
+
+"Well, I guess so. Course they'd talk--you know this place. You've
+always been well thought of in Jonesville, but that would 'a' been the
+end of you, far as bein' respectable goes."
+
+"Well, you can't say this ain't respectable."
+
+"No; I can't say it ain't respectable; but I can say it's the
+foolishest thing I ever heard of. An' wrong too; 'cause anything
+foolish is wrong."
+
+"Anything cruel is wrong," Lizzie said, stubbornly.
+
+"Well, you was crazy to think of havin' him visit you. But it don't
+follow, 'cause he can't be visitin' you, that you got to go
+_marry_ him."
+
+"I got to do something," Lizzie said, desperately; "I'd never have a
+minute's peace if he had to go to the Farm."
+
+"He'd be more comfortable there."
+
+"His stomach might be," Lizzie admitted.
+
+"Well, then!" Mrs. Butterfield declared, triumphantly. "Now you just
+let him go, Lizzie. You just be sensible."
+
+"I'm goin' to marry him. I'm goin' to take him round to Rev. Niles day
+after to-morrow; he said he'd marry us."
+
+Mrs. Butterfield gasped. "Well, if Rev. Niles does that!--There! You
+know he was a 'Piscopal; they'll do anything. What did he say when you
+told him?"
+
+"Oh, nothin' much; I asked him about him visitin' me, an' he said it
+wa'n't just customary. Said it was better to get married. Said we must
+avoid the appearance of evil."
+
+"Well, I ain't sayin' he ain't right; but--" Then, in despair, she
+turned to ridicule: "Folks'll say you're marryin' him 'cause you
+expect he'll make money on his ghost-machine!"
+
+"Well, you tell 'em I don't believe in ghosts. That'll settle
+_that_."
+
+"If folks knew you didn't believe in any hereafter, they'd say you was
+a wicked woman!" cried Mrs. Butterfield, angrily;--"an' that fool
+machine--"
+
+"I never said I didn't believe in a hereafter. Course his machine
+ain't sense. That's what makes it so pitiful."
+
+"He'll never finish it."
+
+"Course he won't. That's why I'm takin' him."
+
+"Well, my _sakes!_" said Mrs. Butterfield, helplessly. And then,
+angrily again, "Course if you set out to go your own way, I suppose
+you don't expect no help from them as thinks you are all wrong?"
+
+"I do not," Lizzie said, steadily; and then a spark glinted in her
+leaf-brown eye: "Folks that have means, and yet would let that poor
+unfortunate be taken to the Farm--I wouldn't expect no help from 'em."
+
+"Well, Mis' Graham, you can't say I ain't warned you."
+
+"No, Mis' Butterfield, I can't," Lizzie responded; and the two old
+friends parted stiffly.
+
+The word that Lizzie Graham--"poor as Job's turkey!"--was going to
+marry Nathaniel May spread like grass fire through Jonesville. Mrs.
+Butterfield preserved a cold silence, for her distress was great. To
+hear people snicker and say that Lizzie Graham must be "dyin' anxious
+to get married"; that she must be "lottin' considerable on a good
+ghost-market"; that she "took a new way o' gettin' a hired man without
+payin' no wages,"--these things stung her sore heart into actual anger
+at the friend she loved. But she did not show it.
+
+"Mis' Graham probably knows her own business," she said, stiffly, to
+any one who spoke to her of the matter. Even to her own husband she
+was non-committal. Josh sat out by the kitchen door, tilting back
+against the gray-shingled side of the house, his hands in his pockets,
+his feet tucked under him on the rung of his chair. He was in his
+shirt-sleeves, and he had unbuttoned his baggy old waistcoat, for it
+was a hot night. Mrs. Butterfield was on the kitchen door-step. They
+could look across a patch of grass at the great barn, connected with
+the little house by a shed. Its doors were still open, and Josh could
+see the hay, put in that afternoon. The rick in the yard stood like a
+skeleton against the fading yellow of the sky; some fowls were
+roosting comfortably on the tongue. It was very peaceful; but Mrs.
+Butterfield's face was puckered with anxiety. "Yet I don't know as I
+can do anything about it," she said, her foot tapping the stone step
+nervously; "she ain't got no call to be so foolish."
+
+"Well," Josh said, removing his pipe from his lips and spitting
+thoughtfully, "seems Mis' Graham's bound to get some kind of a
+husband!" Then he chuckled, and thrust his pipe back under his long,
+shaven upper lip.
+
+"Now look a-here, Josh Butterfield; you don't want to be talkin' that
+way," his wife said, bitterly. "Bad enough to have folks that don't
+know no better pokin' fun at her; but I ain't a-goin' to have you do
+it."
+
+"Well, I was only just sayin'--"
+
+"Well, don't you say it; that's all."
+
+Josh poked a gnarled thumb down into the bowl of his pipe,
+reflectively. "You ain't got a match about you, have you, Emmy?" he
+said, coaxingly.
+
+Mrs. Butterfield rose and went into the kitchen to get the match; when
+she handed it to him, she said, sighing, "I'm just 'most sick over
+it."
+
+"You do seem consid'able shuck up," Josh said, kindly.
+
+"Well,--I know Lizzie's just doin' it out of pure goodness; but she'll
+'most starve."
+
+"I don't see myself how she's calculatin' to run things," Josh
+ruminated; "course Jim's pension wa'n't much, but it was somethin'.
+And without it--"
+
+"Without it?--land! Is the government goin' to stop pensions? There! I
+never did like the President!"
+
+"No; the government ain't goin' to stop it. Lizzie Graham's goin' to
+stop it."
+
+"What on airth you talkin' about?"
+
+"Why, Emmy woman, don't ye know the United States government ain't no
+such fool as to go on payin' a woman for havin' a dead husband when
+she catches holt of a livin' one? Don't you know that?"
+
+"Josh Butterfield!--you don't mean--"
+
+"Why, that's true. Didn't you know that? Well, well! Why, a smart
+widow woman could get consid'able of a income by sendin' husbands to
+wars, if it wa'n't for that. Well, well; to think you didn't know
+that! Wonder if Lizzie does?"
+
+"She don't!" Mrs. Butterfield said, excitedly; "course she don't.
+She's calculatin' on havin' that pension same as ever. Why, she
+_can't_ marry Nat. Goodness! I guess I'll just step down and tell
+her. Lucky you told me to-night; to-morrow it would 'a' been too late!"
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Lizzie Graham was sitting in the dark on her door-step; a cat had
+curled up comfortably in her lap; her elm was faintly murmurous with a
+constant soft rustling and whispering of the lace of leaves around its
+great boughs. Now and then a tree-toad spoke, or from the pasture pond
+behind the house came the metallic twang of a bullfrog. But nothing
+else broke the deep stillness of the summer night. Lizzie's elbow was
+on her knee, her chin in her hand; she was listening to the peace, and
+thinking--not anxiously, but seriously. After all, it was a great
+undertaking: Nathaniel wasn't "hearty," perhaps,--but when you don't
+average four eggs a day (for in November and December the hens do act
+like they are possessed!); when sometimes your cow will be dry; when
+your neighbor is mad and won't remember the potato-barrel--the outlook
+for one is not simple; for two it is sobering.
+
+"But I can do it," Lizzie said to herself, and set her lips hard
+together.
+
+The gate clicked shut, and Mrs. Butterfield came in, running almost.
+"Look here, Lizzie Graham,--oh my! wait till I get my breath;--_Lizzie,
+you can't do it._ Because--" And then, panting, she explained.
+"So, you see, you just can't," she repeated.
+
+Lizzie said something under her breath, and stared with blank
+bewilderment at her informant.
+
+"Maybe Josh don't know?"
+
+"Maybe he does know," retorted Mrs. Butterfield. "Goodness! makes me
+tremble to think if he hadn't told me to-night! Supposin' he hadn't
+let on about it till this time to-morrow?"
+
+Lizzie put her hands over her face with an exclamation of dismay.
+
+"Oh, well, there!" Mrs. Butterfield said, comfortably; "I don't
+believe Nat'll mind after he's been at the Farm a bit. Honest, I
+don't, Lizzie. How comes it you didn't know yourself?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't know; it ain't on my certificate, anyhow. Maybe it's
+on the voucher; but I ain't read that since I first went to sign it. I
+just go every three months and draw my money, and think no more about
+it. Maybe--if they knew at Washington--"
+
+"Sho! they couldn't make a difference for one; and it's just what Josh
+says--they ain't goin' to pay you for havin' a dead husband if you got
+a live one. Well, it wouldn't be sense, Lizzie."
+
+Lizzie shook her head. "Wait till I look at my paper--"
+
+Mrs. Butterfield followed her into the house, and waited while she
+lighted a lamp and lifted a blue china vase off the shelf above the
+stove. "I keep it in here," Lizzie said, shaking the paper out. Then,
+unfolding it on the kitchen table, the two women, the lamplight
+shining upon their excited faces, read the certificate together,
+aloud, with agitated voices:
+
+"BUREAU OF PENSIONS
+
+"It is hereby certified that in conformity with the laws of the
+United States--" and on through to the end.
+
+"It don't say a word about not marryin' again," Lizzie declared.
+
+"Well, all the same, it's the law. Josh knows."
+
+Lizzie blew out the lamp, and they went back to the door-step. Mrs.
+Butterfield's hard feelings were all gone; her heart warmed to
+Nathaniel; warmed even to the mangy dog that limped out from the barn
+and curled up on Lizzie's skirt. But when she went away, "comfortable
+in her mind," as she told her husband, Lizzie Graham still sat in the
+dark under her elm, trying to get her wits together.
+
+"I know Josh is right," she told herself; "he's a careful talker. I
+can't do it!" But she winced, and drew in her breath; poor Nathaniel!
+
+She had seen him that afternoon, and had told him, this time with no
+embarrassment (for he was as simple as a child about it), that she had
+arranged with Mr. Niles to marry them. "An' you fetch your bag along,
+Nathaniel, and we'll put the machine together, evenin's," she said.
+
+"Yes, kind woman," he answered, joyously. "Oh, what a weight you have
+taken from my soul!"
+
+His half-blind eyes were luminous with belief. Lizzie had smiled, and
+shaken her head slightly, looking at the battered rubbish in the
+bag--the little, tarnished mirrors, one of them cracked; the two small
+lenses, scratched and dim; the handful of rusty cogs and wheels. With
+what passion he had dreamed that he would see that which it hath not
+entered into the heart of man to conceive! He began to talk, eagerly,
+of his invention; but reasonably, it seemed to Lizzie. Indeed, except
+for the idea itself, there was nothing that betrayed the unbalanced
+mind. His gratitude, too, was sane enough; he had been planning how he
+could he useful to her, how he was to do this or that sort of work for
+her--at least until his eyes gave out, he said, cheerfully. "But by
+that time, kind woman, my invention will be perfected, and you shall
+have no need to consider ways and means."
+
+Lizzie, smiling, had left him to his joy, and gone back to sit under
+her elm in the twilight, and think soberly of the economies which a
+husband--such a husband--would necessitate.
+
+And then Mrs. Butterfield had come panting up to the gate; and now--
+
+"I don't see as I can tell him!" she thought, desperately. To go and
+say to Nathaniel, all eager and happy and full of hope as he was, "You
+must go to the Farm,"--would be like striking in the face some child
+that is holding out its arms to you. Lizzie twisted her hands
+together. "I just can't!" But, of course, she would have to. That was
+all there was to it. If she married him, why, there would be two to go
+to the Farm instead of one. Oh, why wouldn't they give her her pension
+if she married again! Her eyes smarted with tears; Nathaniel's pain
+seemed to her unendurable.
+
+But all the same, the next morning, heavily, she set out to tell him.
+
+At Dyer's, Jonesville had gathered to see the sight; and as she came
+up to the porch, there were nudgings and whisperings, and Hiram Wells,
+bolder than the rest, said, "Well, Mis' Graham, this is a fine day for
+a weddin'--"
+
+Lizzie Graham, without turning her head, said, coldly, "There ain't
+goin' to be no weddin'." Then she went on upstairs to Nathaniel's
+room.
+
+The idlers on the porch looked at each other and guffawed. "I knowed
+Sam was foolin' us," somebody said.
+
+But Sam defended himself. "I tell you I wa'n't foolin'. You ask Rev.
+Niles; she told me only yesterday he said he'd tie the knot. I ain't
+foolin'. She's changed her mind, that's all."
+
+"Lookin' for a handsomer man," Hiram suggested;--"chance for yourself,
+Sam!"
+
+Lizzie, hot-cheeked, heard the laughter, and went on up-stairs.
+Nathaniel was sitting on the edge of his bed, his hat on, his poor
+coat buttoned to his chin; he was holding his precious bag, gripped in
+two nervous hands, on his knee. When he heard her step, he drew a deep
+breath.
+
+"Oh, kind woman!" he said; "I'd begun to fear you were not coming."
+
+"I am--a little late," Lizzie said. "I--I was detained."
+
+"It does not matter," he said, cheerfully; "I have had much food for
+thought while awaiting you. I have been thinking that this wonderful
+invention will be really your gift to humanity, not mine. Had I gone
+to the Farm, it would never have been. Now--!" His voice broke for joy.
+
+"Oh, well, I don't know 'bout that," Lizzie said, nervously; "I guess
+you could 'a' done it anywheres."
+
+"No, no; it would have been impossible. And think, Lizzie Graham, what
+it will mean to the sorrowful world! See," he explained, solemnly; "we
+poor creatures have not been able to conceive that of which we have
+had no experience; the unborn child cannot know the meaning of life.
+If the babe in the womb questioned, What is birth? what is living?
+could even its own mother tell it? Nay! So we, questioning: 'God, what
+is death? what is immortality?' Not even God can tell us. The unborn
+soul, carried in the womb of Time, has waited death to know the things
+of Eternity, just as the unborn babe waits birth to know the things of
+life. But now, _now_, is coming to the world the gift of sight!"
+
+There was a pause; Lizzie Graham swallowed once, and set her lips;
+then she said, "I am afraid, Nathaniel, that I--I can't marry
+you--because--"
+
+"Marry me?" he said, with a confused look.
+
+"We were to get married to-day, you know, Nathaniel?"
+
+"Oh yes," he said.
+
+"Yes; but--but I can't, Nathaniel."
+
+"Never mind," he said. "Shall we go now, kind woman?" He rose,
+smiling, and stretched out one groping hand. Involuntarily she took
+it; then stood still, and tried to speak. He turned patiently towards
+her. "Must we wait longer?" he asked, gently.
+
+"Oh, Nathaniel, I--I don't know what to say, but--"
+
+A startled look came into his face. "Is anything the matter?"
+
+"_Oh!_" Lizzie said. "It just breaks my heart!"
+
+His face turned suddenly gray; he sat down, trembling; the contents of
+his bag rattled, and something snapped--perhaps another mirror broke.
+He put one hand up to his head.
+
+"It's that pension," Lizzie said, brokenly; "if I get married, I lose
+it. An' we wouldn't have a cent to live on. You--you see how it is,
+Nathaniel?"
+
+He began to whisper to himself, not listening to her. There was a long
+pause, broken by his strange whispering.
+
+Lizzie Graham looked at him, and turned her eyes away, wincing with
+pain;--the tears were rolling slowly down his cheeks. She put her
+hand on his shoulder in a passion of pity; then, suddenly, fiercely,
+she gathered the poor bowed head against her soft breast. "I don't
+care! My name ain't worth as much as that! Let 'em talk. Nathaniel,
+are you willin' _not_ to get married?"
+
+But she had to speak twice before he heard her. Then he said, looking
+up at her out of his despair: "What? What did you say?"
+
+"Nathaniel," she explained, kneeling beside him and holding his hand
+against her bosom, "if you were to come and live with me, and we were
+not married--"
+
+But he was not listening. A door opened down-stairs, and there was a
+noisy burst of laughter; then it closed, and the hot room was still.
+
+"Emily Butterfield will stand my friend," she said, her lips
+tightening. Then, gently: "We won't get married; Nathaniel. You will
+just come and visit me until--until the machine is finished."
+
+"You will let me come?" he said, with a gasp; "you will let me finish
+my invention?" He got up, trembling, clutching his bag, and holding
+out one hand to clasp hers.
+
+Lizzie Graham took it, and stood stock-still for one hard moment....
+
+Then she led him down-stairs, out upon the porch, past the loafers
+gaping and nudging each other.
+
+"Goin' to be married, after all, Mis' Graham?" some one said.
+
+And Lizzie Graham turned and faced them. "No," she said, calmly.
+
+Then they went out into the sunshine together.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+"AND ANGELS CAME--"
+
+BY ANNE O'HAGAN
+
+
+The full effulgence of cloudless midsummer enveloped the place. The
+lawns, bright and soft, sloped for half a mile to the sweetbrier
+hedge. Among them wound the drive, now and again crossing the stone
+bridges of the small, curving lake which gave the estate its affected
+name--Lakeholm. To the left of the house a coppice of bronze beeches
+shone with dark lustre; clumps of rhododendrons enlivened the green
+with splashes of color. Lombardy poplars, with their gibbetlike
+erectness, bordered the roads and intersected them with mathematical
+shadows; here and there rose a feathery elm or a maple of
+wide-branched beauty. To the right, a shallow fall of terraces led to
+the Italian garden, Mrs. Dinsmore's chief pride, now a glory of
+matched and patterned color and a dazzle of spray from marble basins.
+Beyond all the careful, exotic beauty of the place, the wide valley
+dipped away, alternate meadow and grove, until it met the silvery
+shiver of willows marking the course of the river. Beyond that again,
+the hills, solemn in unbroken green, rose to cloud-touched heights.
+
+Before the house Brockton's new automobile waited. He himself leaned
+against a stone pillar of the piazza, facing his hostess, who sat on
+the edge of a chair in the tense attitude of protest against delay.
+She had scarcely recovered from her waking crossness yet, and found
+herself more irritated than amused at the eccentricities of her guest.
+She was wondering with unusual asperity why a man with such
+lack-lustre blue eyes dared to wear a tie of such brilliant contrast.
+He interrupted her musings.
+
+"Miss Harned seems mighty stand-offish these days."
+
+"Millicent is a little difficult," admitted Millicent's cousin.
+
+"What do you suppose it is? She seemed all smooth enough in New York
+last winter, and even in the spring after--But now--" He paused again
+without finishing his sentence. "And I had counted on your influence
+to make her more approachable."
+
+"Oh, Millicent is having a struggle with her better nature, that is
+all," laughed Mrs. Dinsmore. "It's hard living with her during the
+process, but she's adorable once her noble impulses have been
+vanquished and she's comfortably like the rest of the world again."
+
+"I don't know what you mean," said the downright Mr. Brockton.
+
+"No?" Mrs. Dinsmore was sure that the impertinence of her monosyllable
+would be lost upon her elderly protege. "I'll make it clear to you, if
+I can. Millicent, you know, has nothing--"
+
+"With that figure and that face?" interrupted Brockton, with gallant
+enthusiasm.
+
+"I was speaking in your terms, Mr. Brockton," said the lady, with
+suave hauteur. "Of course all of us count my cousin's charm and
+accomplishments, though we do not inventory them as possessions far
+above rubies. But in the valuation of the 'change she has nothing. Oh,
+she may manage to extract five or six hundred a year from some
+investments of my uncle, and she has the old Harned place in New
+Hampshire. That might bring in as much as seven hundred dollars if the
+abandoned farm-fever were still on--"
+
+"By ginger!" boasted Brockton, whose expletives lacked _ton_,
+"it's more than I had when I started."
+
+"So I remember your saying before. But I fear that my cousin is not a
+financial genius. What I meant by her struggles with her better nature
+is that she sometimes tries to thwart us when we want to make things
+easy for her. Her better nature had a fearful tussle with her common
+sense about five years ago, when Aunt Jessie asked her to go abroad;
+and it nearly overcame her frivolity and her vanity last winter when I
+met her at the dock and insisted upon having her spend the winter with
+me, and our second cousin, Alicia Broome, offered to be responsible
+for her wardrobe. But, thanks be," she added, laughing, "the world,
+the flesh, and the devil won. So cheer up, Mr. Brockton. It may happen
+again."
+
+"Oh, I'm not hopeless by any manner of means. I want her pretty badly,
+and I'm used to getting what I want. I told her, out and out, when she
+turned me down, back there in May, that if she were a young girl I
+wouldn't urge her any more, after what she said about her feelings.
+But she wasn't, and I thought she could look at a proposition from a
+plain business point of view."
+
+"You told her that? You mentioned to her that she was no longer a
+young girl?" Mrs. Dinsmore's laugh rippled delightedly on the air.
+
+"I did. Oh, I'm used to bargaining," he rejoined, proudly. "I always
+could make the other fellow see what he'd lose by refusing my offers.
+And I got her to take the matter under consideration. I heard
+somewhere that she was interested in some philanthropy. Well, money
+comes in handy in charity." He grinned broadly at Mrs. Dinsmore.
+
+At that moment her protege was extremely distasteful to the lady. But
+she was a philosopher where marriage was concerned, and she
+whole-heartedly hoped that her cousin Millicent would not dally too
+long with her opportunity and allow the matrimonial prize to escape.
+She was sincerely fond of Millicent, and desired for her the best
+things in the world. She sometimes said so with touching earnestness.
+
+"She told me"--Mr. Brockton stumbled slightly--"that there wasn't any
+one else."
+
+"There isn't. She has her train--she's enormously admired--but there
+is no one in whom she is sentimentally interested. And Aunt Jessie
+says it was so all the time they were in Europe."
+
+"Wasn't there ever?" he demanded.
+
+"My dear Mr. Brockton, Millicent is twenty-nine, as you reminded her,
+and she's a normal woman! Of course there have been some ones--her
+music-master at fourteen, I dare say, and an actor at sixteen, and a
+young curate at eighteen--oh, of course I'm jesting. But I suppose she
+was somewhat like other girls. She was engaged at nineteen--and he
+must have been quite twenty-three! No, I should dismiss all jealousy
+of her past if I were you."
+
+"Engaged?"
+
+Mrs. Dinsmore wondered suddenly if she had been wise, after all, to
+admit that widely known fact.
+
+"Oh yes, a bread-and-butter engagement. My uncle was notoriously
+inadequate in all practical affairs; he was a scholar and something of
+a recluse and the most charming gentleman I ever saw, but a child in
+worldly matters,--a child! It ended, you see."
+
+"How did it end?"
+
+"Oh, poor Will Hayter died."
+
+"Dead long?"
+
+"Five or six years."
+
+"Well, I'm not afraid of dead men." Brockton laughed in relief. Mrs.
+Dinsmore did not point out to him from her more subtle knowledge that
+constancy to the unchanging dead is sometimes easier than constancy to
+the variable living. She was only too glad to have the inevitable
+disclosure made lightly and the truth dismissed without frightening
+off the desirable suitor. "And certainly Miss Harned don't look as if,
+as if--"
+
+"Any irremediable grief were gnawing at her damask cheeks?--"
+
+"What's this about damask cheeks?" The question came along with a
+swirl of skirts from the great hall. "Cousin Anna, don't hate me for
+keeping you so long. Mr. Brockton, I owe you a thousand apologies."
+
+Some of those who admitted Millicent Harned's charm declared that it
+lay in her voice. Always there sounded through its music the note of
+eagerness, with eagerness's underlying hint of pathos. Her tones were
+like her face, her motions, herself. Impulse, merriment, yearning, and
+the shadow of melancholy dwelt in her eyes and shaped her lips to
+sensitive curves. She was tall, and her motions were of a spontaneous
+grace, swifter and more changeful than most women's.
+
+"You have been a disgracefully long time, Millicent," her cousin
+answered her apology. "But"--she looked at the beautifully gowned
+figure, the lovely, imaginative face, thereby, like a good showman,
+calling Mr. Brockton's attention to them--"we'll forgive you."
+
+"Oh, it wasn't primping that kept me. I stopped for a few minutes at
+the schoolroom door. Poor Lena! She seemed to be feeling the
+responsibilities of erudition terribly this morning. She showed me her
+botany slides with such an air! Do you know what genus has the
+_rostellum_, Anna?"
+
+"No, I don't," said Anna, shortly. "And Lena's growing up a perfect
+young prig. I'll have to change governesses. Heaven knows what I'll
+draw next time! The last one had charm, but no learning, and mighty
+little intelligence. This one has no manner at all, and is of
+encyclopaedic information. A daughter's a terrible responsibility."
+
+"Isn't she?" Millicent's tone was one of affectionate raillery as she
+gathered her draperies about her in the automobile. The notion of
+Anna's responsibilities amused her; Anna was so untouched by them--as
+smooth-skinned, as slim and vivacious, as the forty-year-old mother of
+two boys entering college, a girl in the schoolroom and another in the
+nursery, as she had been as a _debutante_.
+
+"Oh, you may make fun," said Anna, snapping open the frothy thing she
+called a sunshade, "but you don't know how I lie awake nights,
+shuddering lest Lena grow up a near-sighted girl with no color and
+serious views."
+
+Millicent only smiled as the great machine moved off. The sunshine,
+the rare and ordered beauty of the place, the fragrance of the soft
+winds, all lapped her in indolence. As they neared the gate that gave
+upon the open road, a turn brought them in sight of the front of the
+house. It was very beautiful. She breathed deeply in the content of
+the sight--the delicate lines, the soft color, the perfection of
+detail. In the gardens were stained, mellow columns and balustrades
+which Anna had brought from the dismantled palace in the Italian hills
+where she had found them. Everywhere wealth made its subtlest, most
+delicate appeal to her eyes.
+
+"My house," thought Millicent, as they shot out of the grounds, "shall
+be different, but as beautiful. The Tudor style, I think, and for my
+out-of-door glory a vast rose-garden,--acres, if I please!" Then she
+called sternly to her straying imagination. She was picturing what she
+might have as the wife of the man before her--the man whose first
+proposal she had unhesitatingly refused, whose appearance at Lakeholm
+she had regarded as proof of disloyalty on Anna's part--the man who at
+the best represented to her only the artistic possibilities of riches.
+She dismissed her reverie with a frown and joined in the talk.
+
+"Do you know," she confessed, "I forget where it is that we are going?"
+
+"We're coming back to the Monroes' for luncheon," Mrs. Dinsmore
+reminded her. "But Mr. Brockton is going to skim over most of the
+Berkshires first. I think you said you hadn't been in this part of the
+country before, Mr. Brockton?"
+
+"No," said Brockton, "I haven't had much chance to get acquainted with
+the playgrounds of the country. I've been too busy earning a holiday.
+But I've earned it all right." He turned to emphasize his boast with a
+nod toward Millicent. She blushed. His very chauffeur must redden at
+his braggart air, she thought. The Tudor castle grew dim in her vision.
+
+"What do you think of the bubble, Miss Harned?" he went on. "Goes like
+a bird, don't she?"
+
+"Indeed she does," answered Millicent, characteristically making
+immediate atonement in voice and look for the mental criticism of the
+moment before. "It's really going like a bird. I don't suppose we
+shall ever have a sensation more like flying."
+
+"Not until our celestial pinions are adjusted," said Anna. Brockton
+laughed, but Millicent went on:
+
+"Seriously, the loveliest belief I ever lost was the one in the wings
+with which my virtues should be at last rewarded. To breast the ether
+among the whirling stars,--didn't you ever lie awake and think of the
+possibility of that, Anna?"
+
+"Never! I'm no poet in a state of suffocation, as I sometimes suspect
+you of being."
+
+"As for heaven," declared Brockton, "I don't take much stock in all
+that. We're here--we know that--and we'd better make the most of it.
+For all we know, it's our last chance to have a good time. Better take
+all that's coming to you here and now, Miss Harned, and not count much
+on those wings of yours."
+
+Millicent smiled mechanically. Could any Elizabethan garden of delight
+compensate for the misery of having each butterfly of fancy crushed
+between Lemuel Brockton's big hands in this fashion?
+
+They were entering a village. Before them was the triangular green
+with the soldier's monument upon it. About it were the post-office,
+the stores, the small neat houses of the place. A white church,
+tall-steepled, green-shuttered, rose behind the monument, and with it
+dominated the square. A wagon or two toiled lazily along the road;
+before the stores a few dusty buggies were tied. The place seemed
+drowsy to stagnation in the summer heat. Why, Millicent wondered, were
+towns so crude and unlovely in the midst of a country so beautiful?
+
+There was a sudden explosive sound, and, with a crunch and a jerk
+which almost threw them from their seats, the machine came to a
+standstill. Brockton and his chauffeur were out in an instant, the one
+peering beneath, the other examining more closely. He emerged in a
+moment, and there was a jargon of explanation, unintelligible to the
+two women. All that Anna and Millicent understood was that the
+accident was not serious; that they would be delayed only a few
+minutes, and that Brockton was very angry with some one for the
+mishap. The two men worked together. Anna looked at her cousin.
+
+"I'm dead sleepy," she half whispered. "The wind in my face and the
+sun are too soporific for me. Let us not say a word to each other."
+
+"You read last night," Millicent accused her. "But I don't feel
+particularly conversational myself."
+
+She leaned back and surveyed the scene again. She could read the words
+graved on the granite block beneath the bronze soldier:
+
+"To the men of Warren who fought that their country might be whole and
+their fellows free this tribute of love is erected."
+
+And there followed the honor-roll of Warren's fallen.
+
+Millicent's sensitive lips quivered a little. Her ready imagination
+pictured them coming to this very square, perhaps,--the men of Warren.
+Boys from the hill farms, men from the village shops, the blacksmith
+who had worked in the light of yonder old forge, the carpenter who was
+father to the one now leisurely hammering a yellow L upon that
+weather-stained house,--she saw them all. What had led them? What call
+had sounded in their ears that they should leave their ploughshares in
+the furrows, their tills, their anvils, and their benches? What better
+thing had stirred with the primeval instinct for fight, with the
+unquenchable, restless longing for adventure, to send them forth? She
+read the words again--"that their country might be whole and their
+fellows free."
+
+She moved impatiently. For now an old shadowy theory of hers--an
+inheritance from the theories of the recluse, her father--stirred from
+a long-drugged quiet: a theory that there was a disintegrating
+unpatriotism in the untouched, charmed life of riches she and her
+fellows sought. She felt the disturbing conviction that those common
+men--she could almost hear their blundering speech, see their uncouth
+yawns at the sights and sounds of beauty on which she fed her
+soul--that those men had wells of life within them purer, sweeter,
+than she. She averted her eyes from the monument.
+
+"Honey!" called a voice, full-throated and loving--"honey, where are you?"
+
+There was a play-tent on the little patch of yard before the brown
+cottage to the left. The voice had come from the narrow piazza.
+Millicent shivered as she looked at it, with its gingerbread
+decorations already succumbing to the strain of the seasons. The
+answer came from the tent:
+
+"Here I am, muvver. Did you want me?"
+
+She came out--a child of five or six years. The round-eyed solemnity
+of babyhood had not left her yet. She brought her small doll family
+with her, and a benevolent collie ambled beside her. Her mother
+watched, tenderness beautifying her brown eyes: she was a young woman,
+no older than Millicent, but her face was more lined than Anna's; a
+strand of dark hair was blown across her cheek; there were fruit
+stains on her apron. All the marks of a busy household life were about
+her, all the bounteous restfulness of a woman well beloved, and the
+anxieties of a loving woman. She gave the automobile a passing glance,
+but it had no interest for her. Her eyes came back to caress the young
+thing which toiled up the steps to her, babbling of a morning's events
+in the tent.
+
+"Yes, sweetheart, that was very nice," she said, in answer to some
+breathless demand for sympathy. "And mother has brought you the bread
+and jam she promised you this morning. Will you eat it here, or in the
+tent?"
+
+"Couldn't I come into the kitchen to eat it, where you are?"
+
+"Why, yes, honey, if you want to."
+
+The door closed upon the vision of intimate love. Millicent saw Lena
+walking sedately with the governess of no charm and encyclopaedic
+information.
+
+"Now we're all right," called Brockton, loudly. "Upon my word, Mrs.
+Dinsmore, I think you were asleep! Miss Harned, you can't be as
+entertaining as I thought if your cousin falls asleep with you."
+
+"But think how soothing I must be; that's even better than to be
+entertaining."
+
+"By ginger! I never found that out--that you were soothing, I mean."
+It was evident that Mr. Brockton intended a compliment. Anna Dinsmore
+saw the annoyed red whip out upon Millicent's cheeks. She interposed a
+few ready, irrelevant questions before the tide of Brockton's
+flattery.
+
+They made their swift way through the hills, sometimes overlooking the
+winding course of the river, sometimes skirting the great estates of
+the region, again whizzing noisily through an old village. Anna and
+Brockton sustained the weight of conversation. Millicent smiled in
+vague sympathy with their laughter and Joined at random in the talk.
+Obstinately her mind had stayed behind her--with the men of Warren,
+with the round-faced child, and the woman to whose life love and not
+art gave all its beauty.
+
+They approached one of the larger old towns of the country--a place
+with a bustling main street and elm-shaded thoroughfares branching
+from it. Here were ample, well-kept lawns and houses of prosperous
+dignity. It seemed charming to Millicent with its air of unhurried
+activity or undrowsy repose.
+
+"What is this, Anna?" she asked.
+
+Anna told her.
+
+"Riverfield?" Millicent repeated the name, but in a strange voice.
+Anna stared a little.
+
+"Yes. Why? Do you know any one here?"
+
+"No." The word trickled slowly, unwillingly, from Millicent.
+
+"Lovely town, and there are some good places outside," said Anna. "The
+Ostranders have one, and Jimson, the artist. But the native city, or
+whatever you call it, is adorable. It has that air of rewarded virtue
+which makes one ashamed of one's life--"
+
+"I wish"--Millicent still spoke remotely, as if out of a sleep--"I
+wish, Mr. Brockton, that we might find a little library and museum
+they have here."
+
+"Why, of course!"
+
+"Are you going to compare it with the Vatican, Millicent?" asked Anna,
+flippantly. Millicent turned a distant, starry gaze upon her cousin.
+
+"No," she said; and then, in a flash of sympathy and fright, Anna
+remembered that it had been for some little Berkshire town that Will
+Hayter had built a library and museum just before his death, six years
+before--the town from which his family had originally come. Her memory
+worked rapidly, constructing the story. The blood dyed her face at the
+thought of her obtuseness. Then she set her lips firmly. She had done
+her best; if a wanton fate chose to interfere now and make Millicent
+slave to the phantom of her early, radiant love, she, Anna, could do
+no more!
+
+"Here we are, I guess," called Brockton. The machine shot into a broad
+street. A promenade between a double row of elms down its centre gave
+it a spacious dignity. The modest courthouse stood on one side, as
+green-bowered as if Justice were a smiling goddess; a few churches
+broke the stretch of houses. And on the other side the library and
+museum stood.
+
+"Pretty little building, but plain," commented Brockton, making
+disparaging note of its graceful severity.
+
+"It's exactly suited to the place; it epitomizes its spirit," said
+Anna, glibly. "It's austere without being forbidding--perfect Colonial
+adaptation of the Greek."
+
+Millicent made no architectural observation. Instead she said: "If you
+don't mind, I should like to go in for a while. You could pick me up
+later, perhaps on your way back to--Where is it we are lunching?"
+
+Consternation looked out of Anna's eyes, bewilderment out of
+Brockton's. But Millicent turned to them with such gentle command in
+her gaze that they could offer no protest.
+
+"Come back in half an hour, if you are ready," she said. Upon Anna,
+whose baffled look followed her up the flagging between the
+close-clipt lawns, there came the feeling that she was leaving her
+cousin alone with the beloved dead.
+
+"Now what--" began Brockton, in full-toned protest,--"what the--"
+
+"That was the last thing Will Hayter did,"--Anna interrupted his
+question. "And the first, so to speak. It was a fairly important
+commission. Jessup, the Trya Drop liniment man, came from
+Riverfield--he has a mammoth place outside now. When he began to coin
+money faster than the mint, he gave lots of things to his
+birthplace--which has always blushed for him. It's prouder that
+Whittier once spent Sunday with one of its citizens than that Alonzo
+Jessup is its son. Well, he gave the library and museum, and the
+commission went to Will Hayter. The Hayters came from here two or
+three generations ago. It was just before his death, and Millicent has
+been abroad almost ever since. So she had never seen it."
+
+Brockton gave a look of speechless chagrin at his hostess, which she
+answered haughtily:
+
+"My dear Mr. Brockton, after all, I never undertook to be a
+marriage-broker!" Then she glanced at the chauffeur and forbore.
+
+Meantime Millicent sat in one of the square exhibition-halls. The
+sweet air, with the scent of hay from the farther country faintly
+impregnating it, blew through the quiet. No one else shared the room
+with her. The even light soothed her eyes, the stillness calmed the
+fluttering apprehension in her breast which had presaged she knew not
+what fresh anguish of loss. There were pictures on the walls--one or
+two not despicable originals which Trya Drop Jessup had given, many
+copies, and a few specimens of Riverfield's native talent. But she saw
+none of them, any more than one sees the windows and the paintings in
+a great cathedral in the first fulness of reverence. To her this was a
+sacred place. That grief had lost its poignancy, that youth and health
+with cruel insistence had reasserted their sway over her life, did not
+mean forgetfulness, unfaith.
+
+"Truly, truly,"--she almost breathed the words aloud,--"there has been
+no other one. That was my love, young as we were. But I must fill up
+the days--I must fill up the days."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Her eyes were fixed unseeingly upon a great canvas at the other end of
+the hall. Some Riverfield hand had portrayed a Riverfield
+imagination's conception of the moment in the life of Christ when, the
+temptations of Satan withstood, angels came to Him upon the mountain.
+In the lower distance the kingdoms of the world grew dim beneath the
+shadow that fell from the vanquished and retreating tempter, and from
+the opening heavens a dazzling cloud of angels streamed toward the
+solitary Figure on the height. By and by Millicent's eyes took note of
+it. She half smiled. There was daring at least!
+
+Then the picture faded, and again the persistent figure of the child
+which had so filled her imagination came before her. But this time it
+was toward herself that the rosy face was turned and limpid eyes
+lifted in unquestioning dependence. She was the mother; she stood on
+the piazza, and by her side he stood, who had been so dear in himself,
+so infinitely dearer in the thought of all that should be; toward them
+the child came; they were enveloped by breathless love for each other
+and for that being, innocent, trusting, which their love had called
+into life. So, dimly, she had dreamed in the radiant days of old.
+Almost she could feel his hand upon her shoulder, hear his voice full
+of tenderness that expressed itself only in tone, not in word, taking
+refuge from too great feeling in jest. She closed her eyes against the
+vision that made her faint with anguish.
+
+Some one entered the room with a brisk little trot; Millicent opened
+her eyes and turned her head. A small woman, "old maid" from the top
+of her neat gray head to the toe of her list shoes, came forward. She
+held a pad and pencil and wore the badge of authority in her manner.
+At sight of Millicent she paused, blinking behind her glasses.
+Millicent came slowly out of her trance; recognition dawned upon her.
+She rose.
+
+"Miss Hayter--Aunt Harriet!" she cried, advancing.
+
+"It is you, then!" chirped the elder lady. "My dear, who could have
+expected this?"
+
+"Not I, for one!" She held both Miss Hayter's hands. "I had no idea
+you were here. Surely you haven't given up your beloved Boston
+school?"
+
+"Oh no. Only in the summer I come here for a month and substitute for
+the regular curator while she is on her vacation. It"--she struggled
+against a constitutional distaste for self-revelation--"it seems like
+a little visit with Will, somehow."
+
+Millicent's throat throbbed with a strangled sob. No one had spoken
+his name in so long! Her people had had no interest but to banish the
+memory of him from her heart; this quaint little aunt of his, who had
+adored him and lived for him, was the first who had spoken of him
+in--she did not know how many years. She held tight to the old hands,
+her eyes clung to the withering face. "Say it again," she whispered;
+"say his name."
+
+"Why, my dear," cried the older woman, "is it still as hard as this?
+Come, sit down here with me. Of course I knew that you were not one of
+the changing kind,"--Millicent winced,--"but I'm sorry to think you
+should suffer now as keenly as you do."
+
+"It is not just that," said Millicent, shamefacedly. "Only, seeing you
+unexpectedly gave me a pang. And then, being in the place he built--"
+
+The older woman patted her hand soothingly. "I understand," she said.
+"I've always understood. When--when you didn't write after the very
+first, I knew it was because you couldn't, not because you forgot. You
+were really made for each other, you two. I think I never saw two such
+radiant, happy creatures in the world. Ah, well!" she wiped a sudden
+dew from her glasses, "waiting's hard, my dear, but it ends,--it
+ends."
+
+Millicent was hurt by the unbroken faith in her, by the unquestioning
+belief she could not share. She looked wistfully upon the shining,
+tearful eyes.
+
+"It is very beautiful to think that," she said, "but, dear Aunt
+Harriet, you are mistaken about me. I am going to tell you everything.
+I--I loved your nephew. I shall not love any one else. It happened to
+come to me in perfectness when I was young--love. But I live, I am
+well, I am alive to pleasure and pain. How shall I fill up my life but
+with the things that still matter to me?"
+
+"You think of marrying, you mean?" Aunt Harriet's voice was dry and
+harsh. "Well--I am sure Will would wish your happiness, and I--it
+would not be for me to object. Every day it is done, and very often
+rightly, I suppose; for money, for companionship, for the chance of
+self-development, women marry without love. I--I could only wish you
+happiness."
+
+"You--do not understand."
+
+"My dear,"--her voice softened again; something in the pallor and the
+quivering pain of the girl touched her,--"I do not mean to speak
+hardly to you. It seems to me like this: when it comes to piecing out
+a life that has been broken, as yours was--as mine was, my dear, as
+mine was--there are two ways of doing it. Either you keep your ideal
+of perfect love, and lead your poor every-day life of odds and ends,
+like mine, filling your days with the best scraps of pleasure or
+usefulness you may, or you give up your ideal of perfect love and
+marry, and have your home and your children and your rounded outward
+life. There is, maybe, no question of higher or lower. Each one of us
+does what her nature bids her. I had always thought of you as one
+who--But it is not for me to judge."
+
+Her voice was gentle, and she did not look at Millicent. Her eyes
+seemed to pierce the canvas on the opposite wall and the hangings and
+the stones behind it, and to see a far image of souls in the struggle
+of choice. The woman beside her sat silent, her thoughts with the
+idealists--the men who gave up the comfort of their firesides, the
+gain of their occupations, and followed whither the vision led; the
+woman whose home was built upon love and who would see only infamy in
+houses founded otherwise; the poor soul beside her, stronger in
+courage, more aspiring in thought, than she, with all her delicacies,
+her refinements of taste. The ideal had led them all--the ideal, as it
+had once shone for her and for him whose spirit had informed and
+beautified the spot where she sat and made her choice.
+
+"Aunt Harriet," she said, and her face was like the sudden flashing of
+stars between torn clouds,--"Aunt Harriet--" She could not utter the
+decision in words. "May I come to see you--and learn something from
+you?"
+
+Miss Hayter looked. There was no need to question. No knight ever rose
+from his accolade with a face more glorified than Millicent's when she
+silently dedicated herself to the shining company of those who keep
+unsullied the early vision.
+
+As she passed out of the hall, her eyes fell again upon the painting
+of the Temptation. She read the black and gilt legend below it--"And
+Angels Came and Ministered Unto Him." Then she laughed down upon the
+old-fashioned figure trotting by her side. "And angels came," she
+said.
+
+Her rapt look frightened Anna when the automobile returned for her.
+Then the heart of that frivolous woman was stricken for a moment with
+wistfulness.
+
+"You seem very happy," she faltered, "and--amused, is it? What are you
+smiling over?"
+
+"I am still thinking of angels. Would you ever have dreamed, Anna,
+that they sometimes wore list shoes, and sometimes ate bread and jam,
+and occasionally spoke with granite lips? They do."
+
+Brockton stirred uneasily, foreboding failure. And Anna sighed,
+mourning two lost visions.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+KEEPERS OF A CHARGE
+
+BY GRACE ELLERY CHANNING
+
+
+The Doctor's brougham stood at the door; the Doctor's liveried
+servants waited at the foot of the stairs; the Doctor himself in his
+study was gathering together his paraphernalia for the day, and the
+Doctor's face was a study.
+
+He was tired; he was cross; he was feeling ill. His nervous hands were
+unsteady; his movements were by jerks; his face was a knitted tangle
+of lines. He had rheumatism in both shoulders, and a headache, and a
+pain in his chest. He had slept but little, and one of his patients
+had had the happy idea of despatching a messenger for him in the dead
+hour of the night. The Doctor never went out nights, and she ought to
+have known this, but her only son was ill and she was persuaded he
+could not survive a dozen hours together without the Doctor's personal
+attendance.
+
+It never seemed to occur to any of his patients that his own life was
+of the smallest consequence in the balance with theirs or that of any
+member of their families. Occasionally, when his rheumatism was
+exceptionally severe or his cough racking, this reflection embittered
+the Doctor. At other times--and this was generally--he accepted with
+philosophy this integral selfishness of clients as a part of their
+inevitable constitution. They were a set of people necessarily
+immersed and absorbed in their own woes, or in that extension of their
+woes which was still more passionately their own, and even more
+unmercifully insisted upon in proportion to the decent veneer of
+altruism it possessed.
+
+Without being strictly a handsome man, the Doctor produced the effect
+of one. Nothing gives distinction like character, and this he had and
+to spare. He was not a popular physician, but a famous one; the day
+was long past when his professional success depended upon anything so
+personal as appearance or manner. He could afford to be--and he
+frequently was--as disagreeable as he felt; desperate sufferers could
+not afford to resent it, and their relatives, in the grim struggle for
+a precious life, swallowed without a protest the brusqueries and
+rebuffs of the man who held in, the hollow of his potent hand their
+jewel of existence.
+
+He had his passionate detractors and his personal devotees, and these
+last afflicted him far more than the first. Like the priest, the
+physician cannot escape taking on superhuman proportions in the eyes
+of those to whom he has rendered back life, their own or a dearer, and
+the Doctor (having long outlived the time when it flattered him) was
+often exasperated to the limits of endurance by the blind faith which
+asked miracles of him as simply as cups of tea. The strain these
+women--they were mostly women, of course--put upon him was beyond
+belief, and he got but a mild pleasure out of the reflection that,
+being in their nature foolish, they could not help it.
+
+It was quite in keeping, therefore, that one of them should have
+broken up his night's sleep. He knew those attacks of the boy's by
+heart; there was exactly one chance in one hundred that his presence
+should be necessary. He had sent a safe remedy, telephoned a severe
+but soothing message, and mentally prayed now for patience to meet the
+irrational, angered eyes of maternity, and to administer a reproof
+equally gentle and deterrent--gentle, for of course the woman's nerves
+had to be allowed for; she had been nursing this boy for months. The
+Doctor slipped into his long, fur-trimmed overcoat and reached for his
+tall hat.
+
+"You may as well send those Symphony tickets to somebody," he said,
+impatiently, to his wife; "I sha'n't be able to go. Ten to one I shall
+be late to dinner, and I doubt if I get home to lunch at all."
+
+His wife, who was patiently holding his gloves and cigar-case, looked
+at him with a sweet maternal anxiety as he tumbled together the papers
+on the table, but she only said, "Very well." As he turned to take the
+gloves and cigar-case, she added, quickly, with a second anxious
+glance:
+
+"Do try to get a few minutes' rest somewhere. Any of our friends will
+be so glad to give you a cup of tea--or a little music--and it always
+rests you so."
+
+The Doctor took the things from her hands; he looked abstractedly at
+his wife, then stooped hurriedly and kissed her.
+
+"Don't worry about me; I shall be all right," he said, as he hastened
+from the room. It was characteristic of him that he forgot his
+clinical thermometer, and was never known to have a prescription-pad
+or pencil.
+
+One servant opened the house door for him, and another the carriage
+door; the Doctor stepped in quickly, growling out a direction and
+ignoring the bows of his retainers. He kept his own for the benefit of
+his clients, he was wont cynically to say. He settled himself in the
+seat, and before the door was fairly closed had lighted a cigar and
+unfurled a medical journal.
+
+As the carriage whirled recklessly down the street and around corners,
+several feminine patients looked longingly after, as if virtue went
+out from it, and several masculine ones raised their hats, but the
+Doctor, his eyes glued to the paper, saw none of them.
+
+Perhaps his most restful moments were these spent in his brougham. It
+was almost his only time for reading; he had found, moreover, that
+this served to keep his mind fresh from case to case, detaching it
+from one train of thought and bringing it with new concentration to
+the next. These brief intervals belonged wholly to himself. His home
+was never safe from invasion, and little time and less strength
+remained to him for domestic joys.
+
+Life had not brought to him all that he was conscious might have been
+within its gift. Professionally, indeed, he had reached great heights,
+but these only enabled a measure of the territory beyond, and if to
+his patients he appeared as a species of demigod, to himself he was
+merely a "lucky" physician--his peculiar luck consisting in that sixth
+sense which put him so easily into his patients' skins and pierced
+through obscure maladies to possible sources. How he knew a great many
+things puzzled them, but puzzled him still more. Simply at certain
+crises he was aware that mysteries were momentarily revealed to him.
+Back of that he possessed, of course, the usual outfit of medical
+knowledge, open to any one, but which had never yet made a great
+physician since the world with all its aches and pains began. For
+_that_ other things were needed: a coloring of the artistic
+temperament, a dash of the gambler's, a touch of femininity, as well
+as the solid stratum of cool common sense at the bottom of all;
+_these_ eked out the modicum of scientific knowledge which is all
+mankind has yet wrested from secretive nature. The Doctor sometimes
+described himself as a "good guesser." Surgery might be an exact
+science; few things in medicine were exact, and what was never exact
+was the material upon which medicine must work. The great bulk of his
+fraternity went through their studious, conscientious, hard-working,
+and not infrequently heroic lives under the contented conviction of
+having to deal with two principal facts--disease and medicine--both
+accessible through study. To them the imponderable factor of the
+patient represented such or such an aggregation of material--muscle,
+nerve, blood, brawn, bone, and tissue--which might be counted upon to
+respond to such and such a treatment in such and such a manner, with
+very slight variation. The Doctor envied them their simplicity of
+faith. To him, on the contrary, the patient was a factor which could
+not be counted on, at all--a force about which he knew virtually
+nothing, acting upon a mechanism about which he knew little more, and
+capable of interactions, reactions, and counteractions innumerable,
+reversing and nullifying all past experience at a moment's notice--an
+_unforeseen_ moment always.
+
+He eyed this mystery, accordingly, with respect, lying in wait for
+hints from it, and frequently reversing in his turn patiently prepared
+plans of action, with a prompt speed impossible to a less supple
+mind,--impossible at all, quite often, to any process of conscious
+thought. To have these intuitions--that was his touch of femininity;
+to risk largely upon them was the gambler in him; his swift
+appropriation of the subject's temperament betrayed the artist in his
+own; while the hard common sense which drew the rein on all these was
+a legitimate inheritance--both national and personal. So was his
+manner--not often extremely courteous and quite often extremely rude.
+In this latter case his adorers called it "abstracted," while his
+enemies qualified it as "ill-bred." But his voice, ordinarily abrupt
+and harsh, could pass to exquisite intonations in the sick-room, and
+there were moments when to anxious watchers therein, the man seemed
+more than a man.
+
+The affinity between physician and artist is one of the most curious
+and suggestive. Every one will recall the famous surgeon-etcher, and
+the distinguished specialist in nerves and novels. The Doctor's
+artistic passion was for music. Unfortunately, it was not materially
+portable, like a writing-pad, and there would have been something
+unseemly in the spectacle of a physician fiddling in his carriage, so
+he nursed this love in seclusion. His violin was his one indulgence,
+and when he permitted himself to dream, it was of a life with music in
+it. Sometimes he wished his wife were musical; more often he
+congratulated himself that she was not. He was sincerely attached to
+her, owing--and, what was more significant, realizing that he
+owed--her much besides the promising twins; most of all, perhaps, that
+she consented to be his wife on his own terms. But she was distinctly
+not musical.
+
+The Doctor laid down his paper and took up his mail, and a
+disagreeable expression came into his face. It was one of the pleasant
+features of his professional career that his brother physicians
+occasionally vented their jealousy of him upon one of their joint
+patients--stabbing him, so to speak, through _their_ lungs or
+heart, wherein he was most vulnerable. Just as he expected! They had
+deliberately neglected his prescriptions, after calling him a
+winter-journey north to deliver them, and as deliberately allowed the
+victim to die according to their treatment rather than permit him to
+live according to the Doctor's.
+
+The look upon his face was ugly to behold; he flung open the door with
+unnecessary violence before the carriage had stopped, and his foot was
+on the pavement before the footman could descend. Then he braced his
+rheumatic shoulders for the four steep flights of stairs; he could not
+justly complain of the number, since he himself had sent the patient
+there to be high and dry and quiet. On the way up he had one of his
+nameless seizures of intuition, and in the dark upper hall his hand
+fell sharply away from the knocker and his face set whitely. There had
+been just one chance in a hundred that his presence was necessary;
+before the door opened he knew this had been the hundredth chance.
+
+The ghastly woman's face which met him added nothing to that
+certitude, yet he winced before it in every nerve.
+
+"You have come too late," she articulated only.
+
+"_No_!" thundered the Doctor. He put her aside like a piece of
+furniture and strode into the darkened room beyond.
+
+It was more than an hour later when he emerged. The woman stood
+exactly where he had left her. It was another, tall and young, who
+turned from the window and looked at him with eyes that hurt. But he
+did not wince this time.
+
+"It's all right!" he said, cheerfully. His voice quite sang with
+sweetness. He came and stood a moment by the window, breathing hard.
+His face was gray, but his eyes smiled, and there was something boyish
+in his aspect. He looked from one woman to the other sunnily.
+
+"Bless me--you ought never to let yourselves go like that! He'll pull
+through all right."
+
+The younger woman continued to look at him silently, but the elder,
+with a long quivering sigh, fainted.
+
+"Best thing she could possibly do," said the Doctor, his fingers on
+her pulse. "Get her to bed as soon as you can,--and have these
+prescriptions sent out. I'll come back later. He'll sleep hours now."
+
+He ran down-stairs, consulting his visiting-list as he ran, and jumped
+into the brougham, calling an address as he pulled the door to with a
+slam. This time, however, he did not take out his papers, but sat with
+an unlighted cigar between his lips, gazing intently at nothing.
+
+In the course of the next few hours he looked over an assortment of
+ailing babies, soothed as many distracted mothers, ordered to a gay
+watering-place one young girl whom he was obliged to treat for chronic
+headache--chronic heartache not being professionally recognizable,--
+administered the pathetically limited alleviations of his art to a
+failing cancer-patient (she happened to be a rich woman, going with
+the fortitude of the poor down the road to the great Darkness), and so,
+looking in on various pneumonias and fevers, broken souls and bruised
+bodies, by the way, brought up at last at the hospital to see how
+yesterday's operation was going on. It was going on in so very mixed
+a manner that he telephoned he should not return to lunch--prophesying
+long after the event.
+
+It was turning dusk when he started on his second round of visits
+homeward, stopping on the outskirts to rebandage, in one of the
+tenements, a child's broken arm. He had not returned his footman's
+salutation that morning, but had carried in his subconsciousness all
+day this visit to the footman's child. In one manner or another that
+inconvenient locality had been compassed in his circuit for the past
+three weeks. From it he passed to his daily ordeal, another rich
+patient, a nervous wreck, whose primary ailment--the lack of anything
+to do--had passed into the advanced stages of an inability to do
+anything, with its sad Nemesis of melancholia--the registered protest
+of the dying soul. It was a case which took more out of the Doctor
+than all his day's practice put together; he always came from it in a
+misery of doubts.
+
+The dusk was becoming the dark when he set his foot wearily on the
+carriage step once more, and with his hand on the carriage door paused
+suddenly. He was sick of sickness, mortally tired of mortality! For
+the first time in the whole day he hesitated; an odd, irresolute look
+came into his face; he pulled out his watch, glanced, and changing his
+first-given address for another, threw himself back on the cushions
+with closed eyes. He did not open them again until the carriage,
+rolling through many streets, came to a halt under some quiet trees,
+before an apartment-house. There were yellow daffodils between white
+curtains--very white and high up. As he stepped out, the Doctor
+glanced involuntarily towards them, and a half-breath of relief
+escaped him, instantly quenched in a nervous frown and jump as his arm
+was seized by a firm gloved hand.
+
+"Doctor,--this is really _providential_! You are the very person
+I wished to see!"
+
+It was the younger of two heavily upholstered and matronly ladies who
+spoke, in a voice of many underscorings. The Doctor, who had removed
+his hat with a purely mechanical motion, knew himself a prey,
+identified his captor, and eyed her with restrained bitterness.
+
+"Doctor,--it is about my Elsie;--she hasn't a particle of color, and
+she complains of feeling languid all the time--"
+
+"No wonder!--What do you expect?"--it was the Doctor's harshest tone.
+"She is loaded up with flesh,--she doesn't exercise,--you stuff her.
+Send her out with her hoop,--make her drink water,--stop stuffing her.
+What she, wants is thinning out."
+
+"_Elsie_!--Why, Doctor, the child eats _nothing_,--I have to
+tempt her all the time;--and when she goes out she complains of feeling
+tired."
+
+"Let her complain,--and let her get tired;--it will do her good. Don't
+feed her in betweentimes,--and when you do feed her, give her
+meat--something that will make red blood,--not slops, nor sweets, nor
+dough. There's nothing in the world the matter with her." He lifted
+his hat and strode on up the stairs.
+
+Maternity, grieved and outraged, stared after him, speechless, then
+turned for sympathy in the nearest feminine eye.
+
+"Really, dear,--I think that was almost _vulgar_,--as well as
+unkind," murmured the other mother at her side.
+
+"_Vulgar_! _Unkind_! Well, it is the last time he will have
+the opportunity to insult me! The idea! _Elsie_!--But it's not
+the first time I have thought of changing physicians!" (This was
+true,--but she never did; the solid Elsie was her only one.) "And such
+desperate haste;--he must have a _most critical_ case!" She cast
+an indignant glance at the building, as if to make it an accessory to
+the fact, and turning a kindling and interrogative glance upon her
+companion, encountered one of profound and scintillating significance.
+For a moment they contemplated their discovery breathlessly in each
+other's eyes.
+
+"Did you ever!" exclaimed number one at last. "Oh, of course I had
+heard things,--but I will do myself the justice to say I _never_
+believed a word of it before! _This_, of course, makes it plain
+enough;--this explains _all_!"
+
+The two--good women, but wounded withal--coruscated subtle knowledge
+all down the street.
+
+Meantime the Doctor climbed the stairs. He was perfectly conscious
+that he had been, in fact, both unkind and rude, even though his mood
+did not incline him to take measure of the extent of his delinquency.
+He knew equally that he should presently have to write a note of
+apology--and that it would not do an atom of good, _Tant pis_. He
+rang at the door of the daffodil-room, and it was opened by the tall
+girl whose eyes had hurt him that morning. They did not hurt him now,
+but enveloped him with a keen and soft regard that left no question
+unanswered. In another moment she had put out a firm hand and drawn
+him over the threshold in its clasp.
+
+"Don't speak,--don't try to say a word! There!" She had taken from him
+his hat and gloves and pushed forward a low chair in front of the
+fire, all in one capable movement. "What is it? Tea? Coffee? A glass
+of wine?"
+
+"_Music_!" answered the Doctor, raising two haggard eyes, with
+the exhausted air of an animal taking shelter.
+
+The girl turned away her own and walked towards the piano, stopping on
+the way, however, to push forward a little table set forth with a
+steaming tea-urn and cups, matches and a tray, and to lift to its
+farther edge a bowl of heavy-scented violets. Her every motion was
+full of ministry, as devoid of fuss.
+
+The room was low, broad, and large, and full of books, flowers, low
+seats, and leaping firelight. A grand-piano, piled with music,
+dominated the whole. The girl seated herself before it and began to
+play, with the beautiful, powerful touch of control. After the first
+bars, the Doctor's head sank back upon the cushions of the chair and
+the Doctor's hand stole mechanically to the matches. He smoked and she
+played--quiet, large music, tranquilly filling the room: Bach fugues,
+German Lieder, fragments of weird northern harmonies, fragments of
+Beethoven and Schubert, the Largo of Handel,--and all the time she
+played she looked at the man who lay back in the chair, half turned
+from her, the cigar drooping from his fingers. There was no sound in
+the room but the music and light leaping of little flames in the
+fireplace,--no motion but theirs and the pulsing fingers on the keys.
+The girl played on and on, till the fire began to die, and with a
+sudden sigh the Doctor held up his hand. Then she rose at once, and
+going forward, stood as simply at the side of the fireplace opposite
+him. She was not beautiful, but, oh, she was beautiful with health and
+calm vigor.
+
+The Doctor let his eyes rest on her.
+
+"If you knew," he said, with a little, half-apologetic laugh.
+
+In her turn she held up one of her long hands.
+
+"But I do;--you forget I was there all the morning. And you pulled him
+through. As for the rest--" She stooped suddenly and began to pile
+together the logs; the Doctor watched her, noting with a trained and
+sensitive eye the muscular ease and grace of the supple arms and
+shoulders--like music. "Of course"--she spoke lightly--"they will kill
+you some day, among them; but--it's worth while, isn't it?--and there
+isn't much else that is, is there?" Still kneeling, she turned and
+looked straight up at him. "Do you know what it was like this
+morning--before you came?"
+
+The Doctor shook his head.
+
+She hesitated a moment, smiling a little. "'Lord, _if Thou hadst
+been here_, our brother had not died!'" she quoted.
+
+The Doctor got up quickly from his chair. He knocked the ash from his
+cigar and laid it down on the tray. "Well," he said, lightly, "I must
+be off." He squared his shoulders and held out his hand; its grip upon
+her own trembled very slightly, but he smiled sunnily. "I'll come back
+for some more music some day."
+
+"Do," the girl said. She had risen and was smiling too.
+
+The Doctor looked about the room wistfully. "Jolly place,--I don't get
+up very often, do I?"
+
+"Not very."
+
+They smiled at each other again, then the girl, turning abruptly away,
+walked to the window and came back with a double handful of yellow
+flowers.
+
+"Will you carry these to your wife? They are the first of the year."
+
+She held the door open for him, and from the little landing watched
+him down the stairs. At their turn he glanced up for a moment, holding
+his hat raised silently. She waved him a mute acknowledgment, then
+going into the room again, closed the door.
+
+The firelight still leaped languidly on the hearth, and on the
+half-smoked cigar and pile of ashes in the tray. The girl stood a
+moment looking at these things and the chair, then walked quietly to
+the piano and sat down before it. But she did not play again.
+
+Meantime the Doctor, an erect and urgent presence in the dusk, had
+driven through dim streets and climbed again the four flights of the
+morning, to find the hush of heaven fallen on the house.
+
+"I knew _you_ could save him!" said the pale mother only, lifting
+blind eyes of worship from the couch.
+
+The Doctor laughed, poured her out with his own hands a
+sleeping-draught, and sat patiently beside her till she slept, then
+stole away, leaving injunctions with the nurse, established in his
+absence, to telephone if there came a crisis--"even," after a moment's
+hesitation, "in the night."
+
+"Home!"--he gave the order briefly. There were black circles beneath
+his eyes, making him look thinner than when he left the house that
+morning; he had no distinct reminiscence of lunch, and he was very
+tired; but his shoulders no longer ached, his headache was gone, and
+his hands were perfectly steady.
+
+Odd bits of music hummed perversely through his head, mixing
+themselves up with all things and rippling the air about him into
+their own large waves, bearing now and then upon them, like the
+insistent iteration of an oratorio chorus, fantastic fragments--"If
+Thou hadst been here!--If Thou hadst been here!" His fingers ached
+towards the responsive strings, and pulling out his watch, he made a
+hasty calculation. There should be good fifteen minutes, he
+decided--toilet allowed for--and he hurried the coachman again and
+leaned forward, looking with bright, eager eyes into the night, and
+humming to himself.
+
+One liveried servant opened the house door, another the carriage door,
+and a third relieved him of his hat and coat. Out of the warmth and
+brightness his wife advanced to meet him, a child in either hand,
+their long curls brushed and tied with bright ribbons. Her face was
+filled with tender solicitude.
+
+"You must be worn out;--what a long day you have made! Would you like
+the dinner sent in at once, or would you rather wait? Children, don't
+hang so on papa; he must be dreadfully tired. Oh, and there's a man
+been waiting over an hour; he simply _wouldn't go_; but you'll
+let him come back to-morrow?--you won't try to see any one else
+tonight?"
+
+The Doctor hesitated a moment, letting all the warmth and brightness
+sink into him, while his hands played with the soft hair of his little
+son and daughter. He smiled at his wife, a bright, tired smile.
+
+"Robin," he said, "run down to the carriage; there are some posies
+there for mamma--from Miss Graham, Louise,--you see I did get a
+moment's rest."
+
+"Yes," said his wife. She continued to gaze compassionately at the
+tired man. After a moment she repeated gently, "And the dinner,
+dear--?"
+
+"No,--don't wait for me; I'll not be long. Have it brought in at once,
+and--send the man into the office, please."
+
+He stooped and kissed the children, and turning away, went into his
+office and closed the door behind him.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A WORKING BASIS
+
+BY ABBY MEGUIRE ROACH
+
+
+Why she married him her friends wondered at the time. Those she made
+later wondered more. Before long she caught herself wondering. Yes,
+she had seen it beforehand, more or less. But she had seen other
+things as well: he had developed unevenly, unexpectedly, if logically.
+There had been common tastes--which grew obsolete or secondary. As the
+momentum of what she believed and hoped of him ran down with them
+both, he crystallized into the man he was, and no doubt virtually had
+always been.
+
+It was bad enough to have to ask for money, but to have it counted out
+to you, to be questioned about it like a child, was worse.
+
+"I don't understand," she said in the first months of their marriage.
+"Are you afraid I won't be judicious, responsible? Mightn't you try
+before judging?"
+
+"Judicious? Responsible?" He pinched her cheek. (Judith was five feet
+nine and sweetly sober of mien.) "There are no feminines or
+diminutives of those words, my dear."
+
+She stepped back. "But with more freedom I could manage better, Sam."
+
+"Manage?"--jocularly. "That _is_ your long suit, isn't it? You
+feel equal to managing all of us? Could even give me pointers on the
+business, eh?"
+
+"Why not?" she asked, quietly.
+
+Sam, feet apart, hands in pockets, looked her over with the smile one
+has for a dignified kitten. "I won't trouble you, my dear. I manage
+this family." With his pleasantries a lower note struck--and jangled.
+
+"But that isn't the point. I want--"
+
+"Really? You always do. Don't bother to tell me what. If you got this
+you'd be wanting something else, so what's the use of the expense
+merely to change the object?" He chuckled at her baffled silence.
+
+"I can't answer when you're like that. But--but, Sam! It isn't fair!"
+Still she supposed that relevant.
+
+However, money was not the chief thing. He could manage. Let it go.
+
+Having properly impressed her, nothing made Sam feel larger than to
+bring her a set of pearl-handled knives,--when she had wanted a dollar
+for kitchen tins. His extravagances were not always generosities.
+Once, after she had turned her winter-before-last suit and patched new
+seats into the boy's flannel drawers, because "times were hard," he
+bought a brace of blooded hunting-dogs.
+
+Next day she opened an account at a department store.
+
+With the promptness of the first of the month and the sureness of
+death, the bill came. Sam had expressed himself unchecked before she
+turned in the doorway. "If you will go over it," she said, with all
+her rehearsal unable, after all, to imitate his nonchalance, "you will
+find nothing unnecessary. I think there is nothing there for the
+dogs."
+
+But her cannon-ball affected him no more than a leaf an elephant; he
+did not know he was hit. It was always so.
+
+In his cool way, however, Sam had all the cumulative jealousy of the
+primitive male for his long primacy. Some weeks later, when Judith
+ordered an overcoat for Sam junior sent home on approval, she found
+the store had been instructed to give her no credit.
+
+She got out, with burning face and heart, without the article. Her
+first impulse was to shrink from a blow.
+
+But at table that night she recounted her experience: "The very
+courteous gentleman who informed me of your predicament happened to be
+a cousin of Mr. Banks, of Head and Banks. (They supply your grain, I
+believe?) Mrs. Howe (isn't it R. E. Howe who is president of the
+Newcomb Club?) was at my elbow. The salesgirl has Sam junior's
+Sunday-school class. Doubtless it will interest them all to know you
+are in such straits you can't clothe your children."
+
+Ah? She had touched his vulnerable point? Instantly she was swept by
+compunction, by impulses to make amends, to him, to their love. Their
+love! That delicate wild thing she kept in a warm, moist, sheltered
+place, and forbore to look at for yellowing leaves.
+
+Like the battle of Blenheim, it was a famous victory, but what good
+came of it at last? The overcoat came home, to be sure, with cap and
+shoes besides. But she was too gallant to press her advantage.
+Besides, she still looked for him to take a hint.
+
+He did, after his own fashion. "You ought to see Judith here," he
+laughed to a caller, "practising her kindergarten methods on me." His
+imperturbability was at once a boast and a slight.
+
+"He doesn't mean it," she apologized, later, protecting herself by
+defending him. "You know how men are; the best of them a bit stupid
+about some things. They don't mean to hurt you. You know it, but you
+can't help crying."
+
+"Oh, I understand!" (That any one should sympathize with her! It was
+not so much her vanity that suffered as her precious regard for him,
+her pride in their marriage.) "Nobody minds little things like that
+against such devotion and constancy. Why, he talks of you all the
+time, Judith; of your style, your housekeeping. You are his pet boast.
+He says you can do more with less than anybody he ever saw." And then
+Judith laughed.
+
+They were all articles of the creed she herself repeated--and doubted
+more and more. Faithful enough. He never came or went without the
+customary kiss. When he had typhoid fever, no one might be near him
+but her, until her exhaustion could no longer be concealed, when he
+fretted about her--until he fretted himself back into high temperature
+and had a relapse.
+
+So, run down as she was, she hid it, kept up, went on alone, adding to
+the score of her inevitable day of reckoning, after the old
+heroic-criminal woman-way.
+
+She had begun with ideas of their saving together for a purpose; but,
+not allowed to plan, she must use every opportunity to provide against
+future stricture; besides, Sam's arbitrary and unregulated spending
+made her poor little economies both futile and unfair.
+
+"I know nothing about your business. How can I tell if I spend too
+much?"
+
+"Make your mind easy; I'll keep you posted," he laughed. _He_ was
+not bothering about dangerous ground.
+
+"Doubtless,"--dryly. "But if I spend too little?"
+
+"Not you."
+
+He did mean it! He didn't care! The half-truth fanned the slow fire
+growing within her into sudden flame. Judith turned, stammering over
+the dammed rush of replies.
+
+"My dear, my dear!" he deprecated, amused. "How easily you lose your
+temper lately, every time there is a discussion of expenses! Why
+excite yourself?" Why, indeed? Anger put her at a disadvantage, and
+making her half wrong, half made him right. "I don't say I
+particularly blame you, but you see for yourself you don't keep your
+balance, and it's mistaken kindness to tempt any woman's natural
+feminine weakness for luxury and display."
+
+The retorts were so obvious they were hopeless. She stood looking at
+him.
+
+His eyebrows lifted; he shrugged his shoulders, went out, and forgot.
+
+Why any of it, indeed? There was no bridge of speech between alien
+minds. Their life was a continual game of cross-questions and silly
+answers. Their natures were antipodal; he had the faults that annoyed
+her most; his virtues were those least compensating.
+
+Was her dream of influencing the children a superstition too, then?
+
+The children! They slipped the house whenever possible; avoided their
+father with an almost physical effect of dodging an expected blow;
+when with him, watched his mood to forestall with hasty attention or
+divert with strained wit, with timorous hilarity when he proved
+complaisant. The possibilities for harm to them were numberless. She
+and Sam were losing the children, and the children were losing
+everything.
+
+For years they had been a physical and mental outlet for her nature.
+That love had no question of reciprocity or merit. She had always been
+willing for them. Only it seemed to her all the rest of love should
+come first. It occurred to her ironically how happy her marriage would
+have been without her husband.
+
+What was his love worth? It was only taxation--taxation without
+representation. Had either of them any real love left?
+
+Suddenly she stood on the brink of black emptiness. To live without
+love; her whole nature, every life-habit, changed! _Oh, no, no,
+no_! So the cold water sets the suicide struggling for shore.
+
+Dear, dear! This would not do. Her nerves were getting the best of
+her; she was losing her own dignity and sweetness--was on the verge of
+a breakdown.
+
+But to say so would be to invoke doctors, pointless questions, futile
+drugs, and a period of acute affection from Sam--affection that took
+the form chiefly of expecting it of her.
+
+At times Judith thought of death as an escape, but she thought of no
+other as being any more in her own hands; like so many people, she
+quoted the Episcopal marriage-service as equal authority with the
+Bible. She was too live to droop and break as some do. She had not
+made herself the one armor that would have been effective--her own
+shell. Friction that does not callous, forms a sore. Her love, her
+utmost self, ached like an exposed nerve. She had not dreamed one's
+whole being could be so alive to suffering. She must be alone, to get
+a hand on herself and things again.
+
+At table one night she wanted them all to know she was going away, for
+several months perhaps, leaving her cousin Anne in charge. It was all
+arranged.
+
+The amazing innovation surprised Sam into speechlessness.
+
+Judith had had few vacations. There had always been the babies, of
+course. And Sam's consent had always been so hard to get. His first
+impulse about everything was to refuse, contradict, begrudge. Then
+certainly he mustn't be too easily convinced. After that he always
+moped through her preparations; counted and recounted the cost, and at
+the last perhaps gave her a handsome new bag when her old one was
+particularly convenient, and he had supplied only half she had asked
+for clothes; would hardly tell her good-by for desolate devotion;
+tracked her with letters full of loneliness, ailments, discomforts.
+When she had cut short her plans and hurried back, a bit quiet and
+unresponsive perhaps, "How truly gracious your unselfishness is, my
+dear!" he observed. "If it comes so hard to show me a little
+consideration, you would really better keep doing your own way."
+
+"I never do my own way."
+
+"No? Whose then? I fail to recognize the brand."
+
+"That's the trouble. I might as well stop trying."
+
+Now, she could not delay for, nor endure, the conventional comedy.
+
+Since he asked her no questions, she hastened to explain: "I want to
+rest absolutely. Not even to write letters. You need not bother to,
+either. Anne will let me know if I am needed. And if I need anything,
+you will be sure to hear."
+
+"Oh, sure." Sam was recovering.
+
+But he couldn't think she would really go, in that way at least. He
+thought he knew one good reason why not. Yet, vaguely on guard against
+her capacity for surprise, he did not risk the satire of asking her
+plans. To the last Judith hoped he would shame her a little by
+offering the money; and against his utter disregard her indignation
+rose slowly, steadily, deepening, widening, drowning out every other
+feeling for him.
+
+When, after their final breakfast, he kissed her good-by as for the
+morning only, she took her jewelry and silver, mementos of his
+self-indulgence in generosity, and pawned them, mailing him the
+tickets from the station where she piloted herself alone.
+
+She spent a month (in her rest-cure!), writing and destroying letters
+to him. There was no alternation of moods now. Nor was she seeking a
+solution of the problem; there was only one.
+
+At last a letter seemed to do: "It cannot hurt you to read, as much as
+me to write. But it must come. I can see now it has always been
+coming. Things cannot go on as they are. We are unable to improve them
+together. I will cast no blame. Perhaps some other woman would have
+called out a different side of you, or would have minded things less.
+It is enough that we do not belong together, because we are we and
+cannot change. We are not only ruining each other's happiness--that is
+already irrevocable,--we are ruining each other, and the children, and
+their futures. It is a question of the least wrong. And I am not
+coming back.
+
+"I want the children, all of them. But if you insist, you take Sam
+junior and I the girls--and the baby, of course, at least for the
+present. And you shall provide for us proportionately. There is no use
+pretending independence; I have given my strength and all the
+accomplishments I had to you and them. And there is no sense in the
+mock-heroics that I don't want your money. It isn't your money; it's
+ours, everything we have. I have borne your children, and saved and
+kept house and served and nursed for you and them. If you want to
+divide equally now, I will take that as my share forever. But we can't
+escape the fact that we have been married and have the children."
+
+She could get an answer in two days.
+
+But it did not come in two days, nor two weeks, nor three; while she
+burned herself out waiting.
+
+Moreover, her funds were running low. She had waves of the nausea of
+defeat, fevers of the desperation of the last stand.
+
+Then it occurred to her. Her armor had always been defensive. She had
+never stooped to neutralize his alkali with acid. But there was one
+weapon of offence she occasionally used. She wrote: "I am drawing on
+you to-day through your First National for a hundred and fifty. You
+will honor it, I think. And if I do not hear from you in a day or two
+I shall have Judge Harwood call on you as my attorney."
+
+The answer came promptly enough:--"My dear child, I couldn't make out
+what had struck you, so I hoped you would just feel better after
+blowing off steam and would get over your fit of nerves. Besides, I
+have nothing to say except to quote yourself: 'We can't escape the
+fact that we are married and have the children.' I know you too well
+to be afraid of your throwing off all obligations like that. It is
+impossible to fancy you airing our privacies." Bait? or a goad? Oh
+yes, he counted on her "womanly qualities"--but with no idea of
+masculine emulation! "If you need advice, think what either of our
+mothers would say." Her mother! Judith could hear her, "His doing
+wrong cannot make it right for you to," with logic so unanswerable one
+forgot to question its relevance. And his! Judith held her partly
+accountable; some women absolutely fostered tyranny. Their mothers,
+poor things! Occasionally their fathers were different, but so
+occasionally that now the times were. "This sudden mood strikes me as
+very remarkable. 'After all I have done--twelve years of grind to keep
+you from the brunt of the world; and now...! My dear child, do you
+realize that there are husbands with violent tempers, husbands who
+drink and gamble and worse?
+
+"I honored your draft. Do not try it again. And I advise you to use it
+to come home. We will have Dr. Hunter give you a tonic, and you will
+find you have fewer morbid fancies occupied with your duties. I shall
+look for you the end of the week." Surely Sam was moved quite out of
+himself, that he had no lashes of laughter for her. But the next was
+more in character: "Bridget threatens to leave. She does not work well
+under Anne. The children are not manageable under her, either. Little
+Judith is sallow and fretful. I suspect Anne gives her sweets between
+meals. I saw a moth flying in my closet to-day...."
+
+Judith pushed the letter away, fidgeted, yet smiled. How well they
+knew each other. And they used it only to sting and bully! Surely it
+could be put to better purpose. Had she tried _everything_? Had
+Sam fully understood? Sometimes she thought her early excuses had hurt
+too much for her to admit their truth: much of his unkindness was not
+intentional, only stupid; slow sympathy, dull sensibility; he did not
+suffer, nor comprehend, like a savage or a child. If the possibility
+of separation was new to her, would not he never have thought of it at
+all? But now, might he not see? Was not his unwonted self-defence
+itself admission of new enlightenment and approachability?
+
+She sat long in the increasing dusk. Exhausted with struggle,
+loneliness was on her, crying need of the children, return to the
+consideration of many things. Admitting that at times it was right to
+break everything, wrong not to, it was at least the last resort. Love,
+of course, was over irrevocably; but were there not some things worth
+saving? Could not she and Sam find some working basis?
+
+What had made their being together most intolerable to her was their
+persistence in the religion of a vanished god in whose empty
+ceremonies alone they could now take part together. Of the sacred
+image nothing was left but the feet of clay. Freed of that
+desecration, she could cure or endure everything else; her
+obligations, moreover, would hardly conflict at all.
+
+Looking back at the pressures of nature, society, events, Sam's
+persistence, she wondered at times if, from the beginning, she had
+been any more responsible for her marriage than for the color of her
+hair. There were many such explanations for Sam, too. Not that they
+made her like him any better, feel him any more akin. But it was true
+that between the fatalities of heredity and environment that "slight
+particular difference" that makes the self had but short tether for
+action and reaction. Oh, she could be generous enough to him if he did
+not have to be part of herself!
+
+She got up, lit the gas, shutting out the stars, and wrote: "I am
+coming back to make one more and one last effort. _Won't you_?"
+If he would only try!
+
+Sam met her with the magnanimity of forgiveness, the consciousness of
+kind forgetting. Her redeemed valuables were all in place. Everything
+should be the same, in spite of--And she put the back of her hand
+against his lips!
+
+When he dressed for dinner the salvage of the three balls, the spoils
+of war, were piled in his bureau drawer.
+
+Still he hoped better for the roses by her plate. She had the maid
+carry them out, explaining in her absence, "No gifts, please, Sam.
+Substitutes will not do any longer."
+
+Sam played with his fork, smiling, with lips only. How shockingly she
+showed suffering. Separation had made her appearance unfamiliar; he
+thought the change all recent. He took pains to compliment the
+immediate improvement in the pastry, to give her the servants' money
+unreminded as soon as they were alone.
+
+How characteristic! Judith thought, wearily, letting the bills lie
+where he laid them.
+
+"That's one of the things for us to settle, Sam," she said, in her new
+freedom and self-respect discarding the familiar little diplomacies by
+which she was used to soothe, prepare, manage, the lord of the hearth.
+"I am not going to ask for money in the future, nor depend on what you
+happen to give." The manner was a simple statement of fact. "You must
+make me an allowance through your bookkeeper."
+
+Sam was lounging through his cigar. "So that's it? Still?" He smiled
+confidentially at the smoke, puffing it from his lower lip. "As
+accurately as I can recollect, my dear, I have told you seven thousand
+and three times that I am not on a salary, and don't know from month
+to month what I will make."
+
+How unchanged everything was! Her determination stiffened. "But you
+know what you have made. Base it on the year before. Or have a written
+statement mailed me every month, and file my signature at the bank."
+
+Not quite unchanged; for Sam took the cigar from his mouth and turned
+slowly to look at her. If he had taken her return for capitulation and
+had met it according to his code, things were not fitting in. "Really,
+my dear! Really! What next? Evidently I have never done you justice;
+you have positive genius in the game--of monopoly; first thing,
+_I'll_ be begging from _you_."
+
+Well, why not, as fairly? and why should he think better of her than
+of himself? But it was too old to go over again. For a breath she
+waited to see her further way. She had not planned this as the issue,
+but the moment was obviously crucial, and offered what, in
+international politics already awry, would constitute a good technical
+opportunity. If her mirage of regeneration, her hope of an
+understanding, perhaps even her love, had flung up any last afterglow
+in this home-coming, it was over now. Indeed, now it seemed an old
+grief, the present but confirmation concerning a lover ten years lost
+at sea. She saw the whole man now clearly, the balance of her
+accusations and excuses; he had neither the modern spirit of equality,
+nor the medieval quixotism of honor and chivalry; appeal merely
+stirred the elemental tyranny of strength and masculinity, held as a
+"divine right"; weakness tempted an instinctive cruelty, half
+unconscious, half defiant.
+
+It was Sam who spoke first, abruptly, not laughing. Sam who was never
+angry, was angry now. "I never have understood you in some ways. How a
+woman like you can forever bring money between us! How you got tainted
+with this modern female anarchy! You seem to forget that _I_ made
+the money, it is _mine_. There is bound to be discussion; I never
+knew any one so determined to have everything his own way. All the
+same," the defence rested its case, "it takes two to quarrel, and I
+won't."
+
+No, his defence was only admission of conscious weakness. He was
+afraid--of the solution she had discarded. She did not go back to it
+now. But now she saw the way, the only way, to accomplish
+reconstruction.
+
+Judith looked at him steadily. Her voice was deadly quiet. "I am sure
+I have made myself quite plain. We will never discuss this again. You
+can let me know in the morning which arrangement you choose."
+
+They faced each other with level eyes.
+
+And Sam's shifted.
+
+He never had real nerve, she realized; they didn't--that kind. How had
+she managed to love him so long?
+
+Late that night he knocked at her door with a formal proposition:
+Would that do?--dumbly. She changed a point or two: _That_ would
+do, and signified good night. Sam, looking at her face, turned away
+from it, hesitated, turned back, broke. Fear increased his admiration,
+and, to do him justice, the fear was not wholly for conventions and
+comforts; the man had certain broad moralities and loyalties. A reflex
+muscular action had set in to regain what he had lost. "Judith!
+Judith!" he begged.
+
+Her raised hand stopped him. "You are too late, Sam."
+
+"My dear, you mustn't get the idea that I don't love you still."
+
+"Love has nothing to do with it any more. Besides, it is never any use
+to talk of love without justice."
+
+He went out, dazed and aggrieved. He had always thought they got along
+as well as most people. _He_ had not been cherishing grudges.
+
+Womanlike, having met the emergency gallantly, after it was all over
+Judith collapsed. The day of reckoning for which she had so long been
+running up an account was on her. But the growing assurance rallied
+her, that her going away and her coming back were equally means to her
+success in failure.
+
+The reality of their marriage could not have been saved. But they had
+the children; and to the children was restored much of what their
+father had largely spoiled in the first place, and she nearly
+forfeited in the second. For the fact was that Sam did better; the
+despot is always a moral coward, and always something of the slave to
+a master. Moreover, her growing invulnerability to hurt through him
+set, in large measure, the attitude of the household; everybody was
+more comfortable. She discounted his opinions and complaints; but, in
+considering the welfare of the greatest number, she sacrificed as
+little as possible his individual comforts. His interests she studied.
+And for the rest, she let him go his way and went hers.
+
+Life is a perfect equation: if something is added or subtracted,
+something is subtracted or added, so long as there _is_ life.
+Judith got her poise again in time, as strong natures do after any
+death; with some fibres weakened past mending, gray, but calm. If his
+side of her nature was stunted, she seemed to blossom all the more
+richly in other ways. She loved her children in proportion as she had
+suffered and worked for them. After her domestic years, like so many
+women, she took fresh start, physically and mentally. Her executive
+ability found public outlet. She could admit friends again. Freedom
+from the corrosion of antagonism was happiness. Without the struggle
+to keep that love which must ask so much of its object, she could give
+Sam more of that altruism which asks nothing.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE GLASS DOOR
+
+BY MARY TRACY EARLE
+
+
+Charlotte and Emory Blake lived at the old Blake place, on the little
+plateau at the foot of the Colton hill, in a vine-covered stone
+cottage. The place had belonged to old George Blake. When it came into
+Emory's hands he sold it to Uncle Billy Kerr, and used the money for a
+course in a school of pharmacy. Later, Charlotte, who was then
+Charlotte Hastings, bought it, and, after her marriage, finished
+paying for it out of its own products, while her husband talked
+politics or played chess in his drug-store. It was said that when
+Blake was doing either of these things he was as likely as not to keep
+a customer standing a half-hour before waiting on him,--and this not
+so much out of interest in his discussion or his game as from complete
+lack of interest in the business of selling drugs.
+
+North Pass correctly interpreted this general nonchalance of Blake's
+as a sign that he was an unwilling partner in the matrimonial venture
+he had undertaken. Indeed, it was known that the engagement had hung
+fire for years through no fault of Charlotte's, and everybody had
+noticed that such mildly loverlike enthusiasm for her society as Blake
+had shown before he went to the school of pharmacy had disappeared
+from his manner when he returned. Charlotte had told people that they
+should marry as soon as he came home, yet the wedding did not come off
+for two years. During this time it was noticed that although she held
+her head high and was fertile in good reasons for the delay, her
+girlish look left her, her features sharpened, and her speech
+developed an acid reaction; it was at this time, too, that she
+bargained with Uncle Billy Kerr for the old Blake place, and also
+borrowed money from the old man to put up a new house. When people saw
+the house going up it was generally supposed that she was preparing
+either to rent it or to live in it as an old maid; but when it was
+completed, to the surprise of every one, Charlotte and Blake were
+married and moved in.
+
+The morning after the wedding Blake was in his drug-store playing
+chess as languidly as ever, but Charlotte spent her whole day planting
+a vegetable-garden, in a mood of unreckoning exaltation such as rarely
+comes to a woman of her nature, and never comes to her but once. She
+had felt no such blissful security when Blake and she were first
+engaged. Blake was weak. She had felt it intensely even when her
+infatuation for him was too fresh to permit her to reason, and a weak
+man while unmarried is peculiarly liable to changes of affection. But,
+on the other hand, a weak man once safely married is completely in the
+power of his wife; during the last two years of their engagement
+certain illusions regarding herself and Blake had fallen from her
+eyes; she had stated both those facts plainly to herself, and they had
+helped her to decide upon a course of action. There had been moments
+when she had despised herself for using her stronger will to coerce
+Blake into the fulfilment of his engagement, but on the morning after
+the wedding these moments were forgotten, and, as she hoed and raked
+and planted in the brisk air and the bright spring sunshine, her whole
+existence seemed uplifted by the knowledge that she and Blake at last
+belonged unquestionably to each other; that every output of her
+strength was for their common comfort, and would continue to be as
+long as they both should live.
+
+As the first year of married life goes, Charlotte's first year was
+fairly successful. She knew Blake's faults already, and had made up
+her mind to them, and if there was a frank indifference in his quiet
+languor, she had made up her mind to that, too. He was never unkind,
+and there were times when some fresh evidence of her devotion to him
+would touch him into an appreciation that was almost responsive. And
+there were other times when she would find him looking at her with an
+expression which any other observer might have classed as pity, but
+which she counted as tenderness. On the whole, it seemed to her that
+time was bringing them together, as she had counted that it would, and
+with this hope her face lost its sharp outlines.
+
+Her first heavy chagrin was at the time of her baby's birth. When
+Blake came into the room to inquire for her, and she turned down the
+bed-cover to show him the little bundle at her side, a look of pain
+and aversion flashed across his face, and he moved away, begging her
+not to show the baby to him until it was older. On another day she
+tried to make him select a name for it, and he refused.
+
+"Call it anything you please," he said at first, but she would not let
+him go at that.
+
+"I've been thinking," she suggested, with a hesitation that was
+foreign to her,--"I've been thinking of calling her for your
+mother--Dorcas."
+
+They were alone in the room, and he was sitting by her bed, but
+looking away from her into the corner of the room, while she looked
+anxiously at him. At her words he started, flashing a keen glance at
+her. "Why should we name her that?" he asked.
+
+There was something so sharply disturbed in his manner, and his
+distaste for the idea was so evident, that Charlotte flushed in
+extreme embarrassment.
+
+"I thought you might like to," she explained.
+
+"Well, I wouldn't,--I--I don't think the name's pretty in itself," he
+declared; adding, with a great effort to speak naturally, "I'd rather
+name her for you."
+
+Charlotte's lips came together so closely that all the unpleasant
+lines showed around them. "I certainly shall not name her for myself,"
+she said. "You must think of some other name."
+
+Blake got to his feet. "That's the only one I can think of," he said.
+"If you don't like it, you can take some other. It's your affair, not
+mine."
+
+Charlotte's eyes flashed and then filled with tears, for she was very
+weak. "If I were asking you to father some other man's child, you
+couldn't act more as if you despised me," she sobbed.
+
+He turned as he was leaving the room and gave her a long look full of
+exasperation, repugnance, and despair. "You are quite mistaken," he
+said. "I don't despise you. I despise myself."
+
+For half an hour Charlotte sobbed, her hands clenched at her sides,
+her tears flowing unchecked; then, quite suddenly, she was calm, and,
+drying her disfigured face, she began to take account of stock. All
+that she had before, she reasoned, she still had. The gains of a year
+might seem to be lost in the outbreak of a moment, yet they still
+existed as a solid foundation to build upon. There would be constraint
+at first, but the effort of daily patience would overcome it in time;
+moreover, there was the baby. Blake might refuse to look at her now,
+but as she grew and acquired the irresistible graces of a healthy
+babyhood he would be obliged to see and to yield to her. A man of his
+nature could not live in the house with a child and not love it. She
+touched the small form at her side, as if to assure herself that this
+ally which she had so suffered for had not deserted her. Yes, she had
+more hope now than ever before, she told herself, and her eyes shone
+with a passionate tenderness, though her lips were set in a hard line.
+Suddenly the line broke into a smile.
+
+"I'll name her Hope," she said.
+
+When Hope was two months old she began her mission, and when she had
+reached six months Blake was vying with Charlotte in his devotion to
+her. He even plucked up a little interest in his business; sometimes
+he talked over his place with his wife, and the words which had passed
+between them over the naming of the child, though unforgotten, seemed
+so far in the past that Charlotte's courage strengthened with each
+day. The sense of security which had marked the first months of her
+married life did not return, but she could feel herself making a
+strong fight against fate to hold what she had, and, if she were never
+entirely certain of the issue, at least she fought with the obstinacy
+which has no knowledge of yielding. Sometimes even her love for Blake
+seemed to lose itself in this obstinacy, and her tenderness towards
+her child seemed the only womanly sentiment left in her; but more
+often her love for her husband mounted high and unmixed above the
+other feelings as the tremendous, inexplicable passion of her life.
+
+Hope's attainment of six months was marked by an unusual display of
+energy on the part of Blake. The first cold weather of autumn had
+come, and when the house doors were closed, Charlotte was surprised to
+hear her husband declare that the sitting-room, where the baby would
+spend most of her time in winter, was poorly lighted, and needed to
+have a glass door substituted for the wooden one which opened on to
+the front porch. Still more to her surprise, the door was delivered
+from an adjoining town the next day, and on the following morning
+Blake rose earlier than usual and hung it before going down to his
+store. It was the first time he had lifted his hand towards the
+improvement of Charlotte's house.
+
+He whistled boyishly while he measured and fitted in the hinges, and
+when it came to holding the door while the hinges were screwed in
+place, he called to Charlotte. She came, with lips as usual closed
+very tight, but with cheeks flushed very pink, and when the work was
+finished she was so atremble that she had to sit down for a moment
+before she could put breakfast on the table.
+
+To give a reason for the delay, she kept looking at the door. "The
+room, is perfect now," she said.
+
+Blake swung the new acquisition back and forth, and latched it once or
+twice to make sure that it was perfectly adjusted. When he was
+satisfied he glanced at his wife.
+
+"It will give our baby the sunlight," he said, and their eyes met for
+a moment.
+
+All that day, whenever Charlotte could bring her work into the
+sitting-room, she sat facing the glass door. She was not exactly
+happy; she was too strangely excited for happiness; but she was keenly
+awakened and alert. Every nerve in her seemed keyed up to its ultimate
+tension, and if the shadow of a cloud passed, even if a red leaf fell
+outside, she looked out expectantly through the door.
+
+It was middle afternoon when, on looking up, she saw a young woman
+crossing the porch, leading a little child. Charlotte jumped to her
+feet, then reseated herself and waited for the tap on the glass. The
+visitors were strangers to her, and though she could not have told
+why, as she sat staring at them through the door, her mouth suddenly
+set into the lines of indomitable obstinacy which had grown so deep
+around it in the past three years. When she finally crossed the room
+to open the door, she walked slowly and deliberately, as if she had
+some definite purpose in mind and meant to accomplish it.
+
+The woman on the outside was the first to speak. "Does Mr. Emory Blake
+live here?" she asked.
+
+"He does. I am his wife. What can I do for you?" asked Charlotte.
+
+The woman gave a little cry and drew back. "Oh no!" she said,
+breathlessly.
+
+Charlotte stood, white and stiff and silent, while the other looked
+about her in a despairing helplessness. She was a frail-looking woman,
+worn with fatigue and the excited emotions with which timidity spurs
+itself to action. She looked as if she longed to sit down somewhere,
+and as if perhaps she could have more courage seated, but Charlotte
+made no motion to invite her to enter. After a while the newcomer
+brought her frightened eyes back to the set face in the doorway.
+
+"I am so sorry for you," she said, timidly. "I am his wife."
+
+A shiver of resentment ran convulsively through Charlotte's muscles.
+"You can be sorry for yourself," she said, roughly.
+
+"But he married me while he was at the school of pharmacy," the other
+cried, weakly. "I was Nettie Trent. I clerked, and I boarded where he
+did, and we fell in love and married. He told me about you. You are
+Charlotte Hastings, aren't you, that wanted to marry him before he
+left home?"
+
+Charlotte moved her dry lips soundlessly once or twice before she
+could speak. Then her masterful spirit rose to a new task. She drew
+herself up and looked down gravely, almost compassionately, upon the
+woman who had been Nettie Trent.
+
+"I was Charlotte Hastings before my marriage," she said. "I am sorry
+to be the one to hurt you, but you have been cruelly treated. I was
+married to Emory Blake before he left home for the school."
+
+The smaller woman gave a little gasp and stood silent, while
+Charlotte, with the fire in her veins scorching her cheeks and eyes
+and almost smothering her breath, waited for her to offer some
+resistance, to assert her own claim, or to ask for proof of the
+statement which denied it; but Nettie said nothing, and after a moment
+her gaze dropped from Charlotte's and she began to sob. Charlotte took
+her by the hand and led her into the room.
+
+Neither of them spoke for a long time. Nettie sat with her face buried
+in her hands. On one side her child tugged at her dress; on the other,
+little Hope slept in her cradle. Charlotte stood pale and tall,
+watching all three.
+
+At last Nettie looked up. "I suppose you think I ought to hate
+him--now I've found out," she said, "but I don't; I just can't. When
+we were together he was so sweet to me. I don't think he meant to harm
+me. He must have thought it would come out all right somehow."
+
+"If I were in your place," Charlotte said, slowly, "I should hate him."
+
+Nettie wiped her eyes and drew her child up into her arms. "But what
+he did was almost as bad for you as it was for me," she urged, "and
+you don't hate him."
+
+Charlotte turned suddenly and walked  to her own baby's cradle. "Oh, I
+don't know," she said, in a low voice.
+
+After a moment she came back and sat down. "I must ask you some
+questions," she said, gravely. "Is this your only child?"
+
+The young woman nodded. Her lips were quivering. "Named Dorcas," she
+said, brokenly,--"for his mother."
+
+Charlotte flushed and the lines about her lips deepened. "Does
+he--provide for you?" she asked.
+
+The other nodded once more. "He sends me money once in a while. I
+wrote him not to worry when he didn't have it. I'm clerking again."
+
+Charlotte made no comment. She was thinking how strange it was that
+this other woman, who was a frail, poor-spirited thing, should be
+ready to support herself and child out of love for Blake. In
+Charlotte's mind, which was pitilessly clear and active, there was
+room for a passing wonder at the mysterious power which so weak a man
+could exert over women, even without his will. She was wondering, too,
+if her own passion for him would ever rise again. At present she was
+far from loving him; she felt only a bitter resentment, a desire to
+punish him by holding to him, and a towering obstinacy and pride which
+refused to be set at fault and put to shame. While she was boldly
+examining and analyzing herself she glanced at the clock to see how
+long before he could possibly return; the time was ample, and she
+continued to sit silent. Presently her baby woke, and she rose and
+went to it.
+
+As she lifted it from its cradle, Nettie started up and came towards
+her. Hope hid her face against her mother's neck, but after an instant
+turned shyly to steal a glance at the stranger.
+
+Nettie sat down again, trembling. "Your baby is like him," she said.
+
+"Very like him," Charlotte answered, and as the baby nestled up to her
+again, she dropped her cheek against it and tears came into her
+eyes--scalding tears that seemed to sear their way up from the depths
+of her heart.
+
+Suddenly the other wife leaned forward, eagerly suspicious. "You have
+no other children--_older_?" she asked.
+
+Charlotte looked round blankly, her eyes still wet. "_Other_
+children?" she echoed, but Nettie's sharpened face brought her to
+herself. She wiped her eyes on Hope's dress. "I lost--a child," she
+said.
+
+"Oh," Nettie murmured, "I'm sorry I asked you. It was older than
+Dorcas?"
+
+Charlotte stood at bay, with her child strained close to her. She
+nodded.
+
+"Oh!" Nettie murmured again, in a shaken voice. She looked at
+Charlotte in despairing envy. "What is this baby named?" she asked.
+
+"This one," Charlotte answered, "we call Hope."
+
+She seated herself and began trotting the child to a slow measure.
+There were still a few questions which she wished to ask, but the
+other's simple acceptance of all she said inspired her with cool
+deliberation. There was plenty of time, and she wished to make no
+mistake. She must be sure of her own safety, and after that she must
+do anything she could for the comfort of the other woman. It would
+probably be very little.
+
+"How did you get here?" she inquired, finally. "You must have asked
+somebody where Mr. Blake lived."
+
+"No, I didn't have to ask. He'd written me he was boarding with a
+woman that lived on his old place," Nettie said, "and I knew where
+that was because he'd often told me all about where he grew up and
+just the road he used to take from the station to the house, and I
+remembered every word of it. I didn't like to go to him at his store
+for fear there would be loafers around, so I came right to his house.
+I thought I wouldn't mind telling the woman that I was his wife, if
+she asked me any questions while I waited for him."
+
+"You were very wise," Charlotte said, dryly.
+
+Nettie settled back in her chair, rocking her little girl, who had
+grown restless and impatient, and as she rocked she began to pour out
+her heart. "You must think queer of me to sit down here with you like
+this and not to be in a rush to go," she began, "but I feel like I've
+got to sit still and--and kind of get my breath before I can start
+out. I've been so afraid of it that it doesn't seem like I ought to be
+surprised, but I tell you it pretty near kills me now I know it for
+sure." She paused and stroked a stray lock of hair away from her
+child's eyes. "My baby's like him, too," she said, irrelevantly. "My
+baby's just as like him as yours is."
+
+Charlotte glanced again at the clock. "How do your friends treat you?"
+she asked, abruptly. "Do they believe you were really married or not?"
+
+A bright flush sprang over Nettie's face. "They believed it at first,
+of course, just the way I did," she answered, quickly, "but lately
+they've been suspecting something. It was what they said made me get
+uneasy. I don't distrust folks right quick myself."
+
+"And none of them tried to make inquiries for you?"--Charlotte put the
+question seriously, all her nerves tight strung.
+
+"Oh no," Nettie said. "I don't have any family or any friends close
+enough to me to take trouble like that."
+
+"And I presume you're glad now that they didn't," Charlotte said. "In
+your place I'd rather find it out for myself."
+
+"Oh, I'd much rather," Nettie answered. "I couldn't have stood having
+other people find it out, and I'm not going to give anybody that knows
+me a chance to find out now. You see, I've been afraid of this so long
+that I've had time to make my plans and to save up money a little.
+Before I came here I gave up my place and told folks I was going to
+join Mr. Blake; so I'll not go back. I'll go to New York and get work
+there."
+
+Charlotte looked at her keenly. "I suppose you're depending on Mr.
+Blake to help you?" she said.
+
+Again the color sprang into Nettie's face. "Oh no, ma'am," she
+answered. "I couldn't let him help me now. I did wrong to live with
+him, but I didn't know he was married, so I don't feel like one of
+that kind of women; but if I was to take money from him now, I--I
+shouldn't feel that I was raising my child honest."
+
+Charlotte lifted her baby so that it hid her face. "For him to help
+you would only be right," she said, from its shelter. "He owes
+you--money, at least."
+
+The other shook her head. "I couldn't bear it," she said, chokingly.
+"Oh, you can't understand--nobody could understand unless she'd been
+through what I have, being left before my baby came, and having people
+ask me close questions, and then, little by little, losing my own
+faith. You can't see why, but if I was to take money from him now, it
+would make me feel my shame, and I don't want to,--I want to feel
+honest."
+
+Charlotte lowered Hope to her knee. "Perhaps I can understand that--in
+a way," she said, with twitching lips.
+
+Nettie looked into her face with a helpless, childish perception of
+the suffering shown in its drawn lines. "You're so good to me--I
+believe you feel 'most as bad as I do," she declared; "and if I were
+you, I wouldn't say a word to anybody about my having been here.
+Nobody knows it. I didn't have to ask my way. There aren't many women
+would treat me the way you do, and I won't stay here any longer making
+you feel bad." She rose, still holding her heavy child in her arms.
+"There isn't anything more we've got to say to each other, is there?"
+she asked.
+
+"Wait a moment," Charlotte said. She, too, rose, and as she stood
+looking at the other woman, so much smaller, so much weaker, so
+blindly trustful, and so patient, her heart, which had sunk in shame,
+rose suddenly in pity; at that moment if she had opened her lips the
+truth would have escaped from them, but her stubborn will held her
+lips closed.
+
+Nettie eyed her with troubled uncertainty, but after a moment moved
+towards the door.
+
+"Well, I must go," she declared.
+
+"Wait a moment," Charlotte said again. Her voice was so dry and
+strange that after she had spoken she paused to moisten her lips. Her
+limbs trembled, and in the glass door which she had opened against the
+wall she could see the ashen whiteness of her face.
+
+Nettie turned, and the two women confronted each other, each holding
+her child.
+
+Charlotte put a hand up to her throat. "I have money I could give
+you," she offered. "Not his, my own."
+
+The other shook her head. "Oh, I couldn't," she exclaimed. "Anyway, I
+don't need it. I've saved up a good deal. And you've done better than
+give me money; you've been kind to me." She put out her hand with a
+little appealing gesture and took Charlotte's, which lay cold in it.
+
+"You'd better go," Charlotte broke out. "You'll meet him coming home
+if you wait any longer. Here; I'll tell you how to go a roundabout way."
+
+She walked out on to the piazza and led the way down the steps and
+round to the back of the house, where she stood giving short, sharp
+directions, when across her hurried words came Blake's voice calling
+from the front:
+
+"Charlotte! Charlotte! Where are you and Hope?"
+
+For the first time since they had lived together Blake had come home
+before his hour.
+
+The two women looked at each other. Charlotte pointed to the path
+which hid itself quickly in the shelter of an orchard. "Run," she
+whispered. "I'll keep him in the house."
+
+But Nettie stood as if paralyzed, her eyes widening and filling with
+tears. "Oh, you've been so good--mayn't I see him--mayn't I bid him
+good-by?" she begged.
+
+Charlotte lifted her voice to answer Blake. "Yes, Emory; stay where
+you are; I'm bringing Hope," she called. "Hurry!" she whispered to the
+other woman. "It won't do you any good to see him. Think of what he's
+done. Hurry, I say!"
+
+Nettie put her hand up to her head. "I--I can't," she murmured. She
+swayed a little, and before Charlotte could reach out to catch her she
+had slipped to the ground.
+
+At the same moment Blake came out of the back door of the house. For
+an instant he stared in bewilderment. Then he was at Nettie's side and
+had lifted her in his arms.
+
+Charlotte saw his face as he kissed her. A moment later she was
+indoors on her knees beside her bed, with her face buried in the cover
+and her hands clutching it.
+
+A cold wind swept through the house. Front and back the doors stood
+open. The sun was already low in the west and the evening promised to
+be chill. Presently Charlotte rose. She closed the front door
+carefully, wrapped Hope in a cloak, and, with her child on her arm,
+passed out at the back.
+
+Blake had stretched his wife on the back porch and was bending over
+her. He looked up, and at sight of Charlotte's face he straightened
+himself.
+
+She paused an instant. "I'm starting to harness the horse," she said.
+"You can catch the night train at Antioch if I drive fast."
+
+He stood silent, his face working. It was as if strength were being
+born in him to say something in his own defence.
+
+"She has plans," Charlotte added. "You'd better pick up some of your
+things in the house."
+
+She passed on, and laying Hope in the bottom of the wagon, harnessed
+the horse with swift, shaking hands. The sun was out of sight when she
+drove back to the house. Nettie sat on the steps staring dazedly
+around her. Blake was not in sight.
+
+"Are you ready?" Charlotte called.
+
+He came out, carrying an old handbag. At the step he hesitated.
+
+She pointed to the back seat, where he was to sit with Nettie and the
+child, and after an instant he helped them in.
+
+The ride was long and cold. Night fell, and the stars came out in
+remote, hostile legions. The children slept. Occasionally Nettie and
+Blake advised together in hushed voices. Charlotte whipped the horse.
+
+As they drew near to the end of their journey Blake leaned forward and
+touched her arm.
+
+"What about the store?" he asked.
+
+Charlotte broke her long silence harshly. "Your stock will cover what
+you owe on it, I guess."
+
+At the station she stayed in the wagon. Blake took his wife and Dorcas
+into the waiting-room and came back for his bag. Charlotte had it
+ready for him, resting on the wheel.
+
+He did not offer to take it at first, but stood in the beam from the
+station window, trying to speak.
+
+"Well?" she said.
+
+"I guess there's not much I can say," he choked out.
+
+For a long time she made no answer. Then her breath came with an
+unexpected gasp. "It wasn't your fault--I made you do it." For a
+moment more they were silent. Then she shifted the sleeping baby
+towards him.
+
+"Don't you want to kiss her?" she asked.
+
+He bent his face to the child with a sudden passionate tenderness. As
+he looked up, his wet eyes met Charlotte's, which were full of tears.
+
+She put out her hand to him. "I guess I've been hard on you," she said.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ELIZABETH AND DAVIE
+
+BY MURIEL CAMPBELL DYAR
+
+
+When the town doctor, coming out to Turkey Ridge, had given as his
+verdict that Elizabeth's one chance of life--he could not say how slim
+the chance in that plain room, having within it the pleasant noise of
+bees and the spring sun on the floor--lay in her going to the great
+hospital in the city, it was Davie who fell to sobbing in his worn
+hands.
+
+"I'll jest die at home, Davie," she said in her quiet voice.
+
+"You'll take the money put away for our buryin' an' go, dearie!" Davie
+cried out fiercely. His gaunt frame, stooped as a scholar's, shook so
+pitifully with his grief, she had not the heart to gainsay him, but
+after she promised him it only shook the more.
+
+"Why, Davie," she chided, brightly, "ain't I always been a-wantin' to
+see the city streets with the hurryin' people, 'n' tall houses, 'n'
+churches with towers on 'em? They ain't many folks on th' Ridge'll hev
+sech a lettin'-out as mine."
+
+"If I only had 'nough saved to go too," he mourned.
+
+She answered him simply: "An' who'd I hev to write to me, with you
+goin' 'long? It'll seem terrible nice to hear from somebody. I always
+did love letters. Sence Cousin Tabby died I ain't had one."
+
+"You won't be afeard travellin' so far by yourself?" he asked then,
+awestruck. Davie had the diffidence of the untravelled. Few men ever
+left the small farming district of Turkey Ridge for a journey; but if
+one did so, and the trip were long, he had thereafter a bolder
+bearing.
+
+"Afeard?" She gave a little trembling laugh which would have deceived
+no one but a dull old man, now smitten suddenly by sorrow. "The idee
+o' my bein' afeard! They ain't a mite o' danger o' gettin' run over er
+lost er nothin'--not a mite."
+
+Under the pretext of bending to hunt for a lost pin she hid the sad
+fear in her eyes--a fear of all the greater world which was beyond
+Davie, from whom she had not been parted since her marriage.
+
+But throughout the time of her preparation she went bravely. She would
+herself have put in order for leaving the house kept spotless even
+while her disease had crept upon her, but the news of the doctor's
+words had gone up through the group of farmhouses, huddled like timid
+sheep on the road, and the kindly neighbor women left their own work,
+very heavy in the spring-time, to take her household burdens. In a
+community where no great things ever came save two, and these two
+birth and death, misfortune drew soul to soul. Because of her
+gathering weakness she yielded that others should do the tasks which
+had always hitherto been hers, but she could not be prevented from the
+packing of the little leather trunk that had held her wedding things.
+"You're jest makin' me out a foolish, lazy body," she said, her lips
+seen quivering for the first time. Then, fearful lest she should seem
+ungrateful for the kindness of her friends, she made haste to ask
+where, in the trunk, to put her staid, coarse linen, and where her
+best cap with its fine bow of lavender ribbon, and would they if they
+were she take her mending-basket along in hopes there might be moments
+for Davie's socks?
+
+Many a loving offering was tucked in with her belongings to go with
+her. Now blue-eyed Annie Todd knocked at the door, bringing a bunch of
+healing herbs from her mother, who could not leave for reason of her
+nursing baby. Then old Mr. Bayne drove into the dooryard with a pair
+of knitted bedroom slippers, wrapped carefully in a newspaper. Next
+Kerrenhappuch Green, perturbed in his long jaw, pottered down to fetch
+the pinball which his daughter had forgotten when she came to help.
+Mrs. Glegg, who had lately lost her idiot son, Benje, gave a roll of
+soft flannel. Miss Panthea Potter contributed a jar of currant jam,
+three years sealed, and pretended that she was not moved. The minister
+copied out a verse from the Psalms and fixed it so cunningly about a
+gold piece that, proud as a girl in her poverty, Elizabeth could not
+refuse the gentle gift. It was he, too, possessing the advantage of a
+clerkly hand, who arranged for Elizabeth's admission to the free ward
+of the hospital, and wrote to his niece Mary, living by good fortune
+in the city, to have a care over her while there. He told that Mary
+had a kind, good-humored face, and was herself country born.
+
+"I'll be better able to thank ye all fittenly," the white-haired old
+woman said, "when I come back to ye well 'n' strong."
+
+The last day before she was to start, all that was possible being done
+for her, she and Davie were left to themselves, at the minister's
+suggestion. Forty years before, Davie had brought her to the house,
+yet in her soft marriage dress. The wedding journey had been the
+coming up at sunset to the Ridge from her home in the valley, behind
+his plough-horses, lifting their plodding hoofs as in the furrows. On
+the clean straw in the back of the wagon rested her small trunk and a
+hive of bees, shrouded in calico. Tied to the tail-piece was a
+homesick heifer. While he unhitched the horses and placed her dowry,
+she entered his door to lay off her bonnet tremulously in the
+living-room.
+
+Alone with the clumsy carpet-loom which made his winter's work, and
+his tired week-day hat hanging from a peg against the wall, she had a
+deep moment. Joining him on the door-step, they sat side by side
+watching in silence the light die over the scanty fields handed down
+to him by his father, who had grown bent and weary in wrenching a
+living from them as he was aging. Neither was young; both were marked
+by the swift homeliness of the hard-working; but the look on their
+faces was that which falls when two have gotten an immortal youth and
+beauty in each other's hearts.
+
+It had been their custom on each succeeding spring to go, if the
+anniversary ware pleasant, to sit again at evening on the door-step
+with the sweetness of the straggling spice-bush upon it. Now as they
+sat there a silence came upon them like that of their wedding-day.
+Elizabeth broke it first.
+
+"Davie," she whispered, "if I'd say I'd jest like to run through the
+house a minute by myself, you won't think it queer?"
+
+"No, no," answered Davie, something gripping his chest.
+
+She went slowly, her slippers flapping back and forth on her heels.
+She sought first the tidy kitchen with its scoured tins, then the
+living-room with the old loom still in the corner, then the parlor.
+Here she drew a long, shaken breath. Every Ridge woman loved her
+parlor with an inherited devotion. Many unrecorded self-sacrifices
+furnished it. Elizabeth's lay hallowed to her. It was her Place
+Beautiful. There was a pale, striped paper on the sacred walls, and on
+the floor an ingrain carpet, dully blue. At the windows were ruffled
+white curtains--the ruffles and sheer lengths of lawn had lain long in
+her dreams. The mantel-piece held a row of shells, their delicate pink
+linings showing, and on either end china vases filled with sprays of
+plumy grass. Above was the marriage certificate, neatly framed. On the
+centre-table were sundry piteous ornaments, deeply rooted in her
+affections. The chairs and the single sofa, angular and sombre, were
+set about with proud precision. They had been the result of years of
+careful hoarding of egg-money, and were, to Elizabeth, the achievement
+of her living.
+
+Holding on to the banister, she climbed the stairs forlornly to the
+upper chambers. In her own room Davie found her by and by. She was
+sitting up very straight in her rocker, a baby's long clothes on her
+lap. Her expression of pain was gone, and in its stead was the strange
+peace of a woman who sees her first-born. She looked up absently at
+her husband.
+
+"Melindy Ethel," her voice crooned, "was so little 'n' warm."
+
+"You must jest lay down 'n' rest, dearie," he urged, anxiously. He
+took the things from her and laid them back, one by one, in the lower
+drawer of the high, glass-knobbed bureau whence she had taken them.
+The thin stuff of the little, listless sleeves and yellowed skirts
+clung to his roughened fingers; he freed them with gentleness.
+
+"An' her hair would hev curled," she said, when the last piece was in.
+
+Davie had been kneeling among his vegetables that summer-time long
+since that Elizabeth had come to stand beside him in their garden,
+pushing from her forehead her heavy falling hair, then dark, in the
+way she had if very glad. Seeing that she had something to tell him,
+and wondering at her eyes, he waited for her to speak. She did not
+keep him long. For an instant her serene glance went up to the blue
+sky. Then her hands stretched out to him.
+
+"Davie," she began, "that old cradle of your ma's--" She broke off
+shyly.
+
+Davie stayed on his knees. He could not at once answer her, but could
+only grope toward her blindly. Presently her touch calmed him.
+
+"It rocks from head to foot," he quavered in joy, "'stead o' from side
+to side--the motion's better for 'em."
+
+Striving to go well through her troubled months until her hour should
+come, Elizabeth smiled often at Davie, and sometimes the smile was a
+tender laugh in her throat--Davie clumping excitedly over the farm about
+his work; Davie bringing home from town the cautious purchase of a child's
+sack, and crying out in exultation, "It's got tossels on it!" Davie
+storing singular treasures in a box in the garret--seed-pods which
+rattled when you shook them; scarlet wood-berries, gay and likely to
+please; a tin whistle, a rubber ball, a doll with joints, and a folded
+paper having written on it, "For Croup a poultis of onions and heeting
+the feet"; and Davie, his importance dropped from him as a garment,
+coming to put his head down against her shoulder.
+
+"I dun'no'," he said to her, "as a man better feel too uppity 'bout
+becomin' a pa. It's an awful solemn undertakin', an' the more you
+think it over the solemner it gets. Seems to me it's somethin' like
+playin' the fiddle. There can't jest anybody rush in an' play a real
+good time on a fiddle--takes a terrible lot o' preparin' 'n' hard work
+to tech them little strings to music. An' mebbe the man that can tech
+'em the best is him that's always been clean 'n' honest 'n' real
+grave. I'm beginnin' to feel so no 'count--why, I dun'no' a note o'
+fiddle music!"
+
+"Oh, Davie," she had comforted, "it don't seem to me that the man jest
+_born_ good 'd play the sweetest, but the one who had fought for
+things."
+
+While she turned the tiny hems and ran the wonderful seams, Davie,
+winter-bound, sat on the tall stool before his loom, the bobbins wound
+with rags for a hit and miss. Weaving eked out a slender income. His
+father's finger-tips, too, had become stained by colors of warp and
+woof after the end of the pig-killing had been announced by the
+children racing with the bladders through the thin snow.
+
+On Christmas day he brought down the cradle from the garret, and wiped
+its gathered dust from it with a white cloth. To please him, Elizabeth
+spread it ready with the sheets and blankets. The sight of the pillow
+unmanned him. "The idee o' that stove smokin' so Christmas!" he
+choked. She turned to him quickly. Their seamed hands met as in that
+joyous moment among the vegetables, but this time they clasped above a
+dusted cradle. In view of the increased expenses before the household
+they made each other no gifts; only Davie put a fir bough and a
+teething-ring in his box.
+
+Then he wove as though the clack of his shuttle were the beat of a
+drum going by, then in a vast impatience, then with the bridle hanging
+on the rim of the manger by the plough-horse which had a saddle gait.
+
+The morning that he clambered, frightened, into the saddle a great
+cold wave was on the Ridge, with a fierce wind continually blowing.
+Smoke curled up from the chimneys to perish against the sunny sky.
+Cattle left in the open crowded in the lee of the straw-stacks, their
+rough flanks crawling, and in the folds the ewes, yet frail from their
+travail, stood stung and still, mothering their weak-kneed lambs.
+Beside the thud of the horse's hoofs toward town there was no sound on
+the road save a little, dry cracking of the frost. The doctor, as he
+started in his carriage for Davie's house, drew his robes closely
+about him and scowled at the fierceness of the blast; but Davie,
+riding far ahead, his elbows flying wildly up and down, did not know
+that he had forgotten to fasten his shabby overcoat. Crouched by the
+silent loom, he clutched helplessly at the hit and miss as Elizabeth
+went down into that loneliest of all earth's agonies.
+
+But from the beginning the child hung a doomed thing on her breast.
+After three months they followed her up to the burying-ground, the
+murmuring of its cedars never again to be wholly out of their ears.
+Away from the grave Davie gave an exceedingly bitter cry--"She's
+little to leave!" But Elizabeth's tears fell back in her heart unshed.
+She waved her handkerchief to Melindy Ethel. "But she's brave like her
+pa," she said. And Davie stiffened.
+
+Memories of these and other days, mingled with forebodings for the
+parting, were so heavy upon him that he could get no farther in the
+night's devotions than the reading of the Bible chapter.
+
+"I can't pray to-night, 'Lisbeth," he said.
+
+Propped with pillows for the last rest before her journey, she was
+still faithfully brave. "Mebbe the Lord'll jest take care o' me,
+anyway, bein' as I've tried to do his ways." The old man did not know
+how wistful was her speech.
+
+In the morning she was early dressed in her decent black. To those who
+came for the leave-taking she bade good-by with gentle courtesy.
+Kerrenhappuch Green lent his buggy because of its comfortable seat,
+but Davie drove her carefully over the six miles to the station. No
+shriek of an engine's whistle disturbed the quiet of Turkey Ridge; to
+go into wider ways one must needs start from the nearest town. Once
+she looked back at the house, set like an ancient brown bird's nest on
+the narrow fields.
+
+The yellow-bodied stage, going every other day across the country,
+brought the minister the letter from his niece with the happy tidings
+of Elizabeth's safe arrival, under her guidance, at the city hospital.
+The stage-driver viewed the missive with professional interest as he
+delivered it. The majority of his passengers paid him monotonously in
+butter or eggs for his services, his trips were tedious, and his
+ideals were limited. To read and digest all postals and to conjecture
+at the contents of all envelopes were his reward for handing out the
+mail at the turning of the lanes. The minister jogged down instantly
+to Davie's in his sulky, slapping the lines vigorously, if
+ineffectually, over the back of his brown mare, which understood, with
+a truly feminine insight, his perplexity before her character. Davie
+dropped his hoe and ran stumbling to meet him. He read the pages in a
+tremble. There was something for him from Elizabeth at the bottom of
+the last one. "Dear Davie," it ran, "are you well an' lookin' jest the
+same? Don't get lonesome for me. I ain't missin' you a mite."
+
+During the period that she was resting for the operation Mary wrote
+daily, and every time the letter came the minister jogged down to the
+farmhouse, for the words were really from the old wife to Davie. Very
+cheerful words they were for the most part. "If Davie's askin' how the
+streets look, tell him I can't jest tell, for I come in the night, but
+the noise is amazin'." "Tell Davie I can see a church tower from the
+window, an' it's higher 'n' we ever dreamt of its bein', an' sweeter."
+"Tell Davie to lay listenin' to feet goin' up and down on stones is
+grand." "Tell Davie I hev seen the surgeon an' that I never thought a
+great man'd be so kind. I was all in a flutter over him, but when he'd
+come 'n' had seen me, whatever'd I do but tell him 'bout him 'n'
+Melindy Ethel, an' the meetin'-house, an' how the road runs by in
+front o' the farm. An' he said he knew, an' not to mind--as ma ust to.
+Ain't it strange 'bout his knowin'?"
+
+The letters to Elizabeth were a tremendous labor, for Davie was no
+speller, and always bashful in the presence of ink. He had only little
+happenings for his pen--he wrote with his tongue forming the painful
+syllables about his mouth. But to her they were infinite things--the
+May rose was blossomed in the garden, and a pair of robins were
+nesting on a ledge of the loom on finding the room so still; the
+speckled hen scratched up the pease, and the black cow's calf was
+lamed; the house dog pined for her and whimpered at the doors, letting
+the cats lick the edges of his dish; the neighbors had sent donations
+of a loaf of rye bread, a pitcher of broth, and the half of a new
+pressed cheese; Kerrenhappuch Green sat with him in the evenings, and
+he, Davie, was not getting lonesome nor missing _her_ at all. But
+the one blotted "'Lisbeth, 'Lisbeth," told the true tale of the empty
+house.
+
+When no letter came from Mary he toiled, white as lint, in his
+potato-field. There followed two days of sick suspense; then the
+minister waved to him at the gray fence-rails. So greatly did he dread
+to hear the news he longed to know, he could not stir from the spot
+where he stood, but waited, a strained, pathetic figure, for him to
+make his way across the even furrows. On the fatherly, near-sighted
+countenance, as he drew nearer, was to be seen such a shining
+brightness that straightway Davie knew that she whom he loved had
+issued from her trial. The two men, alike weather-beaten and seamed by
+a humble work--the shepherd no less than the sheep of his flock
+anxiously tilling a rocky farm,--had the reticence which is learned in
+hill solitudes, but in the "Thank God, Davie," and the breaking "Yes,
+sir," much was spoken.
+
+Now Davie slackened his toil and opened all the windows of the house
+to freshen the low-ceilinged rooms for Elizabeth's returning. Every
+morning he picked bunches of spring flowers and arranged them in stiff
+bouquets on the tables and old bureaus. He took out his Sunday suit
+from the closet and rebrushed it carefully and laid it with a clean
+collar and his musty tie. He began to carry himself all at once with
+something of an air, and he developed a reckless and unnatural
+enthusiasm about the weather; for to be darkly critical of the season
+after the thaw was a local point of masculine etiquette which hitherto
+he had scrupulously observed. The spring had always been in his
+judgment, sympathetically received, "too terrible warm," or "pointin'
+right to a late frost that'll kill everything," or, were it not
+palpably a failure, "so durned nice now that the summer'll be mean."
+But with the good news coming from the hospital he was ready to
+declare in response to friendly greetings: "It's the beatin'est time I
+ever come 'cross. Dun'no' when I hev heerd so many bluebirds or sech
+chirky ones. An' the sky's wonderful an' the ground's jest right. It's
+goin' to be a dreadful good year for farmin'."
+
+There was in his mind no premonition of trouble on his receiving from
+the lumbering stage an envelope directed to him in Elizabeth's own
+hand. It was only that she was getting able to write to him herself.
+He took it unopened up to the bench by the May rose to read its
+contents at his leisure away from the stage-driver's curious gaze.
+"Dear Davie," the letter said, "the city streets is so wearyin' an'
+I'm comin' home. If I ain't so well as we hoped, don't mind. 'Tain't
+like I was young to leave. Mary's comin' with me, for she's long been
+wantin' to visit the Ridge. Could you meet me with your wagon, Davie?"
+
+She could not tell, what she did not know, that the money for Mary's
+journey had been sent to her by the minister for his old friend's
+needs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The afternoon was very soft and fair when Davie met the train incoming
+to town from the city. The farms on Turkey Ridge were illumined with
+growing things like the faint, precious pages of a missal. Doves
+fluttered on the lowly roofs. Everywhere was the calling of birds and
+the smell of broken earth. The minister and Mary fell behind along the
+way. Kerrenhappuch Green, caught walking westward to the creek, his
+stale pockets bulged by bait, hid with a simple delicacy in the
+roadside bushes from Davie's face. Only the children hastening from
+school nodded to him as he passed them, nor hushed the loud clatter of
+their burring tongues.
+
+It was not for young children to be stricken by that sight upon the
+road--the pair of patient horses drawing slowly homeward in the
+shining of the sun a wagon fresh lined with straw, on which lay a
+homely mother, smiling with old lips; and above her, on the seat,
+humbly bowed in his Sunday suit, a gray-haired man whose cheeks were
+wet with tears.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BARNEY DOON, BRAGGART
+
+BY PHILIP VERRILL MIGHELS
+
+
+The nine dusty citizens of Bitter Hole, having one and all proposed,
+unsuccessfully, for the hand of Miss Sally Wooster, had about
+concluded that Bitter Water Valley was a desert, after all, when they
+finally thought to turn their attention once again to Barney Doon, the
+cook.
+
+Let it here be stated, nevertheless, there was one thing to prove that
+the valley was a desert, despite the presence of Barney, and that was
+the face of the country itself. One-half of that whole Nevada area was
+a great white blister, forty miles long and fifteen wide, acrid with
+alkali, flat, barren, and harsh as a sheet of zinc. The valley's
+remaining territory was covered with gray, dry scrub, four inches
+high, through which the dusty Overland stage-route was crookedly
+scratched.
+
+Bitter Hole was the station for the stage. In it flourished the nine
+dusty citizens, a dusty dog, and a dusty chicken, in addition to
+Barney and the buxom Miss Sally, whose father was among the citizens
+enumerated. At the end of the street was a hole, or well, the waters
+of which, being not precisely fatal to men and horses, had occasioned
+the growth of the place, there being no other water for leagues along
+the road.
+
+Here in this land, even when Sally had scorned them, each in turn, the
+men of the Hole were still agreed there could be no desolation where
+Barney Doon had residence. Purely and simply they loved the little
+cook for the fiery suddenness of his temper and the ingenuity of the
+insults of which he was never guiltless. The sulphurous little demon
+was, as the miners and teamsters estimated, "only two sizes bigger
+than a full-grown jack-rabbit." What he lacked in size, however, he
+more than supplied in expression of countenance. His eyes were centres
+of incandescence, while the meagre supply of hair he grew bristled
+redly out from beside his ears like ill-ordered spears. Indeed, such a
+red-whiskered, bald-headed little parcel of fireworks as Barney was is
+rarely created.
+
+Calmly considered, it is hardly a matter for marvel that Barney had,
+from time to time, accommodated every individual in the Hole with a
+quarrel. Moreover, he had challenged each to mortal combat. Indeed, he
+had never been known to do anything less. Barney was a challenger
+first and a cook incidentally. But, ancient and modern tradition
+through, there never was chronicle of actual encounter in which the
+fierce little cook cut figure.
+
+And, as a matter of fact, the men esteemed him perhaps somewhat more
+for the skill and adroitness with which he invariably squirmed out of
+impending engagements, than they did for all the alacrity and
+pyrotechnics with which he was wont to surround himself with duelsome
+entanglements. The boys well knew that if blood were unlet till the
+bragging, hot little rogue of a Barney stained his record, they would
+all forget the color of a wound.
+
+It was not without some elemental enthusiasm that the camp, one
+evening, extended its welcome to a mule-driver newly mustered to their
+company. The sobriquet by which the man was duly introduced was
+Slivers. He was swiftly appraised and as quickly assimilated, after
+which there was only one process required to complete his initiation,
+namely, that of preparing his mind for a "racket" with Barney Doon.
+
+"Don't lose no time, but git right in at supper," instructed John
+Tuttle, for the group. "Jest bang him with any old insult you can
+think of, and leave the rest to Barney. Trot out a plain, home-made
+slap at the fodder he's dishin' up, fer instance. And when he comes at
+you with a challenge, don't fergit your privilege of pickin' out the
+weapons--savvy?"
+
+It chanced that the moment selected for the entertainment was most
+propitious, inasmuch as Barney had that day declared his devotion to
+Sally Wooster, and had duly desired her big red hand for his own, only
+to hear a wild peal of laughter in reply, and to find himself boosted
+bodily out of the window by the hearty young lady herself. He was not,
+therefore, exactly in a mood of milk and honey.
+
+It never had failed, and it did not fail to-night, that Barney should
+conceive himself more than half insulted merely by the sight of a
+stranger appearing at the board and calmly requiring the wherewithal
+to satisfy a mountain appetite. Accordingly, when the miners and
+teamsters all came filing in, dusty, angular, raw-looking of
+countenance, Barney instantly detected the presence of Slivers among
+them, and his eyes "lit up shop" without delay.
+
+Slivers, to speak the truth, was easily seen. He was framed like a
+sky-scraping building, with the girders all plainly suggested. Not
+without a certain insolence of deliberation, he stared about the room
+before assuming his seat, and provoked himself to a sneer of
+opera-bouffe proportions.
+
+"You're his meat already," whispered one of the men. "Set down."
+
+Comrade Slivers thereupon proceeded to comport himself with a studied
+indifference to the cook which was duly galling. In a grim silence
+that all who knew him comprehended, Barney went about the table
+glowering with ferocity. Edging closer and closer to Slivers, the
+little man seemed itching in his ears to catch some careless word that
+might, by dint of inventiveness, be construed as a personal affront.
+
+"I can see you ain't got no cook in the camp," said Slivers, loudly,
+to his neighbor, when Barney was directly behind his chair. "Has that
+pizened little boy I seen a while ago been playin' keep-house with the
+grub?"
+
+"What's the matter with the grub, you scion of the wild-ass family?"
+demanded Barney, exploding like a fulminate.
+
+Slivers looked around and scowled. "Git out, you yawping brat," said
+he. "You must have been losin' hair for years--one hair a day--for
+everything you don't know about decent grub. Go look at yer head, and
+figure out your ignorance."
+
+Sensitive concerning the trackless Sahara which his pate presented,
+Barney clapped his hand upon it instantly. He could scarcely speak,
+for rage.
+
+"You--dead lizard!" finally spurted from his safety-valve. "You
+mongrel viper! Low-bred ooze, disowned and outcast, I'll spoil a grave
+with your carcass for this! You jelly of cowardice, meet me to-morrow
+for satisfaction, or I'll swing you about by the tongue, and hurl you
+to pulp against the sty of a pig!"
+
+Even Slivers somewhat gasped.
+
+"Meet you?" he retorted, arising, to tower above his foeman like a
+mast. "Iron me, Johnny!--if I can crawl in the hole to find you where
+you're hidin' I'll make you wish for hair a mile long, to stand on
+your head in your pitiful scare!"
+
+"Oh, fie! Oh, bah!" said the cook, scanning the teamster's length with
+ill-concealed awe. "Buzzard, you toy with languages. To-morrow I shall
+throw tomato-cans in scorn to build your monument."
+
+"All right," answered Slivers. "To-morrow suits me, and we'll fight it
+out bareback on buckin' broncos, out in the small corral, each feller
+armed with a stockin' full of rocks for a weapon."
+
+Barney stared for a moment in consternation at the man before him. He
+had previously grown accustomed to the horrors suggested by pistols,
+knives, red-hot branding-irons, and even pitchforks, but rocks in a
+stocking--that smacked of barbarism. Moreover, to mount on the back of
+a bronco, wild or tame--the very meditation made the walls drop out of
+his stomach. However, he smiled.
+
+"Child's play!" he answered, with fine disgust. "You warty infant! No
+matter, an odious child would become a more detestable reptile! Till
+to-morrow, don't speak to me--don't speak to me! Or I shall cheat
+myself of the morning's pastime." And with that he strode haughtily
+away.
+
+"Howlin' coyotes!" said Slivers, when he met the gaze of a dozen pair
+of gleaming eyes. "Take him dose for dose he's worse than pizen! By
+gar! just see if he burned any holes in my shirt."
+
+Nearly all night long, however, little Barney lay awake, wildly
+fashioning excuses to avoid that horrid duel in the morning. He had
+always escaped by a margin so narrow that no precedent of the past
+gave assurance of luck for the future. He was mortally afraid that at
+last he had challenged such a monster of brute courage, malignity, and
+strength that nothing terrestrial could avert his untimely demise.
+
+Then in the morning the first sight that met his troubled gaze was
+that of Slivers rounding up a pair of unbroken ponies, as wild as
+meteors, in the field of honor, hard by the camp. Every cell in
+Barney's structure was in a panic. How he managed to walk to the
+water-bench to wash was more than he knew. After that there was no
+retreat. The citizens of Bitter Hole surrounded him, according to
+preconcerted arrangement, and began to coach him for his fight.
+
+"Barney, you'd better have a jolt of whiskey in yer vitals," suggested
+one. "Slivers is a regular expert with a stockin' of rocks."
+
+"If I was you, Barney," said Tuttle, "I'd leave my bronco throw me
+right at him. Then. I'd turn in the air and soak my heels into
+Slivers's grub-basket and knock him into pieces small enough to smoke
+in a cigarette."
+
+"Barney," counselled another, "you take my advice and fight standin'
+up on your hoss, so you can jump over onto Slivers's bronco and cram
+your stockin' of rocks down that there mule-driver's neck and choke
+him clean to death."
+
+They were "herding" the speechless Barney toward the corral, in which
+the two vicious ponies had now been confined. Slivers himself came
+forward.
+
+"Leave me see how much the little scarecrow has shrunk in the night,"
+said he.
+
+Barney's wrath was kindled by this. He opened his mouth to deliver a
+broadside of verbal grape and canister, when he was suddenly
+interrupted.
+
+A shot and a yell, from down the road, startled every man in camp.
+Two, three, five more shots barked in swift succession. Miss Sally
+Wooster herself was drawn from the house by the fusillade.
+
+With Comanche-like whoops, a horseman came dashing madly toward the
+men, brandishing two huge revolvers as he rode.
+
+"Skete, and drunk in the morning," said Tuttle.
+
+A moment later the rider scattered the population as he rode his
+weltering pony through the group.
+
+"You lubbers, celebrate!" he yelled, discharging a weapon three times
+in a second. "There's been a baby born at Red Shirt Canyon! We git in
+the census! We git on the map! Big Matt Sullivan's wife has got a
+little boy!"
+
+"A boy!" said Sally Wooster. "Oh my!"
+
+"Is that all?" inquired John Tuttle, on behalf of his somewhat
+indignant townsmen. "Red Shirt's thirty-seven miles away. We've got
+something more exciting than that right here in camp."
+
+"Red Shirt's in this same county," protested the horseman, a trifle
+crestfallen. "I thought you fellers was patriotic."
+
+Barney Doon threw out his chest and swaggered forward.
+
+"Patriotic?" he echoed. "Doggone us, we're the biggest patriots on the
+coast! No man is a gentleman who wouldn't be a gentleman on such an
+occasion as this. Skete, you've saved the life of yonder braggart,"
+and he pointed to Slivers. "I couldn't be a gentleman and slay him
+when a child's been born in this here county. Slivers, you can go your
+way, without alarm."
+
+"What!" demanded Tuttle. "No fight? All on account of a baby?"
+
+"If I ever!" added Sally Wooster.
+
+A third disgusted person queried, "What's a baby got to do with a
+duel, and the kid near forty miles away?"
+
+To this one Barney turned with pitying scorn. "You don't know how easy
+it is to disturb a new-born baby," said he. "There ain't a man but me
+in camp knows how to behave himself in a holy moment like this here,
+and I ain't a-goin' to kill no man when a sacred thing like that has
+went and happened."
+
+"Well, durn his slippery hide!" grumbled Tuttle. "He's gittin' too
+smart!"
+
+The men were all grinning, including Slivers.
+
+"I reckon Barney knows as much about a baby as a hop-toad knows about
+arithmetic," said Wooster, winking prodigiously. "He's got us all
+square beat on kids."
+
+"I don't know about that," replied a lanky individual who had sobered
+amazingly at the news from Red Shirt Canyon. "I've saw a kid or two
+myself."
+
+"That so, Moody?" said Slivers. "Well, say, maybe we could work up a
+bet between you and Barney, to see which knows the most about a
+youngster."
+
+Barney broke in abruptly. "I'll bet a million dollars I know more
+about children than all you cusses put together! There ain't a one of
+you knows how many teeth a baby's got when he's born."
+
+The challenge produced a solemn stillness.
+
+"W-e-l-l, I know they don't git their eyes open for a week," asserted
+Moody.
+
+"You're clear off, first crack," retorted Barney. "It's nine days,
+instead of a week."
+
+Again the men were awed to silence.
+
+"Yes, that's right--Barney's correct," presently admitted citizen
+Wooster.
+
+"You old ninnies!" said his daughter Sally, and she turned away to go
+to the house.
+
+"Well, anyway," said Slivers, after a brisk bit of widespread
+conversation with Tuttle, "we've got a scheme. Barney wants to match
+himself against the whole shebang in knowin' about a kid, and we're
+goin' to fetch a young un to the Hole and leave him prove his claim."
+
+"Not Sullivan's?" gasped Barney, suddenly overwhelmed at the prospect
+of proving his erudition on an infant so tender, with a father so
+brawny.
+
+"Never mind whose," replied the teamster. "You sit quiet and look
+pretty, and we'll provide the kid."
+
+This they did. The following morning, at daylight, Tuttle and Slivers
+reappeared at camp, from a pilgrimage, and the mule-driver held in his
+arms a little red Indian papoose, as fat, dimpled, and pretty as a
+cherub, and as frightened as a captive baby rabbit.
+
+"Now, then," said the man, placing his charge on the floor, in the
+midst of a circle of wondering citizens, "there's your kid. Never mind
+where we got him--there he is. Barney takes charge of him every other
+day, and the rest of us by turns in between--all that cares to enter
+the race."
+
+The news having spread, Miss Sally Wooster was among the astonished
+spectators who beheld the tiny, half-naked, frightened little
+chieftain-to-be, gazing timidly about him as he sat on the planks,
+gripping his own little shirt as his one and only acquaintance.
+
+"Lauk!" she said, and laughing immoderately, sped for the door.
+
+"Sally, you ain't to help neither Barney nor us!" called Tuttle.
+
+"Don't you worry," she answered. "It ain't no pie of mine."
+
+The men continued to look at their "young un" in no small quandary of
+helplessness.
+
+"He's a pretty little cuss," said one of the miners, after a moment.
+"I wouldn't guess him for more than a yearlin'."
+
+Moody coughed nervously. "One of the first things to do for a child,"
+he ventured, "is to git a thimble to rub on his teeth."
+
+"That's right," said a friend. "My mother used to do that regular."
+
+"What's the matter with putting pants on him fairly early in the
+fight?" inquired the next man of wisdom.
+
+"First thing my mother always done for us was to make us a bib,"
+drawled one fidgety fellow, tentatively.
+
+"He'd orter be told never to drink, ner chew, ner smoke, ner swear,
+ner gamble, 'fore it gits too late," added a miner who carefully
+eschewed all and sundry of these virtues.
+
+"Stub-tailed idiots!" said Barney, in huge disgust.
+
+All eyes focussed on the fiery little cook.
+
+"Well, then," demanded Tuttle, "what is the first thing to do for a
+little kid like him?"
+
+"The first thing?" answered Barney. "The first thing is--Do you think
+I'm going to tell you lop-eared galoots all I know about a baby? What
+I want to know is if he's had a bite to eat?"
+
+"What did you think we'd feed him?" asked Slivers. "Do we look like
+his mother?"
+
+"Git away, you venomous scum, and let me have him!" demanded Barney.
+
+"Hold on," interrupted Tuttle. "The first day he goes to the feller he
+picks out himself, only you come last, bein' the challenger. We'll
+arrange things alphabetical. Adams, you git first shot, to find out if
+you're popular with the little skeesicks."
+
+Adams turned redder than usual, which is saying much.
+
+"Ah--I don't know nuthin' about kids," he confessed. "Catherwood--see
+what he can do."
+
+Catherwood also proved to be modest. After him Farnham and Lane waived
+their alphabetical privilege.
+
+Moody, as nervous as a girl, approached the dumb little man on the
+floor, and twisting the corner of his coat, inquired in a trembling
+voice, "Does Bunny love old Goo-goo?"
+
+The child looked up with a frightened little query in his eyes.
+
+"I'd hate to scare him," Moody added. "I don't mind seein' how he
+takes to Barney."
+
+"Yes, give Barney a show," said Wooster.
+
+Something had been happening to the cook. The tenseness had gone from
+his usually wiry little body; his eyes were milder; a curve was
+softening his mouth. Kneeling before the child, he held forth his
+arms.
+
+"Baby want to go by-by?" he said, and tenderly lifting the little man,
+he bore him away, while the men looked on in silence.
+
+Half an hour later the man who peeked through the keyhole reported
+that Barney was singing the youngster to sleep. The words of the song
+are not readily conveyed, but they sounded like--
+
+  "Allonsum sum-sum bill-din,
+   Allonsum sum-sum bill-din,
+   Allonsum sum-sum bill-din,"
+
+repeated times without number. Barney called it an Indian lullaby. As
+sung it was equally good Cherokee, Chinese, or Russian, being Barney's
+clearest recollection and interpretation of a song which his mother
+once had droned.
+
+On the third day following, Slivers, Tuttle, and others held a council
+of war.
+
+"Barney's goin' to clean up the whole works of us," said the
+mule-driver, "unless we can manage to work some better combination."
+
+"What can we do?" inquired Tuttle. "The kid sure likes him best."
+
+"That wasn't the point. It's a game of how much we all know about a
+young un as against little Barney. Now, Moody, on the square, do you
+think you know as much as him?"
+
+"He knows more than you'd think," confessed Moody. "The--the only
+little kid I ever had--she died--ten months old."
+
+"Oh."
+
+"Well--that was hell, sure."
+
+Some of the men puckered their lips as if to whistle, but made no
+sound.
+
+"If only we could paint Barney's face an Irish green, or do something
+so's the kid would be scared to see him, we might win out yet,
+perhaps," resumed Slivers, presently. "Got any ideas?"
+
+"I don't think Barney could scare him if he tried," answered Wooster.
+"Anyhow the pore little scamp ain't cried since he come."
+
+"He ain't laughed any, either," added Moody.
+
+There was neither a cry nor a smile that day, though Barney yearned to
+hear either one of these baby sounds. The little brown captive clung
+as always to his tiny shirt, and watched Barney's face with big,
+brown, questioning eyes. The cook had forgotten his boast. To hold the
+wee bit of babyhood against his heart, to coax him to eat, to yearn
+over him, love him, fondle him--these were his passions. A fierce
+parental jealousy grew in Barney's nature.
+
+But the hour arrived when jealousy changed to a deeper emotion--to
+worry. All Barney actually knew of a child came through the intuitions
+of a natural father's heart, but little as this amounted to, Barney
+was aware that a tiny scamp like this should eat and sleep and creep
+about and crow. And the little brown "Bunny" had done not one of the
+pretty baby tricks.
+
+The fiery little cook's new concern was at first concealed. With
+growing reluctance every time, he resigned the little man to Moody's
+care as the "contest" required. One night, however, when the dumb, sad
+bit of an Indian was with Moody, the man was aroused from his dreams
+by some one's presence. It was Barney, too worried to sleep,
+surreptitiously come to the tiny captive's fruit-box cradle, and
+gently urging the wee bronze man to eat of some gruel prepared at that
+silent hour of the darkness. He was willing that Moody should have the
+credit of taking good care of the motherless baby, if only the child
+could be made a little more happy. Thereafter, by night and day, the
+cook was hovering about the uncomplaining little chieftain; and Moody
+understood.
+
+By some of the mystic workings of nature, Barney's love and worry
+extended to Sally. Hiding her feelings from all the men, even from
+Barney himself, she could not quell the upgush of emotion in her
+bosom, as she snatched the little Indian once, in secret, to her
+heart. Without the courage, as yet, to hear the men ridicule her
+weakness, she nevertheless contrived to place a hundred little
+comforting things in Barney's path, as he went his rounds of mothering
+his sad little wild thing from the hills. Her heart began to ache, as
+it swelled to take in the child and Barney Doon.
+
+The men had lost all spirit of fun in the contest, even to Slivers,
+who strove, however, to see it through in a bluff, rough-hearted way.
+
+Unexpectedly all of it came to a crisis. It was early in the morning.
+After a sleepless night Barney had gone in desperate parent-care to
+receive his foundling back from Moody. In one keen glance he had
+finally perceived what all their folly was leading to, at last.
+
+With the dumb little chap on his arm he hastened to the dining-shed,
+where all the men, save Tuttle, were awaiting breakfast.
+
+"You brutes had no right to steal this child!" he cried out,
+passionately. "He's starving! He's pining away! Look at his thin
+little legs! Look at his poor little eyes--getting hollow!" Tears were
+streaming from his own tired eyes as he spoke. "Slivers, you did
+this!" he charged, angrily. "You tell me where you got him, or I'll
+shoot you down like a dog!" He had hastened up to the teamster,
+against whose very breast he thrust a pistol a foot in length.
+
+"By God! he'd do it!" said Slivers, unmoved by the push of the loaded
+weapon. "Uncock it, Barney. You'd ought to know I wouldn't harm the
+kid, any quicker than you. I'd do as much as any man if we had to save
+his life."
+
+"He may not live through the day!" cried Barney. "I'm going to take
+him home--back to his mother! And if you don't tell me where she is--"
+
+"Hold on, now; I call," interrupted Slivers. "We'll see if you've got
+any sand. The Injun camp is over across the desert, in Thimbleberry
+Cove.... Do you reckon you've got the nerve to pack him across?"
+
+A peculiar silence followed this announcement. Barney stood like an
+animal at bay. His face became deathly white. He fully comprehended
+the awfulness of that great white dead-land just outside.
+
+Wooster broke the silence. "It looks as if the wind is going to blow
+harder to-day," he said. "It's stirring up the desert some already. A
+man could never get two miles out from here, unless the breeze goes
+down."
+
+Barney, with a crazed, wild look on his face, hastened away to the
+kitchen.
+
+"I'm glad he didn't take you up on that," said Moody, gazing forth
+from a window. "Get on to the way the whirlwinds are kickin' up the
+smoke already."
+
+"I reckon it won't blow no worse than yesterday," replied Slivers.
+"But I knowed he wouldn't tackle it anyhow. He'll be back here in a
+minute, to squirm out of the game."
+
+They drummed on the table for fifteen minutes, as they waited. A brisk
+wind was blowing; the desert began to deliver up its cohorts of
+dust-clouds, where powdered alkali billowed and eddied and swept
+across the valley in ever-increasing volumes.
+
+"Peek in the kitchen and see what Barney's up to now," prompted
+Slivers, nudging Adams as he spoke.
+
+"Oh, he'll be back directly," said Adams.
+
+"Here's somebody comin' now," added Catherwood, presently. "Maybe
+it's--"
+
+"Sally," muttered Slivers, who meditated proposing for the hand of the
+buxom Miss Wooster.
+
+She came toward them almost fiercely. Her face was white. She too had
+detected the change come upon the tiny Indian captive. All night she
+had accused herself of neglect and heartlessness.
+
+"Where's Barney? Where's the baby?" she demanded.
+
+"Barney's maybe striking off for Thimbleberry Cove," answered Slivers,
+smilingly. "He was running a bluff on taking the kid to its mother."
+
+"But Tuttle told me the mother's up at Red Shirt Canyon," said the
+girl.
+
+"Of course," agreed Slivers, uneasily. "We--told him about the Cove to
+test his sand."
+
+Sally gazed at him wildly. "Then--it must have been a man--Barney!--I
+saw--on the desert!" she cried, disjointedly. "They'll die! Oh no, he
+wouldn't--" She ran outside to scan the fearful expanse of alkali,
+with its gathering blizzard of dust.
+
+The men, suddenly grown nervous, followed her out of the house.
+Apparently there was nothing, far or wide, on the desert, save the
+sweeping clouds of white, like drifting snow.
+
+"My God! he wouldn't tackle that!" said Slivers.
+
+"I hear some one out in the kitchen now," said Tate. "It must be him."
+
+Sally ran to see. It was only the dog. She darted forth once more.
+
+"Not there!" she said. "But surely Barney wouldn't--There! There!"
+
+Her cry rang out so shrilly that even Slivers started. She was
+pointing stiffly. The men all stared at the storm of dust. For one
+brief second the swirling clouds were reft, revealing, far out
+eastward, in the dead-land of white, a small dark object--the form of
+a man.
+
+One poignant sob was the only sound that Sally made, as she ran toward
+the stable.
+
+"Good Lord! it's him!" said Adams. "Was he heading back this way?"
+
+"I think he was," answered Catherwood.
+
+"He couldn't--do anything--else," stammered Slivers.
+
+For a moment no one spoke.
+
+"I reckon I'll just mosey over to the desert," drawled the fidgety
+man. "I'd hate to have anything go wrong with Barney."
+
+"Guess I'll go along myself," said Adams.
+
+"Boys!" said Slivers, hoarsely, "I'm going to saddle up and git him
+back! I didn't mean no harm when I told him wrong. I didn't think he'd
+go. I'd ride through hell for Barney--or the little Injun, either. You
+fellers know I didn't mean no harm."
+
+He started at once to get his horse. Before he had covered half the
+distance to the stable, Sally suddenly rode forth, bareback, on a
+buckskin pony, and heading for the desert, spurred her bronco to a
+gallop, crying to him wildly as she went.
+
+"Sally!--Sally--I'll go!" yelled Slivers.
+
+She seemed not to hear, but ran her pony out upon the white expanse,
+where the wreathing dust seemed to swallow both herself and the animal
+immediately.
+
+Her horse, fleeing swiftly before the wind, carried Sally a mile or
+two out from the camp before she reined him in. Believing Barney could
+have come no farther than this, she began to search and to call.
+
+At every turn of her head her eyes were blinded by the acrid dust. The
+stuff choked her breathing; already her throat was dry. Dust and
+powder and snow-of-alkali came from everywhere. It was blowing up her
+sleeves. It filtered into and through her clothing. Her ears were
+quickly coated; her hair was heavy.
+
+She turned her head from side to side for a breath. The air was
+thicker than smoke with dust as heavy as flour.
+
+"Barney!" she called, from time to time, but the alkali coated her
+tongue. On either side she could see for a distance of twenty feet, or
+less. It seemed far less, in all that terrible drift of white.
+
+She rode across the wind, doggedly, crying Barney's name. A nameless
+hopelessness began to grow upon her. Now this way, now that, she urged
+her horse. How far could Barney hear her calling? How far could he
+wander? How far would she ride? There were forty miles in length and
+fifteen in width of this reek of wind-driven alkali. God keep them if
+ever they got more than two miles away from the Hole!
+
+It was aimless riding, presently, but she still persisted. A sickening
+conviction that Barney and the little captive would both be dead
+before she could find them made her desperation unendurable. With eyes
+starting hotly, with every breath seeming like a struggle for
+existence, in the dust, she galloped, calling, calling, till at last
+she could call no more.
+
+Dazed, she halted her horse at last, and sat staring blindly at
+nothing. The pony turned about, unheeded, and began to fight his way
+against the storm, his head down between his legs.
+
+Sally's head also came down, by instinct more than by design. She felt
+past thinking. For a time she rode thus, heedlessly. Then abruptly she
+clutched at the reins and drew the horse to a halt. The animal pricked
+up his ears peculiarly.
+
+Weirdly out of the wind and dust came a sound--not a moan, not a
+croon, but like them both, yet a song, uncertain, apparently coming
+from no definitive point. She even caught the words:
+
+ "All on some lonesome bill-din
+    The swallow makes her nest;
+
+  All on some--lonesome bill-din
+    The--swallow makes--her nest."
+
+Sally tried to call out. She made but a croaking noise. Slipping from
+her horse's back, she groped her way forward, leading the pony, and
+trying to shout.
+
+For a rod or more she battled against the driving dust, then halted as
+before. Not another sound would the desert render up--only the strange
+dry swishing by of the particles of stuff rasping the desert's surface
+as they passed and rose.
+
+"Barney!" she called, by a mighty effort. There was no response.
+
+Crying now, in her anguish and plight, she led the pony this way and
+that, up and down, listening, trying to force a shout through her
+swollen lips. At length, in despair, she knew she could search no
+more. A lifelessness of feeling was creeping upon her. Mechanically
+she walked beside her pony, and it was the animal that was leading.
+
+It seemed as if she had plodded onward thus for hours, when at length
+she stumbled upon a gray little mound in the drifting alkali.
+
+"Barney!" she said, in a voice scarcely more than a whisper. Crooning
+and sobbing, she lifted him up--unconscious, but clinging to the
+still, little form that was hugged to the shelter of his breast.
+
+"Hang on--oh, hang on to the horse, dear, please," she coaxed, in all
+the tender strength of a new-born love. "Barney--try--try, dear,
+please. I'll be your wife--I'll do anything--if only you'll try."
+
+She had raised him bodily to the pony's back. Stiffly as a man that
+freezes he straddled the animal. He made no answer, no movement.
+She feared he must be dead. She dared not look at the little papoose.
+Barney's weight rested partially upon her shoulder. She tossed away
+the reins.
+
+"Go on, Sancho--go on home," she croaked to the horse, passionately.
+
+The pony seemed to comprehend. With some faint fragrance of the waters
+of Bitter Hole in his nostrils, the willing creature fought slowly,
+steadily forward, against the terrible drift.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+John Tuttle and Henry Wooster descried a group, like a sculpture in
+whitened stone endowed with life, creep strangely out from the
+blizzard of alkali. A blinded horse, with head bent low, bearing on
+its back a motionless man, and led by a stumbling, blinded girl,
+against whose shoulder the helpless rider leaned, came with ghostlike
+slowness and silence toward them.
+
+And all day long, one by one, more men came forth, like ghosts, from
+the dead-land. But the twilight had come and the wind had died away
+before teamster Slivers limped from the desert. He came afoot. He had
+ridden his horse to death, in his desperate quest. He could barely
+see--and his hair was white, even below the coating of the dust.
+
+Moody ran to meet him.
+
+"Barney?--Sally?--the kid?" the teamster demanded, raucously.
+
+"Back--and goin' to live," said Moody. "The Injuns up to Red Shirt
+heard where the little feller was and was goin' on the war-trail,
+sudden, but the mother came down on the stage to-day,--and got her
+pretty little kid."
+
+"Oh, God! I didn't deserve it!" said Slivers, and letting himself fall
+limply to the earth, he lay with his face in the curve of his arm and
+shook with emotion.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE REPARATION
+
+BY EMERY POTTLE
+
+
+He looked up from the desk where he had been sitting for the last
+hour, his head down on his arms, trying to shut out the brave, old cry
+of life coming in through the open windows, pulling gently at his
+heart, cheeping through the darkened room as lightly and as blithely
+as the birds in the horse-chestnut tree just outside--the brave cry of
+life that, somehow, for all its clamorous traditions, seemed just then
+something peaceful, something that held release, freedom.
+
+He stared about him, furtively, for an instant, as if instinctively on
+his guard against an unwelcome eye. Then, presently, he smiled, and
+going to a window, pushed open the blinds, leaning, with elbows on the
+sill, gratefully out into the rectangular enclosure, walled in high by
+houses, where the late afternoon sun glanced with uncertain warmth on
+the horse-chestnut.
+
+There was now, he told himself, no use of evading or denying it
+longer; right or wrong, things had come to a point with him where
+anything but the truth was unbearable; it was there, like a live thing
+with him in the room, and out in the court, too,--almost as if he
+could put out his hand and draw it in close to him. Freedom, that was
+it. His lips made the word noiselessly, again and again, fascinated
+with the sensation. "Free, free," he kept whispering, stretching out
+his hands greedily, drawing in full breaths of the late September air.
+
+"I'm glad, that's all there is to it--glad. I can't help being
+glad--I've tried, too, but now, to-day, it's bound to come out. Glad!
+It's like being let out of school."
+
+That word--school--brought him back sharply. It seemed to precipitate
+all the old worry in the solution that but a moment ago was so clear.
+He came back hesitatingly from the window and threw himself down
+before the desk again, unable to restrain something he vaguely named
+his conscience from its weary accusations.
+
+"It's an awful thing. It's true, it is. I'm a beast. I'm all wrong to
+be like this. It's a terrible thing to be glad a person is--" He
+shivered as he withheld the end of the sentence, though he realized
+his cowardice in so withholding. "And that person your--" Again he
+hesitated.
+
+Haldane, by the desk, was a figure to make, involuntarily, demands on
+one's sympathy. It seemed all his life--perhaps thirty years long--he
+had been doing this in one way or another, and by no effort of his.
+People had a fashion of "looking out for him." Not that he had grown
+up particularly incapable or helpless; it might rather have been due
+to a certain appealing gentleness of bearing, something that was the
+resultant of a half-shy manner, expanding into boyish confidence
+winningly; a shortish, slender figure, scarcely robust; eager,
+friendly brown eyes behind his glasses; and a keen desire to be liked.
+It might be seen, in the present sharp nervous play of emotion over
+his face, how utterly he was unsuited to the weight of mental
+discomfort,--how it fretted and galled him. That he was a gentleman,
+and by nature of a morbidly just and fair disposition, only made his
+present distress the more intolerable to him.
+
+"Lord God," he muttered, hopelessly, "why, _why_ had it all to
+be?" And this question might, in the end, be taken as an aimless
+appeal to the Almighty to know why He had deliberately led him into a
+wretchedly miserable condition of mind and left him there.
+
+It was the day after Ida's burial--Haldane's wife's burial. A week ago
+he had taken her to a city hospital, and she had died there--she and
+her baby--in the night, away from Haldane. He had gone dazedly, very
+conscientiously, through the dreadful, relentless activity that
+follows immediately on the heels of death; there was some alleviation
+in the thought that everything had been done just as _she_ would
+have liked to have it. To-day the house was free of the grieving,
+sickening smell of flowers; the last of the people had mercifully
+fulfilled their duty to Ida and him and had gone, leaving him the
+humiliation of their honest, warm-hearted words and halting phrases of
+sympathy.
+
+"Great God!" he had kept saying to himself as he listened to them, "if
+you _knew_,--if you _knew_!"
+
+At times he felt, as he thought of those friends, secretly resentful.
+"If it hadn't been for them, I don't believe I," he caught himself
+saying--"I'd ever have married." But again he stopped his mental train
+abruptly. It was such a wearisome business, this "being fair"--he put
+it so--to _her_; this conscientious erasing of self-justification
+which he felt to be so unworthy. It would have been such a relief to
+Haldane to be, for an hour, obliviously selfish in his estimate of his
+two years of marriage with Ida.
+
+There had been nothing, after all, remarkable in Haldane's
+experience--save for him; nothing very far removed from the
+commonplace. His father--a simple-hearted musician--had trained his
+son in music since the days when the lad could first hold a violin
+under his little chin. He had died when the boy was twenty, and
+Haldane had gone on, contentedly enough and absorbed, to take his
+father's place among the violins of an orchestra, and to teach music.
+As he grew older his father's friends told him he was leading a
+wretchedly lonely life; that he ought to marry. And at this Haldane
+smiled his deprecating, affectionate smile--a smile that, somehow,
+convinced his advisers in their own wisdom.
+
+When Ida Locke came to live in a hall bedroom of the untidy
+boarding-house Haldane for years had called home, it was not long
+before she, too, quite unaffectedly, took to the idea that the
+good-natured musician needed "looking after." And since, all her life,
+she had tremendously given herself to the care of people around her,
+it was no unusual experience--she sought it frankly, importantly.
+
+It is scarcely probable that, in the beginning, any thought of
+ultimate marriage entered her head. Those who knew her invariably
+said, "Ida is a sensible girl." Rather, her "looking after" Haldane
+took itself out in the hearty channels of dry boots, overshoes, tea of
+late afternoons, candid suggestions as to proper winter underwear,
+remedies for his frequent colds. This solicitude--which was, in
+essence, quite maternal--made a bond between the two; this and the
+fact that they both were workers--for Ida taught English in a private
+school.
+
+It is hardly necessary to elaborate their romance, if it was such,
+from this point. Gradually, hastened by the awful propinquity in a
+third-rate boarding-house, Haldane really came to believe--as along
+the line of least resistance--in his personal incapacity and his
+loneliness; gradually Ida Locke began to realize that, for the first
+time, this Love she had read of and dreamed of doubtfully had become a
+reality for her. She was not a little amazed and gratified at its
+plain practicability--its _sensibleness_, she put it.
+
+That she so liked him--indeed, he liked _her_ enormously, he
+considered--assured Haldane in his moments of misgiving. The very
+largeness in her ample effect of good looks, her genius for managing
+his affairs and hers, her prim neatness of dress, her utter freedom
+from any sort of weak dependence on him, her uncompromising rigidity
+of moral attitude, and, above all, her _goodness_ to him--this
+convinced him of her ultimate fitness to be a wife to him; and it must
+be said that he had never heretofore given anything but the scantest
+attention to the matter of sentimental attachments; it had not
+occurred to him, definitely, that he was even likely some day to fall
+splendidly in love.
+
+So when he asked her, shyly, gently, to marry him she consented
+frankly--too frankly, Haldane almost admitted. And since, in the world
+as she knew it, men did not ask women to marry them unless they loved
+them really, she took much for granted, and began, at once, to look
+for a cheap flat.
+
+Ida gave up her teaching when they married and went to their Harlem
+flat. Indeed, she considered this her domestic right; now, after
+almost a dozen years--she was older than Haldane--of instruction, she
+wanted "to rest, and keep house," she told her husband.
+
+Then, suddenly, illogically perhaps, after not more than three months
+of it, Haldane knew it was all quite intolerable to him. Before the
+desk to-day, Ida's desk, he saw luminously just how intolerable it had
+been--these two years of marriage.
+
+The more irritatingly unbearable, too, it was because of the
+excellence of Ida's qualities--qualities he had taken humorously
+before marriage, but which later he had to take seriously. He began to
+hate her constant and intimate possession of his motives and tastes,
+her inquiries as to what he ate for lunch, and whether he considered
+his flannels quite adequate. He childishly resented her little nagging
+economies--and especially because he knew they were generally
+necessary. He chafed at the practical, sensible view he was argued
+resolutely into on every matter. What made it hard was that Haldane
+could not decently account for his revulsion of feeling toward Ida,
+now she was his wife. Worse than all, he saw how lightly she held in
+esteem his music--his one real love. To her it was a graceful trade to
+earn a living by--nothing else. And when she finally made it out that
+in his position in the orchestra he was likely never to rise much
+higher, unconsciously the fiddling seemed to her rather more of a
+small business. She told him he ought to be more ambitious.
+
+One night Haldane had played to Ida--he resented so her name
+Ida--parts of the score of a light opera he had been at work on for
+years;--he would never play it on the boarding-house piano.
+
+The moment was as vivid for Haldane now as it was then. He could hear
+again her brisk cheerful voice when he had finished and was
+waiting--more hopeful than he had ever yet been with her: "That's
+_pretty_. It's funny--isn't it, dear?--to think you made it up
+out of your own head. I never _could_ understand--Leonard, have
+you got entirely rid of your sore throat?--Why don't you try to sell
+some of your little tunes?"
+
+The disappointment of it all, for an instant, had brought angry tears
+to his eyes. He remembered now just the bitter hopelessness of feeling
+how she had failed him--and the remembrance hurt anew. That night he
+had seen almost clearly how it was to be with him and her in all the
+years to come.
+
+There was, in Haldane's subsequent attitude toward the question of his
+marriage to Ida Locke, nothing worth the name of heroic. Indeed,
+looked at from the commonplace, critical standpoint, the situation was
+not so bad. It was Haldane's personal conception of it which caused
+the difficulty. Probably it was his sense of fairness to _her_
+which made him accept matters quietly--as he did accept them. It was
+his comfort to-day, out of all the ruck of his artificial
+self-reproach, that Ida had never known--as he said--how he felt
+toward her.
+
+"She never knew," he repeated often, "she never knew. She couldn't,
+I'm sure. Thank God for that!"
+
+What she had never known was, in Haldane's mind, his real idea of her
+as his wife. For he had been very kind; he had patiently let her look
+out for him; he had kept the fret of his heart off his tongue, and the
+sulkiness of his temper off his face. What he had not succeeded in
+doing, however, was to keep the hurt of his soul out of his eyes. So
+they had gone on with it for the two years, with a prospect of going
+on with it forever, Haldane growing daily quieter, more reserved, if
+anything more gently kind, and more pathetically hopeless. With Ida it
+was, rather, a large, legitimate outlet for all the sensibleness,
+practicality, capable qualities, she so generously possessed. It
+seemed to her, when she knew her child was coming, that she was
+wonderfully reaching the culmination of womanhood and wifehood. Yet,
+after all, it had been but just death for Ida.
+
+All this was running through Haldane's brain as he sat, on the day
+after his wife's burial, before her little oak desk. And the result he
+had to make out of it was always the same:
+
+"I'm glad it's over. I'm _glad_."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The room seemed less burdensome when he came back to it late that
+night. Oppressed with the hatefulness of his attitude of the
+afternoon, Haldane had seized his hat and had fled out into the
+streets. He had dined at a restaurant, a thing he had not done in
+years, and had listened to a bad orchestra play cheerful tunes--tunes
+that somehow livened him up, stayed comfortably in his mind
+afterwards. Every one he saw seemed so happy. He assured himself that
+happiness--a quiet content, at least--was to be _his_ now. Why
+not? Why disguise the fact that he was really, underneath, glad? So he
+smiled and lingered and sipped his coffee, feeling suddenly the
+beautiful realization that he was again of the world--irresponsible,
+careless. Coming back into the dull flat was not half the gloomy
+effort he had fancied it was going to be. For one blessed thing, he
+came when he chose. Besides, something had given him a sense of his
+right, his cheerful right, to be as he liked, what he liked. Haldane
+went about the tiny rooms humming gently; he played softly on the
+piano some old love-songs he had composed when he was twenty--things
+_she_ had never heard.
+
+Presently he sat down, lighted a fresh cigarette, and set himself to
+thinking out matters anew.
+
+"It was a mistake, that's all," he said, at last. "And that's plain. A
+mistake for me. But now it's all over and done with. There's nothing
+to be got out of this endless accusing and regret over something that
+couldn't be helped--helped, at least, after it was once started....
+I'll always wear my hurt of it; that I know. It hurts like the devil
+to think I didn't--couldn't--give her the love she ought to have had.
+If there were any way--any possible way of reparation, ... but I
+suppose there isn't. Nothing except to live decently and honorably--if
+that's reparation. Thank God, 'tisn't as if there were any other woman
+mixed up in it--I haven't got that to worry me at any rate. I wonder
+whether a man gets his punishment for--but no, you can't help feeling,
+and being, and loving, just as it comes. It's this dreadful
+unconventionality of--not really liking--loving a person you are
+supposed to love that warps your judgment. And we lie about it to
+ourselves and to others till when we have to face the real truth we go
+all to pieces.... But, just the same, I'd feel so much easier if there
+_were_ only some way I could make it up to Ida now that she's
+gone. Poor Ida, poor Ida."
+
+Haldane's eyes strayed to the little, cheap desk again, and for a
+moment the distress of the afternoon was renewed. But he resolutely
+threw off the accusing mood he so feared. There was a pile of letters
+lying there--letters that he had had neither the time nor the heart to
+look into for the past week. He picked them up now with relief at
+finding something tangible to be done. Most of them were letters of
+consolation and sympathy for him from his friends and hers; the worn
+phrases one can so little avoid in such missives touched him with a
+sense of their dual ineffectuality. Other letters were addressed to
+Ida--commonplace messages and bills which she had not been able to
+open. And there was one from her mother--written evidently before she
+had heard of her daughter's imminent illness and death. This last
+Haldane laid aside until he had finished the others; and even then he
+looked at it long and somewhat tenderly before he opened it.
+
+"It must have come very hard to her; Ida was all she had," he
+considered. "It must have been very hard." He thought of the
+tear-stained, illegible letter Ida's mother had sent him after she had
+had his telegram. An illness had prevented her from coming to the
+funeral; and she lived so far away, somewhere in Iowa. Her heart was
+bleeding for _him_, she wrote. Her own loss was almost blotted
+out in the thought of _his_ terrible grief. He had never finished
+it--that letter; he could not. Such words had seemed too sacred for
+him to read, feeling as he did. So he had torn it up.
+
+"Ida was very good to her mother," he reflected; "at least she was
+conscientiously always trying to do her best by her, support her and
+all that. She took it awfully as a duty--but she did it."
+
+Once, after they were married, Ida had gone back, for six months, to
+the private school that she might have money to send her mother in a
+sudden financial stress. Haldane thought of that, too, with keen
+regret that he had not been able to earn the necessary money
+himself--he was ill that winter. Yes, surely, Ida had been splendid in
+the matter of her mother. "It's a pity that things weren't so that
+Ida's mother could have come to see us here in New York," Haldane
+said, as he opened the envelope--"come before Ida died." The letter
+itself was not long. When he had finished with it--and this only after
+a third reading--he laid it down slowly and stared silently at the
+fine old-fashioned characters.
+
+"Great God!" he said at last, gently, "the poor old lady!"
+
+"My dear daughter," ran the letter, "mother is so sorry to have to
+tell you this now when all your thoughts and energies must be centred
+on the wonderful event so soon to happen. It seems to me I've always
+been calling on you for help and you have done so much. Oh, it hurts
+me to have to worry and distress you now, dear.
+
+"The truth is that Mr. Liddell is going to foreclose the mortgage on
+the house. He says he cannot wait longer than a week or two. I've
+tried every way to get the interest, but I can't do it. The little I
+had left, your cousin George invested for me, and now he tells me--I
+don't understand it at all--that it's quite lost. I know you'll say I
+was foolish to let George have it, but he promised so much--and George
+has been so good to me. I won't ask you and Leonard to give me a home;
+that would be unfair to you both. I'm so distressed and upset. Write
+me, if you can, and tell me what you think is best." And there was
+more in the same distressed key.
+
+Haldane was as near his decision, perhaps, when he laid down the
+letter as hours afterward when he stumbled to bed. It was strangely
+clear to him--the attitude he was to assume. Not that he did not make
+a fight of it, and a sharp fight. But, after all, he knew from the
+first how it was destined to end.
+
+"I asked for my chance to make it up to her," he muttered. "Well, I've
+got it, haven't I? Isn't this it? If where _she_ is she knows
+to-night that I never loved her--sometimes even hated her--then she
+knows that I'll try to pay it back to her in the only way I can. I'll
+bring her mother here to live with me.... My God! and I wanted so the
+_freedom_ of it all again, just to feel _free_.... No, this
+is it--my way--I'll take it. It's what I owe Ida. I can't reason it
+out logically and I dare say the world would put it straight that I
+didn't have to do this--take her mother--but I will. I wouldn't feel
+right about it in this life or in any next if I didn't. Yes, that's
+the reparation."
+
+Haldane's last thought before he slept that night, as it was in the
+fortnight before she came, was, "What is Ida's mother like? I wonder
+if--she is like--like Ida?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It had been six months--a whole winter and more--since Ida's mother
+had come to live with Leonard Haldane. And altogether unexpectedly it
+had been, for Haldane, quite the most beautiful winter he had ever
+spent. As for Ida's mother--well, when she was alone her eyes were
+constantly filling with tears--tears of thankfulness that the Lord had
+sent her, in the language of her frequent prayers of gratitude, a son
+to stay the declining years of her life--a son to her who had so
+wanted a son all these years.
+
+Haldane could never forget that night he had gone, with sharp
+misgivings, to the station to meet Mrs. Locke. "I suppose I'm a fool,"
+he had muttered, as he paced miserably up and down the draughty, smoky
+enclosure where her train, already very late, was to come in. "But
+it's my debt to the dead I'm going to pay." He added a moment later:
+"What I shall hate most of all, what will be hardest to bear, will be
+her endless sympathy. For she won't know--she'll never know--just how
+it was between Ida and me."
+
+He was to look for a "little dried-up, frightened woman in a black
+bonnet, with a handkerchief in her left hand"--so Mrs. Locke had
+written him. Haldane had smiled at the frank characterization--that,
+somehow, didn't sound like Ida's spirit in her mother.
+
+She was the last to come out through the iron gate. Almost he had
+given her up, she had delayed so long. A little, dried-up, frightened
+woman in a black bonnet--that was she. Like a tiny, stray cloud, very
+nervous and out of place. Her face was white with fatigue, the
+excitement of the journey, and the thought of how she should
+meet--ought she to call him Leonard? And when Haldane saw her he
+suddenly smiled boyishly--as if there could be such a thing as a
+problem over this scared, half-tearful, ridiculously pathetic,
+white-haired old woman with a black-bordered handkerchief in her
+shaking left hand.
+
+Before he considered it he had said gently, "Well, mother--"
+
+The tears in her eyes welled over as she gasped in a whisper, "My
+boy!"
+
+So, after all, there was no awkward, conscious period of adjustment
+for the two. They took up their life simply and quite as if it were no
+new thing to them both--as if they had come together again after a
+long separation. And it was, perhaps, in a way, just that--a coming
+together of elements that had long been kept apart. "She's not like
+Ida," Haldane kept saying to himself.
+
+"You're just like a mother in a storybook; the kind you always want
+when you read about them," Haldane often told her. "You know, I never
+had one--one that I remember; mine died so long ago."
+
+"And you--you're--quite my son," she would answer shyly, her voice
+trembling with the joy of it. It was such a regret to her that she
+hadn't Leonard's readiness of speech and the courage to break down her
+reserve--for she wanted to tell him, as she said to herself, just how
+she felt, just how good he was to her.
+
+So it was a beautiful winter for them both. Naturally there was the
+fact of Ida that had to be faced. That was tremendously hard at first.
+He constantly felt her grieving for him, for the failure of all his
+hopes, the wreck of all a man holds so precious. And there were all
+the details of Ida's sickness and death to be gone over with her
+mother--the things she had done just before. How she looked; the
+quantity of flowers; even what she wore for her burial. Instinctively
+Haldane knew how dear these matters were to her, and he went over them
+faithfully, effacing his own bitterness of memory as best he might.
+When Mrs. Locke hesitatingly asked him one evening if--if Ida had--had
+_said_ anything--left any message for _her_, Haldane's heart
+ached for her; Ida had left no message. He softened it as best he
+might.
+
+"You see, she didn't know, couldn't know, that--that she was going to
+die. It was all so sudden, you know, so awfully sudden."
+
+Mrs. Locke nodded. "Yes--I see. Poor Ida! She did so much for me
+always."
+
+After a month or so, quite unconsciously, they ceased to mention Ida.
+Haldane, when he thought of it at all--and that with relief--wondered
+vaguely why Ida's mother did not talk more about her. "Perhaps it's
+because she doesn't want to keep hurting me," he thought it out,
+"bless her!"
+
+Gradually the intimacy between Haldane and his mother--for she was
+quite that to him--grew into a relation that was as rare as it was
+tender. They both felt it keenly. Their talk was all of him, his
+affairs, his music. He played to her for hours in the evenings he was
+not at the orchestra; when he was teaching in the mornings she would
+steal into the room, and sit, sewing, in a corner, listening
+gratefully to the dreary routine of his pupils' exercises. She seemed
+never to tire of "being near Leonard." And always she was asking,
+"Won't you play a little from _the opera_, Leonard?"
+
+Once she said to him, with her timid smile: "It's like heaven, having
+so much music all the time. Seems as if all my life I've been just
+starved to death for tunes."
+
+Haldane bent and kissed her white hair. "Well, mother," he laughed,
+"it's quite a real piece of heaven to have you around the place."
+
+"You're spoiling me," she cried; "how can I ever go back to Iowa?"
+
+"Who said Iowa in this house?" he demanded of her. "You're to stay
+always--as long as you can stand me--_always_."
+
+"My son!" she kept murmuring after he had gone, as if she loved the
+words on her lips. "He's just the kind of son I used to hope I might
+have," she sighed. "I don't see--it's so strange why he's so good to
+me. I'm not at all like _her_. Ida was so sensible always, and
+I'm not at all--Ida always told me I couldn't take care of myself,
+that I was very foolish. I don't see why Leonard is so kind to me. It
+must he just because I'm her mother. Leonard must have loved her so
+much, and understood her. Poor Ida!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The spring had broken through its first slender greenish film into the
+freshness of its young beauty. The sense of faint, far voices
+endlessly calling was in the air. Again the windows of the little flat
+were opened and again the afternoon sun warmed to golden green the new
+growth of leaves on the horse-chestnut in the rectangular enclosure
+outside.
+
+Haldane had never felt so splendidly the birth of new things--in
+himself and in the world. All the morning he had been constantly
+picking up his violin, playing what he called his "Spring-feelings"--
+unrhythmic wild snatches of melody.
+
+"God! it's good, good, _good_," he cried, throwing back his head.
+"Good to have lived out of it all into this."
+
+"Mother," he called presently, "what on earth are you doing there all
+alone? Come out and play with me. You've looked over those old books
+and papers, spring-cleaned your old closets, too long. If you don't
+come out at once, I'll come and drag you out bodily--I will indeed."
+
+He ran to her door in another moment, and flinging it open wide, he
+called: "If you will insist on being led forth--Why, mother, what is
+it? what's the matter? _What is it?_ Are you _ill_? Why--"
+
+She sat on a low stool drawn up close to her bed. Her hands were
+clasped straight out before her over a little book bound in faded
+imitation red leather--a little book Haldane, on the instant, with
+curious alertness, knew as one of Ida's old school note-books. On her
+face was a look so bewildered, so grieved, so terror-stricken almost,
+that Haldane suddenly ceased to speak. She raised her eyes to him with
+the pleading of a hurt animal. For a time neither uttered a word. And
+then, all at once, it seemed to Haldane as if he _knew_. His gaze
+fell hesitatingly. When, at last, he spoke, it was in a very gentle
+voice.
+
+"Mother--is it anything we can talk out together--now?"
+
+She shook her head dumbly, the tears gathering in her eyes. "Oh,
+Lennie!" she whispered, finally, as if he were a little boy. "It isn't
+true, is it?"
+
+Haldane did not reply. She reached out the little red book to him
+slowly. "You'd--you'd better read it. I--found it--this afternoon."
+
+He took the book, without wonder, and went back, softly closing the
+door on her. Unconsciously he sat down before the little, cheap, oak
+desk--Ida's desk--and began to read. It was, perhaps, two hours
+afterward when he had finished. The room was dark and very still.
+
+"So she knew," he said, slowly. "After all, she knew. And I never
+guessed." His head sank down on his arms.
+
+It was a curious inconsistency in the mind of Ida Locke which had
+prompted her to write in that red-covered note-book just what she had
+written. No one would have guessed the secret strain of introspection
+in her, nor guessed the impulse which led her to put into writing her
+hidden life. Unless, indeed, that introspection and that impulse are
+always part of the intuitions of love--yielded to or not, as may be.
+The entries were scattered--as if put down when the stress of feeling
+had overcome her. They ranged over the two years of their married
+life. In each one she had seemed, with a startling lucidity, to have
+apprehended exactly her husband's state of mind toward her. She had
+written freely, baldly, without excess of sentimentality. "I know he
+hates me sometimes; I see it in his eyes." Again: "He is hideously
+kind." "He lives in a mental room that I can't break into." In another
+place it ran: "Why is it? I am his mental equal; his superior in
+education. I'm his wife and he asked me to marry him. And yet he can't
+bear to have me near him. He hates me to-day." "I'm afraid," she wrote
+again, "how Leonard will regard our child. If he should hate it, too.
+Perhaps we shall both not live through it." And so it ran on, with
+awful candor.
+
+"I'm so sorry she had to know," Haldane sighed again and again. "And,
+now, what's to be the end of it? What will Ida's mother do? Lord God,
+she'll never forgive me--never."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Late that night Mrs. Locke came in. Haldane had scarcely stirred from
+his chair. The note-book lay open before him on the desk. He looked at
+her compassionately, for now his thoughts were all for the shrinking,
+hurt woman beside him. She had never before seemed so fragile, so
+dependent, and yet he could not but mark in her hearing a new
+resolution of forces, a dignity as of a stern decision. Haldane did
+not wait for her to question.
+
+"You will want to know," he began, wearily, "if all this written here
+is true. All this Ida wrote down. You want to ask me that? It's--it's
+all true, quite true." He waited, but she gave no sign. "Quite true;
+I--I suppose it wouldn't be worth while for me to explain things now.
+You will think I've lied to you all along. In a way, I have. No, I
+suppose you don't want to hear me make futile explanations, excuses."
+
+"If there--there is anything to be said, Leonard, you had better say
+it--now," she answered, nervously, twisting her handkerchief in her
+fingers.
+
+He hesitated painfully. "Everything I might say seems to be trying to
+shift the load from my shoulders on to--another's," he said, at last.
+"It was a mistake--that's all. A mistake for us. Before it began--our
+marriage--it was different, but afterward--She was very good to me;
+looked after me and all that, but--Oh, I'm afraid I'm only hurting you
+the worse by saying all this. You won't, you can't understand. Let it
+be that it was all my fault. It was, it was. Believe that, please....
+And I know you won't want to stay here with me any longer--after this.
+I quite understand that. A man who--who felt as she wrote it all down
+here--such a man you wouldn't, you couldn't--" He stopped hopelessly.
+"I can't bear to have you go," he burst out, impulsively. "Where will
+you go? Back there to Iowa?"
+
+She nodded sorrowfully.
+
+"And have no more music? And--and--oh, it's cruel. _Why_ had you
+to find it out? It didn't matter anyway when it was all done with. Why
+_did_ you have to know? ... And you haven't any money. You must
+let me help you. Let me do that--just that. Can't you forget it all
+enough for that? Surely you've liked me--for what you've liked in me,
+let me help you. Great heavens, if I thought of you alone out there,
+without money--_Must_ you go?"
+
+Haldane was fast losing control of himself. With an effort he pulled
+himself together and tried to smile.
+
+"You're right to go," he said. "Right. You wouldn't want anything to
+do with me now."
+
+He looked up at her, though loath to meet her eyes. There was a
+wonderful pity in her face. "Don't!" he cried, sharply, not
+understanding.
+
+"I want to say this," he broke out again, almost roughly. "I never
+guessed that she knew how I felt toward her. I wasn't cruel or
+beastly--I was kind. They say that's cruelty, too. I tried--my God!
+how I tried!--never to let her know the truth. That's all I can say
+for myself; ... you'd better go."
+
+She was so silent that at last he faced her again. She was crying
+softly, and, it appeared, without bitterness. Haldane stared at her
+curiously.
+
+"I wanted to know that--that last you said," Mrs. Locke gasped, with
+difficulty. "I--I--I've been thinking it all over in my room. It's very
+hard to say--please let me go on with it just as I can, I--I've said I
+wanted to hear that last. But I knew it--in my heart--all the time.
+I knew you couldn't be cruel to a living thing. And--and--somehow--
+it changed--things. I've had such a terrible struggle all alone. I've
+tried to pray over it and--oh, I'm afraid I'm very wrong and very
+wicked--I almost know I am." Her voice sank to a whisper. "But--oh,
+Leonard ... somehow I just seemed to feel inside me just how you felt,
+just how--it was with you those two years. Oh, it's a dreadful thing
+to say, isn't it? Poor Ida! She was so good to me, and yet sometimes--"
+The trembling old woman's voice faltered and broke.
+
+Haldane's eyes were full of tears. A great light was slowly breaking
+for him. He dared not speak.
+
+"Don't think I'm a wicked old woman, Leonard; I never even
+guessed--till I came here--how I felt. And then you were like a
+son--my son--the boy I wanted so, and--I loved the music so, and being
+with you, more than anything I ever knew--it doesn't seem as if--"
+
+Haldane put his hand on hers gently, "As if you could go away now?"
+
+She turned to him with a little sad smile, and in her face was a sweet
+dignity.
+
+"Yes, I cannot go--now, my son."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE YEARLY TRIBUTE
+
+BY ROSINA HUBLEY EMMET
+
+
+"For science is a cruel mistress. She exacts a yearly tribute of flesh
+and blood like the dragons of ancient pagan mythology."
+
+The eminent scientist paused momentarily here and viewed the earnest
+young faces before him. In this poetic figure of speech he saw fit to
+present to them the hardships of the life they had chosen to embark
+upon. It was a hot June morning, and the heavy scent of syringa came
+in through the high uncurtained windows of the lecture-hall. All the
+students stared with reverence at this distinguished stranger, who had
+come a long distance to speak to the graduating class; and one of its
+members sighed deeply and turned his eyes to the window, and watched
+some maple leaves moving languidly against the blue sky. The lecturer
+heard his sigh, saw him fall into abstraction, realized the peculiar
+character of his face; and marked him as a man who would serve to the
+end, possibly becoming one of the victims of that cruel mistress.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pilchard and Swan had stopped to rest in the middle of the plaza. The
+black Mexican night was falling and a few stars blossomed in the sky,
+but there was no abatement in the heat which had held since sunrise;
+rather, indeed, the thickness of the atmosphere seemed intensified.
+The two Americans, who had spent a whole year in Mexico and become
+accustomed to the climate, attempted to make themselves comfortable.
+Pilchard sank to a dilapidated bench and lighted a cigarette; and
+Swan, not having even sufficient spirit to smoke, stretched himself
+bodily on the flat stones which paved the plaza, and placed his old
+hat upon his upturned face.
+
+Both young men seemed depressed, and without speaking they listened to
+the moaning of the ocean which heaved and glistened in the distance;
+and when Pilchard finally said, "So poor Murphy is gone too," and Swan
+responded, "His troubles are over, poor fellow," it showed how
+completely they had been absorbed in the same thought.
+
+"And Mulligan last week," Pilchard continued, "and all the others who
+went before, and Peele taken sick this afternoon. Swan, we're the only
+white men left."
+
+"And we've only got ten days left."
+
+"Oh, I guess we can do it, so long as we're out of the swamp."
+
+"So long as the swamp isn't in us."
+
+They were alluding to the railroad they had come to Mexico to build.
+The time-limit given in the contract would expire in ten days, and it
+would be a race to get the tracks through the town and down to the new
+docks in that time. Swan, whenever he thought of it, became restless,
+and now he sat up with a jerk, and his old hat slipped off his face.
+Even in that dim light Swan's ugliness was apparent. He measured over
+six feet and was loose-jointed and ungainly; he had big flat feet, and
+big bony, capable hands; and his features, which were big and bony
+too, seemed in proportion to nothing but his general ungainliness.
+Swan was an inventive Yankee with no background and no tradition. He
+could not even claim the proverbial Connecticut farm. His people had
+been dreary commercials in a middle-sized New Hampshire town, and he
+had worked his way through college to fit himself for a scientific
+career. His memory of his deceased parents was so colorless that it
+seemed to Swan as if they had never existed, and his contacts had been
+so dull, his outlook so dreary, that he had almost no conception of
+beauty. His plain college room, where, by the hour, he had worked out
+mathematical problems, and a grimy engine-room (which was the next
+stage of his advancement), where he had stood in a greasy black shirt,
+surrounded by an unceasing whir of machinery, and bossed a gang of
+men--these had been the things which had substituted for him romance
+and passion and life; and finally, when Pilchard, a college friend,
+had persuaded him to come down to Mexico and build a railroad, he had
+taken off his greasy black shirt and gone, principally because this
+was such a big undertaking, and it would undoubtedly in the end lead
+to something very much bigger.
+
+The company which was causing the railroad to be built had established
+large exporting-houses in San Francisco, which sent down certain
+articles of merchandise to Mexico, and the railroad was designed to
+transport this freight from one of the southwestern seaport towns to
+the city of Mexico. The undertaking included the erection of docks
+with swinging elevators to lift the freight from the vessels and
+deposit it in the cars, and as the pay was very large and Pilchard was
+an adventurous soul, he undertook the job when it was offered to him,
+and going to the manager's office, impressed him with his boldness and
+ability, and signed his name to the contracts without reading them
+through; then gayly, and feeling no uneasiness, he buttoned his coat
+over the neatly folded paper and went to see Swan.
+
+Swan, in a greasy black shirt, was in the engine-room, hard at work,
+and he was just about to reprimand one of the men when Pilchard came
+in. Although it was early in May, a spell of precocious heat had taken
+New York by the throat, and what with the whir of rapidly turning
+wheels, and the smell of hot machine-oil and perspiring men, there was
+something filthy and degraded about the atmosphere. Swan suddenly
+realized this, although it was the only atmosphere he knew anything
+about. Glancing upward, he saw a little patch of blue sky through the
+top of one of the grimy windows ... a white cloud sailed past ... and
+then another ... something akin to longing welled in his heart,
+something like a wave of despair and hope, a desire to lift himself
+into a higher and less degraded world.... He looked toward the door
+and saw Pilchard, and crossing the room, he greeted him warmly and
+read the contract Pilchard pulled from his pocket.
+
+"That's a queer business," said Swan, when he had finished.
+
+"How so?"
+
+"Man alive, haven't you read what you've signed your name to?"
+
+"Certainly I've read it."
+
+"And you think you can put the job through in a year?"
+
+"Why not?" asked Pilchard, with his "cock-sure" smile.
+
+Swan, like every one else, was taken in by this smile, and to convince
+himself he read the contract again, out loud this time, and in a
+thoughtful way. Pilchard listened.
+
+The contract guaranteed that a railroad covering two hundred and fifty
+miles, between the city of Mexico and the little seaport of Zacatula,
+on the Pacific Ocean, would be built and completed in one year's time,
+work starting on the 25th of June. Docks and freight-elevators were
+included in the work, and if the tracks were not in fit condition for
+the trains to run by the date specified, every penny of the very large
+pay would be forfeited by the builders. A strange contract, indeed!
+Pilchard, however, as he heard it read, betrayed by no sign that he
+was as much surprised as Swan.
+
+"Well," said Swan, looking up and meeting that "cock-sure" smile, "you
+think you can do it in a year?"
+
+"I'm certain I can."
+
+"Of course," Swan continued, not yet convinced, "it's the worst
+country on earth; full of swamp and yellow fever."
+
+"I'll run in a gang of Mexican Indians to lay the ties. They can stand
+their own climate."
+
+"But you'll have to take down some white men, too, good fellows who
+know the business. You can't be the only man to do the bossing. It'd
+kill you."
+
+All this time Pilchard was closely watching Swan, and almost
+unconsciously something had been growing in his mind. Swan had an
+ugly, resolute face, and endurance seemed to be expressed in every
+line of his body. Behind him the engine roared, and spit steam, and
+ground out the produce of a great city factory; his face and hands
+were grimy and covered with grease, and the black cinders around his
+deep-set eyes gave him a terrible, deathly look. Pilchard saw
+instantly that he must have Swan to do the work. He must take him down
+to Mexico or else the railroad would never be built. Swan would come,
+too, because there was a look of tragic fatigue in his deep-set eyes,
+an expression of sick nausea in the lines about his mouth, that showed
+how gladly he would change, how completely he had come to the end of
+his hopes here; so Pilchard suggested with a careless smile that they
+go down to Mexico together. "Of course," he said, "I don't say that it
+mightn't be better for me to do it alone--two heads to a job, you
+know, isn't always a good arrangement; but you've got a pretty mean
+berth here. It'll take years for you to get a rise, and you're wasting
+your youth and health shut up with this filthy gang of men. This job
+of mine would push you right along, and you'll get others like it.
+Better come."
+
+Swan reflected. His work was the only thing on earth that he cared
+for, and to progress in his work, to keep putting through more and
+more difficult jobs, was what he had always aimed to do. But had he a
+right to take advantage of Pilchard's generosity? He glanced around
+the room, conscious of the incessant chattering of the different parts
+of the engine, which he must keep going in order to turn out the
+produce of a great city factory. He was no more here than one of the
+many parts of that engine, and if some day he should be absorbed into
+the midst of those whirring wheels and ground up like corn, who would
+ever be the wiser?
+
+So he went.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Had a letter from the company today," Pilchard observed, suddenly.
+
+"That so?"
+
+"They're going to send a fellow down from Frisco on the steamer that
+touches on the 25th. Everything plays into their hands. Steamer
+reaches here the day the contract expires."
+
+"Well, that's all right."
+
+"They request that I meet the fellow and show him around."
+
+"That's easy, too."
+
+Pilchard breathed smoke through his nose in his self-possessed way,
+and said nothing more, until Swan suddenly broke out:
+
+"Well, I for one won't be sorry to get out of this hole. I'll get the
+job done, of course, but we've just had a terrible setback. I think
+Peele's dying."
+
+"Lord!"
+
+"I came away from him only half an hour ago. He may last through the
+night, but I doubt it. Anyhow, if he lives or dies, we're devilish
+pressed for time. I'm beginning to think we'll have to work at night,
+too."
+
+"At night?"
+
+"There's a full moon. Here she comes now." Swan looked at the full
+moon, which, as the darkness increased, grew in radiance.
+
+Pilchard breathed more smoke through his nose, then said with a sigh:
+"That's hard luck, Swan. I'm sorry."
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"And yet it's a lucky thing that you're as strong as you are. It's a
+lucky thing you haven't got the responsibilities at home that I have."
+
+"I don't see what you mean."
+
+"Why, you know I'm engaged! I'm as good as married. That poor girl's
+got everything ready for the wedding. You met her that day last year
+you came up to Maine before we left New York."
+
+"Yes, I met her."
+
+"And you remember how much she thought of me?" Pilchard spoke slowly.
+It was impossible to tell why he did so. Was it because he did not
+care to discuss the woman he loved with an outsider like Swan, or was
+it because he was going on tiptoe, because he wondered what he must
+say next, because he was waiting, hoping that something unexpected
+would develop?
+
+Swan, however, dropped the question of Pilchard's marriage.
+
+"You mean, I suppose, that you won't work at night."
+
+"I can't. I'm not well enough."
+
+Swan grunted and sighed and stretched all his limbs, shaking his great
+shoulders as if he were trying to shake out the ague. Then he cleared
+his throat again and turned to Pilchard.
+
+"See here, Pilchard, it's time we came to some understanding."
+
+"Understanding?" Pilchard queried in a surprised voice.
+
+"Yes, about this job. About the pay--m--not so much the pay as the
+credit. This job ought to give a man a name. It's been a big piece of
+engineering and devilish hard work to put it through. I've planned the
+whole thing and watched every stroke of what's been done, and I
+deserve at least half the credit, if not all."
+
+Swan spoke in a brutal, masterful way. Perhaps he realized as he did
+so how completely the acknowledgment of his services depended on
+Pilchard's generosity. Pilchard alone had signed the contract, and
+Swan's existence was no more to the company than the existence of the
+other workmen. Moreover, the eleven mechanics they had brought down
+had all been carried off by fever, and there was no one else who, in
+case of necessity, could testify to the splendid work Swan had done,
+practically alone. All this was in Pilchard's mind as well as Swan's,
+and all this suddenly showed Pilchard how completely Swan was in his
+power. He must play a careful game.
+
+"Why, what the devil do you mean?" he asked, speaking rather angrily.
+
+"What do I mean? I mean that this is all too unbusinesslike. It's too
+vague. I'm risking my life to put this business through, and I want to
+get what I deserve. It's the biggest thing I've ever done, and I won't
+do it for nothing."
+
+"For nothing? Man alive, you're almost accusing me of dishonesty! I
+told you when we started out that I'd give you half the pay. If I'd
+ever supposed you didn't trust my word I'd have had it drawn up on
+paper. And as for the credit, you deserve it all, and you'll get it
+all ... and that's all."
+
+Pilchard ended with a self-conscious laugh, and got up to go indoors
+and take a few drinks before he went to bed. He stood for a moment,
+uncertainly, before Swan, wondering with a strange distrust, which
+lately had been growing upon him, what Swan really thought. Swan was
+so silent and reserved, and he worked with such unflinching constancy,
+that Pilchard often felt as if he too must be developing some plan. It
+was fortunate, he told himself, that there were only ten days more.
+His nerves could not have held out much longer; but after he had
+filled himself with several drinks and was sitting in gauzy pajamas
+beside an open window, things began to look brighter. Ten days might
+develop unheard-of things. To work all night on the borders of a swamp
+in this rainy season, which is almost certain death for a white
+man--Pilchard closed his eyes and peacefully slept....
+
+Swan continued to sit on the bench, and throwing back his head, looked
+at the sky. A full moon swung above him, huge and tropical and red,
+seeming to garnish the black depths that lay behind it and that great
+black mouth that opened immeasurably into the west. All his actual
+surroundings faded away, and, as is often the case with men at these
+moments, he thought of a woman that he had seen once and had never
+forgotten.
+
+That cool summer day just a year ago that he had spent on the coast of
+Maine, whither he had gone to see Pilchard about some final
+arrangements for their journey to Mexico--Pilchard had introduced him
+to the girl he was going to marry, and it had somehow happened that he
+and she had taken a short walk together along a cliff where some pines
+were growing, and which looked forlornly enough across the solitary
+ocean. Nothing but the most commonplace words had passed between them;
+they had talked of Pilchard and his enterprise, and had stopped to
+look at the view, and had gazed out over the rolling waves. He had
+scarcely dared look at his companion, but once he had helped her over
+some rocks, and he remembered that her foot had slipped, and for an
+instant her body had swayed against his. He remembered, too, that she
+had pale cheeks and dreamy eyes, and a slim hand laden with rings that
+held back her skirts. This slight experience had made a changed man of
+him. New senses existed for him, new hopes for the future that turned
+him dizzy, a splendid and deeper insight into life. The sordid
+realities of his life no longer claimed all his thoughts; they were
+beautified by rare and exquisite dreams, and by repetitions of that
+strange welling of hope and despair which had come to him in the grimy
+engine-room. After all, there were things in the world other than
+engines and boilers and steel tracks; there were plenty of uses for
+him besides calculating and experimenting and bossing a lot of filthy
+men. He, too, could serve and wait and hope and ... die!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Swan spent the remainder of that night with Peele, and as the sick man
+was still alive at sunrise, and Swan was obliged to oversee the men,
+he swallowed some coffee and went off, leaving Pilchard in charge.
+About noon Pilchard came out to him with a white face.
+
+"What's the matter?" Swan asked, full of apprehension.
+
+"Peele died before you'd been gone an hour."
+
+"We must see to having him buried at once."
+
+"He's underground already."
+
+"Where we'll all be if we stay much longer."
+
+"Where I feel as if I ought to be," Pilchard groaned.
+
+"What d'ye mean?"
+
+"I mean that I'm about ready to give up. If it wasn't for you I would
+give up. I'm as weak as water. I just saw Peele die, and that finished
+me. Ugh! It was awful!"
+
+And Pilchard, who certainly was pale, drew a flask from his pocket and
+took a long drink. He seemed to drink to his own weakness. He seemed
+to glory in the fact that he had given up, and that he knew Swan never
+would.
+
+Swan realized this and looked wearily across the swamp they had just
+covered. It was all his work. A narrow mound of solid earth ran back
+as far as eye could reach, and on it two shining steel rails glittered
+in the blazing sun. On either side lay wet, poisonous ground covered
+with deadly growths and exuding fearful odors and devitalizing forces
+which even the heat could not dissipate. In that noonday light which
+burned and burned and made no impression on the moisture, Swan's face
+was wilted like a white flower which is dead and turning yellow. His
+eyes, too, were like things once living and now dead. The muscles
+around his mouth twitched like electric wire.
+
+"It isn't possible for me to finish it alone," he told himself. He
+knew that he could finish the job by working both night and day, but
+could he stand the strain? Had he, after all, a stronger physique than
+any other white man had ever had before? He leaned far back as if he
+were trying to fold himself up, and then bent forward in the same
+manner, trying, with a desperation like death, to relieve the weakness
+that was numbing his limbs. He suddenly felt dizzy as he looked at the
+hot distance where some big leaves were waving--dizzy as he knew that
+he must fail.
+
+"By God!" he exclaimed, striking the pile of dirt. "By God! I'll do it!"
+
+Pilchard put on his hat and smiled. He had been waiting for this. "If
+you say you will, I bet you will!" he told Swan. "That's why you'll
+always come out ahead." As he said this he looked intently at Swan,
+who was still sitting on the pile of dirt. He noticed for the first
+time the peculiar look in his eyes and the trembling of his whole
+body.
+
+Swan sat silent. He saw the dark perspiring bodies of the Indians who
+were laying ties, and his lifelong ambition to be a great engineer
+suddenly presented itself to him in the old strong unemotional way.
+
+"For science is a cruel mistress. She exacts her yearly tribute of
+flesh and blood like the dragons of ancient pagan mythology."
+
+This had been said by an eminent scientist who had addressed his
+graduating class. Swan had heard it then and remembered it now. He
+clearly remembered that hot June morning ten years ago. Some young
+maple leaves had made a lovely pattern on the blue northern sky
+outside the uncurtained windows of the lecture-hall. He remembered
+that he had looked through the window and vowed that he would never
+give up.
+
+He organized two bands of men, one to work by moonlight and one by
+sunlight; but it was necessary for him to overlook them both, day and
+night, so it happened that there were just two hours in the
+twenty-four when he could find any rest. This was when the daily
+tropical storm broke, late in the afternoon, and all the workmen
+scampered for shelter. Swan crawled into a shanty the men had put up
+to hold their tools, and wrapping himself in a blanket, slept until
+the storm was over. That is to say, for three or four times he slept,
+but gradually he found it impossible to get any rest, and nobody knew
+the agonies he endured fighting off the fever, which he felt had
+marked him for its own. He never looked forward longer than twelve
+hours, thinking always that the next day would decide his fate, and
+the next day never did. "If I can keep it off till to-morrow, I guess
+it won't come back," he repeated, mechanically, standing in the
+moonlight and dosing himself and bossing the men. But in the morning
+there was never any abatement in those deadly symptoms which told him
+that the period of incubation would soon be over; and it almost seemed
+to him as if his cruel mistress was saving him in some miraculous way
+to complete her work, for it was not until the evening of the ninth
+day, when the railroad was finished and the last man paid off, that
+his temperature rose to fever-heat, his pulse quickened, and his
+tongue became congested, and this demon of the tropical swamp claimed
+him for its own.
+
+Early on the morning of the 25th, a Pacific mail-steamer touched at
+the little port of Zacatula, and a man was put off who came down from
+San Francisco to do business for the company in the event of the
+railroad not being completed. He was greatly astonished when Pilchard
+showed him that the last day's work had been done.
+
+"Then," said the agent, mopping his perspiring bald head, "we may say
+that you've carried out the contract to the letter, to the very
+minute. You say you only paid off the men last night?"
+
+"Yes," answered Pilchard, with his engaging smile, and casting a
+possessive glance down the front of his white trousers. "And it was an
+awful rush to get the job done." But in spite of Pilchard's sleek
+figure and social smile, he looked pale that morning. The hot sunlight
+that bathed the end of the dock met no responsive glow in his cheeks.
+
+The agent hung his handkerchief over the top of a post to dry it, and
+looked more closely at his companion. "Anything the matter?" he asked,
+kindly. "You certainly haven't lost anything on the job?"
+
+"No--no." Pilchard brought out that ever-ready smile that was so
+delightful. "But it's about time to go home. This is a terrible
+climate. We've lost every white man that came down, eleven all told,
+except myself and--and--one other, who's dying over in that shed now.
+Maybe--maybe--he's dead--" Pilchard jerked with his thumb towards a
+shanty just where the docks joined the land....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In this rude shanty, knocked together by the workmen to hold their
+tools, on a heap of sacks and blankets, Swan lay as he had dropped the
+night before. Pilchard had found him there, and the full moon coming
+in at the wide opening had revealed a fearful sight--Swan in the
+throes of terrific fever, his face scarlet, his eyes ferrety and
+congested, and his swollen tongue lolling between his lips. When he
+saw Pilchard he asked in a strange voice for water. Pilchard brought
+him some and felt his forehead. It seemed on fire.
+
+"Pilchard," began Swan, in a deliberate voice, as if he were trying to
+fight off the delirium, "the swamp got into me, after all. I've taken
+the fever."
+
+Pilchard, appalled by the terrible sight before him, and the things it
+suggested, which he could not help but see, leaned against the rude
+wall, and for once his self-possession deserted him. "Swan," he
+faltered, "Swan--for God's sake--"
+
+"Hush," Swan interposed, in that same deliberate voice. "Don't lose
+your head. I'm keeping mine. Am I talking sense?"
+
+"Yes, yes, Swan. Perfectly correctly."
+
+"Then I'll tell you what to do." Swan spoke more and more slowly as
+the fire mounted to his brain and besieged it. "There's every symptom
+of fever. You can't deny that."
+
+"Symptoms, Swan? I don't see any. You're worn out, poor fellow. That's
+all."
+
+"Then what's this?" Swan opened his mouth and showed his scarlet
+tongue. "And this?" He tore open the breast of his shirt and showed
+the congested condition of his skin. "But I'll fight death as I fought
+the fever! I'm not going to die. There's too much for me to do in the
+world! I'll be a great engineer. I'll make her proud. I vowed it when
+we looked out over the waves and I wanted to take her in my arms. See
+here!" and suddenly seizing a pickaxe from the ground beside him, he
+swung it around his head and sent it whizzing past Pilchard's ear, out
+through the opening of the shanty. "I've got my muscle and I've got my
+brain and I'll keep my life. I deserve to live. I deserve it as
+payment for putting the job through. I'll keep my wife here, too, here
+in the engine-room, with the pines behind us, and I can look after the
+men then. Who's that leaning against the wall? Pilchard? Poor fool!
+Why did you boast you were the only man who had ever loved a woman?"
+
+"Me boast! Heaven forbid," faltered Pilchard.
+
+"Then," shouted Swan, suddenly sitting up and striking out with both
+arms, "take these things away. All these little black things that are
+pouring over me. It's a regular shower. It must be a whole city. No!
+No! They're sparks! They're fire! They burn! They burn! Take the
+wheels away from me! They're grinding me like corn--oh, Lord! it's
+heavy, it's heavy! There, there! It crushes me! Now, now it's over.
+This is--death--" And he sank back, oppressed by a sudden, and
+overwhelming load of oblivion.
+
+Swan grew worse toward morning, and though the disease had only
+attacked him at sunset the night before, so rapid and terrible were
+its onslaughts that by the time the sun rose a complete physical
+collapse had occurred. His pulse had fallen below normal, and his skin
+assumed a strange yellow hue, the color of a lemon, and in these signs
+and the constant hiccough which convulsed the death-stricken frame
+Pilchard guessed properly what the termination must be. The end would
+come easily. Swan had ceased to suffer.
+
+When light crept gray and silent into the shanty, Pilchard stood and
+looked at Swan's prostrate form. No sound came to them but the gentle
+lapping of the waves. Sober as a dove Day hovered in the sky, and that
+solemn change which is Death was somewhere near, hiding and waiting;
+and Pilchard and Death and the breaking Day were for one second alone.
+And Pilchard was overwhelmed with terror. Some spectre had seized him,
+and he could not shake it off. He looked once more at the dying man,
+at his closed eyes and his still body, momentarily convulsed by the
+final signs of life, like a great piece of machinery when the steam
+power is gradually running down. Then he turned and broke away, to
+take a bath and to take a drink and then go to meet the steamer from
+San Francisco....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Eleven? You don't say. Fever, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes. We tackled three swamps on our way down from Mexico."
+
+"That so? Well, it's worth some sacrifice. It's a good job. I wouldn't
+'a' undertaken it myself."
+
+"I wouldn't do it again."
+
+They walked down the dock....
+
+Swan opened his eyes and looked through the wide opening of the shanty
+out to where the blazing sun struck the hot water of the little
+harbor. He hardly remembered where he was. Oh yes! He must get up and
+go down-town. In a minute, when he was fully awake. And he closed his
+eyes again and heard the accustomed whir of machinery, and knew that
+he was in the engine-room. One of the workmen needed to be spoken to;
+he was the filthiest of the lot, and Swan was the only man who could
+control him. Suddenly Swan opened his eyes again and saw that this
+same workman had entered the shanty and was standing beside him. He
+instantly recognized the man's greasy black shirt.
+
+"For science is a cruel mistress," the man said. "She exacts her
+yearly tribute of flesh and blood."
+
+But, singularly enough, these words meant something entirely
+different. Swan looked curiously at the workman and saw that he too
+was really somebody else. The man smiled and, leaning over, gently
+raised him up, and for the first time in his life Swan felt himself
+encircled by a woman's arms, and he tasted a strange, delicious joy
+awakening deep within him that knowledge of reciprocal love which
+slumbers in the heart of every man.
+
+"And you did it all for me," she said.
+
+"Did what?" he asked her.
+
+"Built the road?"
+
+"Yes," he whispered, closing his eyes again, filled with this new
+strange joy.
+
+"And now we'll go home together to the North, where the maple leaves
+make a lovely pattern against the blue sky."
+
+He knew nothing for a minute, and then she spoke again:
+
+"Well, it's a good job. I'll see that you get pushed along. The
+company 'll have plenty more work; big pay, too. This business has
+made your name. You're a wonderful fellow! You say you worked night as
+well as day?"
+
+"For eight days, yes."
+
+It was Pilchard's voice. He was talking to another man. They were
+leaning heavily against the rough wall of Swan's shanty. A horrible
+sensation came over the sick man, that sensation experienced by men
+who emerge from some unnatural mental condition, who are recalled by
+one sentence, often by one word, which acts like a key and opens again
+to their terrified vision the horrible realities of actual life. Swan
+raised his arms to bring that woman's face close to his, but he could
+not find it. He opened his eyes, and tears of weakness watered his
+cheeks. He was alone in the hovel knocked together by the men to hold
+their tools, and the work for which he had given his life was being
+claimed outside by another man....
+
+The agent leaned against the side of the shanty, gazing reflectively
+at his steamer, which was anchored half a mile from shore. "I'm going
+clear round to New York. You'd better get aboard and come with me," he
+proposed to Pilchard, to whom he had taken a fancy. "Good Lord!" he
+suddenly shouted, leaping forward. "Is this the shed where you said a
+workman was dying of fever? Let's get out quick or we'll take the
+infection."
+
+But Pilchard, pale as death, put up a warning hand. "Yes, let's clear
+out--let's get to sea before I go crazy! But--but--don't speak so
+loud. _He may hear_!"
+
+He had heard every word. His faculties, numb with death, sprang
+instantly into life. He leaped to his feet and left the shanty,
+momentarily endowed with his full strength, and facing the two men,
+spoke three times: "My work! My work! My work!" His eyes were on
+Pilchard all the time, and that look pierced like a sword; it
+penetrated to the very foundations of his being....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pilchard caught the body as it fell and lowered it to the ground, and
+then looked at the agent with a scared face to see how much he knew.
+The agent had leaped still farther away, and now was crouching, livid
+with fear, before this man whose last words had been words of
+delirium. No, he knew nothing. Pilchard alone knew the extent of his
+own deceit, which dead lips could never disclose. He alone knew of
+that half-formed idea he had not dared to mature, which had come to
+him a year ago when he looked at Swan's resolute face in the
+engine-room; and he alone in all the world could ever know of the
+terror which had possessed him at daybreak in the shanty when he had
+turned in a panic and run away--from what? ...
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A MATTER OF RIVALRY
+
+BY OCTAVE THANET
+
+
+It was the fifth afternoon of St. Kunagunda's fair. An interlude of
+semi-rest had come between the clearing up last night's debris of
+crowd and traffic, which had filled the morning, and the renewed crowd
+and traffic that would come with the lamps. The tired elderly women in
+charge of the supper had sunk into chairs before their clean linen and
+dazzling white stone-china dishes and fresh bunches of lilacs. The
+pretty young girls at the "fancy table" were laughing and prattling
+rather loudly with two amiable young men who had been tacking
+home-made lace handkerchiefs and embroidered "art centres" in the
+vacant spaces left on the pink cambric wall by the departure of last
+night's purchases. A comely matron kept guard simultaneously over the
+useful but not perilously alluring wares of the "household table" and
+the adjacent temptations of the flower-stand and the candy-booth. The
+last was indeed fair to see, having a magnificent pyramid of pop-corn
+balls and entrancing heaps of bright-colored home-made French candy;
+and round and round its delights prowled a chubby and wistful boy,
+with hands in his penniless pockets, waiting for the chancellor of the
+exchequer.
+
+Across the hall, the walls whereof were lavishly decked with red,
+white, and blue festoons of cambric, and had the green and gold of
+Erin's flag intertwined with the yellow and black of Germany, stood a
+table which had been the centre of interest for four nights, but which
+now was entirely deserted. There was no glory of color or pomp of
+bedizenment about it; nothing more taking to the eye than a ballot-box
+and a small show-case (the contents of the latter draped in newspapers
+at the present) and a neatly lettered sign above a blackboard, to one
+side. The sign simply demanded, "Vote Here!" The blackboard in less
+trim script announced that "For most popular business man" Mr. Timothy
+G. Finnerty had 305 votes, and three or four other candidates so few
+that there was no interest in deciphering the chalk figures; and that
+"For most popular young lady" Miss Norah Murray had 842 votes, and
+Miss Freda Berglund had 603. At intervals some one of the score of
+people in the hall would saunter up to the show-case or to the
+blackboard, to peer into the one or to study the figures on the
+other--although, really, there was no one in the hall who did not know
+every line on the board, and who had not seen both the gold watch and
+the gold-headed cane of the show-case. Two women came from different
+quarters of the room at the same instant to look at the blackboard.
+One was a comely dame in a silken gown that rustled and glittered with
+jet. She had just entered the hall, and was a little flushed with the
+climb up the stairs. The other was a stunted, wiry little Irish woman
+in black weeds of ancient make. She caught sight of the one in silk
+attire and paused. The first-comer also paused. Her color deepened;
+her head erected itself more proudly on her shoulders. Then she
+continued her progress, halting, with a dignified and elegant air,
+before the blackboard. The little Irish woman tossed her own head and
+appeared about to follow; however, her intention changed at a few
+words from the guardian of the apron table. She inclined her head, and
+with a glance of scorn at the silken back passed on over to the aprons
+and quilts.
+
+The matrons at the supper-table had viewed the incident with interest.
+A little sigh of relief or regret rippled about the board.
+
+"'Tis a great pity, that's sure," said one.
+
+"I was there when they had the words," said another. "Mrs. Conner was
+saying this voting business was all wrong--"
+
+"Well, sure she ain't far out of the way, with this time," interjected
+a voice; "bad blood more'n in this instance it's raised; the whole
+town's taking sides on it, and there was two fights yesterday. Why
+didn't they jest raffle the watch off decent and peaceable?"
+
+"There's some objects to raffling."
+
+"There's some objects to drinking tea an' coffee, they're so bigoted!
+In a raffle there's nobody pays more'n their quarter, or maybe a
+dollar or two--"
+
+"And that's it. Look at the power o' money we're gettin', Mrs. O'Brien
+dear! We'd _niver_ 'a' got nigh on to four hundred dollars for a
+gold watch rafflin'; and well you know it!"
+
+"Maybe," agreed Mrs. O'Brien, grimly, "but neither would we have got
+fightin' out of the church and fightin' in it; nor Pat Barnes be
+having his head broke. 'Twas hurted awful bad he was. His own mother
+told me; and she said Fritz Miller was sick in bed from it; Pat paid
+him well for talkin' down ould Ireland; and poor Terry Flanagin, he
+lost his job at the saw-mill for maddin' the boss that's Dutch, and
+infidel Dutch at that; and there's quarrels on ivery side, God forgive
+'em! They talk of it at the stores, and they talk of it at the saloon,
+where they do be going too often to talk it; and 'tis a shame an' a
+disgrace, down to that saloon the dirty Dutchman--"
+
+"_Whisht_!" three or four mouths puckered in warning, and Mrs.
+O'Brien caught the smouldering gaze of a flaxen-haired woman in very
+full black skirts and black basque of an antique cut, who had but now
+approached the group; with her race's nimbleness of wit she added,
+"Sure there's dirty Germans and there's dirty Irish."
+
+"Dere is," agreed the new-comer, with displeasing alacrity, "und some
+is in _dis_ parish und dis sodality. I vas seen dem viping dishes
+mit a newsbaber. Dot's so. Yesterday night."
+
+An electric thrill ran through the circle, and two matrons, suddenly
+very red, answered at once:
+
+"Would you have us wipe them on our _handkerchiefs_? The towels
+were all gone!"
+
+"'Twas the awful crowd did it; an' 'twas only some saucers for the
+ice-cream."
+
+Mrs. O'Brien waved her hands, very clean, not very shapely, and worn
+by many an honest day's toil, persuading and pleading for peace at
+once. "Sure," says she, "if you'd wurrk at fairs you'd know that you
+can't be doing things like you'd do them at home; and 'twas only for a
+minit they wiped the saucers with the paper napkins, clean tishy-paper
+napkins, Mrs. Orendorf; 'twas only two or three saucers got wiped with
+the newspaper, because the napkins was give out and they was shrieking
+and clamoring for saucers; and they're _terrible_, them young
+girls! waving their hands and jumpin' an' squealin'. 'Me first, Mrs.
+O'Brien!' 'It's _my_ turn, Mrs. O'Brien!' 'Oh, Mrs. O'Brien, wait
+on _me_. I've got six people haven't had a bite in half an hour;
+and they're so cross!' Till your mind's goin'! No doubt we're makin'
+money, but I'm for a smaller crowd an' more good falein'."
+
+"It's for der voting dey kooms," grumbled the German woman, only half
+pacified. "Dot vas bad mistake haf dot votin'. Vot vas dot dirty
+Deutchman you call him do dot make you so mad?"
+
+"Oh, it wasn't so _much_"--Mrs. O'Brien was still bent on
+peace--"he jist telephoned to the next door an' got the returns, as he
+called them, and had 'em posted up in his saloon. An' if they was
+daughters of mine--I 'ain't got anny daughters, praise God! for since
+I seen the way these waiters go on, I'm misdoubtin' I niver could
+manage thim--but if they was daughters of mine, 'twould be the sorry
+day for me whin they'd their names posted up in a saloon!"
+
+"Meine fader in der old country kept a saloon," said the German woman,
+with extreme dryness of accent, "und does you mean to say vun vurd
+against Freda Berglund?"
+
+"No, indade," cried Mrs. O'Brien.
+
+"And do _you_ mean to say one word against Norah Murray?" a bolder
+partisan on the Celtic side struck in, with a determined air. Three or
+four voices murmured assent.
+
+The German stood her ground. "I nefer seen her till yesterday"--thus
+without committing direct assault on the Murray supporters she avoided
+concession; "all I know of her is dot she nefer haf dot gold vatch!"
+
+"Then you know more than _we_ do. Norah's ahead, and she'll be
+_more_ ahead this evening," retorted a Murray voter; "there's
+plenty more money to spend for old Ireland--ain't there, ladies?"
+
+"Whisht!" called the peace-maker, in her turn. "Ain't it easy to see
+how Mrs. Conner and Mrs. Finn come to words and hard falein' when
+we're nigh that same ourselves, we that determined to kape out of the
+worry? They are both awful nice, pretty young ladies, and I'm sorry
+such a question come up between them; and 'tis _dreadful_,
+O'Brien says, the way the young men was spinding their money for Norah
+last night. Sure, an' it is that. 'Tis all a bad thing; I think that
+like Mrs. Conner."
+
+Mrs. Orendorf was unable to adjust her mental view to the varying
+argument; she cast a sullen and puzzled eye on the amiable Irish
+woman, and said, grimly:
+
+"It isn't joost yoong mans vot kan spend money. Freda don't have got
+no yoong mans, 'cause her Schatz vent to der var und die py der fever
+in Florida--"
+
+"Sure he did that!" cried Mrs. O'Brien, "an' 'twas a fine man an' a
+fine carpenter he was. Aw, the poor girl! I mind how she looked the
+day Company E marched out of town, him turnin' his eyes up sidewises,
+an' her white as paper but a-smilin'!"
+
+"God pity her!" chimed in another matron, with the ready response to
+sympathy of the Celt. There was a little murmur of assent. Mrs.
+Orendorf's swelling crest fell a little; her tone was softer.
+
+"But Freda got a fader, a goot man, _too_ goot and kind; he say
+he vunt haf his dochter look down on like she don't got no friends. He
+go and mortgage his farm, und he got drie--tree hunterd dollar"--she
+tapped the sum off her palm with solemn deliberation--"und he svear he
+vill in der votin' all, all spend, an' sie git dot vatch. _Ach
+Himmel! er ist verruckt!_ He say he got his pension and he got der
+insure on his life, und he 'ain't got nobody 'cept Freda, und he vunt
+haf Freda look down on. Und _sie_ don't know. Mans don't can talk
+mit him; he git mad. He git mad at _me_ 'cause I talk. _Dot's_ vat
+der fine votin' do!"
+
+A little gasp from the audience meant more than agreement; their eyes
+ran to Mrs. O'Brien, who faced the German and could see what they saw;
+then back of Mrs. Orendorf to the crimson face of a young girl. Mutely
+they signalled consternation.
+
+But the young girl did not speak; she walked away quickly, not turning
+her head as she passed the voting-booth. She was a pretty girl, with
+fresh skin, the whiter and fresher against her abundant silky black
+hair and black-lashed violet eyes. She carried her dainty head a
+little haughtily, but her soft eyes had a wistful sweetness. Her big
+flowered hat and her white gown, brightened by blue ribbons, were as
+fresh as her skin and became her rich beauty. She walked with the
+natural light grace often seen in girls of her race, whatever their
+class. No one could watch the winsome little figure pass and not feel
+the charm of youth and frank innocence and immeasurable hopes. More
+than one pair of elderly eyes that had seen the glory and freshness of
+the dream fade followed it kindly and with a pensive pride.
+
+"Ain't she pretty and slim!" sighed a stout lady in silk (Mrs. Conner,
+the most important supporter of the parish, no less), "and think of me
+having a waist as little as hers when I was married! But I wish she
+hadn't let them drag her into this voting business, for it has caused
+trouble."
+
+"Norah's as good and sweet's she's pretty," another elderly woman
+replied. "Just to think of that young thing supporting her mother and
+educating her brother for a priest with only those pretty little
+hands! But she won't be doing it long if the boys can one of them get
+their way. And what will we do for a dress-maker then? We never
+_did_ have such a stylish one!"
+
+"That's so," Mrs. Conner agreed, cordially; "she's the only one I ever
+went to didn't make me look fleshier than I am. But I say it is all
+the more shame to make that innocent young creature talked about and
+fought over, and have jokes made in the saloon and at the stores, and
+quarrels outside the parish and in it, too."
+
+"I guess it has gone farther than we thought," said the other. "Look!
+there's Father Kelly and the Vicar-General; they're looking at the
+blackboard. I wish I could hear what they are saying."
+
+Norah, indeed, was the only person who did not look at the two quiet
+gentlemen before the blackboard, curiously, and wonder the same, since
+the voting-booth had become a firebrand menacing the peace of the
+parish. Norah was too busy with her own thoughts even to see them; she
+only wanted to get past her wellwishers and be alone with her
+perplexities. If she did not see her spiritual guides, they saw her,
+and Father Kelly's tired face brightened. "You really can't blame the
+boys," he said, smiling; "and she's as good a daughter and sister, and
+as good a girl, too, as ever stepped."
+
+The Vicar-General smiled faintly, but his eyes were absent. The parish
+at Clover Hill was the newest in the diocese--a feeble folk struggling
+to build a church, or rather help build it, and holding its first
+bazar. There were no rich people of their faith--unless one except the
+Conners, who owned the saw-mill and were well-to-do--not even many
+poor to club their mites; more disheartening yet, the parish roll held
+about an equal proportion of Irish and German names. The Vicar-General
+and the Bishop shook their heads at the yoking of the two races; but
+there was no church nearer than Father Kelly's, five miles away, and
+Father Kelly was not young, and his own great parish growing all the
+time; so the parish was made, and a young American priest, who had
+more sense than always goes with burning enthusiasm, was sent to guide
+the souls at Clover Hill and keep the peace. He kept it until the
+fair, when in an evil hour he consented to the voting-booth. He
+expected--they all expected--that the excitement would focus on the
+gold-headed cane, and that Mr. Michael Conner would lead the poll,
+although the popular Finnerty might give him a pretty race for his
+honors; the gold watch was but an incidental attraction to please the
+young people and attract outsiders; nor was there any suggestion of
+names. Alas! Michael Conner, a blunt man, dubbed the voting scheme a
+"d--- weather-breeder," and would not give the use of his name; hence
+there was a walkaway for Finnerty; and somehow, before any of the
+elders quite realized how it began, the Irish girl and the German girl
+were unconsciously setting the whole town by the ears, and imported
+voters from Father Kelly's were joyously mixing in the fight.
+
+"There's no question about the _need_ of stopping it," said the
+Vicar-General, continuing his own train of thought aloud, "but how are
+we to do it? The feeling is a perfect dynamite factory now, and the
+least stumble on our part will bring an explosion. If we tried to give
+them the money back--and you know women have a tight grip on money
+--we shouldn't know where to give it. Positively we're like the family
+of the poor fellow who had the fit--one doctor said it would kill him
+to bring him to his senses, and the other said he would die if they
+didn't!"
+
+"And Father Martin safe in his bed with pneumonia!" groaned Father
+Kelly.
+
+Norah had found her progress barred by new-comers, and she had fled
+back to avoid them. Her cheeks reddened again, and the tears burned
+her eyelids; she went past too fast for more than a hurried
+salutation, at which Father Kelly shook his head. "That's the girl,
+isn't it?" said the Vicar-General. "I'm afraid the situation is a
+little too much for her, too; she looks excited."
+
+"Not a bit, not a bit," cried Father Kelly, undaunted; "she's a bit
+impulsive, but she's got good sense."
+
+"She wears too much jewelry."
+
+Norah did not hear this; she was out of the hall, speeding back to
+Mrs. Conner's gown that awaited her finishing touches. Her mother, a
+little creature with sweet temper that made amends for an entire lack
+of energy, was rocking over some bastings, sawing the air with her
+forefinger as she discoursed on the weighty splendor of the gold watch
+and chain, ending in gush of parental complacency, "And Norah says
+it'll be as much mine 's hers!"
+
+Norah could hear her chirping on, happily, while she laid away her hat
+in the bandbox and girt herself with a protecting apron.
+
+The talk turned her cold. "It ain't only for myself I want it," she
+declared to an invisible suggester, "though I _do_ want something
+real. I never had a real gold chain, or even a real gold breastpin, in
+my life--or a ring. Oh, I did want one!" She looked scornfully at the
+gay prism gleaming from her pretty fingers (fingers as daintily kept
+as any lady's); they had flashed like rubies and sapphires and
+diamonds from the white velvet drifts of the show-case in the great
+department store where she bought them when she went to the city; but
+now they were cheapened and dimmed by her memories of the "real"
+watch. She peeled them roughly from her hands.
+
+She had no morsel of news ready for the hungry ears awaiting her. To
+her mother's questions she answered briefly that the only thing she
+heard was that Freda Berglund would have a great number of new votes
+in the evening.
+
+Mrs. Murray tossed back a confident: _"Let_ her! I know some boys
+that's going to go this night, with a hundred dollars in their pockets
+each of 'em. Let her bring on her votes, I say. It's a good cause gits
+the money. But it's you'll be wearin' the watch next Sunday, and not
+Freda Berglund!"
+
+Norah bit her lip. She was not used to silence, but she sewed silently
+(Norah, who was so sweet-tempered that she had been known to work a
+whole day with a machine that skipped stitches, never getting cross,
+and stopping four times to wrestle with the bobbin before she subdued
+it). Her mother did not know what to make of her. Her own nickering
+complaints of Norah's "glumness" sank into dumb anxiety. She stole
+timid glances at the bowed black head and the frowning black brows;
+after a glance she would sigh, a prolonged, patient sigh. There are
+times when a sigh is to strained nerves like a blast of hot air on a
+burn. Norah jumped up and ran away from her own irritation before it
+exploded. She made a pretext of looking at her skirt (which was new)
+in the parlor cheval-glass; but in the parlor, behind the door, she
+did not give a glance to the picture in the mirror. The "pire glass,"
+as Mrs. Murray called it, was a relic of the family's better days when
+Norah's father was alive and kept a grocery-store and owned a horse
+and wagon; its florid frame of black-walnut etched with gilt, its tall
+mirror, very little marred by water-spots on the back, long had been
+reverently admired by Norah; it showed that the family had "had
+things"; but she passed it without a glance, just as she passed the
+cabinet organ decked in flowered plush which she had bought with her
+own savings. Never until that day had she stood in the parlor without
+a sensation of pleasure over its fresh paint and paper and the many
+gilt frames on the wall; but to-day she went, unnoting, to the crayon
+picture of a man, and looked through tears at a plain, smiling, kindly
+face.
+
+"I wish you hadn't died," was all she said; but the tears rolled down
+her cheeks and her frame shook with sobs that she forced to be
+noiseless. At last she dried her wet cheeks and tossed her head. "I
+don't see that _I_ need do _anything_," she muttered, while
+she hurried round the house outside, in order that she might reach the
+bedroom and efface the traces of her weeping. "I'm a great fool to
+think of doing anything," she declared. "I didn't put myself up, and I
+won't put myself down--and disappoint mother and all my friends. It's
+none of my business." Therewith she assumed a light and cheerful air,
+which she carried securely through the remainder of the afternoon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The fifth evening of St. Kunagunda's fair opened with a stifling
+crowd. Protestants, Catholics, and Germans who never had seen the
+interior of an American church jostled the buyers at the booths, and
+the faithful dutifully ate turkey and cold rolls for the fifth time at
+the supper-tables. The outsiders did not linger at the booths; they
+were come to vote or to witness the voting, and their jests and
+comments buzzed noisily above the talk. Every moment the note of the
+buzz grew more hostile. More than a few ears were tingling; at every
+turn there were scowls and sullen eyes and ugly smiles. The matrons'
+cheeks were burning; their eyes flashed; every now and again one of
+their voices shrilled defiantly above the hoarse hum of the crowd. The
+young Irish girls were laughing, enjoying the excitement, and admiring
+the young men flaunting their banknotes with the swing of their
+father's shillalahs. The young German girls curled their lips and
+whispered together. There was a significant herding of the contending
+races apart, while the visiting Anglo-Saxons wore an air of safe and
+dispassionate enjoyment, such as pertains of right to the boy on the
+fence waiting for the fight.
+
+Norah Murray had a circle of young men about her, who laughed
+rapturously at her sallies. She wore her chain and a new rhinestone
+brooch and all her rings. She looked very handsome with her flushed
+cheeks and bright eyes. She raised her voice to be heard above the
+din. Mrs. Murray's new bonnet nodded its red roses and black ostrich
+tips among the lace handkerchiefs and embroidery of the fancy
+table--she being enthroned on the step-ladder for lack of other
+seat--and her delighted eyes ran from her daughter to the voting
+blackboard. She waved a spangled fan and smiled buoyantly at every
+familiar face, whether turned towards her in recognition or not. Mrs.
+O'Brien, who had slipped away from the kitchen to be sure the lamps
+were not smoking, stopped a moment beside her. Mrs. O'Brien looked
+tired and worried when she let her own smile of greeting slip from her
+face. A tinge of the same expression was on Father Kelly's kind old
+countenance, but the Vicar-General's features were as inscrutable as a
+doctor's. He had made a genial procession through the room,
+distributing the merited praise at each booth, and appreciably
+softening the atmosphere by his presence. He halted opposite Norah's
+party. Father Kelly's gaze grew anxious. "I mind me," said he--"I mind
+me of the child when her father died--not six she was--holding her
+mother's hand, not weeping herself, the creature, just stroking her
+mother's hand and petting her; and holding the baby, the one that's
+off to the seminary now. Her father was an honest man. He failed once,
+and then paid every dollar with interest--an _honest_ man. I mind
+me of little Norah at her first communion--"
+
+The Vicar-General smiled. "Kelly, you're a good fellow," said he, not
+removing his glance from Norah's excited face.
+
+"She'll come out all right, all right," said Father Kelly, with the
+hammer-like gesture of his right fist which his congregation knew well
+for a storm signal. "She's a good girl. This is no fault of hers, this
+foolish contraption to make money; I'm one with Conner, there; but the
+girls aren't to blame. Freda's a good girl, too. That's she coming."
+
+The German heroine of this miniature Nibelungenlied was tall and
+slender, fair haired and fair faced. Her face wore a placid air; she
+looked perfectly serene and had assumed unconsciousness as a garment;
+she did not talk, only faintly smiled in return to the greetings that
+met her on every side. To right and left, before and behind her,
+walked her two aunts and her two neighbors, women of substance and
+dignity. They walled her about as might a body-guard, sending
+eye-blinks of defiance at the hilarious young Irishmen. Mrs. Orendorf,
+of the guard, went the length of twisting her head for a final glare
+of disapproval at Norah, in passing. Norah laughed. "I used to know
+Freda Burglund last week," said she, "but I guess she has forgotten
+me."
+
+"She's too busy with the blackboard, doing arithmetic," joked one of
+the young men.
+
+"You ought to see old Fritz!" cried another; "he's clean off his base.
+He's mortgaged his farm to Nichols. Nichols didn't want to lend, but
+he would have the money."
+
+"Well, I guess we'll give him a run for his pile."
+
+"He's mortgaged his farm!" said a third young man; when his voiced
+sounded, the very slightest of movements of Norah's head betrayed that
+she listened.
+
+"I'd mortgage two farms if I had them," was the gallant comment from
+the first man, "if Miss Norah needed votes."
+
+The third man felt the rustle of every dollar he had, drawn out of the
+bank that morning, and now bulging his waistcoat-pocket in company
+with a bit of ribbon that had dropped from Norah's hair; but it was
+easier for him to make money than talk; he was ready to push the last
+of it over the voting-table for Norah, but he wasn't ready of tongue;
+he put his big honest hands in his pocket, and lest he should glower
+too openly at the fluent blade, sent his eyes after Freda Berglund's
+yellow head and fine shoulders. Norah could see him. She stiffened.
+
+"I don't think it very nice of her to _let_ her father mortgage
+his farm," said a fourth partisan of Norah's; "he'd better buy her a
+watch out and out; you can get a good one for ten dollars. She'd ought
+to stop the old man. Her mother would if she were alive."
+
+"Fritz ain't so easy headed off," said the third man. "Miss Freda is a
+very nice young lady; I don't believe she knows about it."
+
+He kept his eyes on the yellow head, this unfortunate bungler, who had
+been in love with Norah since he had worn knickerbockers, and Norah
+held her own head higher in the air. And she let Mr. Williamson, the
+new book-keeper at Conner's (he who would have mortgaged two farms for
+her), take her to the ice-cream table, leaving the bungling lover
+(christened Patrick Maurice, his surname being Barnes), to jostle
+dismally over to the apron table, where Freda was.
+
+Norah laughed at Mr. Williamson's jokes, and asked him questions about
+the business college from which he had recently been graduated, and
+was the picture of soft animation and pleasure; and the while her
+heart was like lead, and she hated Freda Berglund. Sitting at the
+table she heard snatches of talk, all tinctured by the strong
+excitement of the evening. "I can't help it if they do quarrel," she
+thought, angrily, answering her own accusation; not even to herself
+did she say that she hated Freda.
+
+Her eyes wandered a second over the hall; they saw the Vicar-General's
+pale, handsome face, a half-head taller than Father Kelly's good gray
+head; they saw a square-jawed, black-haired, determined, smiling young
+man behind the ballot-box turning his eyes from Pat Barnes to an
+elderly man who held up his hand, waving a roll of bills.
+
+"Ah, I see Berglund has arrived," said Williamson. "You are going to
+do a lot to build the church, Miss Norah."
+
+Berglund was rather a short man; his hair was gray; he limped from the
+old wound received at Shiloh. Something clutched at Norah's heart as
+she looked at him. Williamson made some trivial joke; she did not hear
+it; she was hearing over again the words of the German woman to Mrs.
+O'Brien that afternoon. Impulsively she sprang to her feet. "Will you
+excuse me, Mr. Williamson?" she exclaimed. "I have to go to the
+voting-booth one moment." She went so swiftly that Williamson had much
+ado to keep pace with her, besides overpaying the waitress in his
+hurry. Father Kelly swallowed a groan of dismay at the fresh strain on
+his faith when he perceived her beckoning a ring-laden hand at the
+custodian of votes; and the Vicar-General involuntarily frowned. They
+both with one accord pushed up to the table--to the visible relief of
+the young man behind it. "I don't know what to do," he confided to
+Father Kelly, before the latter could ask the question quivering on
+his tongue--"I don't know what to do. Miss Murray wants me not to take
+in any more money 'til I hear from her again. She'll be back. And
+here's old Berglund wants three hundred and fifty dollars' worth for
+Miss Freda, and here's Barnes with a big bunch for Miss Murray, trying
+to scare off the old man. What'll I do, Father?"
+
+"I guess you better not do anything," said Father Kelly, with a
+twinkle in his eye. "Norah Murray is apt to have a good reason for her
+asking. Shut the booth down, and _I'll_ take charge while you go
+off for a cup of coffee."
+
+The Vicar-General nodded approval.
+
+"Well, just's you say, Father," said the young man; "it's kind of
+unprecedented."
+
+"What do you suppose it means?" puzzled the Vicar-General, in an
+undertone, as the vote-taker disappeared; and the crowd fell back a
+little on Father Kelly's bland announcement that Mr. Duffy had been
+called off for a few minutes, and there would be a recess in voting.
+
+"'Tis beyond _me_," said Father Kelly, "but watch the girl; she's
+gone straight to Freda Berglund. There, they're talking; they're going
+off together with Mrs. Orendorf. I can't give a guess, but she's a
+good girl. I'm hopeful."
+
+Norah had indeed gone straight to Freda Berglund. She addressed her in
+so low a voice that only Freda and Mrs. Orendorf, bending across
+Freda's shoulders at that instant, the better to cheapen a darning-bag
+for stockings, could hear her words. "I want to see you, Freda," she
+said. "Won't you and Mrs. Orendorf come away somewhere so we can talk?
+I have got something important to say."
+
+"I--don't--know," faltered Freda.
+
+"I want Mrs. O'Brien, too," said Norah, firmly. "It's all right;
+you'll think it all right, Mrs. Orendorf. Come, come; don't you see
+those men who have been drinking? Don't you hear them? Don't you see
+Mrs. Finn, who used to think there was nobody like Mrs. Conner,
+looking the other way so's not to see her? Can't you hear the
+quarrelling all round? They've stopped voting, but they haven't
+stopped quarrelling. Come!"
+
+Although she had dropped her voice, the listeners were so close that
+they caught snatches of the sentences, and craned their necks forward
+and hushed their own talk to listen. Mrs. Orendorf was not of a nimble
+habit of thought; but she felt the electric impetus of the Irish girl;
+besides, was _she_ not bidden? Could she not protect Freda from
+the machinations of the enemy?
+
+"Dot's so, Freda," she concluded, stolidly. "Koom den, der only blace
+vere we can talk py uns is dot coal-closet wo is der eggstry ice-cream
+freezer. Koom. I see Meezis O'Breen."
+
+Amid a startling pause, every eye questioning them, the three picked
+up Mrs. O'Brien and sought the coal-closet. Then Norah turned. In the
+dim light her face shone whitely. Her full melodious voice shook the
+least in the world with haste and excitement. "We've got to stop
+this," said she, "and I know how. Freda, I am going to withdraw my
+name. I wish to Heaven I never had let them put it on. You may have
+the watch."
+
+Freda's tall figure was only an outline in the shadow; they could not
+see her face; but the outline wavered backward. Her voice was stiff
+and cold.
+
+"I don't think that's fair. You have more votes than I have."
+
+Mrs. O'Brien opened her lips and shut them tightly. It was so dark no
+one saw her, or Mrs. Orendorf, as she sat on the freezer gulping down
+inaudible opinions regarding Norah's sanity.
+
+"I sha'n't have," retorted Norah, impatiently, "when your father
+spends all his money that he mortgaged his farm--"
+
+_"What!"_ cried Freda.
+
+"She not know; ve keep it von her," muttered Mrs. Orendorf. "Fritz
+make me promise not to tell."
+
+"Well, he didn't make _me_," said Norah. "_I'll_ tell. He
+raised the money, and he was trying to buy the votes, and I saw him. I
+haven't any father. I can't remember anything of my father except his
+leading me about when I was a little thing by the finger, and how kind
+his voice was; but I miss him--I miss him all the time; I know he was
+a good man, and loved me; and he'd have done anything for me, just as
+your father is doing; and I couldn't have borne it to have him, and I
+was sure you couldn't, either. Freda, it's all wrong, this spending
+more money than they can afford on us; I've felt it all along. Now
+let's stop it. The church has got enough."
+
+"Is it true about papa?" said Freda, in German.
+
+"_Ach Himmel_! Yes, my child. Dost thou not know thy father yet?
+For all he seems still and stern, thou art more than all the world to
+him." Mrs. Orendorf spoke in the same tongue; her other listeners
+could not understand it, but they marvelled over the soft change in
+her voice.
+
+"It's true enough, Miss Freda," said Mrs. O'Brien, gently. "And maybe
+you're in the right of it, Norah darling, though 'tis a bit hard to
+give in; but, yes, I'm sure you're right."
+
+"You _are_ right," said Freda, "and it's all been wrong, all
+wrong. But I've got to see my father first. Please come with me."
+
+As Norah had led them in the first place, Freda led them by an equally
+potent although entirely different force now; it was Norah's turn to
+follow, blindly.
+
+A hush everywhere in their wake betrayed that a consciousness of their
+conference and its importance was in the air. Freda was pale, Norah's
+cheeks burned, but neither girl looked to the right or the left; and
+both the matrons following avoided their friends' curiosity by a
+soldierly "eyes front." Freda walked up to her father, who looked up,
+not altogether pleased, at her light touch on his arm.
+
+"This is no place for thee, my child," said he; something in her face
+made his voice gentler than common. She looked, he thought, dimly, as
+she had looked when they got the news about Otto.
+
+"I _have_ to say something," said Freda.
+
+"You beples stand back!" commanded Mrs. Orendorf, with a backward
+impulse of her elbows.
+
+"Yes, you stand back, ladies and gentlemen, please," begged Mrs.
+O'Brien, smiling; "'twill all be explained to yous." Only Norah stood
+her ground; and Pat Barnes kept in the front rank of the bystanders.
+
+"What is it?" growled Berglund, bristling at the circle of faces much
+readier for peace than war.
+
+"She wants to give the watch to me," explained Freda, rapidly
+repeating almost word for word Norah's offer. As she spoke suspicion
+wrinkled the corners of old Fritz's eyes.
+
+"Maypi sie know sie vill git peten," he muttered, loud enough for
+Norah to hear. Then, as he saw her color turn, his hard face softened.
+"No," he said, clearly, "it don't be _dot_; dot Pat Barnes got
+his pocket full of moneys; no, sie is a goot schild, und her fader he
+vas a goot mans; sie haf a hard dime mit no fader to look oudt for
+her." He turned to Norah, whose swimming eyes met his full. Pat Barnes
+tried to cough down his emotion and made a strange squeak; but nobody
+smiled; the crowded hall was curiously still as Fritz limped up to
+Norah. "No, ve don't can take it off you; can ve, Freda?" said he.
+
+Freda slipped her hand into her father's arm. "No, Norah," she said.
+"I withdraw my name. And I'm prouder to have my father than all the
+watches in the world!"
+
+"Sure, you're right there, mavourneen," cried Mrs. O'Brien. "Whisht,
+all of you! These blessid children have got the way out of all this
+mess; they're better Christians than anny of us." Mrs. Orendorf
+frowned fiercely, reached for her handkerchief, and wiped her face.
+
+Father Kelly felt it time for his own word, and stepped into the
+circle. A sentence or two from Mrs. O'Brien made the quick-witted old
+Irishman master of the incident.
+
+"As I understand it," his full, rich, Celtic tones purred, "'tis the
+feeling of both these young ladies that there is hard feeling and
+strife and wasteful spending of money coming out of what was meant to
+be a good-natured contest for the good of the church; but this
+disputing, this spending, are neither for the good of the church nor
+the glory of God--far from it--God forgive us our weakness. So both
+these young ladies withdrew their names. We have cause to be proud of
+them both, as they surely have cause to be proud of the loyalty of
+their friends." (Irrepressible applause.) "And the kindest thing their
+friends can do is to shake hands all around." (A voice--in point of
+fact, the voice of the widow Murray: "But what will the sodality do
+with the watch?") "The watch is the property of the parish." Here
+Father Kelly paused, his persuasive argument rolling back on himself;
+_he didn't_ know what to do with the watch. It was too perilous
+to run the risk of new discords over it. The priest cast a distress
+rocket in a look at the Vicar-General; but the Vicar-General
+perfidiously smiled and looked away.
+
+Up spoke Norah, her sweet voice not quite steady, her cheeks
+crimson--but they all heard her: "It's a large gold watch. Why can't
+we give it to Father Kelly?"
+
+The Vicar-General's lifted hand stilled the shout that rose.
+
+"Why not?" called he. "Father Kelly is not a young lady, but he is
+popular."
+
+And Father Kelly, putting both hands over his blushes, ran away from
+the frantic roar of applause and laughter. The Vicar-General pursued
+him to say:
+
+"You were right, Kelly; she _is_ a good girl--and a wise one!"
+
+Perhaps the only person in the hall who was not either shouting or
+screaming, according to sex, was Norah's mother; and the cloud on her
+face lightened when she saw Norah coming to her on Pat Barnes's arm
+and Pat's face aglow.
+
+Freda saw them too; she slipped her hand into her father's arm.
+
+"_Liebchen_!" said he, stroking it with his rough fingers, "I
+will get thee a watch some day, never fear!"
+
+But it was not the thought of a watch that made Freda's heart lighter
+than for many a day. "I don't want a watch," said she. "Oh, I'm sorry
+for Norah, who can't even remember about her father!"
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Life at High Tide, by Various
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