Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook. This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the header without written permission. Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. **Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** **eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** *****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** Title: The Shape of Fear Author: Elia W. Peattie Release Date: September, 1999 [EBook #1876] [This file was first posted on February 6, 2003] [Most recently updated: February 6, 2003] Edition: 10 Language: English Character set encoding: iso-8859-1 *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE SHAPE OF FEAR *** HTML version by Walter DebeufThis etext was prepared by Judy Boss, Omaha, NE
Note: I have omitted signature indicators and italicization of the
running heads. In addition, I have made the following changes to the
text:
PAGE LINE ORIGINAL CHANGED TO
156 1 where as were as
156 4 mouth mouth.
165 5 Wedgwood Wedgewood
166 9 Wedgwood Wedgewood
167 6 surperfluous superfluous
172 11 every ever
173 17 Bogg Boggs
CONTENTS
THE SHAPE OF FEAR
ON THE NORTHERN ICE
THEIR DEAR LITTLE GHOST
A SPECTRAL COLLIE
THE HOUSE THAT WAS NOT
STORY OF AN OBSTINATE CORPSE
A CHILD OF THE RAIN
THE ROOM OF THE EVIL THOUGHT
STORY OF THE VANISHING PATIENT
THE PIANO NEXT DOOR
AN ASTRAL ONION
FROM THE LOOM OF THE DEAD
A GRAMMATICAL GHOST
TIM O'CONNOR -- who was de- scended from the O'Conors with one N --
started life as a poet and an enthusiast. His mother had designed him
for the priesthood, and at the age of fifteen, most of his verses had
an ecclesiastical tinge, but, somehow or other, he got into the
newspaper business instead, and became a pessimistic gentleman, with
a literary style of great beauty and an income of modest proportions.
He fell in with men who talked of art for art's sake, -- though what
right they had to speak of art at all nobody knew, -- and little by
little his view of life and love became more or less pro- fane. He
met a woman who sucked his heart's blood, and he knew it and made no
protest; nay, to the great amusement of the fellows who talked of art
for art's sake, he went the length of marrying her. He could not in
decency explain that he had the tra- ditions of fine gentlemen behind
him and so had to do as he did, because his friends might not have
understood. He laughed at the days when he had thought of the priest-
hood, blushed when he ran across any of those tender and exquisite
old verses he had written in his youth, and became addicted to
absinthe and other less peculiar drinks, and to gaming a little to
escape a madness of ennui.
As the years went by he avoided, with more and more scorn, that part
of the world which he denominated Philistine, and con- sorted only
with the fellows who flocked about Jim O'Malley's saloon. He was
pleased with solitude, or with these convivial wits, and with not
very much else beside. Jim O'Malley was a sort of Irish poem, set to
inspiring measure. He was, in fact, a Hibernian Mæcenas, who
knew better than to put bad whiskey before a man of talent, or tell a
trite tale in the presence of a wit. The recountal of his
disquisitions on politics and other cur- rent matters had enabled no
less than three men to acquire national reputations; and a number of
wretches, having gone the way of men who talk of art for art's sake,
and dying in foreign lands, or hospitals, or asylums, having no one
else to be homesick for, had been homesick for Jim O'Malley, and wept
for the sound of his voice and the grasp of his hearty hand.
When Tim O'Connor turned his back upon most of the things he was born
to and took up with the life which he consistently lived till the
unspeakable end, he was unable to get rid of certain peculiarities.
For example, in spite of all his debauchery, he continued to look
like the Beloved Apostle. Notwith- standing abject friendships he
wrote limpid and noble English. Purity seemed to dog his heels, no
matter how violently he attempted to escape from her. He was never so
drunk that he was not an exquisite, and even his creditors, who had
become inured to his deceptions, confessed it was a privilege to meet
so perfect a gentleman. The creature who held him in bondage, body
and soul, actually came to love him for his gentleness, and for some
quality which baffled her, and made her ache with a strange longing
which she could not define. Not that she ever de- fined anything,
poor little beast! She had skin the color of pale gold, and yellow
eyes with brown lights in them, and great plaits of straw-colored
hair. About her lips was a fatal and sensuous smile, which, when it
got hold of a man's imagination, would not let it go, but held to it,
and mocked it till the day of his death. She was the incarnation of
the Eternal Feminine, with all the wifeli- ness and the maternity
left out -- she was ancient, yet ever young, and familiar as joy or
tears or sin.
She took good care of Tim in some ways: fed him well, nursed him back
to reason after a period of hard drinking, saw that he put on
overshoes when the walks were wet, and looked after his money. She
even prized his brain, for she discovered that it was a delicate
little machine which produced gold.
By association with him and his friends, she learned that a number of
apparently useless things had value in the eyes of certain con-
venient fools, and so she treasured the auto- graphs of distinguished
persons who wrote to him -- autographs which he disdainfully tossed
in the waste basket. She was careful with presentation copies from
authors, and she went the length of urging Tim to write a book
himself. But at that he balked.
§ "Write a book!" he cried to her, his gen- tle face suddenly
white
with passion. "Who am I to commit such a profanation?"
She didn't know what he meant, but she had a theory that it was
dangerous to excite him, and so she sat up till midnight to cook a
chop for him when he came home that night.
He preferred to have her sitting up for him, and he wanted every
electric light in their apartments turned to the full. If, by any
chance, they returned together to a dark house, he would not enter
till she touched the button in the hall, and illuminated the room.
Or if it so happened that the lights were turned off in the night
time, and he awoke to find himself in darkness, he shrieked till the
woman came running to his relief, and, with derisive laughter, turned
them on again. But when she found that after these frights he lay
trembling and white in his bed, she began to be alarmed for the
clever, gold-making little machine, and to renew her assiduities, and
to horde more tenaciously than ever, those valu- able curios on which
she some day expected to realize when he was out of the way, and no
longer in a position to object to their barter.
O'Connor's idiosyncrasy of fear was a source of much amusement among
the boys at the office where he worked. They made open sport of it,
and yet, recognizing him for a sensitive plant, and granting that
genius was entitled to whimsicalities, it was their custom when they
called for him after work hours, to permit him to reach the lighted
cor- ridor before they turned out the gas over his desk. This, they
reasoned, was but a slight service to perform for the most enchanting
beggar in the world.
"Dear fellow," said Rick Dodson, who loved him, "is it the Devil
you
expect to see?
And if so, why are you averse? Surely the Devil is not such a bad old
chap."
"You haven't found him so?"
"Tim, by heaven, you know, you ought to explain to me. A citizen of
the world and a student of its purlieus, like myself, ought to know
what there is to know! Now you're a man of sense, in spite of a few
bad habits -- such as myself, for example. Is this fad of yours
madness? -- which would be quite to your credit, -- for gadzooks, I
like a lunatic!
Or is it the complaint of a man who has gath- ered too much data on
the subject of Old Rye? Or is it, as I suspect, something more
occult, and therefore more interesting?"
"Rick, boy," said Tim, "you're too -- in- quiring!" And
he turned to
his desk with a look of delicate hauteur.
It was the very next night that these two tippling pessimists spent
together talking about certain disgruntled but immortal gentlemen,
who, having said their say and made the world quite uncomfortable,
had now journeyed on to inquire into the nothingness which they
postulated. The dawn was breaking in the muggy east; the bottles were
empty, the cigars burnt out. Tim turned toward his friend with a
sharp breaking of sociable silence.
"Rick," he said, "do you know that Fear has a Shape?"
"And so has my nose!"
"You asked me the other night what I feared. Holy father, I make my
confession to you. What I fear is Fear."
"That's because you've drunk too much -- or not enough.
"'Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of Spring Your winter garment
of repentance fling --'"
"My costume then would be too nebulous for this weather, dear boy.
But it's true what I was saying. I am afraid of ghosts."
"For an agnostic that seems a bit --"
"Agnostic! Yes, so completely an agnostic that I do not even know
that I do not know!
God, man, do you mean you have no ghosts -- no -- no things which
shape themselves?
Why, there are things I have done --"
"Don't think of them, my boy! See, 'night's candles are burnt out,
and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top.'"
Tim looked about him with a sickly smile.
He looked behind him and there was nothing there; stared at the blank
window, where the smoky dawn showed its offensive face, and there was
nothing there. He pushed away the moist hair from his haggard face --
that face which would look like the blessed St.
John, and leaned heavily back in his chair.
"'Yon light is not daylight, I know it, I,'"
he murmured drowsily, "'it is some meteor which the sun exhales, to
be to thee this night --'"
"Damned by the skin of his teeth!" he mut- tered. "A little
more, and
he would have gone right, and the Devil would have lost a good
fellow. As it is" -- he smiled with his usual conceited delight in
his own sayings, even when they were uttered in soliloquy -- "he is
merely one of those splendid gentlemen one will meet with in hell."
Then Dodson had a momentary nostalgia for goodness himself, but he
soon overcame it, and stretching him- self on his sofa, he, too,
slept.
That night he and O'Connor went together to hear "Faust" sung, and
returning to the office, Dodson prepared to write his criti- cism.
Except for the distant clatter of tele- graph instruments, or the
peremptory cries of "copy" from an upper room, the office was still.
Dodson wrote and smoked his inter- minable cigarettes; O' Connor
rested his head in his hands on the desk, and sat in perfect silence.
He did not know when Dodson fin- ished, or when, arising, and
absent-mindedly extinguishing the lights, he moved to the door with
his copy in his hands. Dodson gathered up the hats and coats as he
passed them where they lay on a chair, and called:
"It is done, Tim. Come, let's get out of this."
There was no answer, and he thought Tim was following, but after he
had handed his criticism to the city editor, he saw he was still
alone, and returned to the room for his friend. He advanced no
further than the doorway, for, as he stood in the dusky cor- ridor
and looked within the darkened room, he saw before his friend a
Shape, white, of perfect loveliness, divinely delicate and pure and
ethereal, which seemed as the embodi- ment of all goodness. From it
came a soft radiance and a perfume softer than the wind when "it
breathes upon a bank of violets stealing and giving odor." Staring at
it, with eyes immovable, sat his friend.
It was strange that at sight of a thing so unspeakably fair, a
coldness like that which comes from the jewel-blue lips of a Muir
crevasse should have fallen upon Dodson, or that it was only by
summoning all the man- hood that was left in him, that he was able to
restore light to the room, and to rush to his friend. When he reached
poor Tim he was stone-still with paralysis. They took him home to the
woman, who nursed him out of that attack -- and later on worried him
into another.
When he was able to sit up and jeer at things a little again, and
help himself to the quail the woman broiled for him, Dodson, sitting
beside him, said:
"Did you call that little exhibition of yours legerdemain, Tim, you
sweep? Or are you really the Devil's bairn?"
"It was the Shape of Fear," said Tim, quite seriously.
"But it seemed mild as mother's milk."
"It was compounded of the good I might have done. It is that which I
fear."
He would explain no more. Later -- many months later -- he died
patiently and sweetly in the madhouse, praying for rest. The little
beast with the yellow eyes had high mass cele- brated for him, which,
all things considered, was almost as pathetic as it was amusing.
Dodson was in Vienna when he heard of it.
"Sa, sa!" cried he. "I wish it wasn't so dark in the tomb! What
do
you suppose Tim is looking at?"
As for Jim O'Malley, he was with diffi- culty kept from illuminating
the grave with electricity.
ON THE NORTHERN ICE
THE winter nights up at Sault Ste.
Marie are as white and luminous as the Milky Way. The silence which
rests upon the solitude appears to be white also. Even sound has been
included in Nature's arrestment, for, indeed, save the still white
frost, all things seem to be oblit- erated. The stars have a poignant
brightness, but they belong to heaven and not to earth, and between
their immeasurable height and the still ice rolls the ebon ether in
vast, liquid billows.
In such a place it is difficult to believe that the world is actually
peopled. It seems as if it might be the dark of the day after Cain
killed Abel, and as if all of humanity's re- mainder was huddled in
affright away from the awful spaciousness of Creation.
The night Ralph Hagadorn started out for Echo Bay -- bent on a
pleasant duty -- he laughed to himself, and said that he did not at
all object to being the only man in the world, so long as the world
remained as un- speakably beautiful as it was when he buckled on his
skates and shot away into the solitude.
He was bent on reaching his best friend in time to act as groomsman,
and business had delayed him till time was at its briefest. So he
journeyed by night and journeyed alone, and when the tang of the
frost got at his blood, he felt as a spirited horse feels when it
gets free of bit and bridle. The ice was as glass, his skates were
keen, his frame fit, and his venture to his taste! So he laughed, and
cut through the air as a sharp stone cleaves the water. He could hear
the whistling of the air as he cleft it.
As he went on and on in the black stillness, he began to have
fancies. He imagined him- self enormously tall -- a great Viking of
the Northland, hastening over icy fiords to his love.
And that reminded him that he had a love -- though, indeed, that
thought was always present with him as a background for other
thoughts. To be sure, he had not told her that she was his love, for
he had seen her only a few times, and the auspicious occasion had not
yet presented itself. She lived at Echo Bay also, and was to be the
maid of honor to his friend's bride -- which was one more reason why
he skated almost as swiftly as the wind, and why, now and then, he
let out a shout of exultation.
The one cloud that crossed Hagadorn's sun of expectancy was the
knowledge that Marie Beaujeu's father had money, and that Marie lived
in a house with two stories to it, and wore otter skin about her
throat and little satin-lined mink boots on her feet when she went
sledding. Moreover, in the locket in which she treasured a bit of her
dead mother's hair, there was a black pearl as big as a pea.
These things made it difficult -- perhaps im- possible -- for Ralph
Hagadorn to say more than, "I love you." But that much he meant to
say though he were scourged with chagrin for his temerity.
This determination grew upon him as he swept along the ice under the
starlight.
Venus made a glowing path toward the west and seemed eager to
reassure him. He was sorry he could not skim down that avenue of
light which flowed from the love-star, but he was forced to turn his
back upon it and face the black northeast.
It came to him with a shock that he was not alone. His eyelashes were
frosted and his eyeballs blurred with the cold, so at first he
thought it might be an illusion. But when he had rubbed his eyes
hard, he made sure that not very far in front of him was a long white
skater in fluttering garments who sped over the ice as fast as ever
werewolf went.
He called aloud, but there was no answer.
He shaped his hands and trumpeted through them, but the silence was
as before -- it was complete. So then he gave chase, setting his
teeth hard and putting a tension on his firm young muscles. But go
however he would, the white skater went faster. After a time, as he
glanced at the cold gleam of the north star, he perceived that he was
being led from his direct path. For a moment he hesitated, wondering
if he would not better keep to his road, but his weird companion
seemed to draw him on irresistibly, and finding it sweet to follow,
he followed.
Of course it came to him more than once in that strange pursuit, that
the white skater was no earthly guide. Up in those latitudes men see
curious things when the hoar frost is on the earth. Hagadorn's own
father -- to hark no further than that for an instance!
-- who lived up there with the Lake Superior Indians, and worked in
the copper mines, had welcomed a woman at his hut one bitter night,
who was gone by morning, leaving wolf tracks on the snow! Yes, it was
so, and John Fontanelle, the half-breed, could tell you about it any
day -- if he were alive. (Alack, the snow where the wolf tracks were,
is melted now!)
Well, Hagadorn followed the white skater all the night, and when the
ice flushed pink at dawn, and arrows of lovely light shot up into the
cold heavens, she was gone, and Haga- dorn was at his destination.
The sun climbed arrogantly up to his place above all other things,
and as Hagadorn took off his skates and glanced carelessly lakeward,
he beheld a great wind-rift in the ice, and the waves showing blue
and hungry between white fields.
Had he rushed along his intended path, watching the stars to guide
him, his glance turned upward, all his body at magnificent momentum,
he must certainly have gone into that cold grave.
How wonderful that it had been sweet to follow the white skater, and
that he followed!
His heart beat hard as he hurried to his friend's house. But he
encountered no wed- ding furore. His friend met him as men meet in
houses of mourning.
"Is this your wedding face?" cried Haga- dorn. "Why, man, starved
as
I am, I look more like a bridegroom than you!"
"There's no wedding to-day!"
"No wedding! Why, you're not --"
"Marie Beaujeu died last night --"
"Marie --"
"Died last night. She had been skating in the afternoon, and she came
home chilled and wandering in her mind, as if the frost had got in it
somehow. She grew worse and worse, and all the time she talked of
you."
"Of me?"
"We wondered what it meant. No one knew you were lovers."
"I didn't know it myself; more's the pity.
At least, I didn't know --"
"She said you were on the ice, and that you didn't know about the big
breaking-up, and she cried to us that the wind was off shore and the
rift widening. She cried over and over again that you could come in
by the old French creek if you only knew --"
"I came in that way."
"But how did you come to do that? It's out of the path. We thought
perhaps --"
But Hagadorn broke in with his story and told him all as it had come
to pass.
That day they watched beside the maiden, who lay with tapers at her
head and at her feet, and in the little church the bride who might
have been at her wedding said prayers for her friend. They buried
Marie Beaujeu in her bridesmaid white, and Hagadorn was before the
altar with her, as he had intended from the first! Then at midnight
the lovers who were to wed whispered their vows in the gloom of the
cold church, and walked together through the snow to lay their bridal
wreaths upon a grave.
Three nights later, Hagadorn skated back again to his home. They
wanted him to go by sunlight, but he had his way, and went when Venus
made her bright path on the ice.
The truth was, he had hoped for the com- panionship of the white
skater. But he did not have it. His only companion was the wind. The
only voice he heard was the bay- ing of a wolf on the north shore.
The world was as empty and as white as if God had just created it,
and the sun had not yet colored nor man defiled it.
THE first time one looked at Els- beth, one was not prepossessed.
She was thin and brown, her nose turned slightly upward, her toes
went in just a perceptible degree, and her hair was perfectly
straight. But when one looked longer, one perceived that she was a
charming little creature. The straight hair was as fine as silk, and
hung in funny little braids down her back; there was not a flaw in
her soft brown skin, and her mouth was tender and shapely. But her
particular charm lay in a look which she habitually had, of seeming
to know curious things -- such as it is not allotted to ordinary
persons to know.
One felt tempted to say to her:
"What are these beautiful things which you know, and of which others
are ignorant?
What is it you see with those wise and pel- lucid eyes? Why is it
that everybody loves you?"
Elsbeth was my little godchild, and I knew her better than I knew any
other child in the world. But still I could not truthfully say that I
was familiar with her, for to me her spirit was like a fair and
fragrant road in the midst of which I might walk in peace and joy,
but where I was continually to discover something new. The last time
I saw her quite well and strong was over in the woods where she had
gone with her two little brothers and her nurse to pass the hottest
weeks of summer. I followed her, foolish old creature that I was,
just to be near her, for I needed to dwell where the sweet aroma of
her life could reach me.
One morning when I came from my room, limping a little, because I am
not so young as I used to be, and the lake wind works havoc with me,
my little godchild came dancing to me singing:
"Come with me and I'll show you my places, my places, my places!"
Miriam, when she chanted by the Red Sea might have been more
exultant, but she could not have been more bewitching. Of course I
knew what "places" were, because I had once been a little girl
myself, but unless you are acquainted with the real meaning of
"places," it would be useless to try to ex- plain. Either you know
"places" or you do not -- just as you understand the meaning of
poetry or you do not. There are things in the world which cannot be
taught.
Elsbeth's two tiny brothers were present, and I took one by each hand
and followed her. No sooner had we got out of doors in the woods than
a sort of mystery fell upon the world and upon us. We were cautioned
to move silently, and we did so, avoiding the crunching of dry twigs.
"The fairies hate noise," whispered my little godchild, her eyes
narrowing like a cat's.
"I must get my wand first thing I do," she said in an awed undertone.
"It is useless to try to do anything without a wand."
The tiny boys were profoundly impressed, and, indeed, so was I. I
felt that at last, I should, if I behaved properly, see the fairies,
which had hitherto avoided my materialistic gaze. It was an
enchanting moment, for there appeared, just then, to be nothing
commonplace about life.
There was a swale near by, and into this the little girl plunged. I
could see her red straw hat bobbing about among the tall rushes, and
I wondered if there were snakes.
"Do you think there are snakes?" I asked one of the tiny boys.
"If there are," he said with conviction, "they won't dare hurt her."
He convinced me. I feared no more.
Presently Elsbeth came out of the swale. In her hand was a brown
"cattail," perfectly full and round. She carried it as queens carry
their sceptres -- the beautiful queens we dream of in our youth.
"Come," she commanded, and waved the sceptre in a fine manner. So
we
followed, each tiny boy gripping my hand tight. We were all three a
trifle awed. Elsbeth led us into a dark underbrush. The branches, as
they flew back in our faces, left them wet with dew. A wee path, made
by the girl's dear feet, guided our footsteps. Perfumes of elderberry
and wild cucumber scented the air. A bird, frightened from its nest,
made frantic cries above our heads. The under- brush thickened.
Presently the gloom of the hemlocks was over us, and in the midst of
the shadowy green a tulip tree flaunted its leaves. Waves boomed and
broke upon the shore below. There was a growing dampness as we went
on, treading very lightly. A little green snake ran coquettishly from
us. A fat and glossy squirrel chattered at us from a safe height,
stroking his whiskers with a com- plaisant air.
At length we reached the "place." It was a circle of velvet grass,
bright as the first blades of spring, delicate as fine sea-ferns.
The sunlight, falling down the shaft between the hemlocks, flooded it
with a softened light and made the forest round about look like deep
purple velvet. My little godchild stood in the midst and raised her
wand impressively.
"This is my place," she said, with a sort of wonderful gladness in
her tone. "This is where I come to the fairy balls. Do you see them?"
"See what?" whispered one tiny boy.
"The fairies."
There was a silence. The older boy pulled at my skirt.
"Do YOU see them?" he asked, his voice trembling with expectancy.
"Indeed," I said, "I fear I am too old and wicked to see fairies,
and
yet -- are their hats red?"
"They are," laughed my little girl. "Their hats are red, and
as small
-- as small!" She held up the pearly nail of her wee finger to give
us the correct idea.
"And their shoes are very pointed at the toes?"
"Oh, very pointed!"
"And their garments are green?"
"As green as grass."
"And they blow little horns?"
"The sweetest little horns!"
"I think I see them," I cried.
"We think we see them too," said the tiny boys, laughing in perfect
glee.
"And you hear their horns, don't you?" my little godchild asked
somewhat anxiously.
"Don't we hear their horns?" I asked the tiny boys.
"We think we hear their horns," they cried.
"Don't you think we do?"
"It must be we do," I said. "Aren't we very, very happy?"
We all laughed softly. Then we kissed each other and Elsbeth led us
out, her wand high in the air.
And so my feet found the lost path to Arcady.
The next day I was called to the Pacific coast, and duty kept me
there till well into December. A few days before the date set for my
return to my home, a letter came from Elsbeth's mother.
"Our little girl is gone into the Unknown,"
she wrote -- "that Unknown in which she seemed to be forever trying
to pry. We knew she was going, and we told her. She was quite brave,
but she begged us to try some way to keep her till after Christmas.
'My presents are not finished yet,' she made moan.
'And I did so want to see what I was going to have. You can't have a
very happy Christ- mas without me, I should think. Can you arrange to
keep me somehow till after then?' We could not 'arrange' either with
God in heaven or science upon earth, and she is gone."
She was only my little godchild, and I am an old maid, with no
business fretting over children, but it seemed as if the medium of
light and beauty had been taken from me.
Through this crystal soul I had perceived whatever was loveliest.
However, what was, was! I returned to my home and took up a course of
Egyptian history, and determined to concern myself with nothing this
side the Ptolemies.
Her mother has told me how, on Christmas eve, as usual, she and
Elsbeth's father filled the stockings of the little ones, and hung
them, where they had always hung, by the fire- place. They had little
heart for the task, but they had been prodigal that year in their
expenditures, and had heaped upon the two tiny boys all the treasures
they thought would appeal to them. They asked them- selves how they
could have been so insane previously as to exercise economy at
Christ- mas time, and what they meant by not getting Elsbeth the
autoharp she had asked for the year before.
"And now --" began her father, thinking of harps. But he could not
complete this sentence, of course, and the two went on pas- sionately
and almost angrily with their task.
There were two stockings and two piles of toys. Two stockings only,
and only two piles of toys! Two is very little!
They went away and left the darkened room, and after a time they
slept -- after a long time. Perhaps that was about the time the tiny
boys awoke, and, putting on their little dressing gowns and bed
slippers, made a dash for the room where the Christmas things were
always placed. The older one carried a candle which gave out a feeble
light. The other followed behind through the silent house. They were
very impatient and eager, but when they reached the door of the
sitting-room they stopped, for they saw that another child was before
them.
It was a delicate little creature, sitting in her white night gown,
with two rumpled funny braids falling down her back, and she seemed
to be weeping. As they watched, she arose, and putting out one
slender finger as a child does when she counts, she made sure over
and over again -- three sad times -- that there were only two
stockings and two piles of toys! Only those and no more.
The little figure looked so familiar that the boys started toward it,
but just then, putting up her arm and bowing her face in it, as
Elsbeth had been used to do when she wept or was offended, the little
thing glided away and went out. That's what the boys said.
It went out as a candle goes out.
They ran and woke their parents with the tale, and all the house was
searched in a wonderment, and disbelief, and hope, and tumult! But
nothing was found. For nights they watched. But there was only the
silent house. Only the empty rooms. They told the boys they must have
been mistaken. But the boys shook their heads.
"We know our Elsbeth," said they. "It was our Elsbeth, cryin'
'cause
she hadn't no stockin' an' no toys, and we would have given her all
ours, only she went out -- jus' went out!"
Alack!
The next Christmas I helped with the little festival. It was none of
my affair, but I asked to help, and they let me, and when we were all
through there were three stockings and three piles of toys, and in
the largest one was all the things that I could think of that my dear
child would love. I locked the boys' chamber that night, and I slept
on the divan in the parlor off the sitting-room. I slept but little,
and the night was very still -- so wind- less and white and still
that I think I must have heard the slightest noise. Yet I heard none.
Had I been in my grave I think my ears would not have remained more
unsaluted.
Yet when daylight came and I went to un- lock the boys' bedchamber
door, I saw that the stocking and all the treasures which I had
bought for my little godchild were gone.
There was not a vestige of them remaining!
Of course we told the boys nothing. As for me, after dinner I went
home and buried myself once more in my history, and so inter- ested
was I that midnight came without my knowing it. I should not have
looked up at all, I suppose, to become aware of the time, had it not
been for a faint, sweet sound as of a child striking a stringed
instrument. It was so delicate and remote that I hardly heard it, but
so joyous and tender that I could not but listen, and when I heard it
a second time it seemed as if I caught the echo of a child's laugh.
At first I was puzzled.
Then I remembered the little autoharp I had placed among the other
things in that pile of vanished toys. I said aloud:
"Farewell, dear little ghost. Go rest.
Rest in joy, dear little ghost. Farewell, farewell."
That was years ago, but there has been silence since. Elsbeth was
always an obe- dient little thing.
WILLIAM PERCY CECIL happened to be a younger son, so he left home --
which was England -- and went to Kansas to ranch it. Thousands of
younger sons do the same, only their des- tination is not invariably
Kansas.
An agent at Wichita picked out Cecil's farm for him and sent the
deeds over to Eng- land before Cecil left. He said there was a house
on the place. So Cecil's mother fitted him out for America just as
she had fitted out another superfluous boy for Africa, and parted
from him with an heroic front and big agonies of mother-ache which
she kept to herself.
The boy bore up the way a man of his blood ought, but when he went
out to the kennel to see Nita, his collie, he went to pieces somehow,
and rolled on the grass with her in his arms and wept like a booby.
But the remarkable part of it was that Nita wept too, big, hot dog
tears which her master wiped away. When he went off she howled like a
hungry baby, and had to be switched before she would give any one a
night's sleep.
When Cecil got over on his Kansas place he fitted up the shack as
cosily as he could, and learned how to fry bacon and make soda
biscuits. Incidentally, he did farming, and sunk a heap of money,
finding out how not to do things. Meantime, the Americans laughed at
him, and were inclined to turn the cold shoulder, and his
compatriots, of whom there were a number in the county, did not prove
to his liking. They consoled themselves for their exiled state in
fashions not in keeping with Cecil's traditions. His homesickness
went deeper than theirs, per- haps, and American whiskey could not
make up for the loss of his English home, nor flir- tations with the
gay American village girls quite compensate him for the loss of his
English mother. So he kept to himself and had nostalgia as some men
have consumption.
At length the loneliness got so bad that he had to see some living
thing from home, or make a flunk of it and go back like a cry baby.
He had a stiff pride still, though he sobbed himself to sleep more
than one night, as many a pioneer has done before him. So he wrote
home for Nita, the collie, and got word that she would be sent.
Arrangements were made for her care all along the line, and she was
properly boxed and shipped.
As the time drew near for her arrival, Cecil could hardly eat. He was
too excited to apply himself to anything. The day of her expected
arrival he actually got up at five o'clock to clean the house and
make it look as fine as possible for her inspection. Then he hitched
up and drove fifteen miles to get her. The train pulled out just
before he reached the station, so Nita in her box was waiting for him
on the platform. He could see her in a queer way, as one sees the
purple centre of a revolving circle of light; for, to tell the truth,
with the long ride in the morn- ing sun, and the beating of his
heart, Cecil was only about half-conscious of anything.
He wanted to yell, but he didn't. He kept himself in hand and lifted
up the sliding side of the box and called to Nita, and she came out.
But it wasn't the man who fainted, though he might have done so,
being crazy home- sick as he was, and half-fed and overworked while
he was yet soft from an easy life. No, it was the dog! She looked at
her master's face, gave one cry of inexpressible joy, and fell over
in a real feminine sort of a faint, and had to be brought to like any
other lady, with camphor and water and a few drops of spirit down her
throat. Then Cecil got up on the wagon seat, and she sat beside him
with her head on his arm, and they rode home in absolute silence,
each feeling too much for speech. After they reached home, however,
Cecil showed her all over the place, and she barked out her ideas in
glad sociability.
After that Cecil and Nita were inseparable.
She walked beside him all day when he was out with the cultivator, or
when he was mow- ing or reaping. She ate beside him at table and
slept across his feet at night. Evenings when he looked over the
Graphic from home, or read the books his mother sent him, that he
might keep in touch with the world, Nita was beside him, patient, but
jealous.
Then, when he threw his book or paper down and took her on his knee
and looked into her pretty eyes, or frolicked with her, she fairly
laughed with delight.
In short, she was faithful with that faith of which only a dog is
capable -- that unques- tioning faith to which even the most loving
women never quite attain.
However, Fate was annoyed at this perfect friendship. It didn't give
her enough to do, and Fate is a restless thing with a horrible
appetite for variety. So poor Nita died one day mysteriously, and
gave her last look to Cecil as a matter of course; and he held her
paws till the last moment, as a stanch friend should, and laid her
away decently in a pine box in the cornfield, where he could be
shielded from public view if he chose to go there now and then and
sit beside her grave.
He went to bed very lonely, indeed, the first night. The shack seemed
to him to be removed endless miles from the other habi- tations of
men. He seemed cut off from the world, and ached to hear the cheerful
little barks which Nita had been in the habit of giving him by way of
good night. Her ami- able eye with its friendly light was missing,
the gay wag of her tail was gone; all her ridiculous ways, at which
he was never tired of laughing, were things of the past.
He lay down, busy with these thoughts, yet so habituated to Nita's
presence, that when her weight rested upon his feet, as usual, he
felt no surprise. But after a mo- ment it came to him that as she was
dead the weight he felt upon his feet could not be hers. And yet,
there it was, warm and com- fortable, cuddling down in the familiar
way.
He actually sat up and put his hand down to the foot of the bed to
discover what was there. But there was nothing there, save the
weight. And that stayed with him that night and many nights after.
It happened that Cecil was a fool, as men will be when they are
young, and he worked too hard, and didn't take proper care of him-
self; and so it came about that he fell sick with a low fever. He
struggled around for a few days, trying to work it off, but one morn-
ing he awoke only to the consciousness of absurd dreams. He seemed to
be on the sea, sailing for home, and the boat was tossing and
pitching in a weary circle, and could make no headway. His heart was
burning with impatience, but the boat went round and round in that
endless circle till he shrieked out with agony.
The next neighbors were the Taylors, who lived two miles and a half
away. They were awakened that morning by the howling of a dog before
their door. It was a hideous sound and would give them no peace. So
Charlie Taylor got up and opened the door, discovering there an
excited little collie.
"Why, Tom," he called, "I thought Cecil's collie was dead!"
"She is," called back Tom.
"No, she ain't neither, for here she is, shakin' like an aspin, and a
beggin' me to go with her. Come out, Tom, and see."
It was Nita, no denying, and the men, per- plexed, followed her to
Cecil's shack, where they found him babbling.
But that was the last of her. Cecil said he never felt her on his
feet again. She had performed her final service for him, he said.
The neighbors tried to laugh at the story at first, but they knew the
Taylors wouldn't take the trouble to lie, and as for Cecil, no one
would have ventured to chaff him.
BART FLEMING took his bride out to his ranch on the plains when she
was but seventeen years old, and the two set up housekeeping in three
hundred and twenty acres of corn and rye.
Off toward the west there was an unbroken sea of tossing corn at that
time of the year when the bride came out, and as her sewing window
was on the side of the house which faced the sunset, she passed a
good part of each day looking into that great rustling mass,
breathing in its succulent odors and listening to its sibilant
melody. It was her picture gallery, her opera, her spectacle, and,
being sensible, -- or perhaps, being merely happy, -- she made the
most of it.
When harvesting time came and the corn was cut, she had much
entertainment in dis- covering what lay beyond. The town was east,
and it chanced that she had never rid- den west. So, when the rolling
hills of this newly beholden land lifted themselves for her
contemplation, and the harvest sun, all in an angry and sanguinary
glow sank in the veiled horizon, and at noon a scarf of golden vapor
wavered up and down along the earth line, it was as if a new world
had been made for her. Sometimes, at the coming of a storm, a
whip-lash of purple cloud, full of electric agility, snapped along
the western horizon.
"Oh, you'll see a lot of queer things on these here plains," her
husband said when she spoke to him of these phenomena. "I guess what
you see is the wind."
"The wind!" cried Flora. "You can't see the wind, Bart."
"Now look here, Flora," returned Bart, with benevolent emphasis,
"you're a smart one, but you don't know all I know about this here
country. I've lived here three mortal years, waitin' for you to git
up out of your mother's arms and come out to keep me company, and I
know what there is to know. Some things out here is queer -- so queer
folks wouldn't believe 'em unless they saw. An' some's so pig-headed
they don't believe their own eyes. As for th' wind, if you lay down
flat and squint toward th' west, you can see it blowin' along near
th' ground, like a big ribbon; an' sometimes it's th' color of air,
an' sometimes it's silver an' gold, an' some- times, when a storm is
comin', it's purple."
"If you got so tired looking at the wind, why didn't you marry some
other girl, Bart, instead of waiting for me?"
Flora was more interested in the first part of Bart's speech than in
the last.
"Oh, come on!" protested Bart, and he picked her up in his arms and
jumped her toward the ceiling of the low shack as if she were a
little girl -- but then, to be sure, she wasn't much more.
Of all the things Flora saw when the corn was cut down, nothing
interested her so much as a low cottage, something like her own,
which lay away in the distance. She could not guess how far it might
be, because dis- tances are deceiving out there, where the alti- tude
is high and the air is as clear as one of those mystic balls of glass
in which the sallow mystics of India see the moving shadows of the
future.
She had not known there were neighbors so near, and she wondered for
several days about them before she ventured to say any- thing to Bart
on the subject. Indeed, for some reason which she did not attempt to
ex- plain to herself, she felt shy about broaching the matter.
Perhaps Bart did not want her to know the people. The thought came to
her, as naughty thoughts will come, even to the best of persons, that
some handsome young men might be "baching" it out there by
themselves, and Bart didn't wish her to make their acquaintance. Bart
had flattered her so much that she had actually begun to think
herself beautiful, though as a matter of fact she was only a nice
little girl with a lot of reddish-brown hair, and a bright pair of
reddish-brown eyes in a white face.
"Bart," she ventured one evening, as the sun, at its fiercest, rushed
toward the great black hollow of the west, "who lives over there in
that shack?"
She turned away from the window where she had been looking at the
incarnadined disk, and she thought she saw Bart turn pale.
But then, her eyes were so blurred with the glory she had been gazing
at, that she might easily have been mistaken.
"I say, Bart, why don't you speak? If there's any one around to
associate with, I should think you'd let me have the benefit of their
company. It isn't as funny as you think, staying here alone days and
days."
"You ain't gettin' homesick, be you, sweet- heart?" cried Bart,
putting his arms around her. "You ain't gettin' tired of my society,
be yeh?"
It took some time to answer this question in a satisfactory manner,
but at length Flora was able to return to her original topic.
"But the shack, Bart! Who lives there, anyway?"
"I'm not acquainted with 'em," said Bart, sharply. "Ain't them
biscuits done, Flora?"
Then, of course, she grew obstinate.
"Those biscuits will never be done, Bart, till I know about that
house, and why you never spoke of it, and why nobody ever comes down
the road from there. Some one lives there I know, for in the mornings
and at night I see the smoke coming out of the chimney."
"Do you now?" cried Bart, opening his eyes and looking at her with
unfeigned inter- est. "Well, do you know, sometimes I've fancied I
seen that too?"
"Well, why not," cried Flora, in half anger.
"Why shouldn't you?"
"See here, Flora, take them biscuits out an' listen to me. There
ain't no house there.
Hello! I didn't know you'd go for to drop the biscuits. Wait, I'll
help you pick 'em up.
By cracky, they're hot, ain't they? What you puttin' a towel over 'em
for? Well, you set down here on my knee, so. Now you look over at
that there house. You see it, don't yeh? Well, it ain't there! No! I
saw it the first week I was out here. I was jus' half dyin', thinkin'
of you an' wonderin' why you didn't write. That was the time you was
mad at me. So I rode over there one day -- lookin' up company, so t'
speak -- and there wa'n't no house there. I spent all one Sunday
lookin' for it. Then I spoke to Jim Geary about it.
He laughed an' got a little white about th' gills, an' he said he
guessed I'd have to look a good while before I found it. He said that
there shack was an ole joke."
"Why -- what --"
"Well, this here is th' story he tol' me.
He said a man an' his wife come out here t' live an' put up that
there little place. An' she was young, you know, an' kind o' skeery,
and she got lonesome. It worked on her an' worked on her, an' one day
she up an' killed the baby an' her husband an' herself. Th' folks
found 'em and buried 'em right there on their own ground. Well, about
two weeks after that, th' house was burned down. Don't know how.
Tramps, maybe. Anyhow, it burned. At least, I guess it burned!"
"You guess it burned!"
"Well, it ain't there, you know."
"But if it burned the ashes are there."
"All right, girlie, they're there then. Now let's have tea."
This they proceeded to do, and were happy and cheerful all evening,
but that didn't keep Flora from rising at the first flush of dawn and
stealing out of the house. She looked away over west as she went to
the barn and there, dark and firm against the horizon, stood the
little house against the pellucid sky of morn- ing. She got on
Ginger's back -- Ginger being her own yellow broncho -- and set off
at a hard pace for the house. It didn't appear to come any nearer,
but the objects which had seemed to be beside it came closer into
view, and Flora pressed on, with her mind steeled for anything. But
as she approached the poplar windbreak which stood to the north of
the house, the little shack waned like a shadow before her. It faded
and dimmed before her eyes.
She slapped Ginger's flanks and kept him going, and she at last got
him up to the spot.
But there was nothing there. The bunch grass grew tall and rank and
in the midst of it lay a baby's shoe. Flora thought of picking it up,
but something cold in her veins withheld her. Then she grew angry,
and set Ginger's head toward the place and tried to drive him over
it. But the yellow broncho gave one snort of fear, gathered himself
in a bunch, and then, all tense, leaping muscles, made for home as
only a broncho can.
VIRGIL HOYT is a photographer's assistant up at St. Paul, and enjoys
his work without being consumed by it. He has been in search of the
picturesque all over the West and hundreds of miles to the north, in
Canada, and can speak three or four Indian dialects and put a canoe
through the rapids. That is to say, he is a man of adventure, and no
dreamer.
He can fight well and shoot better, and swim so as to put up a
winning race with the Ind- ian boys, and he can sit in the saddle all
day and not worry about it to-morrow.
Wherever he goes, he carries a camera.
"The world," Hoyt is in the habit of say- ing to those who sit with
him when he smokes his pipe, "was created in six days to be pho-
tographed. Man -- and particularly woman -- was made for the same
purpose. Clouds are not made to give moisture nor trees to cast
shade. They have been created in order to give the camera obscura
something to do."
In short, Virgil Hoyt's view of the world is whimsical, and he likes
to be bothered neither with the disagreeable nor the mysteri- ous.
That is the reason he loathes and detests going to a house of
mourning to photograph a corpse. The bad taste of it offends him, but
above all, he doesn't like the necessity of shouldering, even for a
few moments, a part of the burden of sorrow which belongs to some one
else. He dislikes sorrow, and would willingly canoe five hundred
miles up the cold Canadian rivers to get rid of it.
Nevertheless, as assistant photographer, it is often his duty to do
this very kind of thing.
Not long ago he was sent for by a rich Jew- ish family to photograph
the remains of the mother, who had just died. He was put out, but he
was only an assistant, and he went.
He was taken to the front parlor, where the dead woman lay in her
coffin. It was evident to him that there was some excitement in the
household, and that a discussion was going on.
But Hoyt said to himself that it didn't con- cern him, and he
therefore paid no attention to it.
The daughter wanted the coffin turned on end in order that the corpse
might face the camera properly, but Hoyt said he could over- come the
recumbent attitude and make it ap- pear that the face was taken in
the position it would naturally hold in life, and so they went out
and left him alone with the dead.
The face of the deceased was a strong and positive one, such as may
often be seen among Jewish matrons. Hoyt regarded it with some
admiration, thinking to himself that she was a woman who had known
what she wanted, and who, once having made up her mind, would prove
immovable. Such a character appealed to Hoyt. He reflected that he
might have married if only he could have found a woman with strength
of character sufficient to disagree with him. There was a strand of
hair out of place on the dead woman's brow, and he gently pushed it
back. A bud lifted its head too high from among the roses on her
breast and spoiled the contour of the chin, so he broke it off. He
remembered these things later with keen distinctness, and that his
hand touched her chill face two or three times in the making of his
arrangements.
Then he took the impression, and left the house.
He was busy at the time with some railroad work, and several days
passed before he found opportunity to develop the plates. He took
them from the bath in which they had lain with a number of others,
and went energeti- cally to work upon them, whistling some very saucy
songs he had learned of the guide in the Red River country, and
trying to forget that the face which was presently to appear was that
of a dead woman. He had used three plates as a precaution against
accident, and they came up well. But as they devel- oped, he became
aware of the existence of something in the photograph which had not
been apparent to his eye in the subject. He was irritated, and
without attempting to face the mystery, he made a few prints and laid
them aside, ardently hoping that by some chance they would never be
called for.
However, as luck would have it, -- and Hoyt's luck never had been
good, -- his em- ployer asked one day what had become of those
photographs. Hoyt tried to evade making an answer, but the effort was
futile, and he had to get out the finished prints and exhibit them.
The older man sat staring at them a long time.
"Hoyt," he said, "you're a young man, and very likely you have
never
seen anything like this before. But I have. Not exactly the same
thing, perhaps, but similar phenomena have come my way a number of
times since I went in the business, and I want to tell you there are
things in heaven and earth not dreamt of --"
"Oh, I know all that tommy-rot," cried Hoyt, angrily, "but when
anything happens I want to know the reason why and how it is done."
"All right," answered his employer, "then you might explain
why and
how the sun rises."
But he humored the young man sufficiently to examine with him the
baths in which the plates were submerged, and the plates them-
selves. All was as it should be; but the mys- tery was there, and
could not be done away with.
Hoyt hoped against hope that the friends of the dead woman would
somehow forget about the photographs; but the idea was un-
reasonable, and one day, as a matter of course, the daughter appeared
and asked to see the pictures of her mother.
"Well, to tell the truth," stammered Hoyt, "they didn't come
out
quite -- quite as well as we could wish."
"But let me see them," persisted the lady.
"I'd like to look at them anyhow."
"Well, now," said Hoyt, trying to be soothing, as he believed it
was
always best to be with women, -- to tell the truth he was an
ignoramus where women were concerned, -- "I think it would be better
if you didn't look at them. There are reasons why --"
he ambled on like this, stupid man that he was, till the lady
naturally insisted upon see- ing the pictures without a moment's
delay.
So poor Hoyt brought them out and placed them in her hand, and then
ran for the water pitcher, and had to be at the bother of bath- ing
her forehead to keep her from fainting.
For what the lady saw was this: Over face and flowers and the head of
the coffin fell a thick veil, the edges of which touched the floor in
some places. It covered the feat- ures so well that not a hint of
them was visible.
"There was nothing over mother's face!"
cried the lady at length.
"Not a thing," acquiesced Hoyt. "I know, because I had occasion
to
touch her face just before I took the picture. I put some of her hair
back from her brow."
"What does it mean, then?" asked the lady.
"You know better than I. There is no ex- planation in science.
Perhaps there is some in -- in psychology."
"Well," said the young woman, stammer- ing a little and coloring,
"mother was a good woman, but she always wanted her own way, and she
always had it, too."
"Yes."
"And she never would have her picture taken. She didn't admire her
own appear- ance. She said no one should ever see a picture of her."
"So?" said Hoyt, meditatively. "Well, she's kept her word, hasn't
she?"
The two stood looking at the photographs for a time. Then Hoyt
pointed to the open blaze in the grate.
"Throw them in," he commanded. "Don't let your father see them
--
don't keep them yourself. They wouldn't be agreeable things to keep."
"That's true enough," admitted the lady.
And she threw them in the fire. Then Vir- gil Hoyt brought out the
plates and broke them before her eyes.
And that was the end of it -- except that Hoyt sometimes tells the
story to those who sit beside him when his pipe is lighted.
A CHILD OF THE RAIN
IT was the night that Mona Meeks, the dressmaker, told him she didn't
love him. He couldn't believe it at first, because he had so long
been accustomed to the idea that she did, and no matter how rough the
weather or how irascible the passengers, he felt a song in his heart
as he punched transfers, and rang his bell punch, and signalled the
driver when to let people off and on.
Now, suddenly, with no reason except a woman's, she had changed her
mind. He dropped in to see her at five o'clock, just before time for
the night shift, and to give her two red apples he had been saving
for her.
She looked at the apples as if they were in- visible and she could
not see them, and stand- ing in her disorderly little dressmaking
parlor, with its cuttings and scraps and litter of fab- rics, she
said:
"It is no use, John. I shall have to work here like this all my life
-- work here alone.
For I don't love you, John. No, I don't. I thought I did, but it is a
mistake."
"You mean it?" asked John, bringing up the words in a great gasp.
"Yes," she said, white and trembling and putting out her hands as
if
to beg for his mercy. And then -- big, lumbering fool -- he turned
around and strode down the stairs and stood at the corner in the
beating rain waiting for his car. It came along at length,
spluttering on the wet rails and spitting out blue fire, and he took
his shift after a gruff "Good night" to Johnson, the man he relieved.
He was glad the rain was bitter cold and drove in his face fiercely.
He rejoiced at the cruelty of the wind, and when it hustled
pedestrians before it, lashing them, twisting their clothes, and
threatening their equilib- rium, he felt amused. He was pleased at
the chill in his bones and at the hunger that tortured him. At least,
at first he thought it was hunger till he remembered that he had just
eaten. The hours passed confusedly.
He had no consciousness of time. But it must have been late, -- near
midnight, -- judging by the fact that there were few per- sons
visible anywhere in the black storm, when he noticed a little figure
sitting at the far end of the car. He had not seen the child when she
got on, but all was so curious and wild to him that evening -- he
himself seemed to himself the most curious and the wildest of all
things -- that it was not surpris- ing that he should not have
observed the little creature.
She was wrapped in a coat so much too large that it had become frayed
at the bottom from dragging on the pavement. Her hair hung in unkempt
stringiness about her bent shoulders, and her feet were covered with
old arctics, many sizes too big, from which the soles hung loose.
Beside the little figure was a chest of dark wood, with curiously
wrought hasps. From this depended a stout strap by which it could be
carried over the shoulders. John Billings stared in, fascinated by
the poor little thing with its head sadly drooping upon its breast,
its thin blue hands relaxed upon its lap, and its whole attitude so
suggestive of hunger, loneliness, and fatigue, that he made up his
mind he would collect no fare from it.
"It will need its nickel for breakfast," he said to himself. "The
company can stand this for once. Or, come to think of it, I might
celebrate my hard luck. Here's to the brotherhood of failures!" And
he took a nickel from one pocket of his great-coat and dropped it in
another, ringing his bell punch to record the transfer.
The car plunged along in the darkness, and the rain beat more
viciously than ever in his face. The night was full of the rushing
sound of the storm. Owing to some change of tem- perature the glass
of the car became obscured so that the young conductor could no
longer see the little figure distinctly, and he grew anxious about
the child.
"I wonder if it's all right," he said to him- self. "I never
saw
living creature sit so still."
He opened the car door, intending to speak with the child, but just
then something went wrong with the lights. There was a blue and green
flickering, then darkness, a sudden halt- ing of the car, and a great
sweep of wind and rain in at the door. When, after a moment, light
and motion reasserted themselves, and Billings had got the door
together, he turned to look at the little passenger. But the car was
empty.
It was a fact. There was no child there -- not even moisture on the
seat where she had been sitting.
"Bill," said he, going to the front door and addressing the driver,
"what became of that little kid in the old cloak?"
"I didn't see no kid," said Bill, crossly.
"For Gawd's sake, close the door, John, and git that draught off my
back."
"Draught!" said John, indignantly, "where's the draught?"
"You've left the hind door open," growled Bill, and John saw him
shivering as a blast struck him and ruffled the fur on his bear-skin
coat. But the door was not open, and yet John had to admit to himself
that the car seemed filled with wind and a strange coldness.
However, it didn't matter. Nothing mat- tered! Still, it was as well
no doubt to look under the seats just to make sure no little
crouching figure was there, and so he did.
But there was nothing. In fact, John said to himself, he seemed to be
getting expert in finding nothing where there ought to be some-
thing.
He might have stayed in the car, for there was no likelihood of more
passengers that evening, but somehow he preferred going out where the
rain could drench him and the wind pommel him. How horribly tired he
was! If there were only some still place away from the blare of the
city where a man could lie down and listen to the sound of the sea or
the storm -- or if one could grow suddenly old and get through with
the bother of living -- or if --
The car gave a sudden lurch as it rounded a curve, and for a moment
it seemed to be a mere chance whether Conductor Billings would stay
on his platform or go off under those fire-spitting wheels. He caught
in- stinctively at his brake, saved himself, and stood still for a
moment, panting.
"I must have dozed," he said to himself.
Just then, dimly, through the blurred win- dow, he saw again the
little figure of the child, its head on its breast as before, its
blue hands lying in its lap and the curious box beside it. John
Billings felt a coldness beyond the coldness of the night run through
his blood. Then, with a half-stifled cry, he threw back the door, and
made a desperate spring at the corner where the eerie thing sat.
And he touched the green carpeting on the seat, which was quite dry
and warm, as if no dripping, miserable little wretch had ever
crouched there.
He rushed to the front door.
"Bill," he roared, "I want to know about that kid."
"What kid?"
"The same kid! The wet one with the old coat and the box with iron
hasps! The one that's been sitting here in the car!"
Bill turned his surly face to confront the young conductor.
"You've been drinking, you fool," said he.
"Fust thing you know you'll be reported."
The conductor said not a word. He went slowly and weakly back to his
post and stood there the rest of the way leaning against the end of
the car for support. Once or twice he muttered:
"The poor little brat!" And again he said, "So you didn't love
me
after all!"
He never knew how he reached home, but he sank to sleep as dying men
sink to death.
All the same, being a hearty young man, he was on duty again next day
but one, and again the night was rainy and cold.
It was the last run, and the car was spin- ning along at its limit,
when there came a sudden soft shock. John Billings knew what that
meant. He had felt something of the kind once before. He turned sick
for a moment, and held on to the brake. Then he summoned his courage
and went around to the side of the car, which had stopped.
Bill, the driver, was before him, and had a limp little figure in his
arms, and was carry- ing it to the gaslight. John gave one look and
cried:
"It's the same kid, Bill! The one I told you of!"
True as truth were the ragged coat dangling from the pitiful body,
the little blue hands, the thin shoulders, the stringy hair, the big
arctics on the feet. And in the road not far off was the curious
chest of dark wood with iron hasps.
"She ran under the car deliberate!" cried Bill. "I yelled to
her, but
she looked at me and ran straight on!"
He was white in spite of his weather-beaten skin.
"I guess you wasn't drunk last night after all, John," said he.
"You -- you are sure the kid is -- is there?"
gasped John.
"Not so damned sure!" said Bill.
But a few minutes later it was taken away in a patrol wagon, and with
it the little box with iron hasps.
THEY called it the room of the Evil Thought. It was really the pleas-
antest room in the house, and when the place had been used as the
rectory, was the minister's study. It looked out on a mournful clump
of larches, such as may often be seen in the old-fash- ioned yards in
Michigan, and these threw a tender gloom over the apartment.
There was a wide fireplace in the room, and it had been the young
minister's habit to sit there hours and hours, staring ahead of him
at the fire, and smoking moodily. The replenishing of the fire and of
his pipe, it was said, would afford him occupation all the day long,
and that was how it came about that his parochial duties were
neglected so that, little by little, the people became dis- satisfied
with him, though he was an eloquent young man, who could send his
congregation away drunk on his influence. However, the calmer pulsed
among his parish began to whisper that it was indeed the influence of
the young minister and not that of the Holy Ghost which they felt,
and it was finally decided that neither animal magnetism nor
hypnotism were good substitutes for religion.
And so they let him go.
The new rector moved into a smart brick house on the other side of
the church, and gave receptions and dinner parties, and was
punctilious about making his calls. The people therefore liked him
very much -- so much that they raised the debt on the church and
bought a chime of bells, in their enthu- siasm. Every one was lighter
of heart than under the ministration of the previous rector.
A burden appeared to be lifted from the com- munity. True, there were
a few who con- fessed the new man did not give them the food for
thought which the old one had done, but, then, the former rector had
made them uncomfortable! He had not only made them conscious of the
sins of which they were already guilty, but also of those for which
they had the latent capacity. A strange and fatal man, whom women
loved to their sor- row, and whom simple men could not under- stand!
It was generally agreed that the parish was well rid of him.
"He was a genius," said the people in commiseration. The word was
an
uncom- plimentary epithet with them.
When the Hanscoms moved in the house which had been the old rectory,
they gave Grandma Hanscom the room with the fire- place. Grandma was
well pleased. The roaring fire warmed her heart as well as her chill
old body, and she wept with weak joy when she looked at the larches,
because they reminded her of the house she had lived in when she was
first married. All the forenoon of the first day she was busy putting
things away in bureau drawers and closets, but by afternoon she was
ready to sit down in her high-backed rocker and enjoy the comforts of
her room.
She nodded a bit before the fire, as she usually did after luncheon,
and then she awoke with an awful start and sat staring before her
with such a look in her gentle, filmy old eyes as had never been
there before.
She did not move, except to rock slightly, and the Thought grew and
grew till her face was disguised as by some hideous mask of tragedy.
By and by the children came pounding at the door.
"Oh, grandma, let us in, please. We want to see your new room, and
mamma gave us some ginger cookies on a plate, and we want to give
some to you."
The door gave way under their assaults, and the three little ones
stood peeping in, wait- ing for permission to enter. But it did not
seem to be their grandma -- their own dear grandma -- who arose and
tottered toward them in fierce haste, crying:
"Away, away! Out of my sight! Out of my sight before I do the thing I
want to do!
Such a terrible thing! Send some one to me quick, children, children!
Send some one quick!"
They fled with feet shod with fear, and their mother came, and
Grandma Hanscom sank down and clung about her skirts and sobbed:
"Tie me, Miranda. Make me fast to the bed or the wall. Get some one
to watch me.
For I want to do an awful thing!"
They put the trembling old creature in bed, and she raved there all
the night long and cried out to be held, and to be kept from doing
the fearful thing, whatever it was -- for she never said what it was.
The next morning some one suggested tak- ing her in the sitting-room
where she would be with the family. So they laid her on the sofa,
hemmed around with cushions, and before long she was her quiet self
again, though exhausted, naturally, with the tumult of the previous
night. Now and then, as the children played about her, a shadow crept
over her face -- a shadow as of cold remem- brance -- and then the
perplexed tears followed.
When she seemed as well as ever they put her back in her room. But
though the fire glowed and the lamp burned, as soon as ever she was
alone they heard her shrill cries ring- ing to them that the Evil
Thought had come again. So Hal, who was home from col- lege, carried
her up to his room, which she seemed to like very well. Then he went
down to have a smoke before grandma's fire.
The next morning he was absent from break- fast. They thought he
might have gone for an early walk, and waited for him a few min-
utes. Then his sister went to the room that looked upon the larches,
and found him dressed and pacing the floor with a face set and stern.
He had not been in bed at all, as she saw at once. His eyes were
bloodshot, his face stricken as if with old age or sin or -- but she
could not make it out. When he saw her he sank in a chair and covered
his face with his hands, and between the trembling fingers she could
see drops of perspiration on his forehead.
"Hal!" she cried, "Hal, what is it?"
But for answer he threw his arms about the little table and clung to
it, and looked at her with tortured eyes, in which she fancied she
saw a gleam of hate. She ran, screaming, from the room, and her
father came and went up to him and laid his hands on the boy's
shoulders. And then a fearful thing hap- pened. All the family saw
it. There could be no mistake. Hal's hands found their way with
frantic eagerness toward his father's throat as if they would choke
him, and the look in his eyes was so like a madman's that his father
raised his fist and felled him as he used to fell men years before in
the college fights, and then dragged him into the sitting- room and
wept over him.
By evening, however, Hal was all right, and the family said it must
have been a fever, -- perhaps from overstudy, -- at which Hal cov-
ertly smiled. But his father was still too anxious about him to let
him out of his sight, so he put him on a cot in his room, and thus it
chanced that the mother and Grace con- cluded to sleep together
downstairs.
The two women made a sort of festival of it, and drank little cups of
chocolate before the fire, and undid and brushed their brown braids,
and smiled at each other, understand- ingly, with that sweet
intuitive sympathy which women have, and Grace told her mother a
number of things which she had been waiting for just such an
auspicious oc- casion to confide.
But the larches were noisy and cried out with wild voices, and the
flame of the fire grew blue and swirled about in the draught
sinuously, so that a chill crept upon the two.
Something cold appeared to envelop them -- such a chill as pleasure
voyagers feel when a berg steals beyond Newfoundland and glows blue
and threatening upon their ocean path.
Then came something else which was not cold, but hot as the flames of
hell -- and they saw red, and stared at each other with mad- dened
eyes, and then ran together from the room and clasped in close
embrace safe beyond the fatal place, and thanked God they had not
done the thing that they dared not speak of -- the thing which
suddenly came to them to do.
So they called it the room of the Evil Thought. They could not
account for it.
They avoided the thought of it, being healthy and happy folk. But
none entered it more.
The door was locked.
One day, Hal, reading the paper, came across a paragraph concerning
the young min- ister who had once lived there, and who had thought
and written there and so influenced the lives of those about him that
they remem- bered him even while they disapproved.
"He cut a man's throat on board ship for Australia," said he, "and
then he cut his own, without fatal effect -- and jumped overboard,
and so ended it. What a strange thing!"
Then they all looked at one another with subtle looks, and a shadow
fell upon them and stayed the blood at their hearts.
The next week the room of the Evil Thought was pulled down to make
way for a pansy bed, which is quite gay and innocent, and blooms all
the better because the larches, with their eternal murmuring, have
been laid low and carted away to the sawmill.
THERE had always been strange stories about the house, but it was a
sensible, comfortable sort of a neighborhood, and people took pains
to say to one another that there was nothing in these tales -- of
course not!
Absolutely nothing! How could there be?
It was a matter of common remark, however, that considering the
amount of money the Nethertons had spent on the place, it was curious
they lived there so little. They were nearly always away, -- up North
in the sum- mer and down South in the winter, and over to Paris or
London now and then, -- and when they did come home it was only to
entertain a number of guests from the city. The place was either
plunged in gloom or gayety. The old gardener who kept house by
himself in the cottage at the back of the yard had things much his
own way by far the greater part of the time.
Dr. Block and his wife lived next door to the Nethertons, and he and
his wife, who were so absurd as to be very happy in each other's
company, had the benefit of the beau- tiful yard. They walked there
mornings when the leaves were silvered with dew, and even- ings they
sat beside the lily pond and listened for the whip-poor-will. The
doctor's wife moved her room over to that side of the house which
commanded a view of the yard, and thus made the honeysuckles and
laurel and clematis and all the masses of tossing greenery her own.
Sitting there day after day with her sewing, she speculated about the
mystery which hung impalpably yet undeniably over the house.
It happened one night when she and her husband had gone to their
room, and were congratulating themselves on the fact that he had no
very sick patients and was likely to enjoy a good night's rest, that
a ring came at the door.
"If it's any one wanting you to leave home," warned his wife, "you
must tell them you are all worn out. You've been disturbed every
night this week, and it's too much!"
The young physician went downstairs. At the door stood a man whom he
had never seen before.
"My wife is lying very ill next door," said the stranger, "so
ill
that I fear she will not live till morning. Will you please come to
her at once?"
"Next door?" cried the physician. "I didn't know the Nethertons
were
home!"
"Please hasten," begged the man. "I must go back to her. Follow
as
quickly as you can."
The doctor went back upstairs to complete his toilet.
"How absurd," protested his wife when she heard the story. "There
is
no one at the Nethertons'. I sit where I can see the front door, and
no one can enter without my know- ing it, and I have been sewing by
the window all day. If there were any one in the house, the gardener
would have the porch lantern lighted. It is some plot. Some one has
designs on you. You must not go."
But he went. As he left the room his wife placed a revolver in his
pocket.
The great porch of the mansion was dark, but the physician made out
that the door was open, and he entered. A feeble light came from the
bronze lamp at the turn of the stairs, and by it he found his way,
his feet sinking noiselessly in the rich carpets. At the head of the
stairs the man met him. The doctor thought himself a tall man, but
the stranger topped him by half a head. He motioned the physician to
follow him, and the two went down the hall to the front room. The
place was flushed with a rose-colored glow from several lamps. On a
silken couch, in the midst of pillows, lay a woman dying with
consumption. She was like a lily, white, shapely, graceful, with
feeble yet charming movements. She looked at the doctor ap-
pealingly, then, seeing in his eyes the in- voluntary verdict that
her hour was at hand, she turned toward her companion with a glance
of anguish. Dr. Block asked a few questions. The man answered them,
the woman remaining silent. The physician ad- ministered something
stimulating, and then wrote a prescription which he placed on the
mantel-shelf.
"The drug store is closed to-night," he said, "and I fear the
druggist has gone home.
You can have the prescription filled the first thing in the morning,
and I will be over before breakfast."
After that, there was no reason why he should not have gone home.
Yet, oddly enough, he preferred to stay. Nor was it professional
anxiety that prompted this delay.
He longed to watch those mysterious per- sons, who, almost oblivious
of his presence, were speaking their mortal farewells in their
glances, which were impassioned and of un- utterable sadness.
He sat as if fascinated. He watched the glitter of rings on the
woman's long, white hands, he noted the waving of light hair about
her temples, he observed the details of her gown of soft white silk
which fell about her in voluminous folds. Now and then the man gave
her of the stimulant which the doc- tor had provided; sometimes he
bathed her face with water. Once he paced the floor for a moment till
a motion of her hand quieted him.
After a time, feeling that it would be more sensible and considerate
of him to leave, the doctor made his way home. His wife was awake,
impatient to hear of his experiences.
She listened to his tale in silence, and when he had finished she
turned her face to the wall and made no comment.
"You seem to be ill, my dear," he said.
"You have a chill. You are shivering."
"I have no chill," she replied sharply.
"But I -- well, you may leave the light burning."
The next morning before breakfast the doc- tor crossed the dewy sward
to the Netherton house. The front door was locked, and no one
answered to his repeated ringings. The old gardener chanced to be
cutting the grass near at hand, and he came running up.
"What you ringin' that door-bell for, doc- tor?" said he. "The
folks
ain't come home yet. There ain't nobody there."
"Yes, there is, Jim. I was called here last night. A man came for me
to attend his wife. They must both have fallen asleep that the bell
is not answered. I wouldn't be sur- prised to find her dead, as a
matter of fact.
She was a desperately sick woman. Perhaps she is dead and something
has happened to him. You have the key to the door, Jim.
Let me in."
But the old man was shaking in every limb, and refused to do as he
was bid.
"Don't you never go in there, doctor,"
whispered he, with chattering teeth. "Don't you go for to 'tend no
one. You jus' come tell me when you sent for that way. No, I ain't
goin' in, doctor, nohow. It ain't part of my duties to go in. That's
been stipulated by Mr. Netherton. It's my business to look after the
garden."
Argument was useless. Dr. Block took the bunch of keys from the old
man's pocket and himself unlocked the front door and entered.
He mounted the steps and made his way to the upper room. There was no
evidence of occupancy. The place was silent, and, so far as living
creature went, vacant. The dust lay over everything. It covered the
delicate damask of the sofa where he had seen the dying woman. It
rested on the pillows. The place smelled musty and evil, as if it had
not been used for a long time. The lamps of the room held not a drop
of oil.
But on the mantel-shelf was the prescrip- tion which the doctor had
written the night before. He read it, folded it, and put it in his
pocket.
As he locked the outside door the old gar- dener came running to him.
"Don't you never go up there again, will you?" he pleaded, "not
unless you see all the Nethertons home and I come for you myself.
You won't, doctor?"
"No," said the doctor.
When he told his wife she kissed him, and said:
"Next time when I tell you to stay at home, you must stay!"
BABETTE had gone away for the summer; the furniture was in its summer
linens; the curtains were down, and Babette's husband, John Boyce,
was alone in the house. It was the first year of his marriage, and he
missed Babette. But then, as he often said to him- self, he ought
never to have married her. He did it from pure selfishness, and
because he was determined to possess the most illusive, tantalizing,
elegant, and utterly unmoral little creature that the sun shone upon.
He wanted her because she reminded him of birds, and flowers, and
summer winds, and other exqui- site things created for the
delectation of mankind. He neither expected nor desired her to think.
He had half-frightened her into marrying him, had taken her to a poor
man's home, provided her with no society such as she had been
accustomed to, and he had no reasonable cause of complaint when she
answered the call of summer and flitted away, like a butterfly in the
morning sunshine, to the place where the flowers grew.
He wrote to her every evening, sitting in the stifling, ugly house,
and poured out his soul as if it were a libation to a goddess.
She sometimes answered by telegraph, some- times by a perfumed note.
He schooled him- self not to feel hurt. Why should Babette write?
Does a goldfinch indict epistles; or a humming-bird study
composition; or a glancing, red-scaled fish in summer shallows
consider the meaning of words?
He knew at the beginning what Babette was -- guessed her limitations
-- trembled when he buttoned her tiny glove -- kissed her dainty
slipper when he found it in the closet after she was gone -- thrilled
at the sound of her laugh, or the memory of it! That was all.
A mere case of love. He was in bonds.
Babette was not. Therefore he was in the city, working overhours to
pay for Babette's pretty follies down at the seaside. It was quite
right and proper. He was a grub in the furrow; she a lark in the
blue. Those had always been and always must be their relative
positions.
Having attained a mood of philosophic calm, in which he was prepared
to spend his evenings alone -- as became a grub -- and to await with
dignified patience the return of his wife, it was in the nature of an
inconsist- ency that he should have walked the floor of the dull
little drawing-room like a lion in cage. It did not seem in keeping
with the position of superior serenity which he had assumed, that,
reading Babette's notes, he should have raged with jealousy, or that,
in the loneliness of his unkempt chamber, he should have stretched
out arms of longing.
Even if Babette had been present, she would only have smiled her gay
little smile and co- quetted with him. She could not understand.
He had known, of course, from the first mo- ment, that she could not
understand! And so, why the ache, ache, ache of the heart!
Or WAS it the heart, or the brain, or the soul?
Sometimes, when the evenings were so hot that he could not endure the
close air of the house, he sat on the narrow, dusty front porch and
looked about him at his neighbors. The street had once been smart and
aspiring, but it had fallen into decay and dejection. Pale young men,
with flurried-looking wives, seemed to Boyce to occupy most of the
houses. Some- times three or four couples would live in one house.
Most of these appeared to be child- less. The women made a pretence
at fashion- able dressing, and wore their hair elaborately in
fashions which somehow suggested board- ing-houses to Boyce, though
he could not have told why. Every house in the block needed fresh
paint. Lacking this renovation, the householders tried to make up for
it by a display of lace curtains which, at every window, swayed in
the smoke-weighted breeze.
Strips of carpeting were laid down the front steps of the houses
where the communities of young couples lived, and here, evenings, the
inmates of the houses gathered, committing mild extravagances such as
the treating of each other to ginger ale, or beer, or ice-cream.
Boyce watched these tawdry makeshifts at sociability with bitterness
and loathing. He wondered how he could have been such a fool as to
bring his exquisite Babette to this neighborhood. How could he expect
that she would return to him? It was not reason- able. He ought to go
down on his knees with gratitude that she even condescended to write
him.
Sitting one night till late, -- so late that the fashionable young
wives with their husbands had retired from the strips of stair
carpeting, -- and raging at the loneliness which ate at his heart
like a cancer, he heard, softly creep- ing through the windows of the
house adjoin- ing his own, the sound of comfortable mel- ody.
It breathed upon his ear like a spirit of consolation, speaking of
peace, of love which needs no reward save its own sweetness, of
aspiration which looks forever beyond the thing of the hour to find
attainment in that which is eternal. So insidiously did it whis- per
these things, so delicately did the simple and perfect melodies creep
upon the spirit -- that Boyce felt no resentment, but from the first
listened as one who listens to learn, or as one who, fainting on the
hot road, hears, far in the ferny deeps below, the gurgle of a
spring.
Then came harmonies more intricate: fair fabrics of woven sound, in
the midst of which gleamed golden threads of joy; a tapestry of
sound, multi-tinted, gallant with story and achievement, and
beautiful things. Boyce, sitting on his absurd piazza, with his knees
jambed against the balustrade, and his chair back against the
dun-colored wall of his house, seemed to be walking in the cathedral
of the redwood forest, with blue above him, a vast hymn in his ears,
pungent perfume in his nostrils, and mighty shafts of trees lifting
themselves to heaven, proud and erect as pure men before their Judge.
He stood on a mountain at sunrise, and saw the marvels of the
amethystine clouds below his feet, heard an eternal and white
silence, such as broods among the everlasting snows, and saw an eagle
winging for the sun. He was in a city, and away from him, diverging
like the spokes of a wheel, ran thronging streets, and to his sense
came the beat, beat, beat of the city's heart.
He saw the golden alchemy of a chosen race; saw greed transmitted to
progress; saw that which had enslaved men, work at last to their
liberation; heard the roar of mighty mills, and on the streets all
the peoples of earth walking with common purpose, in fealty and
understanding. And then, from the swelling of this concourse of great
sounds, came a diminuendo, calm as philosophy, and from that,
nothingness.
Boyce sat still for a long time, listening to the echoes which this
music had awakened in his soul. He retired, at length, content, but
determined that upon the morrow he would watch -- the day being
Sunday -- for the musician who had so moved and taught him.
He arose early, therefore, and having pre- pared his own simple
breakfast of fruit and coffee, took his station by the window to
watch for the man. For he felt convinced that the exposition he had
heard was that of a masculine mind. The long, hot hours of the
morning went by, but the front door of the house next to his did not
open.
"These artists sleep late," he complained.
Still he watched. He was too much afraid of losing him to go out for
dinner. By three in the afternoon he had grown impatient. He went to
the house next door and rang the bell. There was no response. He
thun- dered another appeal. An old woman with a cloth about her head
answered the door.
She was very deaf, and Boyce had difficulty in making himself
understood.
"The family is in the country," was all she would say. "The
family
will not be home till September."
"But there is some one living here?"
shouted Boyce.
"_I_ live here," she said with dignity, put- ting back a wisp of
dirty gray hair behind her ear. "It is my house. I sublet to the
family."
"What family?"
But the old creature was not communica- tive.
"The family that lives here," she said.
"Then who plays the piano in this house?"
roared Boyce. "Do you?"
He thought a shade of pallor showed itself on her ash-colored cheeks.
Yet she smiled a little at the idea of her playing.
"There is no piano," she said, and she put an enigmatical emphasis
to
the words.
"Nonsense," cried Boyce, indignantly. "I heard a piano being
played
in this very house for hours last night!"
"You may enter," said the old woman, with an accent more vicious
than
hospitable.
Boyce almost burst into the drawing-room.
It was a dusty and forbidding place, with ugly furniture and gaudy
walls. No piano nor any other musical instrument stood in it. The
intruder turned an angry and baffled face to the old woman, who was
smiling with ill- concealed exultation.
"I shall see the other rooms," he an- nounced. The old woman did
not
appear to be surprised at his impertinence.
"As you please," she said.
So, with the hobbling creature, with her bandaged head, for a guide,
he explored every room of the house, which being identical with his
own, he could do without fear of leaving any apartment unentered. But
no piano did he find!
"Explain," roared Boyce at length, turning upon the leering old hag
beside him. "Ex- plain! For surely I heard music more beau- tiful
than I can tell."
"I know nothing," she said. "But it is true I once had a lodger
who
rented the front room, and that he played upon the piano. I am poor
at hearing, but he must have played well, for all the neighbors used
to come in front of the house to listen, and sometimes they applauded
him, and some- times they were still. I could tell by watching their
hands. Sometimes little chil- dren came and danced. Other times young
men and women came and listened. But the young man died. The
neighbors were angry.
They came to look at him and said he had starved to death. It was no
fault of mine.
I sold his piano to pay his funeral ex- penses -- and it took every
cent to pay for them too, I'd have you know. But since then,
sometimes -- still, it must be non- sense, for I never heard it --
folks say that he plays the piano in my room. It has kept me out of
the letting of it more than once. But the family doesn't seem to mind
-- the family that lives here, you know. They will be back in
September. Yes."
Boyce left her nodding her thanks at what he had placed in her hand,
and went home to write it all to Babette -- Babette who would laugh
so merrily when she read it!
WHEN Tig Braddock came to Nora Finnegan he was red-headed and
freckled, and, truth to tell, he re- mained with these features to
the end of his life -- a life prolonged by a lucky, if somewhat
improbable, incident, as you shall hear.
Tig had shuffled off his parents as saurians, of some sorts, do their
skins. During the temporary absence from home of his mother, who was
at the bridewell, and the more ex- tended vacation of his father,
who, like Vil- lon, loved the open road and the life of it, Tig, who
was not a well-domesticated animal, wandered away. The humane society
never heard of him, the neighbors did not miss him, and the law took
no cognizance of this detached citizen -- this lost pleiad. Tig would
have sunk into that melancholy which is attendant upon hunger, -- the
only form of despair which babyhood knows, -- if he had not wandered
across the path of Nora Finne- gan. Now Nora shone with steady
brightness in her orbit, and no sooner had Tig entered her
atmosphere, than he was warmed and com- forted. Hunger could not live
where Nora was. The basement room where she kept house was redolent
with savory smells; and in the stove in her front room -- which was
also her bedroom -- there was a bright fire glowing when fire was
needed.
Nora went out washing for a living. But she was not a poor
washerwoman. Not at all.
She was a washerwoman triumphant. She had perfect health, an enormous
frame, an abounding enthusiasm for life, and a rich abundance of
professional pride. She be- lieved herself to be the best washer of
white clothes she had ever had the pleasure of knowing, and the value
placed upon her ser- vices, and her long connection with certain
families with large weekly washings, bore out this estimate of
herself -- an estimate which she never endeavored to conceal.
Nora had buried two husbands without being unduly depressed by the
fact. The first hus- band had been a disappointment, and Nora winked
at Providence when an accident in a tunnel carried him off -- that is
to say, carried the husband off. The second husband was not so much
of a disappointment as a sur- prise. He developed ability of a
literary order, and wrote songs which sold and made him a small
fortune. Then he ran away with another woman. The woman spent his
fort- une, drove him to dissipation, and when he was dying he came
back to Nora, who re- ceived him cordially, attended him to the end,
and cheered his last hours by singing his own songs to him. Then she
raised a headstone recounting his virtues, which were quite numerous,
and refraining from any reference to those peculiarities which had
caused him to be such a surprise.
Only one actual chagrin had ever nibbled at the sound heart of Nora
Finnegan -- a cruel chagrin, with long, white teeth, such as rodents
have! She had never held a child to her breast, nor laughed in its
eyes; never bathed the pink form of a little son or daughter; never
felt a tugging of tiny hands at her voluminous calico skirts! Nora
had burnt many candles before the statue of the blessed Virgin
without remedying this deplor- able condition. She had sent up
unavailing prayers -- she had, at times, wept hot tears of longing
and loneliness. Sometimes in her sleep she dreamed that a wee form,
warm and exquisitely soft, was pressed against her firm body, and
that a hand with tiniest pink nails crept within her bosom. But as
she reached out to snatch this delicious little creature closer, she
woke to realize a barren woman's grief, and turned herself in anguish
on her lonely pillow.
So when Tig came along, accompanied by two curs, who had faithfully
followed him from his home, and when she learned the details of his
story, she took him in, curs and all, and, having bathed the three of
them, made them part and parcel of her home. This was after the
demise of the second husband, and at a time when Nora felt that she
had done all a woman could be expected to do for Hymen.
Tig was a preposterous baby. The curs were preposterous curs. Nora
had always been afflicted with a surplus amount of laughter --
laughter which had difficulty in attaching itself to anything, owing
to the lack of the really comic in the surroundings of the poor. But
with a red-headed and freckled baby boy and two trick dogs in the
house, she found a good and sufficient excuse for her hilarity, and
would have torn the cave where echo lies with her mirth, had that
cave not been at such an immeasurable dis- tance from the crowded
neighborhood where she lived.
At the age of four Tig went to free kinder- garten; at the age of six
he was in school, and made three grades the first year and two the
next. At fifteen he was graduated from the high school and went to
work as errand boy in a newspaper office, with the fixed de-
termination to make a journalist of himself.
Nora was a trifle worried about his morals when she discovered his
intellect, but as time went on, and Tig showed no devotion for any
woman save herself, and no consciousness that there were such things
as bad boys or saloons in the world, she began to have con- fidence.
All of his earnings were brought to her. Every holiday was spent with
her. He told her his secrets and his aspirations. He admitted that he
expected to become a great man, and, though he had not quite decided
upon the nature of his career, -- saving, of course, the makeshift of
journalism, -- it was not unlikely that he would elect to be a
novelist like -- well, probably like Thackeray.
Hope, always a charming creature, put on her most alluring smiles for
Tig, and he made her his mistress, and feasted on the light of her
eyes. Moreover, he was chap- eroned, so to speak, by Nora Finnegan,
who listened to every line Tig wrote, and made a mighty applause, and
filled him up with good Irish stew, many colored as the coat of
Joseph, and pungent with the inimitable perfume of "the rose of the
cellar." Nora Finnegan understood the onion, and used it lovingly.
She perceived the difference between the use and abuse of this
pleasant and obvious friend of hungry man, and employed it with
enthu- siasm, but discretion. Thus it came about that whoever ate of
her dinners, found the meals of other cooks strangely lacking in
savor, and remembered with regret the soups and stews, the broiled
steaks, and stuffed chickens of the woman who appreciated the onion.
When Nora Finnegan came home with a cold one day, she took it in such
a jocular fashion that Tig felt not the least concern about her, and
when, two days later, she died of pneumonia, he almost thought, at
first, that it must be one of her jokes. She had departed with
decision, such as had charac- terized every act of her life, and had
made as little trouble for others as possible. When she was dead the
community had the oppor- tunity of discovering the number of her
friends. Miserable children with faces which revealed two generations
of hunger, homeless boys with vicious countenances, miserable wrecks
of humanity, women with bloated faces, came to weep over Nora's bier,
and to lay a flower there, and to scuttle away, more abjectly lonely
than even sin could make them. If the cats and the dogs, the sparrows
and horses to which she had shown kindness, could also have attended
her funeral, the procession would have been, from a point of numbers,
one of the most imposing the city had ever known. Tig used up all
their sav- ings to bury her, and the next week, by some peculiar
fatality, he had a falling out with the night editor of his paper,
and was discharged.
This sank deep into his sensitive soul, and he swore he would be an
underling no longer -- which foolish resolution was directly trace-
able to his hair, the color of which, it will be recollected, was
red.
Not being an underling, he was obliged to make himself into something
else, and he recurred passionately to his old idea of be- coming a
novelist. He settled down in Nora's basement rooms, went to work on a
battered type-writer, did his own cooking, and occasionally pawned
something to keep him in food. The environment was calcu- lated to
further impress him with the idea of his genius.
A certain magazine offered an alluring prize for a short story, and
Tig wrote one, and rewrote it, making alterations, revisions, an-
notations, and interlineations which would have reflected credit upon
Honoré Balzac himself. Then he wrought all together, with
splendid brevity and dramatic force, -- Tig's own words, -- and
mailed the same. He was convinced he would get the prize. He was just
as much convinced of it as Nora Finne- gan would have been if she had
been with him.
So he went about doing more fiction, tak- ing no especial care of
himself, and wrapt in rosy dreams, which, not being warm enough for
the weather, permitted him to come down with rheumatic fever.
He lay alone in his room and suffered such torments as the condemned
and rheumatic know, depending on one of Nora's former friends to come
in twice a day and keep up the fire for him. This friend was aged
ten, and looked like a sparrow who had been in a cyclone, but
somewhere inside his bones was a wit which had spelled out devotion.
He found fuel for the cracked stove, some- how or other. He brought
it in a dirty sack which he carried on his back, and he kept warmth
in Tig's miserable body. Moreover, he found food of a sort -- cold,
horrible bits often, and Tig wept when he saw them, remembering the
meals Nora had served him.
Tig was getting better, though he was con- scious of a weak heart and
a lamenting stomach, when, to his amazement, the Spar- row ceased to
visit him. Not for a moment did Tig suspect desertion. He knew that
only something in the nature of an act of Providence, as the
insurance companies would designate it, could keep the little bundle
of bones away from him. As the days went by, he became convinced of
it, for no Sparrow came, and no coal lay upon the hearth. The
basement window fortunately looked toward the south, and the pale
April sunshine was beginning to make itself felt, so that the tem-
perature of the room was not unbearable. But Tig languished; sank,
sank, day by day, and was kept alive only by the conviction that the
letter announcing the award of the thousand- dollar prize would
presently come to him.
One night he reached a place, where, for hunger and dejection, his
mind wandered, and he seemed to be complaining all night to Nora of
his woes. When the chill dawn came, with chittering of little birds
on the dirty pavement, and an agitation of the scrawny willow
"pussies," he was not able to lift his hand to his head. The window
before his sight was but "a glimmering square." He said to himself
that the end must be at hand. Yet it was cruel, cruel, with fame and
fortune so near! If only he had some food, he might summon strength
to rally -- just for a little while! Impossible that he should die!
And yet without food there was no choice.
Dreaming so of Nora's dinners, thinking how one spoonful of a stew
such as she often compounded would now be his salvation, he became
conscious of the presence of a strong perfume in the room. It was so
familiar that it seemed like a sub-consciousness, yet he found no
name for this friendly odor for a bewildered minute or two. Little by
little, however, it grew upon him, that it was the onion -- that
fragrant and kindly bulb which had attained its apotheosis in the
cuisine of Nora Finnegan of sacred memory. He opened his languid
eyes, to see if, mayhap, the plant had not attained some more
palpable mate- rialization.
Behold, it was so! Before him, in a brown earthen dish, -- a most
familiar dish, -- was an onion, pearly white, in placid seas of
gravy, smoking and delectable. With unexpected strength he raised
himself, and reached for the dish, which floated before him in a halo
made by its own steam. It moved toward him, offered a spoon to his
hand, and as he ate he heard about the room the rustle of Nora
Finnegan's starched skirts, and now and then a faint, faint echo of
her old-time laugh -- such an echo as one may find of the sea in the
heart of a shell.
The noble bulb disappeared little by little before his voracity, and
in contentment greater than virtue can give, he sank back upon his
pillow and slept.
Two hours later the postman knocked at the door, and receiving no
answer, forced his way in. Tig, half awake, saw him enter with no
surprise. He felt no surprise when he put a letter in his hand
bearing the name of the magazine to which he had sent his short
story.
He was not even surprised, when, tearing it open with suddenly alert
hands, he found within the check for the first prize -- the check he
had expected.
All that day, as the April sunlight spread itself upon his floor, he
felt his strength grow.
Late in the afternoon the Sparrow came back, paler, and more bony
than ever, and sank, breathing hard, upon the floor, with his sack of
coal.
"I've been sick," he said, trying to smile.
"Terrible sick, but I come as soon as I could."
"Build up the fire," cried Tig, in a voice so strong it made the
Sparrow start as if a stone had struck him. "Build up the fire, and
forget you are sick. For, by the shade of Nora Finnegan, you shall be
hungry no more!"
WHEN Urda Bjarnason tells a tale all the men stop their talking to
lis- ten, for they know her to be wise with the wisdom of the old
people, and that she has more learning than can be got even from the
great schools at Reykjavik.
She is especially prized by them here in this new country where the
Icelandmen are settled -- this America, so new in letters, where the
people speak foolishly and write unthinking books. So the men who
know that it is given to the mothers of earth to be very wise, stop
their six part singing, or their jangles about the free-thinkers, and
give attentive ear when Urda Bjarnason lights her pipe and begins her
tale.
She is very old. Her daughters and sons are all dead, but her
granddaughter, who is most respectable, and the cousin of a phy-
sician, says that Urda is twenty-four and a hundred, and there are
others who say that she is older still. She watches all that the
Iceland people do in the new land; she knows about the building of
the five villages on the North Dakota plain, and of the founding of
the churches and the schools, and the tilling of the wheat farms. She
notes with sus- picion the actions of the women who bring home webs
of cloth from the store, instead of spinning them as their mothers
did before them; and she shakes her head at the wives who run to the
village grocery store every fortnight, imitating the wasteful
American women, who throw butter in the fire faster than it can be
turned from the churn.
She watches yet other things. All winter long the white snows reach
across the gently rolling plains as far as the eye can behold.
In the morning she sees them tinted pink at the east; at noon she
notes golden lights flashing across them; when the sky is gray --
which is not often -- she notes that they grow as ashen as a face
with the death shadow on it.
Sometimes they glitter with silver-like tips of ocean waves. But at
these things she looks only casually. It is when the blue shadows
dance on the snow that she leaves her corner behind the iron stove,
and stands before the window, resting her two hands on the stout bar
of her cane, and gazing out across the waste with eyes which age has
restored after four decades of decrepitude.
The young Icelandmen say:
"Mother, it is the clouds hurrying across the sky that make the dance
of the shadows."
"There are no clouds," she replies, and points to the jewel-like
blue
of the arching sky.
"It is the drifting air," explains Fridrik Halldersson, he who has
been in the North- ern seas. "As the wind buffets the air, it looks
blue against the white of the snow.
'Tis the air that makes the dancing shadows."
But Urda shakes her head, and points with her dried finger, and those
who stand beside her see figures moving, and airy shapes, and
contortions of strange things, such as are seen in a beryl stone.
"But Urda Bjarnason," says Ingeborg Chris- tianson, the pert young
wife with the blue- eyed twins, "why is it we see these things only
when we stand beside you and you help us to the sight?"
"Because," says the mother, with a steel- blue flash of her old eyes,
"having eyes ye will not see!" Then the men laugh. They like to hear
Ingeborg worsted. For did she not jilt two men from Gardar, and one
from Mountain, and another from Winnipeg?
Not even Ingeborg can deny that Mother Urda tells true things.
"To-day," says Urda, standing by the little window and watching the
dance of the shadows, "a child breathed thrice on a farm at the West,
and then it died."
The next week at the church gathering, when all the sledges stopped
at the house of Urda's granddaughter, they said it was so -- that
John Christianson's wife Margaret never heard the voice of her son,
but that he breathed thrice in his nurse's arms and died.
"Three sledges run over the snow toward Milton," says Urda; "all
are
laden with wheat, and in one is a stranger. He has with him a strange
engine, but its purpose I do not know."
Six hours later the drivers of three empty sledges stop at the house.
"We have been to Milton with wheat," they say, "and Christian
Johnson
here, carried a photographer from St. Paul."
Now it stands to reason that the farmers like to amuse themselves
through the silent and white winters. And they prefer above all
things to talk or to listen, as has been the fashion of their race
for a thousand years.
Among all the story-tellers there is none like Urda, for she is the
daughter and the grand- daughter and the great-granddaughter of
story- tellers. It is given to her to talk, as it is given to John
Thorlaksson to sing -- he who sings so as his sledge flies over the
snow at night, that the people come out in the bitter air from their
doors to listen, and the dogs put up their noses and howl, not liking
music.
In the little cabin of Peter Christianson, the husband of Urda's
granddaughter, it some- times happens that twenty men will gather
about the stove. They hang their bear-skin coats on the wall, put
their fur gauntlets underneath the stove, where they will keep warm,
and then stretch their stout, felt-covered legs to the wood fire. The
room is fetid; the coffee steams eternally on the stove; and from her
chair in the warmest corner Urda speaks out to the listening men, who
shake their heads with joy as they hear the pure old Icelandic flow
in sweet rhythm from between her lips. Among the many, many tales she
tells is that of the dead weaver, and she tells it in the simplest
language in all the world -- language so simple that even great
scholars could find no simpler, and the children crawling on the
floor can understand.
"Jon and Loa lived with their father and mother far to the north of
the Island of Fire, and when the children looked from their win- dows
they saw only wild scaurs and jagged lava rocks, and a distant, deep
gleam of the sea. They caught the shine of the sea through an
eye-shaped opening in the rocks, and all the long night of winter it
gleamed up at them, like the eye of a dead witch. But when it
sparkled and began to laugh, the children danced about the hut and
sang, for they knew the bright summer time was at hand. Then their
father fished, and their mother was gay.
But it is true that even in the winter and the darkness they were
happy, for they made fish- ing nets and baskets and cloth together,
-- Jon and Loa and their father and mother, -- and the children were
taught to read in the books, and were told the sagas, and given
instruction in the part singing.
"They did not know there was such a thing as sorrow in the world, for
no one had ever mentioned it to them. But one day their mother died.
Then they had to learn how to keep the fire on the hearth, and to
smoke the fish, and make the black coffee. And also they had to learn
how to live when there is sorrow at the heart.
"They wept together at night for lack of their mother's kisses, and
in the morning they were loath to rise because they could not see her
face. The dead cold eye of the sea watching them from among the lava
rocks made them afraid, so they hung a shawl over the window to keep
it out. And the house, try as they would, did not look clean and
cheerful as it had used to do when their mother sang and worked about
it.
"One day, when a mist rested over the eye of the sea, like that which
one beholds on the eyes of the blind, a greater sorrow came to them,
for a stepmother crossed the thres- hold. She looked at Jon and Loa,
and made complaint to their father that they were still very small
and not likely to be of much use.
After that they had to rise earlier than ever, and to work as only
those who have their growth should work, till their hearts cracked
for weariness and shame. They had not much to eat, for their
stepmother said she would trust to the gratitude of no other woman's
child, and that she believed in lay- ing up against old age. So she
put the few coins that came to the house in a strong box, and bought
little food. Neither did she buy the children clothes, though those
which their dear mother had made for them were so worn that the warp
stood apart from the woof, and there were holes at the elbows and
little warmth to be found in them anywhere.
"Moreover, the quilts on their beds were too short for their growing
length, so that at night either their purple feet or their thin
shoulders were uncovered, and they wept for the cold, and in the
morning, when they crept into the larger room to build the fire, they
were so stiff they could not stand straight, and there was pain at
their joints.
"The wife scolded all the time, and her brow was like a storm
sweeping down from the Northwest. There was no peace to be had in the
house. The children might not repeat to each other the sagas their
mother had taught them, nor try their part singing, nor make little
doll cradles of rushes. Always they had to work, always they were
scolded, always their clothes grew thinner.
"'Stepmother,' cried Loa one day, -- she whom her mother had called
the little bird, -- 'we are a-cold because of our rags. Our mother
would have woven blue cloth for us and made it into garments.'
"'Your mother is where she will weave no cloth!' said the stepmother,
and she laughed many times.
"All in the cold and still of that night, the stepmother wakened, and
she knew not why.
She sat up in her bed, and knew not why.
She knew not why, and she looked into the room, and there, by the
light of a burning fish's tail -- 'twas such a light the folk used in
those days -- was a woman, weaving. She had no loom, and shuttle she
had none. All with her hands she wove a wondrous cloth. Stoop- ing
and bending, rising and swaying with motions beautiful as those the
Northern Lights make in a midwinter sky, she wove a cloth. The warp
was blue and mystical to see, the woof was white, and shone with its
whiteness, so that of all the webs the step- mother had ever seen,
she had seen none like to this.
"Yet the sight delighted her not, for beyond the drifting web, and
beyond the weaver she saw the room and furniture -- aye, saw them
through the body of the weaver and the drift- ing of the cloth. Then
she knew -- as the haunted are made to know -- that 'twas the mother
of the children come to show her she could still weave cloth. The
heart of the stepmother was cold as ice, yet she could not move to
waken her husband at her side, for her hands were as fixed as if they
were crossed on her dead breast. The voice in her was silent, and her
tongue stood to the roof of her mouth.
"After a time the wraith of the dead mother moved toward her -- the
wraith of the weaver moved her way -- and round and about her body
was wound the shining cloth.
Wherever it touched the body of the step- mother, it was as hateful
to her as the touch of a monster out of sea-slime, so that her flesh
crept away from it, and her senses swooned.
"In the early morning she awoke to the voices of the children,
whispering in the inner room as they dressed with half-frozen
fingers. Still about her was the hateful, beau- tiful web, filling
her soul with loathing and with fear. She thought she saw the task
set for her, and when the children crept in to light the fire -- very
purple and thin were their little bodies, and the rags hung from them
-- she arose and held out the shining cloth, and cried:
"'Here is the web your mother wove for you. I will make it into
garments!' But even as she spoke the cloth faded and fell into
nothingness, and the children cried:
"'Stepmother, you have the fever!'
"And then:
"'Stepmother, what makes the strange light in the room?'
"That day the stepmother was too weak to rise from her bed, and the
children thought she must be going to die, for she did not scold as
they cleared the house and braided their baskets, and she did not
frown at them, but looked at them with wistful eyes.
"By fall of night she was as weary as if she had wept all the day,
and so she slept. But again she was awakened and knew not why.
And again she sat up in her bed and knew not why. And again, not
knowing why, she looked and saw a woman weaving cloth. All that had
happened the night before happened this night. Then, when the morning
came, and the children crept in shivering from their beds, she arose
and dressed herself, and from her strong box she took coins, and bade
her husband go with her to the town.
"So that night a web of cloth, woven by one of the best weavers in
all Iceland, was in the house; and on the beds of the children were
blankets of lamb's wool, soft to the touch and fair to the eye. After
that the children slept warm and were at peace; for now, when they
told the sagas their mother had taught them, or tried their part
songs as they sat together on their bench, the stepmother was silent.
For she feared to chide, lest she should wake at night, not knowing
why, and see the mother's wraith."
THERE was only one possible ob- jection to the drawing-room, and that
was the occasional presence of Miss Carew; and only one pos- sible
objection to Miss Carew. And that was, that she was dead.
She had been dead twenty years, as a matter of fact and record, and
to the last of her life sacredly preserved the treasures and
traditions of her family, a family bound up -- as it is quite
unnecessary to explain to any one in good society -- with all that is
most venerable and heroic in the history of the Republic.
Miss Carew never relaxed the proverbial hos- pitality of her house,
even when she remained its sole representative. She continued to
preside at her table with dignity and state, and to set an example of
excessive modesty and gentle decorum to a generation of restless
young women.
It is not likely that having lived a life of such irreproachable
gentility as this, Miss Carew would have the bad taste to die in any
way not pleasant to mention in fastidious society. She could be
trusted to the last, not to outrage those friends who quoted her as
an exemplar of propriety. She died very un- obtrusively of an
affection of the heart, one June morning, while trimming her rose
trellis, and her lavender-colored print was not even rumpled when she
fell, nor were more than the tips of her little bronze slippers
visible.
"Isn't it dreadful," said the Philadelphians, "that the property
should go to a very, very distant cousin in Iowa or somewhere else on
the frontier, about whom nobody knows any- thing at all?"
The Carew treasures were packed in boxes and sent away into the Iowa
wilderness; the Carew traditions were preserved by the His- torical
Society; the Carew property, standing in one of the most umbrageous
and aristo- cratic suburbs of Philadelphia, was rented to all manner
of folk -- anybody who had money enough to pay the rental -- and
society entered its doors no more.
But at last, after twenty years, and when all save the oldest
Philadelphians had forgotten Miss Lydia Carew, the very, very distant
cousin appeared. He was quite in the prime of life, and so agreeable
and unassuming that nothing could be urged against him save his
patronymic, which, being Boggs, did not commend itself to the
euphemists. With him were two maiden sisters, ladies of excellent
taste and manners, who restored the Carew china to its ancient
cabinets, and replaced the Carew pictures upon the walls, with ad-
ditions not out of keeping with the elegance of these heirlooms.
Society, with a magna- nimity almost dramatic, overlooked the name of
Boggs -- and called.
All was well. At least, to an outsider all seemed to be well. But, in
truth, there was a certain distress in the old mansion, and in the
hearts of the well-behaved Misses Boggs.
It came about most unexpectedly. The sis- ters had been sitting
upstairs, looking out at the beautiful grounds of the old place, and
marvelling at the violets, which lifted their heads from every
possible cranny about the house, and talking over the cordiality
which they had been receiving by those upon whom they had no claim,
and they were filled with amiable satisfaction. Life looked
attractive.
They had often been grateful to Miss Lydia Carew for leaving their
brother her fortune.
Now they felt even more grateful to her. She had left them a Social
Position -- one, which even after twenty years of desuetude, was fit
for use.
They descended the stairs together, with arms clasped about each
other's waists, and as they did so presented a placid and pleasing
sight. They entered their drawing-room with the intention of brewing
a cup of tea, and drinking it in calm sociability in the twilight.
But as they entered the room they became aware of the presence of a
lady, who was already seated at their tea-table, regarding their old
Wedgewood with the air of a con- noisseur.
There were a number of peculiarities about this intruder. To begin
with, she was hatless, quite as if she were a habitué of the
house, and was costumed in a prim lilac-colored lawn of the style of
two decades past. But a greater peculiarity was the resemblance this
lady bore to a faded daguerrotype. If looked at one way, she was
perfectly discern- ible; if looked at another, she went out in a sort
of blur. Notwithstanding this compara- tive invisibility, she exhaled
a delicate per- fume of sweet lavender, very pleasing to the nostrils
of the Misses Boggs, who stood look- ing at her in gentle and
unprotesting surprise.
"I beg your pardon," began Miss Pru- dence, the younger of the Misses
Boggs, "but --"
But at this moment the Daguerrotype be- came a blur, and Miss
Prudence found her- self addressing space. The Misses Boggs were
irritated. They had never encountered any mysteries in Iowa. They
began an im- patient search behind doors and portières, and
even under sofas, though it was quite absurd to suppose that a lady
recognizing the merits of the Carew Wedgewood would so far forget
herself as to crawl under a sofa.
When they had given up all hope of dis- covering the intruder, they
saw her standing at the far end of the drawing-room critically
examining a water-color marine. The elder Miss Boggs started toward
her with stern decision, but the little Daguerrotype turned with a
shadowy smile, became a blur and an imperceptibility.
Miss Boggs looked at Miss Prudence Boggs.
"If there were ghosts," she said, "this would be one."
"If there were ghosts," said Miss Prudence Boggs, "this would
be the
ghost of Lydia Carew."
The twilight was settling into blackness, and Miss Boggs nervously
lit the gas while Miss Prudence ran for other tea-cups, preferring,
for reasons superfluous to mention, not to drink out of the Carew
china that evening.
The next day, on taking up her embroidery frame, Miss Boggs found a
number of old- fashioned cross-stitches added to her Ken- sington.
Prudence, she knew, would never have degraded herself by taking a
cross-stitch, and the parlor-maid was above taking such a liberty.
Miss Boggs mentioned the incident that night at a dinner given by an
ancient friend of the Carews.
"Oh, that's the work of Lydia Carew, with- out a doubt!" cried the
hostess. "She visits every new family that moves to the house, but
she never remains more than a week or two with any one."
"It must be that she disapproves of them,"
suggested Miss Boggs.
"I think that's it," said the hostess. "She doesn't like their
china,
or their fiction."
"I hope she'll disapprove of us," added Miss Prudence.
The hostess belonged to a very old Philadel- phian family, and she
shook her head.
"I should say it was a compliment for even the ghost of Miss Lydia
Carew to approve of one," she said severely.
The next morning, when the sisters entered their drawing-room there
were numerous evi- dences of an occupant during their absence.
The sofa pillows had been rearranged so that the effect of their
grouping was less bizarre than that favored by the Western women; a
horrid little Buddhist idol with its eyes fixed on its abdomen, had
been chastely hidden behind a Dresden shepherdess, as unfit for the
scrutiny of polite eyes; and on the table where Miss Prudence did
work in water colors, after the fashion of the impressionists, lay a
prim and impossible composition representing a moss-rose and a number
of heartsease, col- ored with that caution which modest spinster
artists instinctively exercise.
"Oh, there's no doubt it's the work of Miss Lydia Carew," said Miss
Prudence, contemptu- ously. "There's no mistaking the drawing of that
rigid little rose. Don't you remember those wreaths and bouquets
framed, among the pictures we got when the Carew pictures were sent
to us? I gave some of them to an orphan asylum and burned up the
rest."
"Hush!" cried Miss Boggs, involuntarily.
"If she heard you, it would hurt her feelings terribly. Of course, I
mean --" and she blushed. "It might hurt her feelings -- but how
perfectly ridiculous! It's impos- sible!"
Miss Prudence held up the sketch of the moss-rose.
"THAT may be impossible in an artistic sense, but it is a palpable
thing."
"Bosh!" cried Miss Boggs.
"But," protested Miss Prudence, "how do you explain it?"
"I don't," said Miss Boggs, and left the room.
That evening the sisters made a point of being in the drawing-room
before the dusk came on, and of lighting the gas at the first hint of
twilight. They didn't believe in Miss Lydia Carew -- but still they
meant to be beforehand with her. They talked with un- wonted vivacity
and in a louder tone than was their custom. But as they drank their
tea even their utmost verbosity could not make them oblivious to the
fact that the perfume of sweet lavender was stealing insidiously
through the room. They tacitly refused to recognize this odor and all
that it indicated, when sud- denly, with a sharp crash, one of the
old Carew tea-cups fell from the tea-table to the floor and was
broken. The disaster was fol- lowed by what sounded like a sigh of
pain and dismay.
"I didn't suppose Miss Lydia Carew would ever be as awkward as that,"
cried the younger Miss Boggs, petulantly.
"Prudence," said her sister with a stern accent, "please try
not to
be a fool. You brushed the cup off with the sleeve of your dress."
"Your theory wouldn't be so bad," said Miss Prudence, half laughing
and half crying, "if there were any sleeves to my dress, but, as you
see, there aren't," and then Miss Prudence had something as near
hysterics as a healthy young woman from the West can have.
"I wouldn't think such a perfect lady as Lydia Carew," she ejaculated
between her sobs, "would make herself so disagreeable!
You may talk about good-breeding all you please, but I call such
intrusion exceedingly bad taste. I have a horrible idea that she
likes us and means to stay with us. She left those other people
because she did not approve of their habits or their grammar. It
would be just our luck to please her."
"Well, I like your egotism," said Miss Boggs.
However, the view Miss Prudence took of the case appeared to be the
right one. Time went by and Miss Lydia Carew still remained.
When the ladies entered their drawing-room they would see the little
lady-like Daguerro- type revolving itself into a blur before one of
the family portraits. Or they noticed that the yellow sofa cushion,
toward which she appeared to feel a peculiar antipathy, had been
dropped behind the sofa upon the floor, or that one of Jane Austen's
novels, which none of the family ever read, had been re- moved from
the book shelves and left open upon the table.
"I cannot become reconciled to it," com- plained Miss Boggs to Miss
Prudence. "I wish we had remained in Iowa where we belong. Of course
I don't believe in the thing! No sensible person would. But still I
cannot become reconciled."
But their liberation was to come, and in a most unexpected manner.
A relative by marriage visited them from the West. He was a friendly
man and had much to say, so he talked all through dinner, and
afterward followed the ladies to the draw- ing-room to finish his
gossip. The gas in the room was turned very low, and as they entered
Miss Prudence caught sight of Miss Carew, in company attire, sitting
in upright propriety in a stiff-backed chair at the extremity of the
apartment.
Miss Prudence had a sudden idea.
"We will not turn up the gas," she said, with an emphasis intended
to
convey private information to her sister. "It will be more agreeable
to sit here and talk in this soft light."
Neither her brother nor the man from the West made any objection.
Miss Boggs and Miss Prudence, clasping each other's hands, divided
their attention between their corporeal and their incorporeal guests.
Miss Boggs was confident that her sister had an idea, and was willing
to await its development. As the guest from Iowa spoke, Miss Carew
bent a politely attentive ear to what he said.
"Ever since Richards took sick that time,"
he said briskly, "it seemed like he shed all responsibility." (The
Misses Boggs saw the Daguerrotype put up her shadowy head with a
movement of doubt and apprehension.) "The fact of the matter was,
Richards didn't seem to scarcely get on the way he might have been
expected to." (At this conscienceless split to the infinitive and
misplacing of the preposition, Miss Carew arose trembling per-
ceptibly.) "I saw it wasn't no use for him to count on a quick
recovery --"
The Misses Boggs lost the rest of the sen- tence, for at the
utterance of the double nega- tive Miss Lydia Carew had flashed out,
not in a blur, but with mortal haste, as when life goes out at a
pistol shot!
The man from the West wondered why Miss Prudence should have cried at
so pathetic a part of his story:
"Thank Goodness!"
And their brother was amazed to see Miss Boggs kiss Miss Prudence
with passion and energy.
It was the end. Miss Carew returned no more.
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