Emma McChesney looked troubled. She stood in the doorway, head on one side, as one who conjures up a mental picture.
"Come here," she commanded suddenly, addressing the startled T. A.
"You nagged until I had to take you along. Here"s a chance to justify your coming. I want your opinion on the kitchen."
"Kitchens," announced T. A. Buck of the English clothes and the gardenia, "are my specialty," and entered the domain of the gas-range and the sink.
Emma McChesney swept the infinitesimal room with a large gesture.
"Considering it as a kitchen, not as a locker, does it strike you as being adequate?"
T. A. Buck, standing in the center of the room, touched all four walls with his stick.
"I"ve heard," he ventured, "that they"re--ah--using "em small this year."
Emma McChesney"s eyes took on a certain wistful expression. "Maybe.
But whenever I"ve dreamed of a home, which was whenever I got lonesome on the road, which was every evening for ten years, I"d start to plan a kitchen. A kitchen where you could put up preserves, and a keg of dill pickles, and get a full-sized dinner without getting things more than just comfortably cluttered."
T. A. Buck reflected. He flapped his arms as one who feels pressed for room. "With two people occupying the room, as at present, the presence of one dill pickle would sort of crowd things, not to speak of a keg of "em, and the full-sized dinner, and the--er--preserves. Still--"
"As for a turkey," wailed Emma McChesney, "one would have to go out on the fire-escape to baste it."
The swinging door opened to admit the agent. "Would you excuse me? A party down-stairs--lease--be back in no time. Just look about--any questions--glad to answer later--"
"Quite all right," Mrs. McChesney a.s.sured him. Her expression was one of relief as the hall door closed behind him. "Good! There"s a spot in the mirror over the mantel. I"ve been dying to find out if it was a flaw in the gla.s.s or only a smudge."
She made for the living-room. T. A. Buck followed thoughtfully.
Thoughtfully and interestedly he watched her as she stood on tiptoe, breathed stormily upon the mirror"s surface, and rubbed the moist place with her handkerchief. She stood back a pace, eyes narrowed critically.
"It"s gone, isn"t it?" she asked.
T. A. Buck advanced to where she stood and c.o.c.ked his head too, judicially, and in the opposite direction to which Emma McChesney"s head was c.o.c.ked. So that the two heads were very close together.
"It"s a poor piece of gla.s.s," he announced at last.
A simple enough remark. Perhaps it was made with an object in view, but certainly it was not meant to bring forth the storm of protest that came from Emma McChesney"s lips. She turned on him, lips quivering, eyes wrathful.
"You shouldn"t have come!" she cried. "You"re as much out of place in a six-room flat as a truffle would be in a boiled New England dinner.
Do you think I don"t see its shortcomings? Every normal woman, no matter what sort of bungalow, palace, ranch-house, cave, cottage, or tenement she may be living in, has in her mind"s eye a picture of the sort of apartment she"d live in if she could afford it. I"ve had mine mapped out from the wall-paper in the front hall to the laundry-tubs in the bas.e.m.e.nt, and it doesn"t even bear a family resemblance to this."
"I"m sorry," stammered T. A. Buck. "You asked my opinion and I--"
"Opinion! If every one had so little tact as to give their true opinion when it was asked this would be a miserable world. I asked you because I wanted you to lie. I expected it of you. I needed bolstering up. I realize that the rent I"m paying and the flat I"m getting form a geometrical problem where X equals the unknown quant.i.ty and only the agent knows the answer. But it"s going to be a home for Jock and me.
It"s going to be a place where he can bring his friends; where he can have his books, and his "baccy, and his college junk. It will be the first real home that youngster has known in all his miserable boarding-house, hotel, boys" school, and college existence. Sometimes when I think of what he"s missed, of the loneliness and the neglect when I was on the road, of the barrenness of his boyhood, I--"
T. A. Buck started forward as one who had made up his mind about something long considered. Then he gulped, retreated, paced excitedly to the door and back again. On the return trip he found smiling and repentant Emma McChesney regarding him.
"Now aren"t you sorry you insisted on coming along? Letting yourself in for a ragging like that? I think I"m a wee bit taut in the nerves at the prospect of seeing Jock--and planning things with him--I--"
T. A. Buck paused in his pacing. "Don"t!" he said. "I had it coming to me. I did it deliberately. I wanted to know how you really felt about it."
Emma McChesney stared at him curiously. "Well, now you know. But I haven"t told you half. In all those years while I was selling T. A.
Buck"s Featherloom Petticoats on the road, and eating hotel food that tasted the same, whether it was roast beef or ice-cream, I was planning this little place. I"ve even made up my mind to the scandalous price I"m willing to pay a maid who"ll cook real dinners for us and serve them as I"ve always vowed Jock"s dinners should be served when I could afford something more than a shifting hotel home."
T. A. Buck was regarding the head of his if walking-stick with a gaze as intent as that which he previously had bestowed upon the chandelier. For that matter it was a handsome enough stick--a choice thing in malacca. But it was scarcely more deserving than the chandelier had been.
Mrs. McChesney had wandered into the dining-room. She peered out of windows. She poked into butler"s pantry. She inspected wall-lights.
And still T. A. Buck stared at his stick.
"It"s really robbery," came Emma McChesney"s voice from the next room.
"Only a New York agent could have the nerve to do it. I"ve a friend who lives in Chicago--Mary Cutting. You"ve heard me speak of her. Has a flat on the north side there, just next door to the lake. The rent is ridiculous; and--would you believe it?--the flat is equipped with bookcases, and gorgeous mantel shelves, and buffet, and bathroom fixtures, and china-closets, and hall-tree--"
Her voice trailed into nothingness as she disappeared into the kitchen. When she emerged again she was still enumerating the charms of the absurdly low-priced Chicago flat, thus:
"--and full-length mirrors, and wonderful folding table-shelf gimcracks in the kitchen, and--"
T. A. Buck did not look up. But, "Oh, Chicago!" he might have been heard to murmur, as only a New-Yorker can breathe those two words.
"Don"t "Oh, Chicago!" like that," mimicked Emma McChesney. "I"ve lain awake nights dreaming of a home I once saw there, with the lake in the back yard, and a couple of miles of veranda, and a darling vegetable- garden, and the whole place simply honeycombed with bathrooms, and sleeping-porches, and sun-parlors, and linen-closets, and--gracious, I wonder what"s keeping Jock!"
T. A. Buck wrenched his eyes from his stick. All previous remarks descriptive of his eyes under excitement paled at the glow which lighted them now. They glowed straight into Emma McChesney"s eyes and held them, startled.
"Emma," said T. A. Buck quite calmly, "will you marry me? I want to give you all those things, beginning with the lake in the back yard and ending with the linen-closets and the sun-parlor."
And Emma McChesney, standing there in the middle of the dining-room floor, stared long at T. A. Buck, standing there in the center of the living-room floor. And if any human face, in the s.p.a.ce of seventeen seconds, could be capable of expressing relief, and regret, and alarm, and dismay, and tenderness, and wonder, and a great womanly sympathy, Emma McChesney"s countenance might be said to have expressed all those emotions--and more. The last two were uppermost as she slowly came toward him.
"T. A.," she said, and her voice had in it a marvelous quality, "I"m thirty-nine years old. You know I was married when I was eighteen and got my divorce after eight years. Those eight years would have left any woman who had endured them with one of two determinations: to take up life again and bring it out into the sunshine until it was sound, and sweet, and clean, and whole once more, or to hide the hurt and brood over it, and cover it with bitterness, and hate until it destroyed by its very foulness. I had Jock, and I chose the sun, thank G.o.d! I said then that marriage was a thing tried and abandoned forever, for me. And now--"
There was something almost fine in the lines of T. A. Buck"s too feminine mouth and chin; but not fine enough.
"Now, Emma," he repeated, "will you marry me?"
Emma McChesney"s eyes were a wonderful thing to see, so full of pain were they, so wide with unshed tears.
"As long as--he--lived," she went on, "the thought of marriage was repulsive to me. Then, that day seven months ago out in Iowa, when I picked up that paper and saw it staring out at me in print that seemed to waver and dance"--she covered her eyes with her hand for a moment-- ""McChesney--Stuart McChesney, March 7, aged forty-seven years.
Funeral to-day from Howland Brothers" chapel. Aberdeen and Edinburgh papers please copy!""
[Ill.u.s.tration: ""Emma." he said, "will you marry me?""]
T. A. Buck took the hand that covered her eyes and brought it gently down.
"Emma," he said, "will you marry me?"
"T. A., I don"t love you. Wait! Don"t say it! I"m thirty-nine, but I"m brave and foolish enough to say that all these years of work, and disappointment, and struggle, and bitter experience haven"t convinced me that love does not exist. People have said about me, seeing me in business, that I"m not a marrying woman. There is no such thing as that. Every woman is a marrying woman, and sometimes the light- heartedest, and the scoffingest, and the most self-sufficient of us are, beneath it all, the marryingest. Perhaps I"m making a mistake.
Perhaps ten years from now I"ll be ready to call myself a fool for having let slip what the wise ones would call a "chance." But I don"t think so, T. A."
"You know me too well," argued T. A. Buck rather miserably. "But at least you know the worst of me as well as the best. You"d be taking no risks."
Emma McChesney walked to the window. There was a little silence. Then she finished it with one clean stroke. "We"ve been good business chums, you and I. I hope we always shall be. I can imagine nothing more beautiful on this earth for a woman than being married to a man she cares for and who cares for her. But, T. A., you"re not the man."