I couldn"t say a word, and I am sure I don"t know what I would have done if it hadn"t been for the doctor. He leaned forward and his deep eyes came out in their wonderful way and seemed to collect every pair of eyes at the table, even the most astounded, as he raised his gla.s.s. We all held our breaths and waited for him to speak.
"No wonder we are all stricken dumb at Mrs. Carter"s telegram," he said in his deep voice that commands everybody and everything, even the terrors of birth and death. "The whole town will be paralyzed at the news that its most distinguished citizen is only going to give them two days to get ready to receive him. I can see the panic the bra.s.s band will have now getting the bra.s.s shined up, and I want to be the one to tell Mayor Pollard myself, so as to suggest to him to have at least a two-hour speech of welcome to hand out at the train. We"ll make it one "hot time" for him when he lands in the old town, and here"s to him, G.o.d bless him. Every gla.s.s high!" They all drank, and I suppose it helped them. I wish I could have drained a quart, but I couldn"t swallow a sip, though I did a good stunt of pretending.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "Every gla.s.s high"]
The rest of this evening has paid me off for every sin I have ever committed or am ever going to commit. Tom took Pet home early and I hope they walked in the moonlight for hours. Tom is the kind of man that any pretty girl who is loving enough in the moonlight could comfort for anything. I"m not at all worried about him, but--
The hour I sat on my front steps and talked to Judge Wade must have brought gray hairs to my head if it was daylight and I could see them.
Ruth Chester had said good-by with the loveliest haunted look in her great dark eyes and I had felt as if I had killed something that was alive and that I hadn"t killed it enough. Doctor John had been called from his coffee to a patient and had gone with just a friendly word of good night, and the others had at last left the judge and me alone--also in the moonlight, which I wished in my heart somebody would put out.
They say among the lawyers that it is a good thing that Benton Wade is on the bench, for it is no use to try a case against him when he has the handling of a jury. He just looks them in the face and tells them how to vote. To-night he looked me in the face and told me how to marry, and I"m not sure yet that I won"t do as he says. Of course I"m in love with Alfred, but if he wants me he had better get me away quick before the judge makes all his arrangements. A woman loves to be courted with poems and flowers and deference, but she"s mighty apt to marry the man who says, "Don"t argue, but put on your bonnet and come with me." The fact that it was too late to get into the clerk"s office saved me to-night, but in two days--
Oh, I"m crying, crying in my heart, which is worse than in my eyes, as I sit and look across my garden, where the cold moon is hanging low over the tall trees behind the doctor"s house and his light in his room is burning warm and bright. They are right; _he_ doesn"t care if I am going away for ever with Alfred. His quick toast to him and the lovely warm look he poured over poor frightened me at his side, as he drank his champagne, told me that once and for all. Still we have been so close together over his baby and I have grown so dependent on him for so many things that it cuts into me like a hot knife that he shouldn"t care if he lost me--even for a neighbor. I shouldn"t mind not having _any_ husband if I could always live close by him and Billy like this, and if I married Judge Wade I could at least have him for a family physician.
_No--I don"t like that_! Of course I"m going with Alfred now that an accident has made me announce the fact to the whole town before he even knows it himself, but wherever I go that light in the room with that lonely man is going to burn in my heart. Hope it will throw a glow over Alfred!
LEAF SEVENTH
DASHED!
I do believe G.o.d gave that wise angel charge concerning me lest I get dashed, but I just got dashed anyway, and its my own fault, not the angel"s. I have suffered this day until I want to lay my face down against the hem of His garment and wait in the dust for Him to pick me up. I shall never be able to do it myself, and how He"s going to do it I can"t see, but He will.
That dinner-party last night was bad enough, but to-day"s been worse.
I didn"t sleep until long after daylight and then Judy came in before eight o"clock with a letter for me that looked like a state doc.u.ment.
I felt in my trembly bones that it was some sort of summons affair from Judge Wade; and it was. I looked into the first paragraph and then decided that I had better get up and dress and have a cup of coffee and a single egg before I tried to read it.
Incidental to my bath and dressing, I weighed and found that I had lost all four of those last surplus pounds and two more in three days. Those two extra pounds might be construed to prove love, but exactly on whom I was utterly unprepared to say. I didn"t even enjoy the thinness, but took a kind of already-married look in my gla.s.s and tried to slip the egg past my bored lips and get myself to chew it down. It was work; and then I took up the judge"s letter, which also was work and more of it.
He started in at the beginning of everything, that is at the beginning of the tuberculosis girl and I cried over the pages of her as if she had been my own sister. At the tenth page we buried her and took up Alfred and I must say I saw a new Alfred in the judge"s bouquet-strewn appreciation of him, but I didn"t want him as bad as I had the day before when I read his own new and old letters, and cried over his old photographs. I suppose that was the result of some of what the judge manages the juries with. He"d be apt to use it on a woman and she wouldn"t find out about it until it was too late to be anything but mad.
Still when he began on me at page sixteen I felt a little better, though I didn"t know myself any better than I did Alfred when I got to page twenty.
What I am, is just a poor foolish woman, who has a lot more heart than she can manage with the amount of brains she got with it at birth. I"m not any star in a rose-colored sky, and I don"t want to inspire anybody; it"s too much of a job. I want to be a healthy happy woman and a wife to a man who can inspire himself and manage me. I want to marry a thin man and have from five to ten thin children, and when I get to be thirty I want my husband to want me to be as fat as Aunt Bettie, but not let me.
An inspiration couldn"t be fat and I"m always in danger from hot m.u.f.fins and chicken gravy. However, if I should undertake to be all the things Judge Wade said in that letter he wanted me to be to him, I should soon be skin and bones from mental and physical exercise. Still, he does live in Hillsboro and I won"t let myself know how my heart aches at the thought of leaving my home--and other things. It"s up in my throat and I seem always to be swallowing it, the last few days.
All the men who write me letters seem to get themselves wound up into a skyrocket and then let themselves explode in the last paragraph and it always upsets my nerves. I was just about to begin to cry again over the last words of the judge when the only bright spot in the day so far suddenly happened. Pet Buford blew in with the pinkest cheeks and the brightest eyes I had seen since I looked in the mirror the night of the dance. She was in an awful hurry.
"Molly, dear," she said, with her words literally falling over themselves, "Tom says you"ll give us some of your dinner left-overs to take for lunch in the Hup, for we are going way out to Wayne County to see some awfully fine tobacco he has heard is there. I don"t want to ask mother, for she won"t let me go; and his mother, if he asked her, will begin to talk about us. Tom said come to you and you would understand and fix it quick. He said kiss you for him and tell you he said "Come on in, the water"s fine." Isn"t he a joke?" And we kissed and laughed and packed a basket, and kissed and laughed again for good-by. I felt amused and happy for a few minutes--and also deserted. It"s a very good thing for a woman"s conceit to find out how many of her lovers are just make-believes. I may have needed Tom"s deflection.
Anyway, I don"t know when I ever was so glad to see anybody as I was when Mrs. Johnson came in the front door. A woman who has proved to her own satisfaction that marriage is a failure is at times a great tonic to other women. I needed a tonic badly this morning and I got it.
"Well, from all my long experience, Molly," she said as she seated herself and began to hem a dish-towel with long steady stabs, "husbands are just stick candy in different jars. They may look a little different, but they all taste alike and you soon get tired of them. In two months you won"t know the difference in being married to Al Bennett and Mr. Carter and you"ll have to go on living with him maybe fifty years. Luck doesn"t strike twice in the same place and you can"t count on losing two husbands. Al"s father was Mr. Johnson"s first cousin and had more crochets and worse. He had silent spells that lasted a week and family prayers three times a day, though he got drunk twice a year for a month at a time. Al looks very much like him."
"Mrs. Johnson," I said after a minute"s silence, while I had decided whether or not I had better tell her all about it. If a woman"s in love with her husband you can"t trust her to keep a secret, but I decided to try Mrs. Johnson. "I really am not engaged exactly to Alfred Bennett, though I suppose he thinks so by now if he has got the answer to that telegram. But--but something has made me--made me think about Judge Wade--that is he--what do you think of him, Mrs. Johnson?" I concluded in the most pitifully perplexed tone of voice.
"All alike, Molly; all as much alike as peas in a pod; all except John Moore, who"s the only exception in all the male tribe I ever met! His marrying once was just accidental and must be forgiven him. She fell in love with him while he was treating her for typhoid, when his back was turned as it were, and it was G.o.d"s own kindness in him that made him marry her when he found out how it was with the poor thing. There"s not a woman in this town who could marry, that wouldn"t marry him at the drop of his hat--but, thank goodness, that hat will never drop and I"ll have one sensible man to comfort and doctor me down into my old age.
Now, just look at that! Mr. Johnson"s come home here in the middle of the morning and I"ll have to get that old paper I hunted out of his desk for him last night. I wonder how he came to forget it!" It"s funny how Mrs. Johnson always knows what Mr. Johnson wants before he knows himself and gets it before he asks for it!
As she went out the gate the postman came in and at the sight of another letter my heart again slunk off into my slippers, and my brain seemed about to back up in a corner and refuse to work. In a flash it came to me that men oughtn"t to write letters to women very much--they really don"t plow deep enough, they just irritate the top soil. I took this missive from Alfred, counted all the fifteen pages, put it out of sight under a book, looked out the window and saw the ginger barber coming dejectedly around to the side gate from the kitchen--I knew the scene he had had with Judy, about the bottle encounters of the night before--saw Mr. Johnson shooed off down the street by Mrs. Johnson; saw the doctor"s car go chucking hurriedly in the garage and then my spirit turned itself to the wall and refused to be comforted. I tried my best, but failed to respond to my own remonstrances with myself, and tears were slowly gathering in a cloud of gloom when a blue gingham, rompers-clad sunbeam burst into the room.
"Git your night-gown and your toothbresh quick, Molly, if you want to pack "em in my trunk!" he exclaimed with his eyes dancing and a curl standing straight up on the top of his head, as it has a habit of doing when he is most excited. "You can"t take nothing but them "cause I"m going to put in a rope to tie the whale with when I ketch him, and it"ll take up all the rest of the room. Git "em quick!"
"Yes, lover, I"ll get them for you, but tell Molly where it is you are going to sail off with her in that trunk of yours?" I asked, dropping into the game as I have always done with him, no matter what game of my own pressed when he called.
"On the ocean where the boats go "cross and run right over a whale.
Don"t you remember you showed me them pictures of spout whales in a book, Molly? Doc says they comes right up by the ship and you can hear "em shoot water and maybe a iceberg, too. Which do you want to ketch most, Molly, a iceberg or a whale?" His eager eyes demanded instant decision on my part of the nature of capture I preferred. My mind quickly reverted to those two ponderous and intense epistles I had got within the hour and I lay back in my chair and laughed until I felt almost merry.
"The iceberg, Billy, every time," I said at last. "I just can"t manage whales, especially if they are ardent, which word means hot. I like _icebergs_, or I think I should if I could catch one."
"I don"t believe you could, Molly, but maybe Doc will let you put a rope and a long hook in his trunk to try with if your clothes go into mine.
His is a heap the biggest anyway and Nurse Tilly said he oughter put my things in his, but I cried and then he went up-stairs and got out that little one for me. Come see "em!"
"What do you mean, Billy?" I asked, while a sudden fear shot all over me like lightning. "You"re just playing go-away, aren"t you?"
"No, I ain"t playing, Molly!" he exclaimed excitedly. "Me and you and Doc is a-going across the ocean for a long, long time away from here.
Doc ast me about it this morning and I told him all right and you could come with us, if you was good. He said couldn"t I go without you if you was busy and couldn"t come and I told him you would put things down and come if I said so. Won"t you, Molly? It won"t be no fun without you and you"d cry all by yourself with me gone." His little face was all drawn up with anxiety and sympathy at my lonely estate with him out of it and a cry rose up from my heart with a kind of primitive savagery at what I felt was coming down upon me.
Without waiting to take him with me, or think, or do anything but feel deadly savage anger, I hurried across the garden and into Doctor Moore"s office, where he was just laying off his gloves and dust coat.
"What do you mean, John Moore, by daring, daring to think you can go and take Billy away from me?" I demanded looking at him with what must have been such fear and madness in my face that he was startled as he came close to the table against which I leaned. His face had grown white and quiet at my attack and he waited to answer for a long horrible minute that pulled me apart like one of those inquisition machines they used to torture women with when they didn"t know any better modern way to do it.
"I didn"t know Bill would tell you so soon, Mrs. Molly," he said at last gently, looking past me out of the window into the garden. "I was coming over just as soon as I got back from this call to talk with you about it, even if it did seem to intrude Bill"s and my affairs into a day that--that ought to be all yours to be--be happy in. But Bill, you see, is no respecter of--of other people"s happy days if he wants them in his."
"Billy"s happy days are mine and mine are his and he has the heart not to leave me out even if you would have him!" I exclaimed, a sob gathering in my heart at the thought that my little lover hadn"t even taken in a situation that would separate him from me across an ocean.
"Bill is too young to understand when he is--is being bereaved, Molly,"
he said and still he didn"t look at me. "I have been appointed a delegate to represent the State Medical a.s.sociation at the Centennial Congress in London the middle of next month--and somehow I--feel a bit pulled lately and I thought I would take the little chap and have--have a _wander-jahr._ You won"t need him now, Mrs. Peaches, and I couldn"t go without him, could I?" The sadness in his voice would have killed me if I hadn"t let it madden me instead.
"Won"t need Billy any more!" I exclaimed with a rage that made my voice literally scorch past my lips. "Was there ever a minute in his life that I haven"t needed Billy? How dare you say such a thing to me? You are cruel, cruel, and I have always known it, cold and cruel like all other men who don"t care how they wring the life blood out of women"s hearts and are willing to use their children to do it with. Even the law doesn"t help us poor helpless creatures and you can take our children and go with them to the ends of the earth and leave us suffering. I have gone on and believed that you were not like what the women say all men are and that you cared whether you hurt people or not, but now I see that you are just the same and you"ll take my baby away if you want to--and I can do nothing to prevent it--nothing in the wide world--I am completely and absolutely helpless--you coward, you!"
When that awful word, the worst word that a woman can use to a man, left my lips, a flame shot up into his eyes that I thought would burn me up, but in a half-second it was extinguished by the strangest thing in the world--for the situation--a perfect flood of mirth. He sat down in his chair and shook all over with his head in his hands until I saw tears creep through his fingers. I had calmed down so suddenly that I was about to begin to cry in good earnest when he wiped his eyes and said with a low laugh in his throat:
"The case is yours, Molly, settled out of court, and the "possession-nine-points-of-the-law clause" works in some cases for a woman against a man. Generally speaking, anyway, the pup belongs to the man who can whistle him down and you can whistle Bill from me any day.
I"m just his father and what I think or want doesn"t matter. You had better take him and keep him!"
"I intend to." I answered haughtily, uncertain as to whether I had better give in and be agreeable or stay prepared to cry in case there was further argument. But suddenly a strange diffidence came into his eyes and he looked away from me as he said in queer hesitating words:
"You see, Mrs. Molly, I thought from now on your life wouldn"t have exactly a place for Bill. Have you considered that you have trained him to demand you all the time and all of you? How would you manage Bill--and--and other claims?"
And if there is a contagious thing in this world it is embarra.s.sment. I never felt anything worse in all my life than the shame that swept over me in a great hot wave when that look came into his eyes and made me realize just exactly what I had been saying to him, about what, and how I had said it. I stood perfectly still, shook all over like a leaf, and wondered if I would ever be able to raise my eyes from the ground. A dizzy nauseated feeling for myself rose up in me against myself and I was just about to turn on my heels and leave him, I hoped for ever, when he came over and laid his hand on my shoulder.
"Molly," he said in a voice that might have come down from heaven on dove wings, "you can"t for a moment feel or think that I don"t realize and appreciate what you have been to the motherless little chap, and for life I am yours at command, as he is. I really thought it would be a relief to you to have him taken away from you for just a little while right now, and I still think it is best; but not unless you consent. You shall have him back whenever you are ready for him, and at all times both he and I are at your service to the whole of our kingdoms. Just think the matter over, won"t you, and decide what you want me to do?"
Something in me died for ever, I think, when he spoke to me like that.
He"s not like other men and there aren"t any other men on earth but him!
All the rest are just bugs or bats or something worse. And I"m not anything myself. There"s no excuse for my living and I wish I wasn"t so healthy and likely to go on doing it. It was all over and there was nothing left for me to live for, and before I could stop myself I buried my face in my hands.