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.
STORY OF THE VANISHING PATIENT
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!”
THE PIANO NEXT DOOR
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!
AN ASTRAL ONION
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!”
FROM THE LOOM OF THE DEAD
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.”
A GRAMMATICAL GHOST
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.