A Silent Singer

A Silent Singer

BY
Clara Morris

NEW YORK
BRENTANO’S
1899

COPYRIGHT 1899
BY
CLARA MORRIS HARRIOTT

TO
That small public of my very own—the
two who have listened to me unweariedly—criticised
gently, and encouraged heartily—to
that patient pair—my Mother and my Husband,
I dedicate these little stories.

Clara Morris Harriott.

May 1st, 1899.

Contents

A Silent Singer

A Silent Singer

It had been a hot day, and the minister had brought us, my mother and myself, from the city to his country home, in a mysterious, antediluvian species of buggy. Of all the race of men it is the country minister alone who can discover this particular breed of buggy. They are always gifted with strange powers of endurance; never being purchased until they have seemingly reached the point of dissolution, they will thereafter, for years and years, shake and totter, and rattle and rock, carrying all the time not only people but almost every conceivable kind of merchandise, from a few pounds of groceries to a pumpkin or a very youthful calf, without coming one step nearer their final wreck.

This special buggy could hold one person in comfort, two in discomfort and three in torture. I had been the party of the third part in that day’s ride, and worn out and crumpled and dusty, we passed from darkness into a room full of lamplight and faces. I was trying to support myself steadily upon a pair of legs so recently aroused from dumb sleep that they had barely reached the ticklish stage, and the ten thousand needle-prickling power was in full blast when the Rev. Hyler introduced me to his seven sons. My dazzled eyes and tired mind made them seem full seventeen to me, and they were so big and rough and noisy, I hung my head, confused, disappointed, frightened even, and then I felt the gentle pressure of her hot little hand on mine.

I raised my childish eyes and saw the sweetness of the smile upon her pallid face, saw it dawn upon her lips, pass swiftly to the dimple in her cheek, hide a moment there, only to reappear the next dancing in the sapphire blueness of her eyes—saw and mentally bowed down and worshipped her from that moment. Physically, I clung close to her burning hand and gave her back a smile of such astounding breadth and frankness as must have revealed to her my entire dental economy; and when, a few minutes later, I learned that she whispered because her voice was gone—lost forever, I felt such a passion of love and pity for her, such a longing to spare her suffering, that, but for its absurdity, I could have wounded my own flesh that I might bear the pain in her name. Grown-ups do not always understand the strength of feeling young things are capable of.

Next day we two round pegs began fitting ourselves into the new holes prepared for us, and though they were not absolutely square, they were still far enough from roundness to be very uncomfortable holes indeed. My mother began her never-ending duties of housekeeper. Mrs. Hyler had broken down from overwork and sick-nursing, and I having, as my mother once declared, “as many eyes as had a peacock’s tail,” began my almost unconscious observations of a new form of poverty. (I already had a really exhaustive knowledge of the subject both from observation and from personal experience, and I had come to the conclusion that the bitterness of poverty was greatly influenced by the manner in which it was accepted. I had known abject, ragged poverty to enjoy streaks of real merriment on comparatively comfortable occasions, while higher up in life those who openly acknowledged their poverty seemed only to suffer its inconvenience and to know nothing of the shame and humiliation of those who tried to hide theirs by agonizing makeshifts.) Here I found it was accepted in sullen silence, but, nevertheless, bitter resentment lowered on every face save my dear Miss Linda’s.

She always turned to those eighteen watchful, loving eyes a sweetly-smiling, pallid face with serene brows; but I saw her sometimes when smile and serenity were both gone and her face was anguished.

The Rev. Hyler, minister, farmer, father of seven sons, was himself a seventh son, and had he been examined at his birth with that closeness of scrutiny given to first-born babies, I’m positive the word “failure” could have been found plainly stamped upon his small person. He was a tall, gray, narrow man, and seemed always to have a bitter taste in his mouth. Black-coated, white-tied and pale, he seemed to have been pressed between the leaves of some old volume of sermons and left there till all the color and sap had dried out of him as it might dry out of a pressed violet or pansy. Perpetual ill-humor had stamped to the very bone the three-lined frown he wore between his eyebrows. He was an educated man and full of information—that was of no use to him. He could give statistics as to the number of the inhabitants of Palestine, but he could not tell whether an unsatisfactory field required topdressing or under-draining. He had been an instructor, a teacher; had, in fact, been at the head of one of the State colleges, but failed and came back, much embittered, to the small church he had left with such high hopes; but finding he had provided himself with more mouths than his salary could well fill he had taken to farming, at which he seemed to be the greatest failure of all.

Narrow and cold by nature, soured by disappointment, he loved but one person on earth, and that person was his first-born child, his only daughter, Linda. He admired her, he was proud of her, he loved her, truly and tenderly, beyond a doubt; but, alas, as surely beyond a doubt, his was a jealous and a selfish love, and she, with eyes whose power and penetration fully equalled their rare beauty of coloring, read him through and through, as she might have read a book! Saw the dry, gray man’s weakness of resolve, his bitter temper, his small tyrannies, and worse—far worse, because that was a most repellant sin—his hypocrisy; saw all these things and with no touch of sympathy for any one of them, but, with what seemed almost divine compassion, she gave him reverent service and such tender, loyal love as many a better father fails all his life to win.

And this sweet Linda, woman-grown—this young lady who had “come out,” and had had a season of social gaiety in the city—who—oh, wondrous being! had had real “for true” lovers—she stooped from her high estate to honor me with her attention, her conversation—even, to a certain point, her confidence—while I had only reached that humiliating stage in life where old ladies could refer to me as a “growing-girl.” And this condescension filled me with such joy—such stupendous pride—I marvel it did not precede a mighty fall. But, looking back upon it all, I think I see a pathetic reason for that unequal companionship. My mother, knowing me to be painfully sensitive to suffering or sorrow, kept from me the knowledge that the girl I so loved was slowly dying, a victim of that fell disease, consumption! Her days were so surely numbered that no one had the faintest hope that she would see the yellowing of the leaves that now danced greenly on the trees. I saw her pale and very, very fragile, and only loved her more. I saw her faint sometimes, but I had seen other women faint when I knew they were not ill, and, to my childish ideas, anyone who rose from her bed and dressed each day must surely be quite well. So it came about that in my eyes alone she belonged still to the world of the living—in my face alone could she read love without anxiety, and when she laughed, as she often did, it was only in my eye she found a hearty, gay response, for every other glance was full of anguished pity.

If my ignorance was not bliss, it was, at least, I truly think, a comfort to her, since by its help she could forget for a time, at least, that she was doomed and set aside as having nothing more to do with life. And my profound interest and naïf admiration egged her on to tell me of the gay, sweet past—such an innocent, pitifully short past it was—of her small triumphs and her pretty frocks. Sometimes she would even show me her few girlish trinkets, but I was quick to observe that if I ever asked about her future use of them a sort of shudder passed over her white face and her eyes would close quickly for a moment; then she would answer evasively, gently; yet there was a flatness in the tones of her voice, and she would surely remark, “that she would try now to doze a little.”

It was not long before my observation brought me closer to her tender heart, while slowly I learned, little by little, something of the weight of the cross this fragile girl was bearing on her trembling shoulders.

Mrs. Hyler was, I think, the most disconcerting person in this uncomfortable family. Her manner toward them was that of a moderately devoted housekeeper—head nurse, who presumed slightly by reason of her long service. The last scant drop of kindness—the last ray of warmth of affection—I dare not use a stronger word—was for her Linda! But we must remember that for four and twenty years she had listened to what the Rev. Hyler “was going to do,” and had suffered from what the Rev. Hyler “did not do,” and there was no hope left in her.

I shall not introduce her sons individually, but will simply state that between the Spanish-looking eldest one—brave, loyal, honest and kind—and the impish youngest, with the face of a blond seraph and a heart like a nether mill-stone, there were five others, each one striving to be—or so it seemed—as unlike his brothers as possible. In all their lives they had found but two subjects they could agree upon; on these, however, they were as one boy. Their honest, hearty love for “Sister Linda” was one subject, and a fixed determination to “get even” with their father was the other.

Linda Hyler loved music profoundly, and she had not only natural talent, but powers of concentration and a capacity for hard work that might have made an artist of her. And the poor child had had her opportunity—for one with means and power and the inclination to use them, attracted by the purity and volume of her voice and by her earnest ambition, had offered to assist her to that stern training, so difficult in those days to obtain, even when one had the money to pay for it. But if she had talent, she also had a father, and he with the bitter taste seemingly strong in his mouth, refused the kindly offer, giving no nobler reason for his act than that “she was his only daughter and he would miss her far too much.” She pleaded with him in vain, and had the pain of seeing her one opportunity float away from her, taking on, as it went, all the airy grace, all the glancing beauty of a bubble floating in the sunshine.

Had her father not provided so much material for its building, the cross she bore might not have been so heavy. Up to the time of our arrival, Linda had managed to sit a little while each day before the battered old organ that stood in an otherwise empty room. To any other family it would have been the parlor—to this family it was a thing without a name. But even as you have seen a timid, lonely woman appear at her window, whistling loudly and wearing a man’s hat—by means of which she convinces would-be burglars of the presence there of a large and very destructive man—so these parlor windows were well curtained, that the occasional humped-over, slow-driving passer-by might be convinced that this parlor held—(as much ingrain-horse-hair-worsted-crocheting, and high art plaster cats, with round black spots and heavy coats of varnish as any)—and I suppose that one trick was quite as convincing as the other—any way, there sat Linda in that dreary room, before the organ, drawing from its sulky and unwilling interior sounds of such solemn sweetness as made one pray involuntarily; and sometimes she played simply an accompaniment—sitting with lifted face and closed eyes, the veins swelling in her throat, but no sound coming from her moving lips. Already I had become her second shadow, and so I’d creep into the empty room after her, and listen to her playing, and once when I was greatly moved, she turned to me and said: “Little Sister”—the pet name she had graciously bestowed on me—“what does that make you think of?”

And without a pause I answered eagerly: “A church—not,” I hurriedly explained, “not our church, but a great one with pictures, and lots of people, and lights and sweet-smoke!”

Ah, how she laughed, and though it was but a husky whispering affair, it was still a very merry laugh, because of the light that danced so gaily to it in her eyes. She then informed me that the music had been a mere scrap from a famous oratorio, and that my “sweet-smoke” was called incense, and though she set me right, it was her harmless jest to use the word “sweet-smoke” herself ever after.

We had been there but a little while, when one day I noticed something wrong with the music; the tones were weak and wavering, there seemed to be no certainty in her touch. Her little hand could not hold a simple chord with firmness, and then the next moment there was a soft crash of the yellow, old keys, as Linda sank forward helpless and panting. I sprang to help her, and between two struggling, unwilling breaths, I heard her whisper: “Must this go too? Dear God! must this go too?”

By chance the little brother had been present. He called his mother, and presently Linda was on the sofa in the other room, and the inevitable farm-house remedy for all mortal ills, the camphor-bottle—or to use the rural term, the “camfire”—had been produced, and soon Linda raised her eyes and called up the old, sweet smile; while little Arthur stood with sturdy legs far apart—his hands in his small pockets, and his father’s own special brand of frown upon his brow—watching his sister’s restoration; then he remarked: “Linda, it was blowin’ wind into that d—blamed old organ, that busted yer all up just now!—so it was!—and after this yer just pull yer feet back out of the way, and I’ll crawl under there, and work them ‘pedal treadle things,’ and blow yer all the wind yer want—and if I blow so hard it busts the thing, papa darsent lick me, ’cause I’ll be doin’ it for you!” and he danced with malicious glee!

Next day he kept his word, and though Miss Linda played a little while, somehow the spirit seemed to have gone out of her music. But when Arthur came out on all-fours from under the instrument’s front, hot, red and tousled, his sister shook his little hand and thanked him and kissed him tenderly—and he, swelling with gratified pride and love, went out behind the smoke-house, where he swore a little for practice, and tried to kill the cat.

Next morning early, as I left our room, I glanced into Miss Linda’s, and saw it had not been put in order yet. Being ever eager to do something in her service, I thought I might slip in and beat up her pillows and place them in the sun as I had seen the “grown-ups” do. So in I went and, snatching up the nearest pillow, I gave a startled “Oh!” and stood staring, for beneath it lay the miniature of a man, whose questioning brown eyes looked up at me from a face young yet stern to the point of sombreness. My first impulse was to restore the pillow and run away, but next moment I noticed, lying close to the picture, all crumpled up into a little wad, Miss Linda’s handkerchief. I leaned over and touched it, and it was still damp with tears. A great lump rose in my throat and, though I was but a “growing-girl,” it was the heart of a woman that was giving those quick, hard blows in my breast and making me understand. I sprang across the room and softly closed the door. I said to myself: “Miss Linda loves him, and she is unhappy and grieves, and she does not wish them to know!”

I went to her bureau and took a fresh handkerchief from the drawer, then I took the miniature—it was on ivory, and, from its small, gold frame, I fancied it had been intended for an ornament—and slipped it into the velvet case I found near by; then I carefully rolled the case inside of the handkerchief and started downstairs, trying hard to look unconcerned as I entered the dining-room.

Breakfast had just been placed upon the table, and every one save Linda was moving toward it. A little, drooping figure still seated, she seemed very ill that morning, and the great, dark circles about her eyes looked like purple stains on her white face. I crossed directly to her, thus turning my back upon every one else, and leaning over her and thrusting my small package into her hand with a warning pressure of the fingers, I said: “I have brought a fresh handkerchief for you, Miss Linda—do you want it?”

The moment she touched the parcel she understood. Her eyes sent one startled glance toward her father—then she looked at me. The white weariness faded all away, and warmly, rosily I saw her love blossom sweetly in her face, while she answered: “Thank you, little sister—yes I want it,” and slipped the handkerchief into the pocket of her gown, just as her father pushed me impatiently aside that he might assist her to her place at table.

He instantly noted the color in her face and sharply exclaimed: “What’s this—what’s this! is this a feverish manifestation, at this hour of the day?”

And Linda smiled and charged him with “cultivating his imagination, instead of his corn,” and by the time she was in her place the color had faded, the waxen pallor was back upon her face, and the small incident had been safely passed.

Late that afternoon Linda was lying on, or perhaps I should say clinging to, the hard and slippery thing they called a sofa—Heaven save the mark! It was long and hard, and smoothly covered with shiny leather. It arched up in its middle over very powerful springs, and the springs and the slipperiness did the trick for every one. You could not snuggle on it to save your life, and if you attempted to be friendly with it and tried to rest your book or fan or smelling bottle beside you—hoop la!—with an intensity of malice known only to the inanimate enemy it would hitch up its back and fire everything off onto the floor well out of your reach—and if you showed any marked annoyance it would fire you after them. There was not a day that it did not shoot Miss Linda’s pillow from under her head, and twice I saw it slide her bodily to the floor.

I had found just one thing that could hold on to this slippery fiend, and that was a blanket—but who on earth wanted to lie on a blanket in the summer-time? So there Miss Linda lay on the glassy-surfaced “sofa,” with a chair pushed close up to it to prevent her sliding off, and I on the floor slowly fanning her and hoping she might be asleep, she was so very quiet. But no, she was not sleeping, for presently, without opening her eyes or making the least movement, she whispered: “Little sister, you saved three of us much grief and pain by your caution and your thoughtfulness to-day, and now, dear, I will explain about the picture.”

I turned hot and shame-faced, and rubbing my head upon her hands like an affectionate young puppy, I muttered confusedly, “that, if she pleased, I’d rather not!” But she smiled; not her family smile, but a sad, slow smile, and stroked my hair and went on gently: “It is right that you should know. He, the man of the miniature, was to have been my—” She stopped; she swallowed hard at something. She moistened her lips and started again: “He—at least, I was to have been his wife! I wore his ring—I—I—” Suddenly her eyes opened wide on mine, and she said with a sort of rush: “Child, child! Heaven will have to be a very glorious place to make me forget the happiness I knew with him! and I loved him so! oh, I loved him so!”

In a very transport of sympathy I broke in: “But he was good, I am sure he was! and he don’t look as if he were dead?”

She smiled kindly at me, and fully understood my blundering, hurried words: “Yes, dear,” she said, “you are right; he is not dead, and he is good! A little hard, perhaps—” Her eyes closed again. “Yes, perhaps, a little hard, but—well, men must be hard or they cannot succeed! We were very happy, dear! Papa—” Her brows drew together quickly for a moment;—“papa gave his consent. He—Roger—had a noble voice; we sang together at the church, we rode, we planned—we planned—” A pause, a long, long, shivering sigh, and then: “Papa changed his mind. I was not of age—even had I been, I had been bred up to such strict obedience—I—oh, I don’t know!—but Roger, he could not bear dependence on another man’s whims for two long years! He was one of the college professors; he needed quiet, regularity, positively settled plans, or the quality of his work might suffer! Papa broke his promise—he gave no reason. Roger said ‘he was jealous of us.’ I only know he broke his promise! Roger would not wait! Father commanded—he demanded! They were two angry men—I stood between them, dear—and I am crushed!”

“Oh,” I cried, “he did not love you hard enough, dear Miss Linda! What was enduring two years of Mr. Hyler compared to enduring a whole life without you?” It was not exactly a polite way to speak of the reverend gentleman or of her lover, and she laid her finger on my lips, as she resumed: “Papa does not understand—time has passed—but, oh, child, child!—each day of my life—I lose my love—each day the pain of it—is fresh and new! Had papa known of the picture to-day—he might have understood—he might have—suffered remorse—and he is old and—and—‘As we forgive those who trespass against us!’”

Her whisper died away on the last word; she lay quite still. I fanned her gently, slowly, and kissed her little, paper-dry hands now and then, and by-and-by the smile faded quite away, the sweet lips took a downward droop, the heavy waves of her brown hair made her face look piteously small and wasted, and, with hot tears dropping down into my lap, I took my first look at the real Linda. The little songster, with the song stopped in her throat! The loving little woman, with her heart crushed in her breast!—and as it was my first so it was my last look at that Linda, for it was the only time I ever saw her asleep, and when awake she was always on dress-parade, and wore her smile as an officer would his sword.

Shortly after this I began to worry, for though I was still in ignorance, even I could see that as these hot days went panting by each one of them took with it some small portion of dear Miss Linda’s strength. The dandelion in seed, lifting in air its phantom, downy globe, was scarcely whiter, lighter or more frail than she. Then I was worried about myself. The family were taking suddenly too deep an interest in me, my tastes and my desires. I was even asked what I would do under such and such circumstances, or how I would decide between this claim and that, and when I entered a room the “grown-ups” were almost sure, of late, to stop speaking, or they would clear their throats and speak of the weather with an elephantine lightness that could not deceive a goggle-eyed infant negotiating teeth with a rubber ring.

Once my very own mother, speaking excitedly, too, stopped short when I came in, and though I looked and looked at her with forty-horse questioning power in my eyes, she answered nothing, and my most penetrating and gimlet-like glance finally brought out a very brief, not to say sharp, suggestion that I sit down and stare at my spelling-book awhile—which, like most good advice, was neither kindly given nor willingly followed. So I was worrying, when one morning I stood listening to Miss Linda’s unspeakably sad music. She was playing with fervor and more strength than usual, and suddenly she was seized with a paroxysm of coughing. Instead of going to her at once, I ran into the next room for some troches that were on a table, and before I could return with them she had fallen and was lying motionless on the floor. My cry and the shouts of little Arthur gave the alarm. Mrs. Hyler entered first. She went very white, but she stooped and lifted Linda like a child, and I thought it strange that, as she carried her, she held a handkerchief to her face. Mr. Hyler appearing suddenly, exclaimed in excited tones: “Ice—ice! Salt—linen!” and, taking these exclamations as orders, I ran forward, intending to carry the message to my mother. At that moment Mrs. Hyler stretched out her hand to push the door more widely open, and on the breast of her light dress, just where Miss Linda’s head was resting, a great, red stain was slowly, evilly spreading. I glanced from it to the handkerchief in her hand, and it was red! red!! red!!! With stiffening lips, I whispered: “Miss Linda—oh, Miss Linda!” and suddenly there came a mighty roaring in my ears—a cold air on my face, and as I sank into the windy darkness, afar off I heard a voice cry: “There she goes! Catch the child—ah! she saw it all.”

Yes, in very truth I had seen all! And when, with a general sense of discomfort, I opened my eyes upon the sunlight again, I found myself attended by two of the seven sons, who cast water on me with lavish hand and pounded me with an affectionate brutality that left marks by which my fainting might be remembered for days after. I looked stupidly at them at first and wondered, and then I saw that great, red, growing stain beneath the wasted, white face, and I broke into such sobs as fairly frightened them. I was crouching on the top step of the porch, with my feet drawn up and my arms and head resting on my knees, and as I glanced downward I saw four bare, brown, boyish feet, and noted how restless they were. With my heart almost bursting with pain, some portion of my brain made a note of the fact that one of the four great toes before me had received a recent cut that must have been given by a hoe. Then the elder one thumped me kindly on the back and said: “Don’t, Carrie, don’t!”—and the other one said, in a husky voice: “Why, didn’t yo’ never know at all that sister Linda was a-goin’ to die?”

I gave an agonized cry at the words, and the elder boy exclaimed: “What did yer want to say that for? For two cents I’d give yer a good lickin’!”—while he, of the toe, said: “No, yer won’t give me a lickin’ for two cents, nor for one cent, neither!”

“Why won’t I?”

“Why didn’t Jack eat his supper, eh?”

And then they grabbed at each other over my head, but a grave voice said: “Boys, I never was so shamed by you before!”

It was Alfred, the eldest of the seven, and a “grown-up” himself. He paid no attention to their explanations—their recriminations; he simply stooped, and, lifting my shaking body in his arms, carried me into the house. As he was going up the narrow stairs a splash came on my cheek that was no tear of mine. A thrill went through me from head to foot—I lifted my swollen lids to look at him. His face wore that gray tint paleness brings to dark people, and in his always sad eyes I saw slow tears gathering. I buried my own face in his bosom, and laying my shaking, little hand across his eyes, I sobbed: “Don’t, oh, please don’t! She couldn’t bear it if she knew!”

He took me to my mother’s room and, placing me high against the pillows, deftly tied a wet handkerchief about my hot brows, and then he stood looking down at me for a moment before he said, with a quivering voice: “You know now, don’t you, Carrie?”

I nodded my head and wrung my hands silently. “Yes,” he went on, “she is going soon, dear—and—and—it’s rough! Good God! Carrie! if you could have seen her three years ago—if you could have heard her sing! I think sometimes my father is a devil! There—there—I didn’t mean to say that!—but see, dear, little girl!” He knelt down quickly by the bed and took my hands in his. He spoke rapidly—pressing my fingers tightly, to hold my attention: “They are going to ask you to do something—to-morrow, perhaps—this awful attack of Linda’s will hurry things—I can’t tell you what they will ask; I have not the time, but, Carrie, refuse! Don’t be badgered—don’t be coaxed—not even by darling Linda! One martyr is enough! Refuse, refuse! for, oh, we will be a hard lot when sister has left us!”

His body shook with sobs; for a moment he let his head rest on the edge of the bed. Then he rose and left the room to go to his own, where I heard him lock himself in. And that day ended my ignorance about Miss Linda’s fate, and it also ended Miss Linda’s music—she had played her last note.

That I had received a shock was evident to the whole family, and I heard the sick girl say to her father: “Wait, papa, dear, don’t speak to Carrie yet—give her a little time.”

But my grief was greater than my curiosity, and I never asked myself what he could have to speak to me about, or what he could possibly ask of me. I only thought of her—to fan her, hand her a drink, bring her a flower, carry a message, or, above all, during that afternoon hour, to crouch at her side and watch her “silent singing,” as I called it. She never seemed to do it before her mother or anyone but me. But while she was supposed to be taking a nap, and I fanned her quietly, she would lie, with closed eyes, and softly beat time with her shadowy hand, and her throat would swell and her lips move, but no sound came; and through much watching of her, with my heart in my eyes, I came to know what she sang. Often it was “Lead, Kindly Light,” but more often, to my torture now, it was that expression of absolute submission, “Just as I Am, Without One Plea.” And when her pale lips found the words, “O, Lamb of God, I Come,” I would bite my lips and hold my breath, that I might not break into the wild sobs that would have sore distressed her.

I had not liked the Rev. Hyler at any time, but when I learned that, minister as he was, the sole religious observance for the family was a hasty, almost angry, snatch at a blessing on the food, while for visitors there were family prayers both night and morning, my dislike became marked. Linda saw it as she saw everything, and unable to defend him, she suffered and was ashamed, but kept silent until that hot afternoon, when she said: “Little sister, you are not fond of papa, but try, dear—to put out of your mind—that matter of the prayers, and only think how old and tired and tried he is—and” (I heard his step approaching, and his dry, little cough)—“and listen to him kindly—and try to do what he asks of you—try, dear, for all our sakes.”

And then, to my bewilderment, the Rev. Hyler and his worn and helpless wife made solemn entry and seated themselves, and I, having risen respectfully, stood there and received the blood-curdling proposal that I should become the sister of the seven—the adopted daughter of the Rev. Hyler! Amazement kept me silent, and they went on to explain, with their eyes turned away from Linda’s face, “how bad it would be for the boys to be without a sister’s influence—and how they had been greatly gratified, though much surprised, to see that the younger boys had taken a strong liking to me,” and, glancing at their two grim faces, I wondered what they would say or do if they knew that their boys’ liking was founded upon a generous but downright falsehood, told by me to save the second youngest from a most unjust and cruel thrashing; after which I had gone at once to my mother, confessed the lie and accepted my punishment with a cheerful acquiescence that filled the seven with admiration and made them declare, with enthusiastic vulgarity, that I was “the biggest thing on ice!”

At last it dawned upon them that, for mere form’s sake, they should ask an answer from me, and it came in a swift and emphatic “NO!” They were surprised and angry, but to all their half-sneering questions—as to why and wherefore—wide-eyed and amazed, I had but one word for answer: “Mother!” The Rev. Hyler answered: “My wife will be your mother!”—and I almost laughed; then with large conclusiveness I replied: “But my mother loves me, sir!”

Miss Linda caught my hand and said: “Think, Carrie—a home—brothers—father and mother to love you.”

I looked at him a walking bitterness, I looked at her a withering disappointment and said: “No! no, dear Miss Linda, they love you, but they would not love me—and” I triumphantly added, “they will not tell you so!”

She turned questioningly to them, but the challenge was not accepted. Angrily her father bade me go, saying, “I might know what hunger was some day.”

But I answered cheerfully: “Oh, I have been hungry sometimes, and so has mother, but we were together, so it was all right. You know when you’re orphans and widows, you always come all right”—a speech that was as perfect in faith as it was imperfect in grammar.

The Rev. Hyler, with a vindictive gleam in his eye, “hoped I might be hungry again, that I might appreciate what I was rejecting”—and Miss Linda kissed me with a disappointed face, and whispered for me to go, now.

After that life became intolerable there, and soon there came a morning when, ready for an early start, I crept into Miss Linda’s room and knelt down by her bed, and with hands tight-clasped we looked—and looked—and looked, and spoke not one word between us. Then there came a call for me, and I rose to go. As I bent over to kiss her, she lifted a thin, little, warning hand and tried to turn my face away, but with a smothered cry of indignation, I caught her hand and held it while I slipped my other arm beneath her incredibly frail shoulders, and lifting her, I kissed her shadowy hair, her brow, her cheeks and her pale, dry lips. Then with a long, long look into her dark, sapphire-blue eyes, I laid her down and went out, and saw her no more forever. As I closed the door gently behind me, I heard, for the last time, the husky whisper that had grown so dear to me, and all it said was, “Little sister!”

I stumbled down the stairs, and slipping my hand into my mother’s, we faced the world once more, I having faith to believe that somewhere in its mighty length and breadth there was a home for us, and that together we should somehow find it.

For two years the gentle, little silent singer had been lying in her lonely and neglected grave, when I paid my only visit to the Hyler family. Circumstances had brought me into the neighborhood, and I felt in duty bound to “pay my respects,” as they called it. Poor Alfred’s fear seemed to have been justified, for the neighbors declared that since Linda’s death the boys had become a “hard lot,” and seemed actually to be growing more boldly bad week by week.

The Rev. Hyler and his wife at first seemed to derive a sort of sour satisfaction from my visit to them. The boys received me with noisy greetings and many poundings on the shoulders, and young savages that they were, they expressed their hospitality by the making of gifts, such as horse-hair rings, matched jack-stones, and several chunks of not-too-clean flag-root, both the smell and taste of which were particularly offensive to me.

Before tea was over all the kindness had gone out of Mrs. Hyler’s face, and it began to wear the look I had known well in former days, of dull, sullen dissatisfaction. Suddenly, apropos of nothing, she said: “I suppose, Carrie, you have heard all about Linda?”

With some hesitation I answered: “Yes, I think so. I heard that she—she went away in her sleep, and that you held her hand—but never knew when—”

“Oh yes,” she broke in, angrily, “and they told you, too, that I had sat there asleep, or I would have known—I know their tales.”

“Oh dear, Mrs. Hyler,” I cried, “indeed no one ever implied such a cruel thing! They only said she passed so gently that no one could have known the actual moment.”

She seemed somewhat mollified by this assurance, and went on more rapidly, and as she spoke she slowly turned her cup round and round in its saucer: “Linda had been so much better that last day that it seemed almost foolish when she expressed her wish to see each one of the boys alone for a few minutes. I told her so, but she only smiled and said, ‘so much the better for the boys.’ The memory of her last words to them should not be associated with suffering and pain, and so she had her way, and held each brother in her arms and whispered some last words—but smiling, smiling all the time.”

I clasped my hands tight beneath the table, and my heart seemed to beat out those cruel words, “smiling, smiling all the time,” and I whispered “Miss Linda, oh, dear Miss Linda!”

“Yes, and she had a little gift for each—and—well, later in the afternoon she was lying on the sofa, her eyes were closed, and beneath the cover her hand seemed to be moving all the time. Perhaps she was nervous, but she was saying, or repeating-to-herself-like, the words—”

I could not help it—from my lips sprang the line: “Just as I Am, Without One Plea!”

There followed a sort of general exclamation, and Mr. Hyler leaned forward, saying sharply: “How’s this? Who gave you your information—not the boys, I’m sure?”

Hot and confused, I said: “Nobody told me, I had only guessed,” (his disbelief was palpable) “because dear Miss Linda was so very fond of that hymn, and sang it nearly every day to herself.”

“And Mr. Hyler sneeringly assured me that, as Linda has lost her voice more than a year before her death, my statement had at least the element of surprise about it!” I sat mute—I could not explain to them about the silent singing.

Then Mrs. Hyler took up the hateful ball and sent it rolling toward me with the suggestion, “that as I was a good guesser, perhaps I had guessed all that she had been going to say?”

I steadied my voice and answered, respectfully, “that I had not guessed anything else,” and with mock surprise she said: “Indeed?” and then went on: “After a silence Linda spoke of you, Carrie.”

I looked up joyfully—my mortification all forgotten: “She said you were a remarkable girl” (even at that moment I was proud that she had not called me child, but “girl”). “I told her you were well enough, but in no way remarkable. She insisted, however, and then added, that if I ever saw you again I was to give you a remembrance. I thought the gift she chose very odd and unattractive, but she said” (how slowly she was speaking now) “she said you would understand it.”

She paused so long that I looked up. Her eyes were like a ferret’s, and Mr. Hyler, with his head in his hand, was watching me from between his fingers.

“Yes, ma’am,” I whispered, faintly, vaguely. Then she spoke loudly, roughly: “She told me to give you a handkerchief, and say to you, the longer you lived the better you would understand her gratitude, for your golden silence.”

I felt the blood fairly pushing through my veins—my downcast eyes noted that the very backs of my hands were turning red. Then Mrs. Hyler struck the table sharply and said: “Well, was she right—do you understand?”

I had no time to answer, for Mr. Hyler sprang up and, violently thrusting his chair against the wall, cried: “What folly to ask the question—of course she understands! Is not her knowledge burning red in her face?”

He stepped across the room and flung wide the door leading to his study, as he termed it—the boys called it “The Place of Horrors,” because they were always thrashed there with peculiar malevolence and ingenuity, and generally unjustly—they seldom got punished when they deserved it. There he waved me in. But grave and stern, Alfred’s voice came: “Father—father! Carrie is but a child—she is here alone, and she is a visitor!”

“Visitor or no visitor!” was the answer, “I will not permit this stranger, this mere nobody, to have knowledge of my daughter that is unknown to me!”

With wistful voice I meekly asked Mrs. Hyler: “Please ma’am, may I have the handkerchief?” and she sharply answered: “No—no! you shall have no handkerchief” (Alfred quickly left the room a moment) “until you have confessed every word that ever passed between you and Linda!”

Here Alfred came in again and, leaning over, placed in my hand the little gift, and kissing me, gently said: “There, Carrie, it was Linda’s own!” Then as he passed his mother, he laid his hand on her shoulder and said: “Dear mother, it was not yours to withhold—we must all honor sister’s wishes.”

Mr. Hyler fairly shouted: “Take your seat and be silent, sir! As for you,” (turning to me) “into that room! I will know what conduct my daughter was guilty of that she should be grateful for the shelter of your ‘golden silence’!”

The four eldest boys sprang furiously to their feet, but the cry that rang the wildest in that room, that might have been the cry of a woman-grown, came from my lips. I stood gasping a moment, and all I thought was: “Miss Linda, oh my Miss Linda—he insulted you—he—he, whom you always spared!” And then I began to grow cold—bodily, mentally! My shamefacedness, my fear, all fell away from me. I must have gone very white, for No. 5, a rather timid, gentle boy, said lowly: “Oh, mother, will Carrie faint? She won’t die too, will she?”

I lifted my eyes to the Rev. Hyler, and I felt a great contempt for him; while down deep in my heart there was growing a bitter anger that merged, at last, into a vindictive longing to see him suffer. I threw up my head and marched into “The Place of Horrors,” and turning, waited for him to follow me. He paused and looked at me with the same gleam in his eyes that shone there the day he wished “I might know hunger again.” Then, with petty triumph, he exclaimed: “When you leave this room I shall understand this thing!”

But he was only partially right, for when I left that room he understood several things. He banged the door shut, and then seated himself at his writing table, leaving me to stand at his opposite side, as a culprit stands before a judge. I looked at him and saw all the narrow, gray man’s meanness, his eager curiosity that was like that of a scandal-monger’s. Yet, I gave him one chance, for when he demanded: “Well, now, Miss?” I said: “Mr. Hyler, you must know, there is nothing wrong about dear Miss Linda’s kind message to me—she simply—” “Stop, where you are!” he cried. “I’ll have no prevarication! Where there is secrecy there is shame! No one ever conceals what is right! I’ll have the truth, now, and the meaning of this message!”

And I answered: “Yes, sir, you shall have the truth!” and I told him briefly of Miss Linda’s silent singing, and of her undying sorrow for her lost lover. As I spoke, utter amazement grew upon his face—he stammered out: “Why—why—what are you saying? She never spoke of him! Why—nearly three years had passed—since—since—the—r—the break—and ’er—you don’t know what you are talking about—she did not grieve!”

“Oh, yes, she did!” I tranquilly replied. “That was why she would never have a light in her room at night for fear the picture might be seen. She slept with it beneath her cheek, and washed it with her tears, and dried it with her kisses. Oh, yes, she grieved!”

His eyes began to look sunken and his face was working convulsively. Then I told him how I had found the picture and wrapped it in a handkerchief and had given it silently to her in his presence, and she had been grateful, not because she was ashamed of her love or her sorrow, but because she wished to spare him suffering. And with his clenched fist he struck the table, blow after blow, crying furiously: “You lie—you baggage—you lie!” Then suddenly turning his trembling hands palms upward, he pleaded: “Carrie—tell me that you lie!” But coldly I answered: “I do not lie at all, sir—and you know I do not—besides, here are dear Miss Linda’s very own words: ‘Every day of my life I lose my love—and every day the pain is fresh and new!’”

His eyes roamed from side to side—little bubbles formed in the corners of his lips, his hand went up to his throat and tried to loosen his collar, and I could just hear the whispered words that left his lips: “Linda—Linda—Linda!” and then, I struck my last blow at him. (Oh, Miss Linda, to-day, I ask your pardon, but then I was hard and pitiless, as only the very young can be.) And I went coldly on: “She said to me, she did not wish you to know of her sorrow, because, perhaps”—I leaned on the table and brought myself nearer to him—“perhaps you might feel remorse!”

He threw one hand above his head and gave a cry: “Perhaps? perhaps? only perhaps?” and suddenly fell forward on the table, with outspread arms, and I heard him call upon the God he had never truly served and ask the mercy he had denied his own child! And, as I left the room by a second door opening into the entry where hung my hat and cloak, the vindictive devil that possessed me made me say quite clearly: “As a father pitieth his own children!”

I was tying on my hat when I distinctly heard the boys quarreling as to whether or no there would be prayers held in my honor—some saying, “yes, because I was company,” and the younger ones arguing that, as I was not a “grown-up,” “there’d be no family prayers,” then suddenly there was a howl, and I knew they were coming to blows.

I slipped from the house, without good-bye to any one, and as I passed the study window, I glanced in and saw the “gray head” bowed upon the table and two hands beating feebly, aimlessly, and suddenly I seemed to hear Miss Linda’s husky whisper saying: “And only remember how old and tired and tried he is, dear!”

And I cried aloud: “Forgive me, forgive me, dear Miss Linda—I did it because I loved you so!” and looking across the years—I say now—I love you so, dear Little Silent Singer.

An Old Hulk

An Old Hulk

Old Thomas Brockwell—sometimes called Bull Brockwell, he of the mighty thews and sinews—had been for some years a widower, and had he remained a widower I should have been the poorer by one good friend—a lowly one—oh, yes—but you know that true friendship is one of the few things the lowly can afford to give.

But the broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced old Briton had married an American wife in the person of the mother of my closest chum—and so I learned many things about the narrow, hard, honest old giant—things that sometimes filled my eyes with tears of laughter; sometimes with stinging drops of anguished pity. The only surprising thing about Brockwell’s second marriage was that it had not taken place years before—for given a working-class Englishman of middle age—owning a house of his own—you have the worst material in the world for a widower. But, like most of his race, he was a bit contrary, and when all his housekeepers and his elderly unmarried friends pursued him openly—without even trying to hide the matrimonial lasso with a few flowers of sentiment or delicacy—he shook his obstinate, old head and plunged away.

Then Emily had arrived upon the scene, whom he described as “a fine figure of a woman” (she weighed something over two hundred), and if she was too inert to join in the general pursuit of him, she was also too inert to avoid pursuit herself—hence the marriage, and though, while praising her housekeeping, he openly expressed his doubts of her soul’s salvation—the new, phlegmatic Mrs. Brockwell remained quite undisturbed. She was an experienced chewer of gum—she said she had to chew it to aid her digestion—but be that as it may, a certain mental clearness, a sort of spiritual calm, seemed to come to her from her steady, cow-like munching. On the occasion of her second marriage she had contentedly chewed until she took her place before the lean, old minister; then, having no bridesmaid to act for her, she stuck her gum on her breast-pin, temporarily, while she promised to accept the big party at her side, and all his belongings, and to nurse him for the rest of his life without further remuneration—and with the nuptial benediction she had resumed her gum and had gone forth a slowly-chewing, contented bride—and on Sunday, he wishing, probably, to do all that was courteous and polite under the circumstances, took his new wife out to the cemetery and proceeded to introduce her—as it were—to the other members of the family.

A hideous chunk of stone stood in the middle of a plot, from which the graves rayed out like the spokes of a wheel—and old Thomas, with a cane, which so surely only appeared on Sundays that a bad little boy once said: “God made the Sabbath day and old Brockwell’s cane!”—with this cane he immediately bored a little hole at the foot of one grave and remarked: “I buried my first wife there”—and Emily brought her jaws to with a snap, and bowed her head slightly, as though acknowledging an introduction. Then she chewed again, and old Thomas yanked out the cane with some effort, as though Mrs. Brockwell No. 1 was holding on to it. Then he bored another little hole at the foot of another grave with the cane and announced: “I buried my eldest son here”—another stoppage of the jaws and another bow—and so the old “borer” went on, till each member of the family had been presented to the new-comer in turn, and then he gave the final touch of brightness to this very original bridal outing by carefully measuring with the cane the space, to see if there was enough left for two more spokes to his family “wheel of death.”

Mrs. Brockwell was wont to declare she would remember that day as long as she lived. Not because her sensibilities were wounded, but because she had not been constructed for rapid action, and she declared she would never have lived through the homeward walk but for the sustaining power of an extra piece of gum, which she luckily had in her pocket—for this was the golden age of the world when women still had pockets.

Old Thomas Brockwell narrowly—very narrowly—escaped being a religious monomaniac. Unquestionably sincere, his religion was yet a thing so warped and bitter as to fill most people with shrinking dread. He studied only the Old Testament, rarely reading the New. In his ears the rolling thunders of Sinai drowned the gentle “Voice” preaching from the “Mount.” He believed in a personal Devil—he believed in a material Hell.

I have never known anyone who got as much satisfaction out of the whole of his religion as he got out of Hell alone. He talked of it, thought of it, and, in regretful tones, told many of his friends that they were going there. All its accessories were dear to him. The “brimstone,” the “burning lake” and that “undying worm,” which seemed, in his imagination, something between a boaconstrictor and a Chinese dragon, while the “bottomless pit” not only gave him two words to roll sweetly under his tongue, but provided an ideal place to shake frightened little boys over at Sunday-school—for he labored faithfully Sunday after Sunday to frighten sinful youth into the church or the idiot asylum.

His God was a bitterly revengeful God! The Bible told him to fear Him and to obey His commandments. The base of his religion was “an eye for an eye—a tooth for a tooth!” He knew no “turning of the other cheek”—no “forgiveness of enemies,” and many a time, in his efforts to show his disapproval of the loving, gentle, yet strong teaching of the New Testament, he blasphemed unconsciously. Few things made him so angry as to suggest “a Hell of remorse”—of “tortured conscience”—of “mental agony”—while a hint at “atonement”—a final winning of forgiveness—was a rag so red as to set him madly charging through the harshest and most cruelly just punishments meted out in the Bible—and the worse one promised for the future—Hell! “And their future is now!” he would shout, with glaring eyes! “Now, do you understand? All these disobedient servants of the Lord are in fiery torments now! and will be forever! Ah! it’s a big place—a mighty big place!—far and far away bigger than Heaven! It has to be, there’s so many more to go there!”

Night and morning he read a portion of the Bible, and prayed loud and long—and right there he came in conflict with his Emily. There was just one point they differed on—they did not quarrel, because Emily was too slow in speech. There’s no comfort to be had out of a quarrel, unless it’s quick—very quick; and if Emily had had her choice she would a good deal rather have died than try to be quick.

The point of difference between this otherwise peaceful pair was whether the chewing of gum was un-Christianlike and disrespectful when indulged in during family service. The first time he had caught her in the heinous act he had roared out: “Woman, have you no decency? Would you chaw the ten commandments up into a hunk of gum?”

Emily had mildly stated that she chewed “to keep herself awake,” and after many struggles it had come to a compromise—she was only to chew while he read; not while he prayed.

Emily explained matters to me one day in this way: “You see, Mr. Brockwell, he gets riled up because I chew gum while he’s reading gospel, but it’s really his own fault; if he’d only read one chapter, like an ordinary Christian man! My father, now, was a deacon, and he never read mor’n one chapter at a time at family service; but Mr. Brockwell, when he gets a smiting people hip and thigh, and a raining down plagues and things; why, there’s no stop to him; he goes right along over ever so many chapters—and I don’t take to the stoning and the killing—and so I go off to sleep, unless I chew gum right hard. Why, never once since we’ve been married has Mr. Brockwell been satisfied with the ‘Fall of Jericho’ for one reading. On he goes, and tackles that city of ‘Ai,’ and I always feel sorry when that line comes about the ‘men and women that were slaughtered bein’ twelve thousand.’ But, land sakes! it’s all sweeter than honey to Mr. Brockwell—’specially the hanging of the king, and piling stones on his body for the beginning of an altar—nasty, bad-smelling idea I call it. But when Mr. Brockwell begins with them ‘seven trumpets of rams’ horns’ I begin to chew hard, for I know there’s a lot to be gone over before praying begins. If he’d read oftener about Hannah and little Samuel I’d keep awake. Ain’t that a nice little Samuel on the mantel—his left foot’s broken, but kneeling like that you’d never know it, unless you turn him around.” That being the sort of tangent Mrs. Emily was apt to go off on during a conversation.

The old man might have lived without working at that time, but he held idleness as sinful, so he, without any feeling of shame, acted as night watchman in a large building down town. One winter there were many burglaries, and his employer grew a bit uneasy, knowing his was a tempting establishment and remembering that Thomas Brockwell was an elderly man. So he asked his watchman if he would not like to have some one to help him during the rest of the winter. And Brockwell was hot with anger and answered that he could take care of his employer’s property, but he didn’t want to protect some young nincompoop besides. “I am able to take care of any burglars that come my way. A man of the Lord can always lick a law-breaker,” and looking at the really splendid old body of his watchman, the gentleman had laughingly declared he “believed old Brockwell would be up to two or three younger men!” and let him go his obstinate, lonely way, and like many another word spoken in jest, these words proved true.

One bitter night, after reading with great enjoyment of the prompt action of the bears in the taking off of those ribald little boys who had made unpleasant remarks about the scarcity of hair among the prophets (surprising how alike the boys of to-day are with the boys of the scriptural epoch), and had prayed till Emily had fallen asleep, with her face squelched in the seat of the chair she knelt by, and had awakened and acknowledged her fault. “For,” as she said to me, “after he had fallen over my legs without waking me, he might have thought I was lying if I had said I was just thinking.”

And I had quite agreed with her and complimented her on her truthful nature—and he had taken his tin pail of coffee in his mittened hand and his package of sandwiches in his pocket and gone forth to his night’s watch. He had been a sailor in his early manhood, and, in addition to the tattooed anchor and star on the backs of his hands, he still retained a few words from his sailor’s vocabulary which he used now and then with bewildering effect upon the landsmen. Mrs. Brockwell found that habit particularly trying. She was one of those women who always get drabbled when they walk. Long street dresses were worn in her day, and had she possessed six hands instead of two, she would have failed still to keep her dress out of the wet or the mud. On Sundays when she was crowded into her best gown and was clutching her skirt in the most useless places, trying to pick her way across a muddy street, old Thomas was wont to exclaim from the rear: “Take a reef in the la’board side of your petticoat, Emily!” and Emily would hoist high the right side instead, and the left would go trailing through the mud, while the old man pounded the walk with his Sunday cane, crying: “La’board—la’board—la’board, not sta’board. Now just look at your sails! Oh, woman, the ignorance of you at forty-six, not to know your la’board from your sta’board side!” And meek Emily never suggested that left and right were the generally accepted terms for use on shore.

And as old Thomas walked through the biting cold, he congratulated himself on the honesty his wife had shown in admitting she had fallen asleep during prayers, and said to himself that it was the end of her day’s work and he supposed she was tired—and—“great guns, how cold it was!” And so he maundered on and reached his store and entered and made his rounds, and finally at about two o’clock he took his coffee from the heater and began to drink it, when he paused—to listen. Then he put the coffee gently down and stole softly to the office—and saw two men at the safe, and with a cry, “Avast there!” he was upon them, striving to grasp them both! The smaller one was like an eel and had slipped from his clutch, but the larger one he held on to, and after a short struggle, he got his head “in chancery.” He had just put in a couple of good blows—when he heard an ominous click behind him—at the same instant the man he was pounding fiercely growled: “No, no, don’t use the ‘barker’—you fool, you’ll ‘jug’ us all yet! Choke the devil off, so I can do something—choke him, I say!”

With beautiful obedience and the spring of a wild-cat, No. 2 was on Brockwell’s back, and doing his best to carry out orders. But it was that neck—that had given rise to the name Bull Brockwell; and the small ruffian tried in vain to get his clever thief’s fingers in a choking grasp about the massive throat; but his weight was disturbing and distressing, and old Brockwell loosed No. 1 for a moment, while he reached up and tore the incubus from his shoulders. In the effort he wheeled half round and found himself facing a third man in the doorway. He had just time to note that the man had a bull’s-eye lantern in one hand, some weapon in the other, and wore a half-mask on his face—when he received a crushing blow upon the head. He felt the hot blood leap forth in swift response to that savage gash. He staggered a bit, too, but did not fall, to the amazement of the brawny scoundrel, who exclaimed: “Well, I’ll be damned!” Those words were like a veritable “slogan” to old Brockwell. “Aye, aye,” he cried, “right you are, my hearty! Damned you will be, sure, and the burning lake of brimstone you’ll get for this night’s work!” and then they were upon him. He threw No. 3 out of the doorway and took that place himself, thus keeping all of them before him, and like an old bear “baited” by a pack of snapping, snarling dogs, he was slowly driven back until he found himself in the room again where stood his coffee. While he placed many blows where they would do the most good, still a great many more had fallen short. He felt his wind was going, and the streaming blood from his head impaired his sight, and just at that moment of threatened weakness the little thief struck him in the face, not with his fist but with his open hand—slapped him, in fact. With a roar of rage, old Brockwell caught up the pail and dashed the hot coffee full into his assailant’s face, then shouting, “You little whelp, you cur, you worm!” with a mighty blow he drove the tin pail hard and tight on to the thief’s head, half cutting off his ears with its rim, and as the other men made at him, by a happy fluke, he caught each man by the back of the neck and with every ounce of power to be had from his great arms and shoulders, he drove their two heads together in a smashing blow, and dropped their bodies as a well-bred terrier drops the rats he has shaken the life from. Then he turned for the little foe, just in time to catch upon his arm the blow that had been meant for his heart, and, by the hot smarting of his skin, he knew he had been cut by the little ruffian, whom he hammered into submission easily. Then Bull Brockwell sounded his whistle at the door for the police, and when they came he laid his hand on one of the officers’ shoulder and faintly asked: “Why—don’t—you—hold still—officer? You keep—going up—and down—,” and then old Thomas went down, and for a time knew neither prayer, nor burglar, nor even burning brimstone, but only darkness.

When his senses came back to him he gave an exhibition of what might be called pig-headed honesty. There was a drug store and a doctor’s office about two blocks away, and the policeman, on seeing the sorry condition of the old man, urged him to go and have his hurts cared for. They would see that all was safe during his absence, but he refused point blank, saying: “If a man was a watchman, he watched! If he was a night watchman he watched till the night was gone, or deserved the ‘cat.’ His employer paid him to stay in that building till daylight, and he’d stay, and be tended to afterwards.”

Half angrily the policeman exclaimed: “You obstinate, old bull! Do you want to bleed to death, then?” And the “bull,” with some embarrassment, had acknowledged that he did not really desire death, but with a sigh of satisfaction, he suddenly announced: “The Lord will settle all that. All I’ve got to do—is my duty—and though I don’t feel just what you might call—hearty—I—I—guess—I’ll hold out—till time’s up and—” and his gray white lips trembled into silence.

The policeman, finding him immovable in his determination, sent for help, and soon the battered “old Brockwell” was being washed and strapped and bandaged and stitched, and had a few feet of plaster over some strained muscles, and was generally “made over.” And then the stunned burglars had recovered their scattered senses and received a smiling and joyous welcome from the policemen, such as is only offered when the lost is found—and indeed one of these gentlemen had been lost—from the penitentiary—for several months. When the party of three were rounded up, ready for an early morning stroll to the station house, No. 1 had turned to Brockwell and growled: “See here, you old slugger, next time I come up against you just hit me over the head with a loaded cane, or the butt-end of a revolver or something soft like that, will you? I don’t want to be ‘put out’ no more with another ‘mug’s’ head, now I tell you fair!”

“A—a—ah!” cried the little fellow, “he’s a fightin’ freak, he is! He ought to be a doin’ time for jamming a tin pail over a man’s head and half cutting off his ears!”

And so they went forth, cursing the night they had tackled “old Bull Brockwell!”

And then he had returned home, “sans buttons et sans reproche,” and finding a barrel of flour standing at the side door, had picked it up and carried it into the house, apparently to convince himself that he was not much hurt. Then, beginning to feel stiff and lame, he put himself into Emily’s hands, and she promptly put him into his bed, and scrambled through the “Fall of Jericho,” stuck her gum upon the bed-post while she did it, then she had looked at his head and said, “she’d no idea a man could sew so neatly!” and then old Brockwell got hot and feverish, and his eye and cheek had blackened, and the doctor said he must be kept quiet a few days, at which dictum Emily had groaned aloud: “Kept quiet? Him? Good Lord!”

And, truly, had she been alone with him those days, her work would have been cut out for her. The ideal “bull in a china shop” would have proved an inoffensive and lymphatic creature compared to this pawing, plunging, irritable old Bull Brockwell! Bad enough at any time, when his eyes had swelled so he could no longer by the aid of his Bible put women and children to “the edge of the sword,” nor erect altars, nor even calculate the dollars’ worth of a “wedge of gold of fifty shekels weight,” he proceeded to fret himself into a fever, and I was moved partly by pity and partly, I am sorry to say, by a spirit of mischief, to seat myself by his side, and with the air of one who carefully selects a soothing and pleasant topic for sick-room conversation, I brought forward the subject of eternal punishment, and for my reward had his fixed attention in a moment.

For a time he expatiated on the strong points of that place of torment, seeing no inconsistency in paving with broken promises a bottomless pit, and as he began to run down, assuming the air of one eager for information, I asked his opinion of that place of eternal coldness—that frozen lake.

“Coldness—coldness?” he repeated, “Why, I don’t seem to remember!” and then another thought came to him and he broke out: “Fine! Splendid! I never felt such pain in my life as when I went near a fire with my frosted hands. Cold and fire! That’s good! Ah, it would have been better to have respected them commandments—only ten of ’em too!”

Egged on by his evident satisfaction, I went on introducing to him “circle” after “circle” of the great Italian’s Vision of Hell, and if Mr. Thomas Brockwell ever knew a genuinely happy afternoon, that was the one. And when I got a soft pencil and made black lines about the inside of his shaving-mug to illustrate the idea of the “circle,” he eagerly peered in with his nearly-closed, discolored eyes and triumphantly cried: “And the old, burning-brimstone lake right at the bottom—eh?”

All the punishments had met with his hearty approval save one. That great, black, “windy horror,” through which unfortunate lovers beat their blind way—seeking, eternally seeking their sinful mates—met with instant condemnation. “If they had sinned—they had broken a very important law—a law, mind you, that Moses had received direct from Heaven. Just flying round in the dark was no punishment for such a sin! They got worse than that when they were alive!” For, you see, the old man was very material, and he failed to imagine the anguish of that “eternal, loving, despairing search!”

All went well. Old Brockwell not only kept to his bed, but enjoyed himself until night and time for family service arrived, and then the “snag” appeared in my way that I should have seen from the first. Suddenly suspicious, he placed his hand on the book and asked: “Just in what part of ‘this’ did you find all that new ‘Hell’ you’ve been telling me about, lass?”

I sat stupidly silent. I had a vision of myself being driven away as unworthy to enter in with true believers, having jested upon the great subject. I tried to force my lips to speak, to tell him I would bring the book I had read it all in—but, truth to tell, I was too frightened to speak, and his brow blackening with anger, Mattie, his step-daughter, calmly asked: “Mother where was it in the old-world they found those ‘sacred’ manuscripts the other day?” (Poor Emily wasn’t at all sure there was an old-world.) “Mr. Brockwell, you’ll know—Egypt wasn’t it? Those wise men are working over them, you know, to translate them; they say they are parts of the old—”

“Egypt,” declared the battered Brockwell. “Egypt, and very interesting they are too!”

“But,” I meekly started, “but”—then Mattie cleared her throat loudly, and bending over me, muttered: “Don’t be a fool—leave well-enough alone!” and I followed her advice and was silent. A month later, I told them “good-bye,” my profession taking me far from them, and I could not help admiring the upright, powerful figure of the old man, as he stood at his gate—so perfectly proportioned that it was hard to believe that he was inches over six feet in height. As I reached the walk I looked back. Emily, large and buxom, stood in the door, a soft, red shawl about her ample shoulders—her jaws working with a slow precision that told me plainly she was “breaking in” a new piece of gum. Bull Brockwell waved his hat to me, and, against the westering sun, he loomed up black and big! And I said to myself: “In faith as in body—a giant!”

Three years had passed before I saw him again, three vivid, crowded years for me! Success had perched upon the lonely, little banner I had carried into that strange campaign where each one fights according to his own individual plan, and I was back in the old city, and because of that success was in great haste to seek my lowly, old friends out—for self respect, even a suspicious pride, renders it very hard for the lowly to make the first advance toward one who has risen ever so slightly. I had heard nothing of them during my absence, and standing at the door waiting a good, long wait—for Emily, like most large bodies, moved slowly—I said to myself: “I shall not see the dear, old ‘Bull’ for a couple of hours yet, as he will surely be sleeping now, but by six o’clock—” and then the door opened, and Mrs. Emily was before me, quite unchanged—and had taken me into a big comfortable embrace—and kissed me warmly and loudly, and expressed her gratification so noisily that I wondered she was not afraid of waking her husband—and then she led the way to the sitting-room, without one word of warning or explanation—which was so like Emily—and crying out, “My, Mr. Brockwell, but here is some one you’ll be glad to see,” she moved aside and left me in the doorway, where I stood quite still, the smile of welcome drying stiffly on my lips, while with pained astonishment I stared at—Mr. Brockwell (?)—oh, yes; that thick thatch of hair was neither whiter nor thinner than before. There was the splendid, old torso with all its depth of chest and breadth of shoulder. But why was he in that dread wheel-chair? Why were his great limbs covered with a quilt? and, worst of all, why that strange expression in his face? Meeting that piteous, appealing glance, I felt the tears begin to fall, for I realized that in spite of the presence here of Mr. Brockwell—old Bull Brockwell was no more! The painful silence was broken by the trembling voice of Emily: “Father, I clean forgot to tell her—anything—and—and, I declare, she does take it right hard—don’t she, now?” and she slipped out of the room, wiping her own eyes furtively as she went!

As I crossed the room toward him, his chin sank upon his breast, and shaking his old head slowly, he sadly murmured: “From him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which he hath!”

I took his great hand between both of mine, and my lips were just forming the words: “Surely this is but temporary?” when he raised his eyes, and, looking into them, I saw that hope was dead and buried there. I sank upon my knees beside him and said: “Tell me about it, Mr. Brockwell.” He glanced towards his wife’s room, but I persisted gently: “No—I want you to tell me,” for my true sympathy had bridged the years between us, and we were like old friends.

In low tones he told his simple, commonplace story. It was the construction he put upon the usual that made it seem unusual, and brief and simple as his story was, it was intensely characteristic. He had started earlier than usual to his night’s work, and was swinging his coffee-pail to the measure of the old hymn, “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand,” when, turning into a cross-street, he found himself in a crowd of running men and women, and in a few moments was in the midst of all the turmoil and commotion attending a fire, and he soon saw there was cause for the cries of the women and the curses of the men. There had been a nasty accident, and it had come to the first engine approaching the fire. It had been a case of strange driver and a too-short turn, and there, in a terrible heap, lay one horse flat, the other on its knees, and behind them a partly overturned engine. Worst of all, not only were its own services lost, but it was keeping other engines from entering the street, save by a long detour. Now, if ever there was a demand for lifting-power that demand was made right there, and old Brockwell sat down his coffee-pail and began to remove his heavy coat (it was early November then), when he learned quite suddenly that the burning house was a haunt of evil doers, was in fact a place that honest folk turned their faces from as they passed, and for the moment he hesitated, then flinging his coat fiercely off, he shouted: “Help! men, help! That fire must be quenched, to give those people one last chance to save themselves from eternal fire,” and the “old Bull” was with the firemen, working with a will and showing such splendid lifting-power that the crowd cheered the “gray old Hercules” lustily, and among other happenings some “company’s hose” had burst, and many were wetted thoroughly, among them old Brockwell. A church clock had boomed out the hour, and it was time for him to go on to his work, and then he felt how wet he was. He might have gone home and changed his clothing and only have been a little late in getting to the store. There was no one to make comment or to report his action, but he would be late, and he was proud, (the old man’s lips had twisted painfully in uttering that word), proud of his punctuality, and—well—he had gone on to the store, wet as he was, and the night had been long, and now and then, strange, deep, burning pains, that seemed a mile long, had run from hip to heel, but he had watched the night out—and—and he would never watch again—that was all. He had, in fact, “scuttled his own ship,” but in ignorance, lass! In ignorance, not in villainy. Yes, it was rheumatism first. He hadn’t minded that so very much, because he had the awful pain to fight, but this (again that piteous twist of the lips), this partial paralysis—well there was nothing even to fight now.

Had I not seen hope dead in his eye? His head sank low on his breast. I touched my lips to his hand, and whispered, “How you have suffered!” His eyes closed wearily, and he answered lowly: “I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping,” then, almost with a sob, he said: “Aye, aye—in very truth my sin hath found me out!”

I started almost angrily, exclaiming: “Your sin? What sin? You have loved—at least you have feared God all your life long! His word has ever been upon your lips. You have striven to obey His laws—what sin has found you out?” He raised his head, crying: “And to think I was so blind—so self-satisfied! To think how I tried to keep the boys from going to perdition by way of Sunday ball, and the girls by way of their vanity in their bits of ribbons! The blind ‘leading the blind,’ in good truth! Even when I was stricken I did not understand, until a neighbor made my sin plain to me.”

“Ah,” I said, “and had that neighbor removed the beam from his own eye, that he could see so very plainly the mote in yours?”

“I do not know,” he answered, “but he said that pride went before a fall. And when I looked a bit surprised he added, ‘you have been eaten up with vanity and puffed up with pride all your life, because of your great strength,’ and oh, lass! lass! I was sore ashamed! Ah, well, I have no strength to sin with now—I am just naught but a useless, old hulk, or what is worse, ‘a derelict!’”

“No,” I said, “a ‘derelict’ is a menace and a floating danger to many men—you are no derelict!”

But he, shaking his clenched hand above his head in impotent sorrow, went on: “Worse! I’m worse than a danger to men! Men are strong and can save themselves, but here I hang like a mill-stone about the neck of that poor woman there—my wife, and she’ll have to bear the dragging and the weight for years and years. For, mind you, I’m not like to die. The doctors say these things inside of me that they call ‘organs’ are all sound and strong, and that a man lives by them, not his legs, and so I’m to sit here rusting away, and watching her grow sick at the sight of me!”

Two slow, difficult tears stood chill and unshed in his eyes, and I felt, with a pang, how great must be the storm of sorrow that could cast its spray into those stern, old eyes.

“I don’t suppose,” he went on, “that she realizes it yet; she’s good as gold. She takes care of me, helpless as I am, always just as smiling and pleasant, and sets right by me, and don’t even go to church—just talks a little over the fence with the neighbors, so she can come and tell me what’s going on. Why, she even offered to give up gum, and she a needing it for her digestion so, ’cause she thought it might make me restless-like (and there is a kind of gum, you know, that squeaks a good deal when it’s new); but I ain’t so selfish as all that. But, oh, if I could just die decently, as a man should when he’s no more use, and not be a burden and a drag! For, you see, Emily’s a mighty fine figure of a woman, and she might easily find a new home, with some good, sound man for a husband—who would protect her, and not sit, as I do, waiting for the day to come when his wife will look at him with loathing.”

“Mr. Brockwell,” I cried, “do you know that you are cruel to yourself and unjust to your wife?” He looked hard at me, but made no answer. “Your wife was always proud of you!” His face quivered—I had struck a wrong note—I hurried on: “proud of your character and standing, and of the pretty, little home you had so hardly earned, and now, oh, believe me, dear old friend, I know her heart better than you do yet—now she is proud to be the world for you, to be your feet, your nurse, your companion, your friend as well as wife.”

He sadly shook his head: “She is a slave,” he said. “Yes, if you will, she is a slave to her love for you, therefore she is a happy slave. You have said, yourself, that she smiles on you constantly. She never looked better in her life, and why does she call you ‘father’ now?”

His face brightened a little. “Yes,” he answered, “she has called me ‘father’ ever since the—the—(how he shrank from the word) since the paralysis came upon me—yes, ever since.”

“And,” I went on, “can’t you see what that means? She used to call you Mr. Brockwell—but when your cruel affliction came upon you she felt the absolute need of some term of endearment, because she loved you.” Still, with the perversity of unhappiness, he exclaimed: “But Emily didn’t say that. She never told me that she—she—”

“Oh, indeed,” I broke in, “and have you given her a chance to tell you? Have you ever asked her if she loved you still?” And the old man, with a mind full of clean and wholesome memories, blushed at the question with a swift swirl of color in his cheeks that a girl of eighteen might have envied. “Have you?” I persisted. “Come, now, let us have a little fair play. You know she can’t speak first. You know that, like every other modest, self-respecting woman, she must be dumb about her feelings—her emotions, until the man breaks the silence. You know she has been trained to silence from her earliest girlhood. Yet, knowing all that, you gnaw your heart in bitterness, because she does not dare lay her arms about your neck and assure you of her faithful love.”

His eyes glowed, his great hands opened and shut nervously. He stammered and stumbled over his few words: “You think I haven’t steered a straight course with Emily, eh? You actually believe, if I take a new tack, eh?—if I tell her how I—how,—well, how things are with me—that she’ll come around to the helm—I mean—” and then suddenly his face fell and, shaking his fist in impotent rage at his helpless limbs, he cried: “Oh, she can’t, she can’t! Look at the miserable ‘old hulk,’ just rottin’ slowly away between the tides of Time and Eternity, and talk of a woman lovin’ it—a-a-h!”

I saw Emily’s troubled face at the door and swiftly waved her away. Then I said, as brightly as I could: “Well, all ‘hulks’ are not despised! I saw a real one a few weeks ago!” He looked up quickly. “Where?” he asked.

“By the sea,” I answered. “What kind of a hulk was it—some unfinished failure of a ‘tub,’ I suppose?”

“No, a wreck! A great, gaunt-ribbed thing; stately even in its ruin. The waves—” He caught my dress as I rose to my feet. “Tell me about the ‘hulk,’ lass, tell me!” He pleaded just as a child pleads for a story.

“Very well,” I said, “I’ll tell you, but you must let me go to the spare room to lay off my hat. I’m going to stay all night, if your wife will let me!” I laughed at his request “for me to hurry,” and said: “Mr. Brockwell, before I go, I want to say just one more word about your wife. You may doubt, but I am certain, certain, that should you have your cruel wish and die to-morrow, and should Emily be spared for many, many years to come, at the very end she will lie at your side, and will carry your name to her grave”; and as I passed Emily I whispered eagerly: “Don’t be angry with me; I’ll explain later, but, for God’s sake, go straight to your husband and kiss him!” The tears rushed into her eyes—she nodded her head and passed into the room where he sat.

I loitered long over the removal of my hat and wrap; I even waited to bathe my reddened eyes, and then, as I slowly descended the tiny staircase, Emily’s voice, mildly indignant, came up to me, crying, “Oh, father, how could you, how could you?” and from the deep, bass rumble that followed there escaped these words: “A mighty fine figure of a woman, Emily!”

Then I sneezed loudly and entered the room to find them discussing the rival merits of “beaten” and “raised” biscuit, one of which we were to have for “tea.” Mrs. Brockwell, being of a slow and peaceful nature, naturally preferred “raised” biscuit, but Mr. Brockwell, being more aggressive, took a great interest in the “beating” process. Once he asked, indeed, if he might not beat the dough, and Emily delightedly assented, putting a big, white apron about him and bringing everything close to his chair. But the poor, old giant’s second blow had split the bread-board, and that had been the end of biscuit-beating for him. While Emily was pounding vigorously, if somewhat slowly, at her dough, I told my old friend of that other hulk, bleached white as chalk by the blazing sun, lying high upon the beach, listing over so that it made a sort of shelter for people to sit under, with the fine, pale sand slowly filling it—slowly piling up about it; how, when I saw it, the ocean which had cast it there was stretched out waveless beneath the sun, with only a slow, deep, regular heave, that was like the breathing of some mighty monster at rest. I told him of that awful night when the signals of distress were sent up into the pitiless sky, and were seen and heard by helpless, distracted men and women on shore; and how, in the gray morning, they were astounded to see the big ship high upon the beach, and dumbfounded when they saw she was a coffin, for there was the body of a woman there. Slight and young and small of foot and hand, and a Catholic, since a “scapula” was about her neck—and that was all. How the young stranger had been buried on the high land overlooking the sea and the wreck, and how, down below and up above, both were waiting, one for utter destruction, the other, for a glorious resurrection; and meantime the old hulk had become not only a landmark, but a thing beloved. Oh, yes; he need not shake his head, for that old hulk was the loyal friend of all true lovers. The great, gray, maimed thing sheltered many a shrinking pair from prying eyes. Brown, young rustics, who were fairly stricken dumb in the “sittin’-rooms” of their sweethearts, here, in the velvety, black shadow of the friendly, old hulk, found their tongues, and told swiftly and well the one old story that is ever new; while, as to summer nights—why, the old hulk was the trysting-place of lovers from half the countryside. It was so public, and yet so sheltered—so protecting. And it was so wise, the gray, old, sand-filled thing—it knew so much of Love, and Love’s dear brother, Death!—so much—good God, so much! and yet was silent—ever silent!

Half the young married women of the little town had received their engagement rings within the sheltering arms of the old hulk, and some of them had carried their little children there, later on, that they might take their first, uncertain steps upon the soft, pale sands that were drifting ever higher about the bleaching wreck, just as one might take the first spring blossoms to some spot that was sacred to us.

That noble ship that on even keel, with mighty spread of snowy canvas, had sat the water a living thing of strength and beauty, had had a commercial value only, but wrecked, it had become a precious thing to them all, garlanded with the tenderest sentiments of both men and women, draped with the radiant hopes of youth, and each day gilded anew with ever-living love. As it sank deeper in the sand, so it sank deeper in their memories—their beloved “old hulk”!

The old man had listened so closely to my story that I was somewhat puzzled when he remarked on my last word: “If I was sure and certain that Emily was telling the truth about that patch-work, I don’t know but what I might get to be more that sort of hulk myself, lass! If I could just be of a little use—ever so little, but real!—I could get along, but I don’t want to be fooled, like a child, into doing useless things. The Lord says: ‘A man should rejoice in his work!’ but a man can’t rejoice if it’s only make-believe work!”

I began dimly to comprehend, and, proceeding cautiously, I remarked “that it would not be easy to deceive him, and I did not believe anyone would try!” He looked doubtful and, lowering his voice so that his wife might not hear him, asked: “You know what a master hand Emily is at piecing patch-work, don’t you?”

I did know! I recalled the really handsome quilts she had shown me. It was the only way she had to gratify her natural love of color, and the workmanship was exquisite. The quilting in “fan” and “shell” and “diamond” forms equalling the piecing. Indeed, patch-work was a fine art in Mrs. Brockwell’s hands. “Yes, I knew!”

Then his keen, old, blue eyes took fast hold upon mine and, in an aggressive tone, he made this astonishing statement: “Well, Emily can’t cut out any of her patch-work herself. She can’t cut any two pieces exactly alike, to save her life!” Oh, Emily, Emily! poor, bungling, loving Sapphira! I understood and thought fast while those piercing, old eyes held me! I tried to laugh naturally, as I exclaimed: “Well, there’s a pair of us, then! I have lovely pieces—enough for two quilts, but I can’t cut pieces alike, and am ashamed to ask anyone to do it for me; so there they lie!”

“Oh, you!” he impatiently answered, “but Emily, now!” I thought of those quilts upstairs, while he went on: “See this thing, now!” He pointed to the small quilt over his knees. I required no invitation, goodness knows! for the ugly, ill-made thing had forced my attention long ago. No two pieces matched in length; they were puckered and stretched (the old man called them “we-wahed”).

“That’s her cutting,” he announced! I was about to explain, when I saw Emily behind him in the kitchen-door frantically signing me to keep quiet. “Oh, dear!” I moaned to myself, “what about those quilts upstairs?”

“Yes;” he went on, “that’s a woman’s cuttin’ out! Yes (argumentatively), I saw her do it! And think of those quilts upstairs! (Ah, I thought!) Why, Emily says she would have had enough for herself and for her daughters’ marrying, if she could have got her first husband to cut her pieces for her! (O, Emily!) but she had to beg and beg, and he wouldn’t cut a single piece for a whole year sometimes. She says he was ashamed to do it, she reckons! Well!” he hotly ejaculated, “I’m not ashamed to do anything for my wife, unless”—he cooled suddenly again—“unless she’s only making believe so as to give me employment!”

“Well,” I said, “if you choose to doubt your wife, after looking at that awful quilt, you may. But you can’t well suspect me, and if you will cut pieces for one quilt for me I’ll give you silk enough for a quilt for yourself. Will you do it?”

The last suspicion faded! He threw back his head and laughed: “Will I? You’ll see! Say, lass, just step over to the sta’board side of that sewing machine and hand me up that cuttin’ board, and I’ll show you what’s the matter with the ‘cuttin’ out’ of all you women. You see,”—he spoke with an air of growing authority as he unrolled some bits of calico—“you will just have your pattern cut out of a bit of cotton or delaine, and then you smack that down onto, perhaps, several pieces of goods together, never mind whether bias or straight, just to save time. Great guns! save time! Look at that thing over my knees! Well, I take the ‘sun observation,’ and I get my pattern all right, and then I cuts her out in good, stiff pasteboard, ma’am, and if it’s a hard pattern, like ‘bride in the mist’ or ‘the risin’ sun,’ I have the thing cut out of a thin sheet of tin. A—a—ho! I don’t make no mistakes, even with ‘brides in the mist,’ when I’ve a good, tin pattern to work by!”

As so often happens, enthusiasm was too much for his grammar. He talked and planned all through tea and right along to bed time, and I carried the big Bible to him and placed it open upon his lap. His hand instinctively began to turn the leaves in the front of the volume, but I rested my hand on the place I had selected, and, laughing, I said: “You have chosen for three whole years, I’m company to-night, and you must let me choose!”

He laughed a little and yielded, but when he saw my choice was from the New Testament, he frowned heavily, then cleared his brow as with an effort and read. He was not so familiar with the script as usual, and he read slowly and carefully, and when he came to that gentle, generous invitation and that all-comprehending promise, “Come to me all ye—all ye—who are weary and heavy laden—and I will give you rest!” he stopped! To this day I believe I felt the old man’s thought, which was of the astounding comprehension by Jesus of his one craving wish—not for great joy—not for the inheritance of the earth—no, not for anything but that which was promised: “Rest.”

“Come unto me all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest!” Slowly, with trembling lips, he repeated the words a second time. Then he leant forward, tore a bit from the evening paper, and placing it as a marker, he closed the book. Emily and I knelt, and for once I felt no sense of the ridiculous in hearing a poor, finite creature explaining matters to the Infinite Being who knows all things. Very humbly the old believer explained to the God he had made so fearsome to himself why he lifted his voice in prayer in this unseemly attitude, instead of on his knees in humble, loving humility!

I gasped—I felt Emily’s hand slip over and grasp mine—which proved lucky later on. Never before had that word been heard in that way, in this house of faith. But, oh, when the old man asked forgiveness for having wickedly doubted for a time the perfect truthfulness of one very near to him—his truest friend—Emily gave a plunge and tried to pull away from me. “I can’t,” she gasped. “I can’t bear it! I must confess my lie!”

“Oh!” I moaned under cover of his bass rumble, “keep still! He’s so happy now! Confess to heaven!” She tried again to pull her hand away. I clung tight, and putting my lips close to her ear, whispered: “He will forgive you because of your love! You know,” I muttered wildly, “much shall be forgiven because she loved much! That’s not it, but you know what I mean!”

The bass rumble stopped suddenly—so did I—but thank heaven, Emily’s spurt of remorseful courage was over—her loving falsehood unconfessed! The rumble was resumed, and all was well!

Next day, as I came in hatted and cloaked to say “good-bye,” old Brockwell—bright and ruddy—had his cutting board on his knees, bits of calico all over him. A foot-rule, a blue pencil, and several envelopes before him, and the air of “this is my busy day” of a railroad magnate at least. His “log-cabin” pattern had been found in a “rocky-mountain” envelope, and in fact things were all at loggerheads—but by-and-by they would be ship-shape. I was just to wait till I saw some of his own designs! Emily was going to go right at one—of “anchors”—blue anchors on a white ground, and did I suppose any of my pieces would be long enough—he couldn’t well have those anchors less than six or seven inches long, and then a bit of the old Adam came out in him, when he lowered his voice to tell me: “He was not ashamed to cut patch-work, and he was not afraid—that in a year from now there would be quilts downstairs that could outsail anything upstairs that had been cut out only after beggin’ and coaxin’!”

I looked at the mighty wreck before me! I thought of the three men he had put out in that early morning fight! Of how, strained and patched and stitched, he had picked up that barrel of flour and carried it in from very pride in his strength! How he had won cheers for his splendid lifting-power at that fire, and now he had come to this! He sat there helpless as a child, his only work cutting up scraps of calico for quilts. He was, as he himself said, “an old hulk!” and yet he looked brightly up to me and said: “You remember old lady Brighton, don’t you, lass? Unbeliever, poor old thing! Emily and I are going to make a real pretty ‘star quilt’ and give to her. Star-pattern works up such small pieces, you know! Nothing, most, too small for that, and so bright too!”

It was no use denying it—this wreck was dearer—was more valuable to others, as a wreck, than it had been in full panoply and strength. He was accepting things—he was conquering himself, and he was “greater than he who taketh a city!”

So there I left him. For background, he had his honest, toilsome, clean-thinking past! His old wife’s faithful love was as the blue sky, bowing gently over him. The slow, still sands of Time piling steadily about him, and before him that great, illimitable ocean of Eternity, which will at last receive into its bosom this fine, old hulk!

The Gentleman Who Was Going to Die

The Gentleman Who Was Going to Die

Of course he had a name, and we both knew it, yet we invariably spoke of him not as Clarks nor as Mr. Clarks, but as “the gentleman who was going to die.” We must have been a troublesome pair of “little pitchers” to have about, with our widely open ears, in such a place and at such a time; and I remember quite well that our elders were much annoyed when they found that we knew that “the gentleman was going to die.”

I was three years older than my companion, and very, very serious; indeed, he was the only child who ever made me enjoy a game of romps. Pretty, golden-haired, laughing little fellow, no one ever resisted him. He passed through his short life a baby Prince Charming, a little, conquering hero.

His father was the Sheriff of the city, and, for the time being, the Sheriff’s family lived in that portion of the jail reserved for home life; and my mother was paying a long visit to the Sheriff’s wife. That’s how it happened that two young children were living within those sullen walls, taking their exercise in its grim corridors and playing their games within the very shadow of the scaffold.

In pleasant weather we used to play out in the jail-yard; it was small, but not so closed in as it now is by the Court-house. At that time the court stood over in the Park, or Public Square, as it was called. Out there we played “escaping prisoner.” I, as the Sheriff, had to run down and bring back little Goldy-locks (Charley was his real name) as prisoner. He was very realistic in his struggles for freedom, as certain, big, blue marks on my arms used to testify; but whenever he saw them he would put penitent little lips to them and tell me reassuringly not to mind, “cause he would play Sheriff to-morrow and I cud ’scape,” in which case I knew he would have nearly pounded the life out of me, so I very much preferred to keep my part of Sheriff.

In other weather, and it was mostly “other” weather, we sought the corridors of the jail. The dwelling-rooms were small and crowded, and, besides, the big people were all the time “don’ting” us—“Don’t do this” and “don’t do that”—so Charley would rumple his curls with a small, impatient hand, look very cross for a moment, then come and whisper, “Let’s go to jail,” and straight we went in search of the turnkey, who was Charley’s uncle as well as slave, and he would put a key into a great lock and we would push at the big, heavy door. Then in we would tumble, and the door would be closed behind us, unless some of the prisoners’ cells were open. In that case the turnkey remained inside the corridor with us, but that was unusual.

The first thing we always did was to run to each cell and peer in to see if anyone was lying down. No one had ever made the suggestion to us, but of our own accord we had made it a point of honor never to make a noise there if we found anyone who remained on his cot after our arrival. Generally every one sprang up and came to the barred doors to greet us, always with nice words, sometimes with very gentle ones. Often they would lay wagers on the result of our games. We used to play “tag” and “blind man’s buff,” and we played “puss-in-the-corner” by counting every other cell door a corner.

That corridor had two great attractions for us. One was that the late afternoon sunlight fell through the barred window at its end. The other was that “the gentleman who was going to die” had his cell there, and Charley loved him, while I was filled with terror, dread and pity by the sight of him. There were three long, troubled years between Goldy-locks and me, and I knew dreadful things about Charley’s friend, things I dared not tell him.

With every human being in or about the jail the boy was the pet, the favorite with one single exception—“the gentleman who was going to die.” He favored me almost to the point of adoration, no one guessing why till he himself explained the mystery.

My heavy, brown braids and solemn, saucer eyes seemed to blind him utterly to the touching beauty of Goldy-locks, and when we stood before his cell door while he told wonderful stories, selected especially to suit the boy’s taste, his eyes were on my face, his fingers held a bit of my little, white apron, or he drew one of my long braids between the crossed bars of his door and stroked and kissed it. Though at that time I loved the stories and liked him, I could never quite make up my mind to kiss him, and Charley used to be angry about it, and once he told me “I wasn’t dratefu’, not one we’est bit on earf, not to kiss dear ‘Mr. No. 3’”; that’s what we always called him before we knew he was going to die—three being the number of the cell in which he was confined.

When I first learned that Mr. Clarks was going to surely die, on a certain positively named day, I was utterly amazed to find that, instead of being frightened and sorry and sending for doctors, everybody seemed to be pleased—that is, everybody out in the streets and in the stores and markets, and being an active, “two-legged why,” I sought information and obtained it in that form known to man as “straight.” He to whom I had applied was a very young man, who knew no reason why a child should be spared such horrible knowledge, and so, with brutal frankness and ample detail, he had explained exactly why Charles Clarks was going to die.

It was the first tale of crime that had been poured into my shrinking, childish ears, and it gave me a distinct shock. I was quite feverish by evening and had to have wet cloths applied to my burning head, while during the night I cried out again and again about the “lightning and the knife,” and the next day found me white and miserable, with only one strong wish, and that was to keep away from “the gentleman who was going to die.”

It was so hard to associate the man with the bright, blue eyes, the manly voice, the gentle hands—ugh! those hands!—with that wretch who had hacked the life out of a fellow creature for a sum of money. It seems curious, but the actual taking of the man’s life had not near the power to torture and torment me that this complete ignoring of a certain sentiment had. The victim had been a fellow-countryman who was unutterably homesick, and whose joy was boundless when he met a friend from the dear, old English home. I would moan aloud when I thought of the awful surprise and horror the man must have felt when he received the first knife-thrust in his breast from the hand of a brother-Englishman in a strange land. Then the shocking details that followed the death! The crime was committed at night during a memorable storm. The body lay upon a railroad bridge; the victim’s identity must be destroyed! The murderer attempted to remove the head; he had but his big clasp-knife, and it was not strong and sharp enough to sever the bone in the neck. He would have to leave the bridge to find a stone to serve as a hammer in this frightful deed! But in that inky darkness how was he to find his way back? He could only wait for the dazzling glare of God’s great flashlight, the lightning; and so with unshaken nerves, bit by bit he worked his unhallowed will. He found the stone and crammed it into his pocket (the other held the dead man’s effects); the knife he carried between his teeth. The mighty wind so tore at him that on the bridge he had to creep upon his hands and knees. He hacked off the head and tied it in a silk neckerchief, and no man knows more unto this day. The stream was dragged, trees chopped down, open ground carefully plowed, all in vain. The head was never found.

With devilish mirth the murderer would sometimes offer to find the head. “Leave me my hands free and send but two men, your bravest, strongest picked men to guard me, and I will send you back the head—I swear it!” he would say; and to the Sheriff’s smiling question, “And you? You say ‘send,’ not ‘bring.’ Would you not bring the head back?” he would reply, “Oh, I say now, you don’t think me quite a fool, do you?” and though he would laugh heartily enough, there would be a quickening of his breath and a hot spark away back in his eye not very pleasant nor by any means reassuring to the man who was responsible for his safe keeping.

Two days after I had picked this bitter fruit from the tree of knowledge I found myself, under the orders of my yellow-haired, little tyrant, slowly and unwillingly entering the jail corridor again. Holding me by the hand, he pulled me past the turnkey and made straight for the dreaded cell. At our entrance various greetings reached us: “Hello, babies!” “How are you, little ones?” “Come up here, youngster, where I can see you!” while the man with the cough called out, “Sissy, come here and I’ll give you half of my licorice!”

But I stood in silence, my eyes fixed upon the stone pavement, while my little companion, trembling with excitement, put his first, troubled, anxious question: “Dear Mr. No. 3, are you truly a-goin’ to die?”

The silence that came upon the occupants of the other cells at this question might have been the silence of death. Mr. No. 3 made a little sound like that the grown-ups make sometimes, and afterward say: “Oh, I had, a stitch in my side!” and then he answered, “Why—er—yes, my boy—we are all going to die—you know that!”

Charley’s delicate brows knit themselves together distressfully as he slowly murmured, “Yes, evweybody. My papa is the biggest mans in this town and he’s goin’ to die, the whole of him, only, only—” suddenly his brow cleared and he hurried on—“only he and us allis jus’ goin’ to die som’time, not a ’xac’ly day to know about. Are you goin’ to die in free weeks? Please don’t!”

Instead of answering directly, he turned to me with, “What’s the matter, little lass? Why don’t you speak; are you sick, child?”

I thought of the lightning and the knife, and truly I was sick, but I could not speak; I only slipped my hand through one of the openings in the door and clung silently to a bar. Charley turned and looked at me, and said in his important, little way: “I dess she’s got the aches in her head ag’in! But please, Mr. No. 3, what’s a-goin’ to be the matter wiv you, if you are goin’ to die?”

And then No. 3 laughed a laugh that made me cold, and said, “Well, your father and some of his friends think I am going to die of a throat trouble, but I’ll bet five dollars they are mistaken!” and then again he spoke quietly to me: “What is it, child; why are you so pale?”

He gently took my little hand in his. I gave a scream and tore it so roughly from him that it was badly cut in passing the bars. I raised my face—and I suppose some of my loathing fear and horror must have been written there, for never shall I forget that next moment! He was looking down straight into my eyes, when suddenly his own flared wide open, then as quickly narrowing to the merest, glittering slit, he gave the most awful oath I ever heard, and angrily muttered: “They have told her! She knows all, this little child! Oh, how could they do it! How could they do it! What cruel beasts men are!” And then rang through the building one great, appalling cry, like that of some wild beast in pain and rage. At that cry all was wild commotion. The turnkey struck out one peal from the alarm bell, and was tearing open the great lock of the main door. No. 3 suddenly clenched his soft, white hand and drove it with all his force against the iron bars. The blood seemed to leap from his gashed wrist and hand and fall in streams down into his sleeve. He seized the bars of his door and shook them as another man might have shaken a wooden lattice. The turnkey was at the cell; was in; there was a scuffle of feet. The heavy, wordless breathing of desperate men, two clear, cold-sounding clicks, and No. 3, with white, drawn face, lifted his manacled hands high above his head to strike a killing blow, stopped suddenly, and pitched forward on his cot, face downward, and as the turnkey hurried us out of the corridor I heard that dreadful sound that wrings with pain all there is of womanhood in any female thing, whether she be seventy or seven years old—the sound of a strong man’s sobs.

The next morning at breakfast we learned that we were all invited to visit Charley’s grandmother in the country, and his father was going to send us in a day or two.

Little Goldy-locks raised surprised eyes and remarked, “I fought we always made hot visits to drandma’s?”

Now his adoring grandparent would undoubtedly have admitted that Charley did make his visits warm for her, but what he meant was that their visits had always been paid at the farm in hot weather. Getting no answer, he went on: “What’s the use, there ain’t anything grode yet?”

“Oh, yes,” said his mother, “there’s grass and flowers, and perhaps the peach trees will be in blossom.”

There was a little silence, then lifting his dear eyes to his father’s face, he asked, “Papa, will it be free weeks while we’s away?” No answer came; then again, “Papa, I love drandma very much, but—but—the gentleman might die while we’s all away, and I’d be so sorry, papa.” His little head drooped, and the tears ran fast down his cheeks. My mother was nearest to him, and she took him in her arms and stroked his curly hair while exchanging looks with his mother, and his father raised up his six-feet-two of height and simply fled in silence from the sight of that innocent, childish grief.

But I was happy—happy at the thought of getting away from the place where “the gentleman was going to die.” Charley was anxious to go to his friend at once; he said he had “free whole things to tell him, most ’ticular.”

So he dragged me off with him, and lo! there sat a strange man inside the corridor and right beside No. 3’s door. We would not go in while he was there, so we went out and down to the yard together, talking excitedly, and wondering who the strange man was.

There we heard, as we managed to hear everything, that Mr. No. 3 was going to be put into another cell. Back we went to the corridor to ask about that, and there sat the strange man. Then Charley grew quite angry, and, turning to his uncle, said, “Why don’t you give that man a cell and not have ’im settin’ roun’ in the way all the time?”

And, under cover of the shouts of laughter of the prisoners, we retired a second time, defeated. It was late in the afternoon when we made our third attempt to see “the gentleman who was going to die.” We had little hope of success, but suddenly, to Charley’s great joy, we saw in a big, square cell, the strange man, with some others, trying the bars with hammers, and we slipped past and begged the turnkey to let us into our corridor quick. He smiled and said, “All right, chicks; I guess this is your last chance at No. 3 without the watch. Even his wife won’t see him alone next time she comes.”

As we tumbled past the big door the sunlight burst out from behind a cloud. Charley gave a shout, and crying, “You can’t catch me ’fore I touch the sunshine,” bounded away toward the window. He was well ahead, but I started after him, and almost in the same instant I saw him slip and throw out his arms. He did not trip; he slid exactly as though he had been on the ice, and then fell heavily, face down on the stone floor. There were many exclamations of pity as I rushed to him, crying, “Oh, Charley, darling! are you hurt very badly?”

I stooped over to help him, but instead of rising at once, he turned slowly over and sat for a moment on the floor and said, “What made me slip?” I only repeated, “Are you hurt, dear?” and though his lips quivered piteously, he bravely answered, “No; only some places smart some, that’s all.”

And all the time that I was lifting him to his feet and noting the steady spread of that cruel mark on his face, I was conscious, coldly conscious, that at No. 3’s door I had seen no face, from No. 3’s cell I had heard no voice. Once again Charley lifted up his puzzled eyes to me and said, “What made me slip?” and putting his arm around my waist to steady himself, he raised his right foot, and resting it on his left knee he looked at the sole of his little slipper and it was wet.

I leaned over and passed my forefinger across it to make sure, then without thought drew my finger down my white apron and left a long red smear. The man in the cell nearest us groaned. I gasped, “Blood!” and Charley hid his face in my garments and trembled like a leaf. Holding him tight with my both arms I looked behind me, and there across the gray, stone floor, slow, sluggish and sinister, there crept a narrow, dark-red stream, silent, so stealthily silent, and yet in that instant’s pause I seemed to understand the excitement it would presently create.

A moment we stood a pair of terror-shaken children; then holding Charley in my arms I rushed madly for the corridor door. The turnkey, peacefully reading his paper, heard us coming and said, “Not through already?”

Then as he turned his head his face went white as he finished with, “What is it?”

I laid my hand upon the smear on my white apron and gasped, “Blood!”

He was unlocking the door as he said, “Where?”

I pointed a flickering forefinger at the slow stream and answered, “No. 3,” and as he rushed past us he cried, “I knew it! God! I knew it!”

Before he reached the cell door he called back to me, “Ring the bell—hard—hard!”

I pulled the big bell and then pandemonium broke loose. The narrow, silent, little stream was beginning to show its power. I hurried down the back stairs and put Charley in the hands of a housemaid, who cared for his hurts and put him in bed and sat by him, while I, making myself as small as possible, crept back through the jail corridors because I could not keep away.

All was excitement. The wildest rumors had already reached the private part of the building. No one noticed me. I crept up the stairs, and for a little while dared go no farther. While I waited there people went and came. One man, tall and bearded, with a black box or case like a big book in his hand, I recognized as a doctor.

I softly followed the path that all had taken to No. 3’s corridor. I stood still in the doorway for the very excellent reason that I had lost all power of movement. Once glance told me the little, red stream I had seen creeping from beneath the door of cell No. 3 was gone, the stones being still wet from their washing, while a second one told me more washing would be required presently. At the far end of the hall, on the floor beneath the window, was stretched the form of “the gentleman who was going to die.” His lower limbs were fully clothed, but from the upper part of his body they had cut the clothing and he was nude. At his feet knelt two men who used all their strength in trying to hold him down. At each shoulder knelt a man who grasped him by wrist and forearm, and with dripping brows bent over him with the same purpose in view. The doctor, on his knees, was leaning across him, while a step away Charley’s mother stood with her face covered with both hands, and each and every one had fearsome, bright red stains upon them. A sudden thought came piercing through my dulled brain, a thought that brought me near to my undoing. I said, “Can this be justice! Are they going to repeat here in this very jail the awful act committed on the railroad bridge that stormy night?” I am certain that a roll of thunder at that moment would have killed me outright. As it was, my eyes closed, and I had a faint feeling of wonder as to whether I was going to fall asleep. Fortunately, I heard certain words that dismissed the grotesque fear and gave me back a little strength; words of advice, of stem command, of argument, and once sobbing words of entreaty. But through them almost continuously there rose a sound of horror. I thought then, and I have never changed the thought since, that it was like the fierce growling and snapping of a mad dog. Encouraged by the words I had heard from all, I opened my eyes. At that same instant the doctor, with a gesture of despair, raised himself, and I was looking full into the awful face of Charles Clarks, murderer and would-be suicide. He had attacked the citadel of his life at his throat. With an almost ludicrously inadequate weapon he had done terrific work, and had almost carried out his purpose. He lay there now, that thing to marvel at—a fighting Englishman brought to bay. And I, a little, shivering child, stood there witness to a savage struggle, awful beyond description, and gathered up and let go of my apron with the regularity of a mechanical toy, while in a whisper I said, and said, and said, perhaps a thousand times—I do not know—“Oh, our Father! Oh, our Father! Oh, our Father!” And one man with a gashed throat and veins nearly empty battled madly for death against six strong fellow-creatures who fought with equal desperation to save him! “Oh, our Father!” What a smile when he heard the doctor say, “Chloroform could not be brought before the light had gone.” The doctor saw, and his face grew like stone, and he said, “He shall be held! The wounds must be stitched at once!”

He bent again to his attempted work, and instantly the ghastly head was jerked this way and that, and there rose again the growling and the snapping. The doctor raised his head and said coldly, “Mrs. B——, you must save us; you must hold his head!”

A cry rang through the jail, and in an instant No. 3 was still. She said, “I can’t! I can’t!”

The doctor insisted. “Your husband will be a ruined man if this prisoner dies before his time. Kneel there!”

She knelt. No. 3 said, in his strange, whistling sort of voice, “You have been good to me, but do this thing and I will curse you here and from the Hell I’m going to.”

The doctor commanded, “Put one hand here, the other there, and hold firmly with all your strength!” Then as five held him the sewing was accomplished, and I turned to fly from the hurt I thought the needle might give him, and stumbled to my mother’s bed. She was not there; all thought I was safe by little Charley, and I fell upon my knees and went right on muttering “Oh, our Father!” until I began to feel very light, and then to float, float, and the next I knew it was morning and I was very sick, but a maid told me that “the gentleman who was going to die” was not dead yet.

The attempted suicide caused the greatest confusion and excitement both inside and outside the jail. People were coming and going at all hours, and the grown-ups were more than ever anxious to get us away to the country. Mrs. B—— would not leave her husband at such a time, so my mother was to take us both the next day.

Little Goldy-locks never gave up his intention of seeing and saying good-bye to the gentleman who was trying so hard to die (in his own way). So through tears and kisses, and by bringing to bear all his graces of body and manner, the little fellow won his way, and just before leaving mother led us (dressed for our journey) to the cell, and the uncle-turnkey let us in. A nurse crossly admonished us all not to talk too much, and then we were standing by the bed. At the first sight of the ghastly face—the grimly bandaged throat and jaws and brow—the little lad gave a cry of terror. But when Mr. No. 3 said softly, “Charley!” he ran and swarmed up the bed with legs and arms, crying, “Oh, dear, dear Mr. No. 3! I fought it wasn’t you! Who hurted you? My papa will find out and he will put the man in a cell, and we won’t never go and see ’im, never!”

Then being told he must not talk so loud and that he must hurry, he said very earnestly, as he brought from his pocket a small, red wad, “Here, Mr. No. 3, here’s my wed stocking; I got it my ownse’f for you. If your froat should get sore, like you said, you dess put it on at night and you’ll come all well in the morning—dess like I did.”

A smile parted the man’s white lips as he said, “Thank you, my boy—I may try it—though I suppose—hemp would suit—my case—better than wool.”

All this time his eyes had gone past Charley and were on me. My mother noticed it, and now he hurriedly whispered “Good-bye,” and as Charley was taken down he motioned to have me lifted up into his place. Then in a whispering voice he said to my mother, “You think—it strange—eh, well!—it’s because she is—so wonderfully like—my child—my only one—my Annie. It’s marvelous—the likeness. It’s not that they both—have that same—surprising length of hair—the same wide, gray-blue eyes—the same tricks—of manner and movement—even to that habit of standing—with hands behind the back—gently pulling at the two great braids. But it’s the voice. I’ve been ready—to swear at times—that my wife—had broken her vow—and had brought—Annie to see me. And though I starve—for the sight of her—until at times I’m almost mad—I’d kill my wife—if she brought—the child here—to know my shame. And this little one—is so like her—so like and yet so different—for Annie loves me—while this child——”

I felt my face flame with hot blood, for my mother did not know I had been told of the murder, and I was frightened, but he went on gently, “Ah, well, there is no reason why this one should—love me—a stranger.”

The nurse exclaimed, “Too much talk.”

Mother moved toward the door, but Charley broke from her and once more climbed up on the bed. “I have dess one ’ticular thing to say, dess one!” he pleaded, and he stooped to whisper to the sick man, “Dear, dear Mr. No. 3—try to get well—and—and—I know you don’t like the preacher man, but I know my own night ‘prays’ my ownse’f, and when I say ‘my soul to keep’ I’ll say ‘your soul to keep,’ too, every time!”

And Clarks groaned, “For God’s sake take him away!” and Goldy-locks put his clean, sweet, little pink lips lovingly to those sin-stained, fever-parched ones and said “Good-bye, good-bye!” and slid down and ran and hid his tears in the folds of my mother’s dress.

I moved to leave the bed, but he laid a detaining hand lightly upon me. I shivered, and looking up I met his gaze and was held by it. It was pleading—commanding, almost compelling. I understood him perfectly, and I tried hard to break away from that controlling glance, but all in vain, until a dimness came across his eyes and slow tears gathered there. Then I wrenched my eyes from his and hung my head and whispered, “Good-bye.” As my mother called me I slid off the bed to go to her, but the hoarse whisper came, “Little torment!” and I stopped. Again, “Dear, little torment!” and foolishly I looked at him, and for the last time our struggle was renewed, and now I had to resist not only his pleading, but that of something within me that said, “Think of his little daughter who cannot tell him good-bye, and kiss him for her sake.” Almost I yielded—and then—the homesick friend, the bridge, the knife, and I threw back my head violently and exclaimed, “No! No! I can’t! but——” and I laid my little hand against his lips. He took it gently, gently, and sighing heavily he kissed it, palm and back, and every dimple, including the tiny one in my wrist, and every finger-tip, and then said under his breath, as it were, “Good-bye, little maid who knows her own mind,” and as the key was turning in the lock after we had gone from the cell we heard him give a husky laugh and say, “She’s got a will—it’s stronger than mine—for, mind you, she never kissed me!”

And that was our last sight of “the gentleman who was going to die,” because that bright day, when Charley and I were out making the acquaintance of a very remarkable calf—remarkable because its forequarters were mild and gentle, while its hindquarters stung like an adder—and we were about to play marketing, and we both had a desire to purchase the forequarters of the calf, and as we never quarreled we drew lots for choice, while the calf slowly chewed up our market basket—and at that very moment, in the city, Goldy-locks’ beloved “Mr. No. 3” was heading a procession to the scaffold with many a jest about the “blue funk” he said the men were in about him. He remarked their pale faces and trembling hands, and actually encouraged and advised them, himself directing the proper placing of the fatal knot. Then with alert, springy step, bright eye and cheerful voice he mounted the scaffold, stepped with quick obedience upon the trap, and was hurled out of this world into—what?

White and cold and silent his wife removed her coffined dead, and when we returned “the gentleman who was going to die” had died. He was gone, and his cell and corridor knew him no more.

Old Myra’s Waiting

Old Myra’s Waiting

Was she mad? I do not know. I only know that she was old, oh! very old, and had known such sorrows as break the heart and blast the intellect of many of her sex. So old, so fragile—so poor—with a wit like polished steel and a tongue like an adder. I was her one friend in the world and was as helpless as herself. We each earned our own living—that was the one experience we had in common. Save for that, there was a whole world between us. She stood wavering and unstrung at one end of life—I stood quivering and tense at the other end. She had known it all, all, and only wished to sleep, to forget—I knew nothing, and only longed to learn, to feel, to know.

The first time I saw her she stood on the bank of the lake, a little, swaying, black-robed figure, facing a blinding gale. The wild wind tore her pitifully thin shawl from her shoulders and sent it whirling down the lonely street. I set my long, young legs in motion and ran it down, and returning, put it about her sharp, old shoulders.

She gave me one piercing glance from the blackest eyes I ever saw. Her dry, pale lips drew back across her rather long, narrow teeth in a sort of smile, and she said: “My dear, you are a wonder; few young people condescend to run like that, particularly for the old. I thank you!”

She turned her face again to the lake. Though I found it hard to keep my position, she somehow managed to maintain hers, frail as she was. I was puzzled—why was she standing there, so thinly clad? I hesitated a moment, then I said as respectfully as I could:

“Madame—could you not go into one of those houses, or home, perhaps, and let me wait here for your message or—or friend, and then come and tell you?”

She turned her sharp eyes upon my face, and exclaimed: “God bless my soul! the girl means a kindness to me!” and she laughed a shrill, thin peal of mocking laughter that made me hot with shame and anger too, and I turned away with a brief “I beg your pardon;” but she could be quick if she was old, and her claw-like hand was on my wrist in a moment, and her sharp voice reached me through the wind: “I can’t, my dear, I can’t leave now! You see my treasures are out there, and if they should be given up, I want to be at hand. Go home! my dear—go home, where people are not old and mad, and do not wait for the sea to give up their dead,” and turned again to face the gale, while I flew like the wind from her strange presence.

Some weeks passed before I saw her again, and then, as it happened, was able to do her a second small service. The day was wet and windy, the streets muddy. I was hurrying down Bank street and was about to cross an alley-way, which opens on that street, when I heard a little cry behind me, and there rolled past my feet a very neatly done up, small package, with a large seal on it in red wax. It stopped in the middle of the alley directly in front of an advancing dray-horse. I snatched it up and sprang across to the sidewalk, where I waited for the owner, who came hurrying across with anxious face and outstretched hands; and behold! there was my strange, old lady again.

She seized the package, and examining it carefully, she muttered, more to herself than to me: “I hope it’s safe, a fortune blowing about the muddy streets like that!”

My face must have been an expressive one; at all events she read it like a book, and went on rather sneeringly:

“Oh, I’m not mad; at least, not now! This does not belong to me; it would not be a fortune if it did; it’s lace—old, rare and very valuable! Had it been ruined? Oh, it makes me quite faint to think of such a chance! I am really very grateful to you, my child!”

She spoke her thanks so gracefully that I felt myself grow pink with pleasure.

We walked side by side a little way, when she said: “My dear, I’m not a stupid woman, but I can’t quite make you out. Your speech and bearing says one thing, but your being out so much, quite unattended, says another. Oh! I’ve seen you many times since that day at the lake. Then, your clothes—they are too good for poverty; but you wear the same things too often to have generous and well-to-do parents. No, I don’t quite understand.”

We were right at the door of the old “Academy” then, and I stopped, saying: “I go in here; there is a rehearsal; I am a member of the company.”

I never saw such fire as could leap into those fierce, old eyes of hers—at that moment they fairly blazed.

“Here, you!—you with that clean, honest, young face! For fifty years I’ve had a curse, hot and burning in my heart, for theatres and all connected with them!”

Then angrily shaking her forefinger at me, she cried:

“You run up your flag, girl!—your flag of red and black, of paint and dye!—that honest craft may know there’s a pirate in these waters!” and, dragging her veil across her face, she left me standing there, divided between the desire to laugh and the desire to cry. A pirate? I was such a harmless, well-meaning, little pirate that even had I shown the flag, and blackened my lashes and rouged my cheeks, I doubt if I should have created a very great panic in the Cleveland shipping—and so, at last, the laugh won; and between laughs I said aloud: “I am a pirate! I am a pirate!” And so a member of the company found me, and paused and looked me gravely over, and, wagging his head desperately, said: “It seems incredible, such meanness in one so young, but you will bear in mind I saw this myself—a girl of sixteen, who knows a good story, takes herself out into a cold, damp hall, and tells this story to herself, and laughs and laughs all to herself, and then wipes her mouth and goes in seriously and sadly to join her defrauded brother and sister artistes. Clara, I wouldn’t have believed it of you!”

I had to tell him what I was really laughing at.

“Good Lord!” he said, “that was old Mrs. Worden. Do you mean to tell me you don’t know her? She’s a terror, is old Myra! She used to carry this town in her pocket. She was young then, and rich, and they do say Myra was a beauty. Hard to believe that, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think so,” I replied. “Her features are really perfect. Her eyes must have been very fine; her hair black, and her figure very graceful.”

“Perhaps,” he yawned, “but she has the sharpest tongue and the longest memory in Cleveland. How she does lash some of our public men! You know the rector of Christ Church, the party who abuses theatres so often? Well, one day there was a race between the ancient Myra and the long-winded Reverend. She was overhauling him fast, and he knew it. These doors stood open—theatre doors. He was between the devil and the deep sea, and—well, quite properly, he chose the deep sea, and slid in here, and behind that billboard. Had he only known it, he need not have gone behind that board for shelter, for nothing on earth could induce the ancient dame to enter the door of a theatre; so he would have been safe had he merely stepped inside. As soon as she had passed, he tried to slip out unnoticed, but I was on the spot, I am proud to say, when I was least wanted, and, lifting my hat, I informed him that if he wanted seats he would find the box-office at the head of the stairs. He glared at me, and then I offered to run up and get him a programme of the evening’s performance, but he snorted something about ‘mistaking the entrance,’ and got away. Well,” my companion added, with a self-satisfied look, “if there is anyone in town who has not heard of that chase and escape, it’s not my fault.”

“But why,” I asked, “does Mrs. Worden dislike theatres so greatly?”

“My dear girl,” replied my friend Lewis, “I just love to instill knowledge into your hungry, young mind, but fifty cents are always full fifty cents to me, and if I stand here stuffing you with valuable information, I shall be late to rehearsal, and fifty cents forfeit will be torn from my unwilling pocket-book. So en avant,” and we both turned our faces stageward.

The next day was very stormy and bitter cold. My mother insisted upon my wrapping her shawl about me as an extra protection, but I had not gone more than a block or two before I was in trouble. The wind tore at me, the small pins could not stand the strain, they gave way, open went the shawl. The wind caught it, and slapped my face with it, and flung it flapping noisily through the air. I grabbed for it, jumped up at it, waltzed around and tried to catch it; but truth to tell that shawl could be found most any place in the street except on my shoulders. While I was laboring like a ship in a high sea, I heard some one knocking on a window-pane, and just as I began thinking I should have to scud under bare poles for home, the knocking was repeated so very loudly that I looked up, and, to my astonishment, there stood Mrs. Worden! I was amazed, because I had supposed the house to be unoccupied. The lower part was so, but at the upper window she was standing and making signs for me to cross over to her. Still wrestling madly with the shawl, I plunged over. The old lady opened the front door, showing an empty and bare hall, and holding tightly to the door itself, to keep from being blown backward, she motioned with her head for me to come in. I obeyed, and stood leaning against the unfriendly-looking wall, trying to regain my breath. Mrs. Worden smiled sardonically at me, and remarked:

“I don’t think you will get to your precious rehearsal to-day at that rate of speed. I’ve been watching you prancing about with that shawl, and I’ve brought you down this.”

She held out to me a shawl-pin. As I took it, I found it was yet warm from the hand of its maker since it was formed of a stout darning needle with a ball of red sealing wax for a head. She had seen my trouble and had hastily made this shawl-pin especially for me. I was surprised beyond speech for a moment, and she mistook my silence, for she began to jeer.

“Oh, use it, use it! If you can keep that shawl about you it may save you from a sickness. Then you can hide the pin from the sight of those lords and ladies at your great, fine theatre. They are so artistic, I fear its roughness and lack of finish might jar upon them.”

But I shook my head, and, smiling broadly at her, I said:

“It’s no use, Mrs. Worden, you can never frighten me again. I know you now, and you are good and kind.”

A sort of wonder came upon her: “Good God!” she cried. “You must be madder than I am!” then she turned her eyes to the rough, gray lake spreading far before us, and on her face there grew the look it wore the first time I saw her. She spoke out quite distinctly, but apparently not to me:

“I wonder if you hear?” she said. “I wonder? You used to call me good and kind, aye, and dear, but that’s five and forty years ago, a weary time my prettys! Perhaps the sign is coming soon—”

I stood a moment, then I laid my hand gently on her arm and said: “See, now, how safe the shawl is; I thank you very much, and I shall get to the rehearsal in time, after all.” She looked a bit bewildered for a moment, then she asked: “Shall you be long to-day?”

“Oh, no,” I answered, “I shall be through very early.”

“Then suppose you stop in here a bit and have a cup of coffee?”

I accepted the invitation eagerly, and, as I ran down the steps, she called to me: “You, girl, who won’t be frightened any more, I may be out when you come; see, here’s where you’ll find the key, and just go right up to the front room and wait for me.”

I nodded, and started again, but once more through the wind came her shrill call: “You, girl, don’t you touch the fire, if you have to wait; mind now, don’t touch it; I attend to that myself.”

The door slammed shut, and I was slammed down the windy street, but in considerable comfort, now that the thick shawl was fastened securely about me. I have seen—owned very handsome shawl pins since then—some double, with connecting chains of silver or of gold, and cunningly decorated by the goldsmith’s skill, but none ever gave me better service than did that darning needle with its head of wax, made beautiful in my eyes by the kindly thought that prompted its creation. I was really quite excited at the prospect of seeing her at home. She was an acquired taste. I had found her bitter at first, but now there was a faint hint of sweetness rising above the bitterness, and I liked it. I hurried to keep my appointment, and as I approached I was struck by the resemblance the house bore to the woman who lived in it. Both were so old, so gaunt, so lonely, and, above all, so frail. Surely, I thought, that trembling, old, frame shell of a house cannot be safe in any great off-lake gale. And when I first entered it and mounted its sagging, old stairs I was really frightened when it jarred at every quick movement and shook in each blast of wind.

Mrs. Worden was out when I arrived, and so I entered gladly the front room she had indicated, for, silly as it sounds, I must admit I am, and always have been, afraid of an empty house. I went in and closed the door.

Now, the French say, when colors do not agree ‘that they swear at each other,’ but never, surely, did inanimate things swell to such a storm of profanity as did the furnishings of this room. The floor was bare, the boards were narrow and warped and hungry-looking. Guiltless of stain or paint, they had been scrubbed to a creamy whiteness, which somehow gave the whole floor a peculiarly frigid, unfriendly look. It had a Pharisaical air, as though it were thanking its maker “that it was not as other floors.” Then, exactly opposite the door, there hung upon the glaring, whitewashed wall, in a magnificent frame, a life-sized, full-length portrait in oil, of a charming girl of about ten years. The “swearing” here was almost audible. The windows, ill-fitting and rattling in their cases, looked out directly upon the lake. The bedstead had been a grand affair in its long-passed day, but now, stripped of all its luxurious hangings, it stretched its thin, old posts up, only to meet the skeleton of its former canopy, while the silken spread of patch-work, of a brain-destroying intricacy of pattern, was worn clear through in places, so that the cotton wadding showed plainly. As I turned slowly around, I found another great portrait. This time it was a boy who smiled happily at me from the canvas; such a handsome, manly little chap, for all his absurd dress. One only smiled with him, not at him. I was very much impressed, for I had only been in two houses where there were family portraits, and I knew they meant a great expenditure. And then, ignorant as I was of such matters, I felt sure these portraits were the work of some great artist, and I was right, for later on I learned they had been painted by the most famous artist of his time.

Two small tables, a bureau, a few chairs, all of the commonest, and a small corner cupboard, completed the furniture of this odd room. Oh, yes; I must not omit the screen, then a very unusual object, a tall, narrow, three-panelled screen, which played an important part in its owner’s daily life. And the fire! Thank Heaven, I thought, for one thing, that did not look cold. I think there was about one scant quart of fire, and, as I threw off my shawl, I started to put on some coal, when suddenly I remembered that injunction, ‘You girl! don’t touch the fire!’ and I stayed my hand, but when I looked into the box and saw there just four pieces of coal, and so suspiciously exact in size one to the other, and leaning at the end of the box a hammer, my heart melted with pity; I began to understand. With a sigh I left the fire, precious but inadequate, and turned to study the painted pair. The boy, swarthy, smiling, happy, won your love at once; but the girl’s blonde, young arrogance slightly repelled. The portrait, considered as a picture, was quite lovely. The dainty figure, in the soft, yellowish-pink gown, stood out well from the olives and dull greens of the brocaded curtain behind her. On the table lay her great hat, while just slipping from her shoulder was the black velvet pelisse which, by contrast, brought out so beautifully the milky whiteness of her childish neck. The features, the lift of the head, the thin, slightly shrewish, delicate lips were all wonderfully like Mrs. Worden. But the color scheme was wrong. This handsome, overbearing child was blonde as she could be, while the boy, with but one feature of her face, her piercing eyes, was surely darker than she had ever been. So while I stood before the girl and thought how clever had been the artist, who had painted the boy with his hand upon his dog’s head—while in the girl’s hand he had placed a broken necklace—in these bits of detail, I thought he has given his idea of their character, and just then I heard Mrs. Worden approaching.

Like many people who live much alone, she had the habit of talking to herself—she was talking then. I heard her say, “That’s fifteen years ago, you fool! yes, all of that. Now, what the devil did I do it for?”

I felt quite certain she was referring to the invitation she had given to me, and I shook with laughter. When she opened the door, her eyes were snapping viciously and her brows were brought together in an inky frown; only her hair was white, her brows were black as they had ever been, but when she saw me standing, my hands behind me, evidently studying the portrait, the frown unknit itself, her eyes softened, and when I asked: “Who are they, the handsome girl and the laughing, little man?” she answered proudly: “They are my treasures, my man-child Philip, and my Edith, gift-of-God; because of whom I have not cursed Him long ago and died.”