The Morgan home on Pine Street was a rambling old house; the only
shingle structure in a block of modern concrete apartments. To the elder
Morgans it had been the fulfilment of a dream; a home of their own in
San Francisco. Clinton Morgan had lived only a year after its
completion, and his widow, in spite of the pressure of hard times and
the inadequacy of the income which he left, had resisted all tempting
offers to sell the old place and had brought up her son and daughter
with a reverence for family tradition as incongruous to their
environment and generation as was the old shingle house among its
businesslike neighbors.
And then, eight years after Clinton Morgan's death, oil had been
discovered in his holdings over at Coalinga, and the last year of Sarah
Morgan's life had been spent in affluence. But she had never parted with
the old home. At the end of that year she had called Clinton, Jr., then
a young instructor in chemistry at the university, to her bedside and
laid a last charge upon him.
"Clint,"--Her voice held that note of unconscious tyranny that
approaching death gives to last utterances. For in the moment of
dissolution there is not one among us but is granted the crown and
scepter of autocracy. "Clint, don't let the old place go. Fix it over
any way you and Marcreta like, but keep it in the family as long as you
live."
"Yes, Mother."
"And Clint, there is something else."
"I know, Mother. It's Marcreta. But you needn't worry about her."
"I don't believe in death-bed promises. It's not right to try to tie up
anybody's future. But----You see, if she were strong and well, I
wouldn't be anxious; I wouldn't say anything but----"
"You don't need to say anything, Mother. I'll always look out for her."
A white, blue-veined hand stretched across the counterpane groping for
his. A moment later Marcreta was holding the other and brother and
sister faced each other alone.
* * * * *
It was about a year after this that Clinton Morgan brought home with him
to dinner one night a young college fellow, just on the eve of
graduating from the University of California. The friendship between the
instructor and this undergraduate, five years his junior, had begun in
the fraternity-house where Clinton dined occasionally as one of the "old
men." And temperamental congeniality and diversity of interests had done
the rest.
"He's slated to be one of those writer freaks." Thus he introduced the
guest to his sister. "But he's harmless at present and he's far from
home, so I brought him along."
Roger Kenwick looked into Miss Morgan's grave blue eyes and became
suddenly a man. His host, surveying him genially from across the
meat-platter, found himself entertaining a stranger. The gay persiflage
which he had known over at "the house" was completely submerged under a
maturity which he had suspected only as potential. In vain he tried that
form of social surgery known to hosts and hostesses as "drawing him
out." He mentioned a clever poem in the college magazine of which
Kenwick was editor. He began a discussion of the approaching track-meet
in which Kenwick was to support his championship for the hundred-yard
dash. He tried university politics in which his guest was a conspicuous
figure. To all these leads his fraternity brother made brief, almost
impatient response. And Clinton Morgan was resentfully bewildered. He
experienced that cheated feeling known to any one who has brought home
exultantly a clever friend, and then failed in the effort to make him
show off.
But he couldn't complain that Kenwick was tongue-tied. He was talking
earnestly, but it was about future, not past achievement. Inspired by
Marcreta's sympathetic interest, he unfolded plans of accomplishment of
which until that moment he himself had been in densest ignorance.
Clinton had seen other men change, chameleon-like, in the presence of
his sister, and he found himself wondering now as he watched Kenwick
take his headlong leap into the future, whether it was Marcreta's regal
beauty which inspired their admiration or her physical disability which
appealed to their chivalry.
Kenwick himself was scarcely conscious of the disability. He was only
vaguely aware that there were cushions at Miss Morgan's back and that on
the way in from the living-room she had leaned slightly upon her
brother's arm. When the evening was over he left the Morgan home
enveloped in a white fury.
"I've been a fool!" he told himself violently. "I've been frittering
away my whole life. This college stuff is kids' play. If I wasn't just
two months from the end I'd ditch it and break into the man's game of
finding a place in the world."
"Great chap, Kenwick," Clinton was telling his sister. "But he wasn't
quite himself to-night. I think he has some family troubles that worry
him. Doesn't get on very well with his sister-in-law back East, I
believe. That's why he came out here to college."
Marcreta made a random reply. She was wondering what kind of person
Roger Kenwick's real self was. And she was soon to discover. For that
evening marked the beginning of a new era for them both. Scarcely a week
passed that he did not spend Saturday and Sunday evenings at the house
on Pine Street. Sometimes he read aloud to her "stuff" that he had
written for the local newspapers. Sometimes she read to him from her
favorite books. Once she helped him plan the plot of an absorbing serial
story. But often they didn't read anything at all; just sat in front of
the open fire and talked.
In May Kenwick was graduated from the university, but was still living
at the fraternity-house in Berkeley when there came a sudden summons
from New York. He ought to come, Isabel informed him, for his brother
was seriously ill. On the night before he left he made a longer call
than usual at the Morgan home.
"Everett's the finest chap in the world," he told Marcreta. "He's been
like a father to me. But----Lord! How I hate to tear myself away from
here! And the worst of it is, I don't know how long I may have to stay.
You won't forget me if it's a long time?"
And then all at once they were not talking about his trip any more, nor
of Everett. "If you could only give me some hope to go on," Kenwick was
saying. "Something to live on while I'm away."
But to this entreaty Marcreta was almost coldly unresponsive. She tried
evasions first; asked solicitous questions concerning his plans; showed
a heart-warming interest in his anxiety concerning his brother. But,
forced at length to answer his persistent question, she said simply:
"No. I don't care for you--in that way. Let's not talk any more about
it. Let's not spoil our last evening together."
It brought him to his feet white and shaken. "Spoil my last evening with
you!" he cried. "Spoil my whole life! That's what it will do if I can't
have you in it." His fingers sought an inside pocket of his coat. "I've
got your picture," he told her fiercely. "I got it down at Stafford's
studio the other day. And I'm going to carry it with me always--until
you give me something better."
A month after his arrival in New York he wrote her that his brother had
recovered and that he would soon be coming back to find a position in a
newspaper office in San Francisco. But he didn't come back. For it was
just at this time that men began to hear strange new voices calling to
them from out of the world-chaos. Day by day they grew in volume and in
authority luring youth out of the isolation of personal ambition into
the din and horrible carnage of war. Just before he left for a Southern
training-camp Kenwick wrote her a long letter. In it there was neither
past nor future tense. It concerned itself solely, almost stubbornly,
with the present.
On the evening that she received it Marcreta held conference with her
brother in the dignified old drawing-room. "Clinton, I want to make the
old house take a part in the war. I've been talking it over with Dr.
Reynolds. He says it would make an ideal sanitarium. I want to use it
for the families of enlisted men; the women and children, you know, who
are too proud for charity and who, for just a nominal sum, could come
here and get the best treatment. If you were at the front, wouldn't it
relieve your mind to know that somebody you loved, I for instance, was
getting the proper care when I was ill, even though you couldn't provide
it for me? I'll do all this out of my own money, of course, and keep
your room and mine, so that this will still be home to you when--you
come back from training-camp."
He stared at her incredulously. "Why, how did you----What makes you
think that--I'm going away?"
"I saw Captain Evans's name on that envelope the other day, so I wrote
to him and asked if you had quizzed him about war work," she told him
shamelessly. "I couldn't help it, Clint. I had to know. I really knew
anyway. Knowing you, how could I help seeing that you were mad to get
away and help. Every _man_ must be. But you've been afraid to broach it
to me."
In his first moment of wild relief, he didn't dare trust himself to
speak. When he at last ventured a response he plunged, manlike, into the
least vital of the two topics. "But you don't quite realize what it
would mean, Crete, tearing the whole house up that way. And the
incessant confusion of having all those people around would be a
frightful strain. With that spine of yours apt to go back on you at any
time----It isn't as if you were a well woman."
The instant the words were out he regretted them. He saw his sister
wince, but her voice was steady and eager with entreaty. "That's just
it, dear. It isn't as if I were well and could do any work myself. But I
can do this. I know what sick people need to make them comfortable. Oh,
let me do it, Clinton."
He reached over and patted her shoulder. "I don't want to stand in the
way of anything that would give you any happiness. But if it should be
too much for you--and I so far away from you----"
"Even if it should be, you would come to see some day that I was right
to do it. I have a right to take that chance. I have just as much right
as a soldier has to stake my life against a great cause."
In the end he yielded, and together they planned the readjustment of
their lives and the old home. Of the rooms on the lower floor, only the
big library remained unchanged. But there were invalid-chairs ranged
about the great room now and little tables holding bottles and trays.
On the Sunday evening before he left Clinton found his sister up in her
room sorting over a pile of letters. "Well, your dreams are coming true,
Crete," he told her. "Dr. Reynolds is delighted with this place
and--you're sending a man to the service."
She looked up at him with a smile, and it flashed across him suddenly
that she had done more than this. A silence fell between them, the tense
throbbing silence that precedes a last farewell. He felt that he ought
to say something; something comforting and cheerful. But the Morgans
were reserved people, and they found confidences incredibly difficult.
So he stood there looking down at her, thinking that she always ought to
wear that soft blue-gray color that seemed to melt into her eyes and
bring out all the richness of the dark curves of hair. It was so that he
would think of her in the days that were to come--a fragile but gallant
figure sitting at the old mahogany desk sorting out letters.
Suddenly she pushed them aside and rose to her full splendid queenly
height. She knew that the moment of farewell had come and was not
grudging it its crucial moment of life. He came toward her and put his
two hands lightly on her shoulders. But words failed him utterly. For
his glance had fallen upon the pile of letters which she had tied with a
narrow bit of white ribbon. And he noticed for the first time that they
were all addressed in the same handwriting.