IX.

The Milrays stayed through August, and Mrs. Milray was the ruling spirit

of the great holiday of the summer, at Middlemount. It was this year that

the landlords of the central mountain region had decided to compete in a

coaching parade, and to rival by their common glory the splendor of the

East Side and the West Side parades. The boarding-houses were to take

part, as well as the hotels; the farms where only three or four summer

folks were received, were to send their mountain-wagons, and all were to

be decorated with bunting. An arch draped with flags and covered with

flowers spanned the entrance to the main street at Middlemount Centre,

and every shop in the village was adorned for the event.

Mrs. Milray made the landlord tell her all about coaching parades, and

the champions of former years on the East Side and the West Side, and

then she said that the Middlemount House must take the prize from them

all this year, or she should never come near his house again. He

answered, with a dignity and spirit he rarely showed with Mrs. Milray's

class of custom, "I'm goin' to drive our hossis myself."

She gave her whole time to imagining and organizing the personal display

on the coach. She consulted with the other ladies as to the kind of

dresses that were to be worn, but she decided everything herself; and

when the time came she had all the young men ravaging the lanes and

pastures for the goldenrod and asters which formed the keynote of her

decoration for the coach.

She made peace and kept it between factions that declared themselves

early in the affair, and of all who could have criticized her for taking

the lead perhaps none would have willingly relieved her of the trouble.

She freely declared that it was killing her, and she sounded her accents

of despair all over the place. When their dresses were finished she made

the persons of her drama rehearse it on the coach top in the secret of

the barn, where no one but the stable men were suffered to see the

effects she aimed at. But on the eve of realizing these in public she was

overwhelmed by disaster. The crowning glory of her composition was to be

a young girl standing on the highest seat of the coach, in the character

of the Spirit of Summer, wreathed and garlanded with flowers, and

invisibly sustained by the twelve months of the year, equally divided as

to sex, but with the more difficult and painful attitudes assigned to the

gentlemen who were to figure as the fall and winter months. It had been

all worked out and the actors drilled in their parts, when the Spirit of

Summer, who had been chosen for the inoffensiveness of her extreme youth,

was taken with mumps, and withdrawn by the doctor's orders. Mrs. Milray

had now not only to improvise another Spirit of Summer, but had to choose

her from a group of young ladies, with the chance of alienating and

embittering those who were not chosen. In her calamity she asked her

husband what she should do, with but the least hope that he could tell

her. But he answered promptly, "Take Clementina; I'll let you have her

for the day," and then waited for the storm of her renunciations and

denunciations to spend itself.

"To be sure," she said, when this had happened, "it isn't as if she were

a servant in the house; and the position can be regarded as a kind of

public function, anyhow. I can't say that I've hired her to take the

part, but I can give her a present afterwards, and it will be the same

thing."

The question of clothes for Clementina Mrs. Milray declared was almost

as sweeping in its implication as the question of the child's creation.

"She has got to be dressed new from head to foot," she said, "every

stitch, and how am I to manage it in twenty-four hours?"

By a succession of miracles with cheese-cloth, and sashes and ribbons, it

was managed; and ended in a triumph so great that Mrs. Milray took the

girl in her arms and kissed her for looking the Spirit of Summer to a

perfection that the victim of the mumps could not have approached. The

victory was not lastingly marred by the failure of Clementina's shoes to

look the Spirit of Summer as well as the rest of her costume. No shoes at

all world have been the very thing, but shoes so shabby and worn down at

one side of the heel as Clementina's were very far from the thing. Mrs.

Milray decided that another fold of cheese-cloth would add to the

statuesque charm of her figure, and give her more height; and she was

richly satisfied with the effect when the Middlemount coach drove up to

the great veranda the next morning, with all the figures of her picture

in position on its roof, and Clementina supreme among them. She herself

mounted in simple, undramatized authority to her official seat beside the

landlord, who in coachman's dress, with a bouquet of autumnal flowers in

his lapel, sat holding his garlanded reins over the backs of his six

horses; and then the coach as she intended it to appear in the parade set

out as soon as the turnouts of the other houses joined it. They were all

to meet at the Middlemount, which was thickly draped and festooned in

flags, with knots of evergreen and the first red boughs of the young

swamp maples holding them in place over its irregular facade. The coach

itself was amass of foliage and flowers, from which it defined itself as

a wheeled vehicle in vague and partial outline; the other wagons and

coaches, as they drove tremulously up, with an effect of having been

mired in blossoms about their spokes and hubs, had the unwieldiness which

seems inseparable from spectacularity. They represented motives in color

and design sometimes tasteless enough, and sometimes so nearly very good

that Mrs. Milray's heart was a great deal in her mouth, as they arrived,

each with its hotel-cry roared and shrilled from a score of masculine and

feminine throats, and finally spelled for distinctness sake, with an

ultimate yell or growl. But she had not finished giving the

lady-representative of a Sunday newspaper the points of her own tableau,

before she regained the courage and the faith in which she remained

serenely steadfast throughout the parade.

It was when all the equipages of the neighborhood had arrived that she

climbed to her place; the ladder was taken away; the landlord spoke to

his horses, and the Middlemount coach led the parade, amid the renewed

slogans, and the cries and fluttered handkerchiefs of the guests crowding

the verandas.

The line of march was by one road to Middlemount Centre, where the prize

was to be awarded at the judges' stand, and then the coaches were to

escort the triumphant vehicle homeward by another route, so as to pass as

many houses on the way as possible. It was a curious expression of the

carnival spirit in a region immemorially starved of beauty in the lives

of its people; and whatever was the origin of the mountain coaching

parade, or from whatever impulse of sentimentality or advertising it

came, the effect was of undeniable splendor, and of phantasmagoric

strangeness.

Gregory watched its progress from a hill-side pasture as it trailed

slowly along the rising and falling road. The songs of the young girls,

interrupted by the explosion of hotel slogans and college cries from the

young men, floated off to him on the thin breeze of the cloudless August

morning, like the hymns and shouts of a saturnalian rout going in holiday

processional to sacrifice to their gods. Words of fierce Hebrew poetry

burned in his thought; the warnings and the accusals and the

condemnations of the angry prophets; and he stood rapt from his own time

and place in a dream of days when the Most High stooped to commune face

to face with His ministers, while the young voices of those forgetful or

ignorant of Him, called to his own youth, and the garlanded chariots,

with their banners and their streamers passed on the road beneath him and

out of sight in the shadow of the woods beyond.

When the prize was given to the Middlemount coach at the Center the

landlord took the flag, and gallantly transferred it to Mrs. Milray, and

Mrs. Milray passed it up to Clementina, and bade her, "Wave it, wave it!"

The village street was thronged with people that cheered, and swung their

hats and handkerchiefs to the coach as it left the judges' stand and

drove under the triumphal arch, with the other coaches behind it. Then

Atwell turned his horses heads homewards, and at the brisker pace with

which people always return from festivals or from funerals, he left the

village and struck out upon the country road with his long escort before

him. The crowd was quick to catch the courteous intention of the victors,

and followed them with applause as far beyond the village borders as wind

and limb would allow; but the last noisy boy had dropped off breathless

before they reached a half-finished house in the edge of some woods. A

line of little children was drawn up by the road-side before it, who

watched the retinue with grave eagerness, till the Middlemount coach came

in full sight. Then they sprang into the air, and beating their hands

together, screamed, "Clem! Clem! Oh it's Clem!" and jumped up and down,

and a shabby looking work worn woman came round the corner of the house

and stared up at Clementina waving her banner wildly to the children, and

shouting unintelligible words to them. The young people on the coach

joined in response to the children, some simply, some ironically, and one

of the men caught up a great wreath of flowers which lay at Clementina's

feet, and flung it down to them; the shabby woman quickly vanished round

the corner of the house again. Mrs. Milray leaned over to ask the

landlord, "Who in the world are Clementina's friends?"

"Why don't you know?" he retorted in abated voice. "Them's her brothas

and sistas."

"And that woman?"

"The lady at the conna? That's her motha."

When the event was over, and all the things had been said and said again,

and there was nothing more to keep the spring and summer months from

going up to their rooms to lie down, and the fall and winter months from

trying to get something to eat, Mrs. Milray found herself alone with

Clementina.

The child seemed anxious about something, and Mrs. Milray, who wanted to

go and lie down, too, asked a little impatiently, "What is it,

Clementina?"

"Oh, nothing. Only I was afraid maybe you didn't like my waving to the

children, when you saw how queea they looked." Clementina's lips

quivered.

"Did any of the rest say anything?"

"I know what they thought. But I don't care! I should do it right over

again!"

Mrs. Milray's happiness in the day's triumph was so great that she could

indulge a generous emotion. She caught the girl in her arms. "I want to

kiss you; I want to hug you, Clementina!"

The notion of a dance for the following night to celebrate the success of

the house in the coaching parade came to Mrs. Milray over a welsh-rarebit

which she gave at the close of the evening. The party was in the charge

of Gregory, who silently served them at their orgy with an austerity that

might have conspired with the viand itself against their dreams, if they

had not been so used to the gloom of his ministrations. He would not

allow the waitresses to be disturbed in their evening leisure, or kept

from their sleep by such belated pleasures; and when he had provided the

materials for the rarebit, he stood aloof, and left their combination to

Mrs. Milray and her chafing-dish.

She had excluded Clementina on account of her youth, as she said to one

of the fall and winter months, who came in late, and noticed Clementina's

absence with a "Hello! Anything the matter with the Spirit of Summer?"

Clementina had become both a pet and a joke with these months before the

parade was over, and now they clamored together, and said they must have

her at the dance anyway. They were more tepidly seconded by the spring

and summer months, and Mrs. Milray said, "Well, then, you'll have to all

subscribe and get her a pair of dancing slippers." They pressed her for

her meaning, and she had to explain the fact of Clementina's destitution,

which that additional fold of cheese-cloth had hidden so well in the

coaching tableau that it had never been suspected. The young men

entreated her to let them each buy a pair of slippers for the Spirit of

Summer, which she should wear in turn for the dance that she must give

each of them; and this made Mrs. Milray declare that, no, the child

should not come to the dance at all, and that she was not going to have

her spoiled. But, before the party broke up, she promised that she would

see what could be done, and she put it very prettily to the child the

next day, and waited for her to say, as she knew she must, that she could

not go, and why. They agreed that the cheese-cloth draperies of the

Spirit of Summer were surpassingly fit for the dance; but they had to

agree that this still left the question of slippers untouched. It

remained even more hopeless when Clementina tried on all of Mrs. Milray's

festive shoes, and none of her razorpoints and high heels would avail.

She went away disappointed, but not yet disheartened; youth does not so

easily renounce a pleasure pressed to the lips; and Clementina had it in

her head to ask some of the table girls to help her out. She meant to try

first with that big girl who had helped her put on the shoeman's bronze

slippers; and she hurried through the office, pushing purblindly past

Fane without looking his way, when he called to her in the deference

which he now always used with her, "Here's a package here for you,

Clementina--Miss Claxon," and he gave her an oblong parcel, addressed in

a hand strange to her. "Who is it from?" she asked, innocently, and Fane

replied with the same ingenuousness: "I'm sure I don't know." Afterwards

he thought of having retorted, "I haven't opened it," but still without

being certain that he would have had the courage to say it.

Clementina did not think of opening it herself, even when she was alone

in her little room above Mrs. Atwell's, until she had carefully felt it

over, and ascertained that it was a box of pasteboard, three or four

inches deep and wide, and eight or ten inches long. She looked at the

address again, "Miss Clementina Claxon," and at the narrow notched ribbon

which tied it, and noted that the paper it was wrapped in was very white

and clean. Then she sighed, and loosed the knot, and the paper slipped

off the box, and at the same time the lid fell off, and the shoe man's

bronze slippers fell out upon the floor.

Either it must be a dream or it must be a joke; it could not be both real

and earnest; somebody was trying to tease her; such flattery of fortune

could not be honestly meant. But it went to her head, and she was so

giddy with it as she caught the slippers from the floor, and ran down to

Mrs. Atwell, that she knocked against the sides of the narrow staircase.

"What is it? What does it mean? Who did it?" she panted, with the

slippers in her hand. "Whe'e did they come from?" She poured out the

history of her trying on these shoes, and of her present need of them and

of their mysterious coming, to meet her longing after it had almost

ceased to be a hope. Mrs. Atwell closed with her in an exultation hardly

short of a clapping the hands. Her hair was gray, and the girl's hair

still hung in braids down her back, but they were of the same age in

their transport, which they referred to Mrs. Milray, and joined with her

in glad but fruitless wonder who had sent Clementina the shoes. Mrs.

Atwell held that the help who had seen the girl trying them on had

clubbed together and got them for her at the time; and had now given them

to her for the honor she had done the Middlemount House in the parade.

Mrs. Milray argued that the spring and summer months had secretly

dispatched some fall and winter month to ransack the stores at

Middlemount Centre for them. Clementina believed that they came from the

shoe man himself, who had always wanted to send them, in the hope that

she would keep them, and had merely happened to send them just then in

that moment of extremity when she was helpless against them. Each

conjecture involved improbabilities so gross that it left the field free

to any opposite theory.

Rumor of the fact could not fail to go through the house, and long before

his day's work was done it reached the chef, and amused him as a piece of

the Boss's luck. He was smoking his evening pipe at the kitchen door

after supper, when Clementina passed him on one of the many errands that

took her between Mrs. Milray's room and her own, and he called to her:

"Boss, what's this I hear about a pair o' glass slippas droppin' out the

sky int' youa lap?"

Clementina was so happy that she thought she might trust him for once,

and she said, "Oh, yes, Mr. Mahtin! Who do you suppose sent them?" she

entreated him so sweetly that it would have softened any heart but the

heart of a tease.

"I believe I could give a pootty good guess if I had the facts."

Clementina innocently gave them to him, and he listened with a

well-affected sympathy.

"Say Fane fust told you about 'em?"

"Yes. 'He'e's a package for you,' he said. Just that way; and he couldn't

tell me who left it, or anything."

"Anybody asked him about it since?"

"Oh, yes! Mrs. Milray, and Mrs. Atwell, and Mr. Atwell, and everybody."

"Everybody." The chef smiled with a peculiar droop of one eye. "And he

didn't know when the slippas got into the landlo'd's box?"

"No. The fust thing he knew, the' they we'e!" Clementina stood expectant,

but the chef smoked on as if that were all there was to say, and seemed

to have forgotten her. "Who do you think put them thea, Mr. Mahtin?"

The chef looked up as if surprised to find her still there. "Oh! Oh, yes!

Who d' I think? Why, I know, Boss. But I don't believe I'd betta tell

you."

"Oh, do, Mr. Mahtin! If you knew how I felt about it--"

"No, no! I guess I betta not. 'Twouldn't do you any good. I guess I won't

say anything moa. But if I was in youa place, and I really wanted to know

whe'e them slippas come from--"

"I do--I do indeed--"

The chef paused before he added, "I should go at Fane. I guess what he

don't know ain't wo'th knowin', and I guess nobody else knows anything.

Thea! I don't know but I said mo'n I ought, now."

What the chef said was of a piece with what had been more than once in

Clementina's mind; but she had driven it out, not because it might not be

true, but because she would not have it true. Her head drooped; she

turned limp and springless away. Even the heart of the tease was touched;

he had not known that it would worry her so much, though he knew that she

disliked the clerk.

"Mind," he called after her, too late, "I ain't got no proof 't he done

it."

She did not answer him, or look round. She went to her room, and sat down

in the growing dusk to think, with a hot lump in her throat.

Mrs. Atwell found her there an hour later, when she climbed to the

chamber where she thought she ought to have heard Clementina moving about

over her own room.

"Didn't know but I could help you do youa dressin'," she began, and then

at sight of the dim figure she broke off: "Why, Clem! What's the matte?

Ah' you asleep? Ah' you sick? It's half an hour of the time and--"

"I'm not going," Clementina answered, and she did not move.

"Not goin'! Why the land o'--"

"Oh, I can't go, Mrs. Atwell. Don't ask me! Tell Mrs. Milray, please!"

"I will, when I got something to tell," said Mrs. Atwell. "Now, you just

say what's happened, Clementina Claxon!" Clementina suffered the woful

truth to be drawn from her. "But you don't know whether it's so or not,"

the landlady protested.

"Yes, yes, I do! It was the last thing I thought of, and the chef

wouldn't have said it if he didn't believe it."

"That's just what he would done," cried Mrs. Atwell. "And I'll give him

such a goin' ova, for his teasin', as he ain't had in one while. He just

said it to tease. What you goin' to say to Mrs. Milray?"

"Oh, tell her I'm not a bit well, Mrs. Atwell! My head does ache, truly."

"Why, listen," said Mrs. Atwell, recklessly. "If you believe he done

it--and he no business to--why don't you just go to the dance, in 'em,

and then give 'em back to him after it's ova? It would suv him right."

Clementina listened for a moment of temptation, and then shook her head.

"It wouldn't do, Mrs. Atwell; you know it wouldn't," she said, and Mrs.

Atwell had too little faith in her suggestion to make it prevail. She

went away to carry Clementina's message to Mrs. Milray, and her task was

greatly eased by the increasing difficulty Mrs. Milray had begun to find,

since the way was perfectly smoothed for her, in imagining the management

of Clementina at the dance: neither child nor woman, neither servant nor

lady, how was she to be carried successfully through it, without sorrow

to herself or offence to others? In proportion to the relief she felt,

Mrs. Milray protested her irreconcilable grief; but when the simpler Mrs.

Atwell proposed her going and reasoning with Clementina, she said, No,

no; better let her alone, if she felt as she did; and perhaps after all

she was right.