time. “You must understand that, Atterbury! We can find men on every
street corner who would like to learn. We want some one with a good
working knowledge, who has had experience, and is familiar with our
machines and our methods—one who can leave his family—and has capital—”
Atterbury shook his head. “No! You want a man like me, one who cannot
only handle your machines, but handle men, and has had experience
outside of your narrow line. Good heavens, Callender, the man you speak
of—barring the capital—can almost be picked up at the street corners.
Your house is full of such as he—good, plodding, trustworthy men, who
understand what they have been taught about your machines and your
accounts and your methods, and who understand nothing else; who stick to
their desks year in and year out. Will one like that do for you? You
know that it will not! Granted that I _don’t_ know the business as you
do—that’s but a detail; I know what business really _is_. Granted that
I’ve got no capital—I’ve got the one thing you really need, and that’s
the brains and energy to get it for _you_. Take me into your
conferences, give me a fighting knowledge of what you want, and I’ll
bring in the capital.
“The export trade has a tremendous future; my mind’s been full of it
lately. You send me to South Africa—to China—to the Philippines, and
I’ll undertake to double the business in three years, but you mustn’t
confine yourself to one narrow line; you must broaden out. You ought to
be able to distance all your competitors; you ought to be able to merge
them in your own company. For many reasons I can be worth more to you
than any other man you know. Great Scott, Nichols, can’t you _see_ that
I’m the opportunity you want?”
Nichols sat immovable, holding on to the arms of his chair with both
hands. Facing the light of Atterbury’s face, the answering light shone
in his own. Callender still objected, although plainly under great
excitement.
“You haven’t managed your own affairs so well.”
“No,” said Atterbury, turning on him like lightning, “and you know why.
You know just what claims the death of Anderson laid upon me, and how
I’ve tried to carry them. They will be paid off now. Callender, you’re
not worth my powder and shot; you’re just _talking_. Mr. Nichols, I’m
speaking to _you_. You know I can handle this thing!”
Both men rose unconsciously and looked at each other, with a long breath
between them.
“When will you send me out?” asked Atterbury at last with his brilliant
smile.
“Come to me to-morrow at ten,” said Nichols, giving his hand to the
other, who grasped it silently. “Mind, I don’t promise anything.”
“No, we don’t promise anything,” agreed the excited Callender.
“No,” said Atterbury jubilantly, “that’s all right. We’ve got a great
future before us, my friends.”
As he wheeled around he caught sight of Harrington, whom he had
momentarily forgotten.
“Ah,” he said airily, “do either of you own any stock in our host’s
Company? It may be just as well for you to investigate a little; you may
find that as the treasurer he’s been speculating with the funds. I’ll
give you my reasons for this also—to-morrow.”
“Come,” he said to Agnes, “we must be going.” As they stepped out once
more into the darkness, the wind nearly hurled them off their feet; a
million icy points of snow pricked and stung the face. She clung to him,
and he put his arm around her and swept her through the storm as a lover
might his bride, unknowing of it.
Yet for all that warm clasp, she subtly felt the severance of his
thought from her, and when they were safely landed in the hall, she said
nervously,
“What was that I heard you saying to Mr. Nichols? You’re not going to
_leave_ me!”
Her tone had in it the universal protest of womankind, to whom the
bodily desertion is less than the spiritual one that makes it possible.
He bent his ardent eyes upon her with a glow which she had never seen in
them even in the earliest days of their love.
“Ah, but it will be only to come back to _you_,” he said with a leap
forward to a joy that made parting dim, and she looked up at him with a
soul so steeped in love that for the moment she could only desire what
he did.
The evidences of a clinging domesticity were again around them; fierce
blasts of heat from the furnace showed that Katy had peacefully
forgotten the dampers; the water dripped, dripped into the kitchen sink
from the thawing pipes. A hollow clanging cough from the upper regions
told that poor little Gwendolen’s post-festive croup had indeed set in,
but even this no longer appeared a bitter and blasting ill to Atterbury,
but merely a temporary discomfort, to be gone with the morrow.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the Reign of Quintilia
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the Reign of Quintilia
AS Mr. Nichols sped on his homeward way to the suburbs by boat and
train, the abstraction which the clerks had noted grew upon him. At
forty-six, his leonine locks streaked with gray, the comfortable, solid,
prosperous father of a family, the president of one corporation and
member of Heaven only knows how many governing boards, Mr. Nichols was
in love—deeply and irremediably in love—with his youngest daughter, an
infant of parts.
She was the sixth child, not the seventh, whom tradition surrounds with
the mysterious opportunities of good fortune. She was, moreover, the
fifth girl in unbroken succession, and her father, like many another man
in like case, had not even looked at the baby until she was nearly a
week old, only to fall a victim to the charms of the little warm,
helpless being after he had once held it in his arms and felt the tiny
rose-leaf fingers close over one of his. As he gazed intently at the
face with its miniature features, the blue eyes suddenly opened and
gazed at him unwinkingly for a space of seconds. Then the lids closed
over them peacefully, and a long sigh issued from the parted lips, in
its reflex breathing giving the indication of a ridiculous dimple at one
corner of the mouth. When Mr. Nichols looked at his wife, who had been
observing him, they both smiled, with a tightening of a new bond of
affection between them.
“Pretty nice sort of a girl, isn’t she?” he remarked as he handed the
child back to the waiting nurse, and when he went downstairs his wife
heard him whistling a tune that had been a part of their early betrothal
days, and hid her face in the pillow with a happy glow on it, although
she was a staid and respectable matron.
It was noticed after this that Mr. Nichols contracted a habit of coming
in each night and gazing at the child intently when he thought himself
unobserved, and that he seemed to derive great and increasing
satisfaction from the perusal. As the baby grew older her face lighted
up for him as for no one else, and before she had reached her present
age of two years they were sweethearts indeed, with a passion on his
part which made it unbearable pain to him if she bumped her head or
pinched her finger.
“How is Quintilia?”
The voice of a near neighbor arrested Mr. Nichols’s attention. A slow
smile overspread his countenance at the mention of the beloved name,
with which the doctor had playfully christened this fifth girl, to the
exclusion of her lawful cognomen.
“Oh, she’s all right. At least I hope she is to-night—she hasn’t been
very well for a couple of days; it’s bothered me a good deal.”
“My wife says that she grows prettier every day,” continued the obliging
neighbor.
Mr. Nichols beamed. “She does. I’m coming home a little earlier to-night
to see how she is. Her mother usually keeps her up for me when she’s
well.”
He could not tell how much he hoped against hope that she _would_ be up
and looking out for him. He knew so well how the little lovely white
thing with the starry eyes and glinting curls would run to the stairway
in her nightgown, and sitting down on the top step with all the
delicious fluttering and sidling motions of her babyhood, would thrust
her plump, bare pink foot up against his rough cheek with the delighted
cry of,
“Pa-pa, _kiss_ a footie! Kiss a footie, pa-pa!”
Then how he would mumble and kiss that darling foot, and pretend to eat
it, finally snatching the adored baby in his arms, laughing and
struggling, to cuddle close to him when he pressed her to his heart,
with the infinitely tender gentleness of the strong, as he carried her
to her crib and laid her in it. His wife was always there, too, watching
him with an indulgent smile. All love between them seemed to have grown
deeper since it merged in this sixth child, whose advent had called
forth a large offering of honest condolence from mistaken friends, and
who had brought a joy which at first the parents decorously—nay,
guiltily—concealed, to revel in it almost indecently afterwards.
The novelty of the first-born, a boy, had hindered complete enjoyment,
and with him, as with the four girls who followed close after, it was a
matter of such supreme importance that all the small rules which
governed the infantile world should be strictly observed.
Even as a young woman Mrs. Nichols was a serious and conscientious
mother, who read all the literature bearing on family health and
education. The infants were trained with adamantine firmness from their
birth, and as they grew older Mrs. Nichols attended kindergarten
meetings where the child was meditated upon with deep graspings of the
intellect, and also painstakingly sat through recitations mixed with
exasperating calisthenics in the higher schools. In fine, she so ordered
her days that when pussy-cats were under discussion in the morning
classes to which Ethel and Edith belonged, she could still lead their
thoughts intelligently pussywards in the afternoon, besides holding the
fourteen-year-old Stan to that hour’s exercise in spelling which was
also like an exercise in breaking stone.
To the higher rule Quintilia promised from the first to be an exception.
She made her own laws. When she lifted her little arms to be “taken up”
it was not in the heart of mortal to resist her; food was given her when
she cried for it, and for the life of her Mrs. Nichols could not always
combat the temptation to hold the dear little clinging form in her arms,
with the damp head and its thistledown curls nestling on her shoulder,
and rock and sing her baby to sleep in the old-fashioned way.
“No, I don’t think she’s any worse.” Mr. Nichols’s wife had met him at
the door with the peaceful kiss of possession before reassuring him for
the non-appearance of Quintilia. She was a woman of medium height,
rather stout, with somewhat large features, a fresh complexion, thick
black hair, brown eyes, and an expression that was at once pleasant and
capable. The heart of her husband trusted in her implicitly, and her
tone was a relief to him.
“What did the doctor say?”
“He thinks that it’s only a cold, but she must be kept very quiet. The
nurse came this afternoon, but she doesn’t seem very—What is it, Miss
Candy?”
Mr. Nichols looked up at the stairs, and his tense gaze involuntarily
softened. A pretty girl in a blue and white cambric uniform appears to
most men as an angel of healing. This one had large and appealing eyes,
and little brown fuzzy curls in front under her white cap. There was a
slip of paper in the hand held forward.
“Would you kindly have this prescription filled at once? I forgot it
when you sent out last.”
“Certainly,” said Mr. Nichols with alacrity. “I’ve got my coat on. I’ll
go for it now.”
“Oh, thank you! And would you mind bringing home some alcohol? I think
there ought to be some in the house.”
“There is a bottle of alcohol,” interpolated Mrs. Nichols.
“I’m so sorry, but I just tipped it over accidentally. Would you please
send one of the maids to sweep up the broken glass? Thank you.”
The vision of the pretty face supported Mr. Nichols but insubstantially
while he waited half an hour in the drug-store in contemplation of a
deserted soda fountain, fly-specked packages of brown headache cure, a
white and bony array of tooth-brushes, and some open boxes of flabby
cigars in a glass case under an electric lighter. A suburban drug-store
is not exactly an enlivening spot, and he was to become fatally well
acquainted with it in the next few days.
To-night he went up and looked at the baby on his return; she was
asleep, with cheeks flushed to a beautiful rose. She was breathing very
hard, but still she slept, with her head thrown back, and the soft rings
of hair spread out over the pillow; the curves of the little round body
were carved out in the white bedclothes. The light in the room was
shaded, and the nurse sat by the table under it, writing out her
official report with a gold pencil held in her taper fingers; but his
wife sat and watched the child. A sudden ache invaded the man’s heart.
“Is she all right?” he whispered.
His wife nodded. “Oh, yes. Doesn’t she look _darling_?”
But Mr. Nichols did not answer. The nurse came forward and smoothed
little Quintilia’s pillow professionally.
“She seems to take an interest,” he whispered to his wife as they left
the room. He felt the tenderness which a good man has for a young girl
who has to earn her own living; she is somewhat on the same plane as
himself, and it is a state of being of which he appreciates the
difficulties. He realized that his wife’s silence was distinctly
unsympathetic.
The children were very noisy that evening, without their mother’s
presence, in the hour allotted them before bedtime. The youngest,
Loulou, who was next to the baby, was seven years old—a stubby, chubby,
black-haired child, with that genius for saying the wrong thing in the
wrong place which is a mother’s woe. As she climbed on her father’s knee
to-night she kept saying:
“Quintilia’s sick, father. Quintilia’s sick! Do you think she’ll be
worse, to-morrow, father?” she grinned at him pleasantly, showing a
mouth with three front teeth missing.
Mr. Nichols resisted a strong impulse to set her down forcibly. His
attitude toward Loulou was a continual reproach to him. He knew, as his
wife often reminded him, that Loulou had been his pet when she was a
baby; he knew that he really loved her, and that if she were ill his
fatherly affection would assert itself in the utmost care for her; but
now her presence in rude and awkward health annoyed and irritated him
beyond expression.
“If Quintilia dies, I’ll be the baby!”
“For shame, Loulou!” said the eldest girl, Christine, who had her
mother’s own gentle manner. “You mustn’t talk like that. Ethel and
Edith, don’t make so much noise. They can’t go to bed, father dear,
until Ann comes back; she’s just gone to the village for something Miss
Candy wanted.”
“Miss Candy is awful pretty!” said the bounding Loulou. “Stan waited by
the stairs to-night to see her come down. She calls him Mr. Stanley, and
he’s been going errands for her all the afternoon. And he put on his
best jacket!”
“I didn’t,” blurted Stan, with a very red face, regardless of the chorus
of horrified ohos! from the rest of the children. “Well, if I did, it
was because the old one was torn.”
“If Quintilia dies, I’ll be the baby.” Loulou reverted to the first
idea.
Stan cried, “Shut up, will you?” and threw his book at her, being a boy
on whom years of training had had no appreciable effect; but Christine
came and put her arm around her father’s neck and kissed him, with her
soft braid of yellow hair falling across his shoulder, and he pressed
the little comforter to him fondly.
Anxiety about Quintilia had grown by morning. Mrs. Nichols came down to
breakfast in a brown cambric gown, with her hair brushed severely back
from her forehead, and hurriedly drank a cup of coffee. The tense
expression of her face, which she strove to render cheerful, took some
of the charm for Mr. Nichols from Miss Candy’s curls and crispness. He
left the house with a load upon him, which grew heavier—and
lighter—heavier—and lighter, with rhythmical regularity, as hope or fear
predominated.
Nearly a week passed, and still the baby’s life hung wavering in the
balance; the president had come down town every day, looking grayer and
quieter each morning.
He came to the office mechanically, and attended mechanically to the
business that had to be transacted. He was dulled to a strange and
abnormal gentleness both there and at home. He thanked those who
performed the usual services for him in the office with punctilious
politeness.
The children at home went unreproved by him. The chatter of poor little
Loulou had ceased to irritate, although it occasionally gave him a spasm
of pain. They were nothing to him, mere simulacrums of what had once
power to please or displease. Even Stan did not come in for the usual
disapprobation on the dirty hands, the slouching walk, or the uncouth
expressions which characterized him. To Mr. Nichols his wife was the
only real person in the house, and there was but one thought between
them—the thought of Quintilia.
The mother worked untiringly, while Miss Candy curled her hair, and
wrote interminable reports, and stood in charming professional attitudes
when the doctor was present, and sent the household individually and
collectively for belated prescriptions, and bottles that were “just
out,” and glycerine, and boracic acid, and camphorated oil, and
disinfectants, and oiled silk, and medicine-droppers, and rubber
water-bags, and absorbent cotton, and whisky, and malted milk, and
biscuits, and candles, and lime-water, and all the various foods so
chemically prepared that they are warranted to be retained by the
weakest stomach, and of which no invalid can ever be persuaded to
swallow more than the first teaspoonful. The doctor studied Miss Candy’s
reports—patently composed from memory—with an imperturbable face, and
questioned Mrs. Nichols closely afterwards. Mr. Nichols, as a mortal
man, still derived a vague satisfaction in her presence, although he
spent his tired evenings in going errands for her; she looked so pretty
that he always felt as if Quintilia must be better.
Sometimes he was allowed to sit by the child while his wife took a short
rest. He knew, most humbly, his deficiencies in the sick-room—by some
ulterior influence when he moved fire-irons fell over, bottles broke,
papers rattled, his shoes made an earthquake, whatever he touched
creaked. He would sit in a rigidly quiet attitude until his wife
returned, with his head on his hand, watching the little pinched face,
the half-closed eyes, listening to the breathing, the rise and fall of
the little chest. Oh, God, the hours by a sick child!
A night came that was long to be remembered in the Nichols household—a
night of ringing bells and shutting doors and hurried running up and
down stairs, with the scared children in their white night-gowns peeping
out of the bedroom door after their tearful prayers for little sister.
In the small hours the doctor’s steady tread could be heard in the
sick-room, or on the landing where he came to give brief orders. Mr.
Nichols sat on a couch in the wide hall outside the door. Sometimes his
wife came from the sick-room and sat down by him for a few seconds, and
they were together in an anguish of dreadful love. When she was gone he
remained with his head on his breast thinking.
He thought of the years of happiness they had had; he thought of the
beloved sleeping children around them and of honest, clumsy Stan, and
troublesome, inconsequent Loulou with special tenderness; he thought of
all the blessings that had been his.
It was as if life were brought to a close, and he humbly confessed to
himself the unfaithfulness of his own part in it, his faults of temper,
his neglect of opportunities to make others happy. He might have been
drowning. His gaze, brought back to land once more, questioned those who
passed him in the hall. Miss Candy went by once with red eyes, her cap
pushed to one side, and her pretty hair all out of curl. She did not
even see him as she passed.
“Father dear!”
He looked up—it was the little eldest daughter of the house, Christine.
“Father dear, I can’t go to sleep, and I’ve been lying in bed so long!”
She sat down beside him and slipped her hand into his; her blue eyes had
the depth that comes from lying awake in darkness. “I’m thinking all the
time of baby. Mayn’t I stay here with you, father dear? I want to stay
with you so much.”
“Yes, my darling.” He took the steamer-rugs his wife had left beside him
and wrapped them around the woman-child, yellow braid and all, and they
stayed there together. Once she whispered,
“You’re praying, too, father dear, aren’t you? I feel that you’re
praying;” and he held her closer and whispered, “Yes.” By-and-by she
fell asleep, and he held her still.
The first streaks of dawn filtered through the rooms, strange to those
who sat bound in darkness and the shadow of death, a household prepared
only for the night. Then an electric current seemed to run through the
breathing souls in it.
The doctor came out in the hall and said, “She will live!” A door opened
farther down—one flashed to another, “She will live!” The message flew
from lip to lip, from heart to heart. The returning breath of the little
ruler of the house revivified all within it. The awakened children ran
out for a moment to whisper the gladness, the servants stole down the
back stairs to clatter in the kitchen and make preparations for an early
breakfast, one could hear the cocks crowing, and the sunshine grew
strong and gathered into a long bar of light. Quintilia would live.
“You may come in and see her for just a minute,” said Mrs. Nichols to
her husband, leading him in as one leads the blind. He fell on his knees
by the bed, awestricken. Was _this_ the little rosy darling of his love?
But she would live—she would live! As he looked the eyes opened
recognizingly; there was a faint roguish smile on the beautiful lips,
and the faintest movement under the bedclothes.
“She wants you to kiss her foot,” said the divining mother.
“Just hearken to the voice of himself in there,” said Ellen, the
waitress, as she came into the kitchen from the breakfast-room. “He says
you’re to make some more coffee, for this isn’t fit to be drank. Oh,
he’s ragin’! He’s sent Loulou from the table for spilling her milk, and
the boy’s not to play golf for a week on account of the dirty hands of
him, the poor child; and he’s got Miss Christine crying into the
porridge, telling her how she’d oughter look after her little sisters
better. Oh, he’s the holy terror the morn, and herself not downstairs to
quaite him! Take your time with the coffee, Ann; sure he’ll murder me
when I get back.”
“The pore man!” said the cook indulgently, pouring out a fresh
installment of the fragrant brown liquid into the coffee-pot. “’Tis the
way wid ’em all; sure ’tis drunk wid sorrow he’s been! What can ye
expict? The big sobs was rindin’ him whin he come from the child’s room
early, and sure he’s got to take it out of somebody. Run you wid the
coffee now!”
“_Please_ don’t go down town to-day,” his wife implored him afterwards.
“You look so horribly tired. Stay at home and rest.” She put her arms
round him tenderly, feeling that now was the opportunity for the
happiness of mutual thanksgiving; and he unconsciously pushed her away
from him as he answered,
“Nonsense! There’s no reason why I should rest.”
She smothered her disappointment at his rebuff. “You won’t be any good
at all at the office; I _know_ you have a dreadful headache. Go upstairs
and lie down in the blue room for a while, and nobody will disturb you
there.”
“Well!” He gave a grudging assent.
The blue room was white and chilly and unlived in. The stiff
pillow-shams rattled down off the pillows as he touched them. He liked
his own room, his own bed. The light glared down from the windows. But
it was a place where he could be let alone, without those eyes
continually waiting upon him to see how he felt. After his debauch of
misery all feeling was nauseous to him. He lay stiffly on the cold,
straight, unaccustomed bed, and looked with burning eyes at the pictures
on the wall. Gradually the rack in his head slackened a little, his
eyelids fell shut, he discerned the far-off approach of a blessed ease.