whispered Porter to his companion as they set off at a jog trot down the
street, Rivers a little ahead. “I suppose they could sing our requiems
with pleasure.”
“I know. They pounded it into me, too. They’ve got some kind of an idea
between ’em that he’s coming to harm. Anything for an excitement. We’ll
get ahead of him when we’re a little nearer to the house.”
It looked very dark and still as they reached it. The moon had set, and
the patch of straggling woods stretched out weird and formless. The
piano, the infant, the yelping dog had given place to an oppressive
silence save for the dismal chirping of insects and the shuddering of a
train of coal cars as it backed far off down the track. “There is no
light now,” said Porter.
The three were drawn up in a line outside the house, and even while he
spoke the gas flared up bright in the second story. The edge of a shadow
wavered toward the back of the room; then it came forward and
disappeared. The next moment the shade of the front window was partly
drawn up and pulled down again by a round white arm, half clad in the
loose sleeve of a pink kimono.
* * * * *
RIVERS sat in the big wicker chair with his arms around his little wife.
Her head, with its light curls, lay on his shoulder, and both of her
hands held one of his large ones as she talked.
“You are sure you do not mind my coming in this way?”
“No. No, my Betsy, I do not mind.” He touched his lips to her forehead,
and smoothed the folds of her pink gown with the strong, unnecessarily
firm touch of a man. “But where are the boys?”
“I left them with Alice”—Alice was her sister—“for another week. I
couldn’t bring them back in this hot weather.”
“Left them with Alice!”
“Yes, don’t talk about it.” She colored nervously and then went on. “I
know they’re all right, but if I think about it too much I’ll get
silly—as I did about you. But, of course, it’s really different with
them, for they have someone to look after them, and Alice will telegraph
every day.”
“How did you get silly about me?”
She clasped and unclasped his hand. “I don’t know. Yes, I do. It was
worse than the time I thought of little Brook and the tiger. I kept
imagining and imagining dreadful things. Last night I thought you
were—dead. I saw you fallen on the floor.” Her voice dropped to a note
of horror, and her eyes grew dark as they stared at him. “Where did you
get that cut on your forehead? Were you ill last night? _Did_ you have a
fall?”
He nodded, gazing steadily at her.
“I’m all right now.”
“Oh,” she said with a long, shivering breath, and hid her face on his
shoulder. Presently she fell to kissing his hand, holding it tight when
he strove to draw it away. Then she went on in a smothered tone, with a
little pause between each sentence,
“I got here at ten o’clock. I thought you’d _never_ come home. Of
course, I _knew_ you were at the Callenders’. I went to work and cleared
up the butler’s pantry, or I couldn’t have _slept_ here! The house is in
a dreadful condition.”
“Yes. Don’t you care.”
“I don’t. I’ll have an army here cleaning to-morrow. But oh, Brookton—”
she broke off suddenly—“don’t send me away again!” There was a new,
passionate ring in her voice. “_Never_ send me away again. I’ve been
wild, wild, _wild_ for you! Promise never to send me away again. Let me
stay with you always—whatever happens—like this—until we die!” A sob
caught her by the throat.
The strong and tender clasp of his arms answered her—her trembling
ceased. After a silence, he said gently,
“I’m going downstairs now to lock up.”
She rose, flushing under his smiling eyes as he held her off at arm’s
length to say,
“It seems to me you’ve reached a high pitch of romance after seven
years, Mrs. Rivers!”
“Ah, don’t, don’t,” she deprecated. She raised her drooping head and
flashed a reckless glance at him, half mirthful, half tragic.
“Oh, it’s dreadful to care so much for _any_ man! Goodness knows what
I’ll get to in seven years more!”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mrs. Atwood’s Outer Raiment
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mrs. Atwood’s Outer Raiment
“HOW much will a new suit cost, Jo?” Mr. Atwood held his fingers
reflectively on the rubber band of his pocketbook as he asked the
question, and glanced as he did so at the round brunette face of his
wife, which had suddenly become all flush and sparkle.
“Oh, Edward!”
“Well?”
“You oughtn’t to give me the money for it now—you really oughtn’t. There
are so many calls on you at this season of the year, I don’t see how we
can meet them as it is. The second quarter of Josephine’s music lessons
begins next month, and the dancing school bill comes in too—besides the
coal. Everything just piles in before Christmas. I meant to have saved
the money, for a coat at any rate, this summer out of my allowance, but
I was obliged to fit Josephine out from head to foot—she grows so fast,
she takes as much for a dress as I do. But it doesn’t make any
difference—I can do very well for a while with what I have—really!”
“How about the Washington trip with me next month? I thought you said
you couldn’t go anywhere without a new suit?”
“Well, I _can’t_, but—”
“That settles it.”
Mr. Atwood pulled off the rubber band from the pocketbook and laid it on
the table before him, as he extracted a roll of bills and began to count
them. It was a shabby article, worn brown at the edges, but it had been
made of handsome leather to begin with, and still held together in spite
of many years of service. Mrs. Atwood would hardly have known her
husband without that pocketbook. It represented in its way the heart of
a kind and generous man, always ready to do his utmost in help of the
family needs, without complaint or caviling.
His wife always experienced mingled feelings when that leather
receptacle appeared—a quick and blessed relief and a sharp wince, as if
it were really his heart’s blood that she was taking. Her fervent
imagination was perennially ready to picture unknown depths of stress.
He paid no attention now to her inarticulate murmur of protest; but
asked, in a business-like way,
“How much will it take?”
“I _could_ get the material for a dollar a yard—” Mrs. Atwood sat with
her hands clasped and her eyes looking off into space, feeling the words
wrung from her—“I could get it for a dollar a yard, but I suppose it
ought to be heavier weight for the winter.”
“Have it warm enough, whatever else you do,” interrupted her husband.
“It would take seven yards, or I might get along with six and a half, it
depends on the width. It’s the linings that make it mount up to so much,
and the making. You _can_ get a suit made for ten dollars; Cynthia
Callender did, and hers looks well, but Mrs. Nichols went to the same
place, and—”
“Will thirty dollars be enough?” asked Mr. Atwood with masculine
directness, seeking for some tangible fact.
“Oh, yes. I’m sure it will be, I—”
“Then here’s fifty,” said Mr. Atwood. He counted out five tens and
pushed them over to her. “Get a good suit while you’re about it, Jo.”
“Oh, Edward. I don’t want—”
“Make her take it,” said a girl of sixteen, rising from the corner where
she had been sitting with a book in her hand, a very tall and thin and
pretty girl, brunette like her mother, with a long black braid that hung
down her back. She came forward and threw her arm around her mother’s
neck, bending protectingly over her. “Make her take it, papa. She buys
everything for me and the boys, and goes without herself, so that I’m
ashamed to walk out in the street with her; it makes me look so horrid
to be all dressed up when she wears that old spring jacket. When it’s
cold she puts a cape over it. I wish you’d see that cape! She’s had it
since the year one. She doesn’t dare wear it when she goes out with you,
she just shivers.”
“Hush, hush, Josephine,” said the mother embarrassed, yet laughing, as
her husband lifted his shaggy eyebrows at her in mock severity. “You
needn’t say any more, either of you. I’ll take the money.” She paused
impressively, and then gently pushed the girl aside and went over and
kissed her husband.
“If I were only as good a manager as some people! I don’t know what’s
the matter with me. I try, and I try, but—”
“Yes, yes, I know,” said the husband. “All I ask now is that you spend
this money on yourself; it’s not for other needs. Remember! You are to
spend it all on yourself.”
“Yes, I will,” said Mrs. Atwood, with the guilty thrill of the perjured
at the very moment of her promise. She knew very well that some of it
would have to be spent for other needs. She had but fifty cents left of
her allowance to last her until the end of the month, five long days
away. No one but the mother of a family of moderate means realizes what
the demand for pads, pencils, shoestrings, lunches, postage stamps, hair
ribbons, medicines, mended shoes, and such like can amount to in that
short time. She had meant to ask Edward to advance her a little more on
the next month’s allowance—already largely anticipated—but she had not
the face to after his generosity to her now. A couple of dollars out of
the fifty would make very little difference, and she did not need it
all, anyway. She almost wept as she thought of Josephine’s championship
of her, and her husband’s thoughtfulness.
Mrs. Atwood adored her husband and her three children. She firmly
believed them to be superior in every way to all other mortals;
sacrificing service for them was her joy of joys, her keenest affliction
the fear that she did not appreciate them half enough. It is certain
that the children, truthful, loving, and obedient as they had been
trained to be, would have been spoiled beyond tolerance if it were not
that the very strength of her admiration made it innocuous. They were so
used to being told that they were the loveliest and dearest things on
earth that the words were not even heard. As they grew older the
extravagance of her devotion was beginning to rouse the protective
element in them, to her wonder and humility.
Mrs. Atwood, at twenty, the time of her marriage, had been a
warm-hearted, fervent, loquacious, impulsive child. At thirty-eight she
was still in many ways the girl her husband had married; even to her
looks, while he appeared much older than his real age, in reality but a
couple of years ahead of hers. She was always longing to be a silent,
noble, and finely-balanced character, quite oblivious of the fact that
she suited him, a humorous but self-contained man, exactly as she was,
and that he would have been very lonesome with anything more perfect.
Perhaps, after all, there are few things that are better to bring into a
household than an uncalculating and abounding love, even if the
manifestations of it are not always of the wisest.
The extra money cast a rich glow over Mrs. Atwood’s horizon. In the
effulgence of it she received a bill for twelve dollars presented to her
just after breakfast the next morning, by the waitress, with the word
that the man waiting outside the door had already brought it once
before, when they were out of town. Could Mrs. Atwood pay it now? He
needed the money.
“Why, certainly,” said Mrs. Atwood with affluent promptness. The bill
was for work on the lawn during the summer, something her husband always
paid for, but it seemed a pity to have the man go away again when the
money was there at hand. She would not in the least mind asking Edward
to refund it to her. But she felt the well-known drop into her usual
condition of calculating economy.
Her husband came home that night with a bad headache, and the night
after she had another bill waiting for him for repairs on the furnace.
It was unexpectedly and villainously large, and Mrs. Atwood was
constitutionally incapable of adding another straw to his burden, while
she stood by consenting sympathetically unto his righteous wrath. A day
later, when she spoke of going to town to buy the material for her new
costume with outward buoyancy, but inward panic at the rapid shrinkage
of her funds, Sam, a boy of twelve, announced the fact that he must have
a new suit of clothes at once. As it was Saturday, he could accompany
her.
“What is the matter with those you have on? They are not in the least
worn out,” said his mother.
“Mamma, they’re so thin that I’m freezing all the time I’m in school.
You ought to have heard me coughing yesterday.”
“You have the old blue suit; I’m sure that’s thick enough.”
“The blue suit! Yes, and it hurts me, it’s so tight I can hardly walk in
it. I can’t sit down in it at all. It makes ridges all around my legs.”
Mrs. Atwood looked at her son with rare exasperation. It was well known
that when Sam took a dislike to his clothes for any reason, they always
hurt him. His coats, his trousers, his caps, his shoes, even his
neckties developed hitherto unsuspected attributes of torture. And there
was always a haunting feeling with the outraged dispenser of these
articles that it might be true. A penetrative and scornful remark from
the passing Josephine at once emphasized this view of the case to the
anxious mother, remorseful already at her own lack of sympathy.
“I’m astonished at you, Josephine. If the clothes hurt him—” but the
girl had disappeared beyond hearing. Sam came from town that jubilant
evening, in warm and roomy jacket and trousers, and, oh, weakness of
woman! with a new football, besides. Mrs. Atwood carried with her a box
of lead soldiers for Eddy, and a sweet little fluffy thing in neckwear
for Josephine, such as she saw other girls displaying. After all, what
was her own dress in comparison with the darling children’s happiness?
She would get some cheap stuff and make it up herself. No one would know
the difference.
“How about your suit, Jo?” asked her husband one evening as they sat
around the fire. “Is it almost finished?”
“Not—exactly,” said Mrs. Atwood.
“The club goes to Washington on the fifteenth of the month, it was
decided to-day. Nearly all the men are going to take their wives with
them. I’m looking forward to showing off mine.”
“My mamma will look prettier than any of them,” said Eddy belligerently.
“And lots younger,” added Sam.
“Have you ordered the suit yet?” asked the voice of Josephine. Oh, how
her mother dreaded it!
“No, I haven’t—yet,” she felt herself forced into saying.
“I don’t believe there is any money left for it,” pursued the pitiless
one. “She spends it for other things, papa. She pays bills and doesn’t
tell, because she hates to bother you. And she buys things for us. And
she paid a subscription to the Orphan’s Home yesterday, and she got a
new wash-boiler for Katy. And—”
“Hush, hush, Josephine,” said her father severely. “I found that
receipted bill of Patrick’s lying around the other day, Jo. I should
have paid you back at once. How much money have you left?”
“Oh, Edward—I’m _so_ foolish. I—”
“Have you thirty dollars?”
“I—I don’t think so.”
“Have you twenty?”
“I haven’t—_more_ than that.” She had, as she well knew, the sum of nine
dollars and sixty-seven cents in the purse in her dressing table drawer.
“Will this help you out?” His tone had the business-like quality in it
as natural as breathing to a man when he speaks of money matters, and
which a woman feels almost as a personal condemnation in its chill
removal from sentiment.
“Oh, Edward—please don’t! It makes me feel so—” She tried not to be too
abject. “But nearly all of it has gone for necessary things.”
“That’s all _right_.” He added with a touch of severity. “Don’t let
there be any mistake about it this time, Jo,” and she murmured
contentedly,
“No. No, indeed.”
With her allowance money, too, how could there be?
Mrs. Atwood now set herself seriously to the work of getting appareled.
She read advertisements, and went to town two days in succession,
bringing home samples of cloth for family approval; she sought the
advice of her young sister-in-law, Mrs. Callender, and of her friend,
Mrs. Nichols, with the result that she finally sat down one morning
immediately after breakfast, and wrote a letter to a New York firm
ordering a jacket and skirt made like one in a catalogue issued by them,
and setting down her measurements according to its directions. Just
before she finished, a maid brought her up word that Mrs. Martindale was
below.
“Mrs. Martindale—at this time in the morning!”
Mrs. Martindale was her cousin, and lived over the other side of the
track, some distance away. Mrs. Atwood hurried down with a premonition
of evil to find the visitor, a pretty woman, elegantly but hastily
gowned, sitting on the edge of a chair, as if ready for instant flight.
There was a wild expression in her eye.
She began at once, taking no notice of Mrs. Atwood’s greeting.
“I suppose you think I’m crazy to come here in this way. I didn’t sleep
a wink last night. I didn’t know what to do. We’re in such a state!”
“Is it the business?”
“Oh, it’s the estate and the business and everything. Mr. Bellew’s death
has just brought the whole thing to a standstill. All the money is tied
up in some dreadful way—don’t ask _me_. Of course it will be all right
in three or four weeks, Dick says, and we have credit everywhere. It’s
just to tide over this time. But we haven’t a penny of ready money; not
a _penny_. It would be ridiculous if it wasn’t horrible. Dick gave me
all he could scrape together last week, and told me to try and make it
last, but it’s all gone—_I_ couldn’t help it. And the washerwoman comes
to-day. If you could let me have ten dollars, Jo; I couldn’t _bear_ to
let Dick know.”
“Why, certainly,” said Mrs. Atwood with loving alacrity. “Don’t say
another word.” If she felt a pang, she scorned it.
“You don’t know how many calls there are on one,” murmured the other,
sinking back with relief.
Mrs. Atwood thought she did, but she only said, “You poor thing,” and
rushed upstairs to get one of her crisp ten-dollar bills; she could not
use the house money for this. She passed Josephine in the hall,
afterwards, on her way to school, and held the bill behind her, but she
felt sure the girl’s keen eyes had spied it.
“I’m so glad I had it! Are you sure this will be enough?” she asked as
the other kissed her fervently. What were clothes for herself in
comparison with poor Bertha’s need? She would look over the catalogue
again to-morrow, when she had time, and order a cheaper suit, or buy one
ready made.
After all, she did neither. Her money—but why chronicle further the
diminution of her forces? Delay made it as inevitable as the thaw after
snow. Her entire downfall was completed the day she had unexpected and
honorable company to dinner, and sent Sam out to the nearest shops
instead of those at which she usually dealt, to “break a
bill”—heart-rending process—in the purchase of fruits and sweets for
their consumption. No one has ever satisfactorily explained why the
change from five dollars never amounts to more than two dollars and
sixteen cents. Poor Mrs. Atwood could never get quite used to the fact
that if she spent money it was gone. She cherished an underlying hope
that she could get it back somehow.
As the time approached for the Washington trip she did not dare to meet
her Edward’s eye, and replied but feebly to his unusually jolly
anticipations of “this time next week.” She had hoped that she might
have some excuse to remain at home, much as she had longed for this
jaunt alone with her husband, but there seemed to be no loophole of
escape.
She tried to freshen up her heaviest skirt, and took the spring jacket
she was wearing and made a thick lining to it, planning to disguise it
further with a piece of fur at the neck. She felt horribly guilty when
Josephine came in and caught her at it. The tall girl with her red
cheeks just out of the wintry air looked at her mother with an
inscrutable expression, but she merely said,
“I suppose that’s to save your new suit. You’ll never be able to get
into it, if you put so much wadding in,” and went off again. The mother
felt relieved, yet a little hurt, too, in some mysterious way.
Many a time she tried to screw her courage up to confessing that she had
no outer raiment; that after all the money and all her promises she had
nothing to show in exchange. The fatal moment had to come, but she put
it off. She had done it so many times! For herself she did not mind; she
could have confessed joyfully to all the crimes in the Decalogue, if it
would have benefited her dear ones, but to wound their idea of her, to
pain them by showing how unworthy she was, how unfit to be trusted—that
came hard. She prayed a great deal about it on her knees by the bed in
the dusk of her own room when she came upstairs after dinner, on the
pretext of “getting something”; she belonged to the old-fashioned,
child-like order of women who do pray about things, not only daily, but
hourly, and who, unknown to themselves, exhale the sweetness born of
heavenly contact.
She wondered if, perhaps, it might not be better if she were dead, she
was such a poor manager, and set such a bad example to the children.
Josephine had that clear common sense that she lacked. The girl was
getting to be so companionable to her father, too. She had the
sacrificial pleasure of the victim when she heard them laughing and
talking downstairs together.
“Well, Jo, has your suit come home yet?”
It was three nights before the fateful Thursday, and the family were
grouped in the library as was their wont in the evenings immediately
after dinner. Eddy was lying on the fur rug playing with the cat in the
warmth of the wood fire, and Mr. Atwood, in a big chair with his wife
leaning on the arm of it, sat watching the little boy. The two older
children were studying by a table in the back of the room in front of a
shaded lamp, with a pile of books before them.
Mr. Atwood, although his hair and mustache were grizzled and his face
prematurely lined, had a curious faculty of suddenly looking like a boy,
under some pleasurable emotion; anticipation of his holiday made him
young for the moment. His wife thought him beautiful.
“Did you say it had not come home yet? You must be sure to have it on
time. Take all your party clothes along, too.”
“Oh, yes, I’m going to,” said Mrs. Atwood. She was on sure ground here.
The gown she had had made for a wedding in the spring was crying to be
worn again.
“What color did you decide on?”
“I—I decided on—brown,” said Mrs. Atwood with fixed eyes. Her respite
was gone.
“Brown—yes, I always liked you in brown. Have you heard your mother talk
much about her new clothes, Josephine?”
“No,” said Josephine, “I haven’t.”
“Didn’t you wear brown when we went on our wedding trip? It seems to me
that I remember that. I know you had red berries in your hat, for I
knocked some of them out.”
“Were you married in a brown dress?” called Sam.
“No,” answered the father for her, “your mother was married in
white—some kind of white mosquito-netting. What makes you look so
unhappy, Jo? Aren’t you glad to go off with me—in a new suit?”
“Edward!” said Mrs. Atwood. She rose and stood in front of him, her dark
eyes unnaturally large, the color coming and going in her rounded olive
cheek. Her red lips trembled. Here, before the loved and dreaded
domestic tribunal she would be shriven at last. Her children should know
just what she was like. “Edward! I have something to tell you.”
“There’s the door bell,” said her husband with an arresting hand, as he
listened for the outer sounds.
“A package, sir. By the express. Twenty-five cents.”
“Have you the change, Jo? It’s some clothes I ordered myself for the
Washington trip; I wanted to do you credit. Oh, don’t go upstairs for
it.”
“I don’t mind,” said Mrs. Atwood. Change! She had nothing but change.
Clothes! How easy it was for him to get them! Do her credit—in his
glossy newness, while she was in that old black skirt, grown skimp and
askew with wear, and that tight, impossible jacket! She charged up and
down stairs in the vehemence of her emotion, filled with anger at her
folly, and paid the man herself before reentering the library.
Her husband was untying the cords of the long pasteboard box with slow
and patient fingers. He was a man who had never cut a string in his
life. The children were standing by in what seemed unnecessary
excitement, their faces all turned to her as she came toward them.
Edward had lifted the cover of the box.
“What color are your clothes, Edward?” asked his wife. It was the first
time that he had ever bought anything without consulting her.