They did not move for the reason that Maisie did. Not for forty-eight
hours did Tom learn of her departure. As Mrs. Danker kept not a
boarding house but a rooming house, and her guests went days at a time
without seeing their landlady, he had no sources of information when
Maisie, as she sometimes did, kept herself out of sight. Watching for
her on the Monday and the Tuesday following his Sunday night talk with
Honey, he thought it strange that she never appeared in the hallway,
though he had no cause to be alarmed. He was going to leave Honey, get
a job, and be independent. When he had added a little more to his fund
in New York, he would propose to Maisie, and marry her if she would
take him. He would be eighteen, perhaps nineteen by the time he was
able to do this, an early, but not an impossible, age at which to be a
husband.
On both these days he had gone to school from force of habit, but on
the Wednesday he was surprised by a letter. Though he had never seen
Maisie's writing, the postmark said Nashua. Before tearing the envelope
he had a premonition of her flight.
A telegram on Monday morning had bidden her come home at once, as her
stepmother was dying. She had died. Till her father married again,
which she supposed would be soon, she would have to care for the four
little brothers and sisters. That was all. On paper Maisie was laconic.
Since his mother's death no revolution in his inner life had upset the
boy like this. The Tollivant experience had only left him a little hard
and skeptical; that with the Quidmores had passed like the rain and
the snow, scarcely affecting him. With Honey his need for affection
had always been unfed, and for reasons he could not fathom. Maisie had
made the give and take of life easy, natural. She had her limitations,
her crude, and sometimes her cruel, insistences; but she liked him. He
loved her. He was ready to say it now, because of the blank her loss
had hollowed in his life. For the unformed, growing hot-blooded human
thing to have nothing on which to spend itself is anguish. Sitting
down at his deal table, he wrote to her out of a heart fuller and more
passionate than poor Maisie could ever have understood.
All he had been planning in rebellion against fate he poured out now as
devotion. He had meant to cut loose, to go to work, to live on nothing,
to save his money, and be ready to marry her in a year or two. And yet,
on second thoughts, if he went through college, their position in the
end would be so much better that perhaps the original plan was the best
one. He thought only of her, and of what would make her happiest. He
loved her--loved her--loved her.
Maisie wrote back that she saw no harm in their being engaged, and
she wouldn't press him for a ring till he felt himself able to give
her one. For herself she didn't care, but if she told the girls she
was engaged to a fellow, and had no ring to corroborate her word, she
wouldn't be believed. In case he ever felt equal to the purchase she
was sending him the size in the circlet of thread inclosed.
Tom was heroic. He had never thought of a ring, and a ring would mean
more money. Be it so! He would spend more money. He would spend more
money if he mortgaged his whole future to procure it. Maisie should not
be shamed among her friends in Nashua.
Giving all his free hours to wandering about and pricing rings, he
found them less expensive than he feared. Maisie having once confided
to him her longing for a diamond, a diamond he meant to make it if it
cost him fifty dollars. But he found one for twenty, as big as a small
pea, and flashing in the sunshine like a lighthouse. The young Jew who
sold it assured him that it would have cost a hundred, except for a
tiny flaw which only an expert could detect. On its reception Maisie
was delighted. He felt himself almost a married man.
The rest of the winter went by peaceably. With Honey he declared a
truce of God. He would go to college, and live up to all that had been
planned; but Honey must look on his own self-sacrifice as of the nature
of a loan which would be repaid. Honey was ready to promise anything,
while, in the hope of getting through college in three years instead of
four, Tom worked with increased zeal. Then, one day, when spring had
come round, he stumbled on Guy and Hildred Ansley.
It was in Louisburg Square, as usual. Having arrived from the south
the night before, they were sailing soon for Europe.
"Rotten luck!" the fat boy complained. "Got to trail a tutor along too,
so that I shan't fall down on the Harvard exam when it comes. Wish I
was you."
"If you were Mr. Whitelaw, Guy," his sister reminded him, "you'd find
something else to worry you. We all have our troubles, haven't we, Mr.
Whitelaw?"
"She's got nothing to worry her," the brother protested. "If she was
me, with mother scared all the time that I'll be too hot or too cold or
too tired or too hungry, or that some damn thing or other'll make me
sick...."
"All the same," Tom broke in, "it's something to have a mother to make
a fuss."