with Binns, whose scraggy horse dropped his head so low with the
dropping of the reins that he looked as if he would drop in the street
altogether if the authorities did not interfere--if Roxy were not
Roxy, but were Gladys tossing a rose over the drawing-room balcony to
the gallant young cavalry officer on his prancing Abdallah that had
carried him through the terrific skirmishes of an Indian campaign,
then I will admit that more entertainment and much finer company
might be had out of the affair. The dinners which we might attend
together in the course of our acquaintance would be very different
from the surreptitious turnovers and custards with which Roxy regaled
Binns; the music we might hear would have far other charms than those
strains which Roxy, in her hours of leisure, called out from a bit of
comb wound with a bit of paper; the dresses, too, would be far more
satisfactory to the soul and the soul’s eye than Roxy’s dirt-colored
calicoes, bought to wash and hide the dirt as long previously as might
be; and we will say nothing of the diamonds, the pictures, the operas,
and all the rest that we might arrive at in our experiences; for Roxy
had no diamonds but her tears, and very few of them in the beginning;
no pictures but cuttings from the comic weeklies, which she pinned up
about the kitchen; and as for the dinners, again, I doubt if we should
bring better appetites to our sumptuous banquet, with terrapin and
canvas-back and champagne _frappé_, than Binns had when grinning over
his apple turnover, wiping his mouth on his blue sleeve after it, and
giving Roxy a resounding smack, to receive in return as resounding a
slap. “She’s a clipper, I say,” Binns would chuckle, as if it were a
love-pat after his own heart. Meanwhile not an opera of all the list
is to be heard with more satisfaction than that wont to be evinced
by Binns as he sat, during his evenings “on,” while Roxy, after her
voluntary upon the comb and paper, which she kept in the drawer of
the kitchen table with the nutmegs and allspice, sang in her loud and
clear, if somewhat nasal, voice the simple ballad of “Whoa, Emma!” or
“I don’t know why I love him,
He does not care for me,
But my poor heart will wander
Wherever he may be.
If I had minded mother
I’d not been here to-day;
But I was young and foolish,
And easy led astray”;
or reverted to older tunes--“Oh, where have you been, Lord Ronald, my
son?” and “Drownded, drownded, in the middle of the sea,” with other
like tearful selections. To be sure, Binns’s delight was chiefly
manifested by a frequent use of his coat-sleeve in the manner of
lachrymose individuals without a handkerchief, in a very luxury of
woe; for if the comb and paper tickled the cockles of his heart, as
some mellow flute or honeyed violin might do, the enjoyment was just
as ecstatic which made the tears pour forth over the sad fate of the
lovers “’Way down in Salem town,” while he thought nothing of an
unprotected outright boohoo, with his face twisted into all sorts of a
coil, over the last words of the wretched person who implores,
“Oh, make my grave quick, brother, make my grave deep;
The sooner I lay there the sooner I’ll sleep;
For why should I wait from this sad world to part,
When the girl that I love so has broken my heart?”
Nevertheless, it was not of love, at any rate not of love of Roxy,
that Binns would ever die. Roxy’s turnovers and gingersnaps and
five-fingered doughnuts, her liberal bowls of coffee and secret
draughts of mineral water, were very agreeable variations in his
daily fare. When Roxy asked him to come in and spend an evening with
some friends of hers and have a game of forty-five, he saw visions
of the same run of dainties, and was much pleased by the rosy apples
and tingling cider and roasted chestnuts of the regale. Come again?
Of course he would come again--one did not need to be asked twice
to things of that sort. He came again, and this time the nuts were
butternuts, and there were cookies as nearly pound-cake as it is the
nature of cookies to approach, and Binns munched and cracked and picked
and sipped, and thought that Roxy was a mighty cute body to be able
to have the kitchen to herself at this hour, and to have whatever she
chose in it, moreover. And so he came again.
Was it Roxy’s cakes and ale alone, then, that allured Binns? Was not
the face reflected in the pewter platter she scoured, as she sang her
doleful ditties, as fair to him as the face of Gladys thrown up from
a golden salver would have been to the cavalry officer? Sooth, I know
not. I only know that a cosey kitchen, with a hot stove and bright
tins, is a pleasant place, and a capacious rocking-chair with long
rockers, in which you are allowed to travel all about the kitchen, is
a comfortable thing, and that hands never look more kindly than when
pressing toothsome dainties upon you, and that if one has nothing
better to do one is rather inclined to repeat such experiences than
not. If, then, it is suggested, very palpably suggested, to one, in
return, that the old butcher’s nag should be hitched into the pung,
with the horse-blanket for a robe, and a sleigh-ride should be given
the generous purveyor of doughnuts and peanuts, could one do less? And
as for scaring Roxy from any repetition of the suggestion by tipping
her over into a crusty snow-drift, one’s mind would have to move a
great deal more quickly than what answered Binns for a mind was able
to do in order to be up to such an opportunity.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Roxy. “The next time, Binns, I’ll take the
big red comforter off my bed for an extra robe, and a couple of hot
flat-irons--or bricks would be better, wouldn’t they?--wrapped in
newspapers, and we’ll be as warm as toast. Say Friday. There’ll be a
first-rate moon. And we’ll have a real egg-and-cider flip with the hot
stove-lifter in it when we get back.”
“If--if--he’ll let me have the horse,” said Binns, doubtfully, and not
with radiating pleasure.
“Oh, of course he will. Now you put the blanket on him and come in, and
we’ll have some hot hash--I’ve got some left over all ready to warm
up--and a little taste of sangaree.”
If I should say that Roxy’s sangaree was made of vinegar and hot
water and brown sugar and nutmeg and other like substances, you would
not believe how Binns smacked his lips over it; so what is the use
of saying anything of the sort? But it is true that Binns went away
repeating to himself, “Well, for getting sunthin outer northing, she’s
a beater!” And so I am sure--in view of Binns--she was.
When--hardly knowing how to help it, Roxy having taken it so for
granted, feeling that he was driven by an inexorable fate when Roxy
said that on Monday the moon would be good, as if the moon wasn’t
always good--Binns asked for the horse the third time, his master
slapped him on the back with a force that sent him half across the
shop. “Well, Binns,” said he, “so you’ve got a girl, you sly dog! I
never thought you’d muster face enough for that. Have the old horse
and welcome, there’s no danger of fast driving when two folks are in
love.” During this kindly if not altogether delicate address, Binns
was pink and purple, yellow, green, blue, and white, by turns, with
fright, with shame, with gratified vanity, with a sense of manly power,
but, above everything else, with a prevailing awe and terror of it all,
anyway, as the full meaning of his master’s words overcame him, and
the gulfs of the future yawned before him. To eat Roxy’s turnovers
was one thing--to marry her was quite another. The possibility had not
occurred to him before, only a vague consciousness of the impossibility
of anything else was beginning to oppress him--all the more vaguely,
perhaps, because of his extreme unwillingness to utter anything of the
sort even to himself.
If Binns had not had to stop at the house for the dinner order, it is
doubtful if he would have seen Roxy that day. But “there was no going
back on the shop,” he said to himself, and, looking like a sheep, he
went prepared to take the order for beef.
“Roxy!” the old gardener called, opening the door--for Binns, on the
idea of getting it over with, was a little earlier than common, and
Roxy was not upon the outposts as usual--“here’s your young man!”
“Roxy!” cried the mischievous and vulgar Kitty, “here’s your feller!”
“You go along!” said Roxy, making her appearance, and wiping her hands
on her pink print apron. And there stood Binns, as pink as the apron;
and he stammered something about to-night at half-past seven sharp,
and hurried off, forgetting all about the order. He had to come back,
of course, and he found Roxy sitting on the edge of a water-pail inside
the storm-door, with her pink apron thrown over her pink face, sobbing
fit to break her heart.
“Why--why--Roxy--why, what’s the matter, Roxy?” he exclaimed. But Roxy
only sobbed, the sob none the less affecting to a tender-hearted hearer
because broken by a hiccough. “Why, Roxy--why, what on earth--has
anybody been a-hurting of you? Why don’t you tell me?”
But Roxy’s sobs still preserved the secret.
Mr. Binns really began to feel bad himself. What man unmoved can see
lovely woman shed tears? “Come now, Roxy, don’t you be a-fretting,” he
urged. “You just wipe your eyes and tell me all about it.”
“Oh! No! I--I can’t.”
“Oh, come now, Roxy.”
“It’s--it’s--that hateful--that--oh, I can’t--that spiteful
Kitty--a-calling you my feller.”
“Well,” said Binns, “ain’t I?”
Wretched Binns! To have taken pains not to call Roxy _dear_, to tell
her to wipe her eyes, not her bright eyes, and to be caught in this
unguarded way by three chance words! It was all over now; he was in for
it, he saw plainly; he might as well give up handsomely. And yet--he
couldn’t. All that he could do was to take to his heels and clip down
the steps and into the pung and drive away as if Wild Ladies--or
something else--were after him. It was Roxy’s voice that was after him,
shrill as a view-halloo: “Oh, Binns! A tenderloin roast! First cut!
Don’t forget--ten pounds--”
But Binns had to face the music that night or else Mr. McMasters would
have to get another butcher-boy, as otherwise he would not dare face
Roxy to-morrow, and there had been too much trouble from people needing
employment in those overcrowded days for him to give up his place for
a trifle. Well, he would go. And he would say, “Roxy, now let’s be
friends, two friends, two fellers together, two folks bound to have
a good sleigh-ride, with no sparking about it, no nonsense, no--you
know--no spooning. You’re a first-rate girl, and I don’t know such a
hand at turnovers in all the kitchens I see; but that’s no reason we
should be a couple of fools with nothing to be fools on. If I was in
the marrying way, there’s nobody I wouldn’t marry quicker ’n you,” and
here he knew his conscience would twinge him, but he would say it. “But
I ain’t, and you ain’t, and so we’ll just continue the services as we
were going on before.”
And did he say it? Did Binns say it? Not a word of it! Roxy was at the
gate, all alert, peering out, with the bright red comforter over her
arm; and running back for the hot bricks, she had whisked into that
pung, and tucked the comforter about them, and chirruped to the old
nag, all in a moment, and Binns found himself slipping along the road
without a word, but--I am ashamed to tell it--with a shrewd suspicion
that somehow he had better not lean back, for that was Roxy’s arm
behind him.
“I declare!” said Roxy. “Splendid sleighing, splendid moonlight, warm
as toast, and your--your--you know who--beside you, a-driving as if he
could turn round on the point of a pin--I don’t know as any one needs
to be any happier.”
Perhaps the compliment on his driving was soothing to Binns’s perturbed
soul; but he was naturally reticent, and at that moment he did not
commit himself. One thing was safe--music; and presently he had piped
up a warlike song:
“Ne’er shall oppressors brave us,
Or foreign power enslave us;
Our stripes and stars shall wave us
To glory or the tomb!
Hark! ’tis the war-trump sounding!”
followed by another effort indicative of the leadings of his fancy,
whose refrain rang:
“Pride of the pirate’s heart!”
This failure of Binns to improve his opportunity evidently struck no
chill to Roxy’s ardor. They were approaching Trimble’s Hollow, where
a bridge crossed the frozen mill-stream, and Binns leaned forward
for the whip in order to accelerate their motion--one could not say
speed--when suddenly Roxy flung herself a little on one side, crying
out, “No, no, now, you mustn’t begin that!”
“Mustn’t begin what?” said Binns, gruffly.
“Kissing me at every bridge we come to, just as all the other boys do.
It’s something I never did approve of.”
“Nor I nuther,” said Binns. But what if you don’t approve of a
thing--when a rosy cup of wine is held to your lips, and the fire
tingles there, and the color sparkles, and the aroma is that of a
garden of flowers under your nose, do you always have the strength of
mind to set that cup down instantly? Instantly; for the man as well
as the woman who hesitates is lost. And Binns, with those sparkling
eyes sparkling into his, that rosy cheek close beside his own, those
wholesome rosy lips--I am sure that neither you nor I would have done
the like--but Binns was only Binns. And what you have done once it is
so easy to do again. Before they reached home, that wicked Binns--the
poor guileless little fellow--felt himself quite on the way to become
what, in his ignorance of the existence of Don Giovanni, stood for the
same thing. But as for Roxy, she felt very well satisfied with herself
and her excursion. Binns was hers; he himself had said it that morning;
and on the sleigh-ride that evening he had conducted very much as, in
her imagination and belief, all lovers should conduct. The horse was
blanketed at the hitching-post, and Binns was brought in whether he
would or no, and some sequestered turkey-bones were grilled, and a flip
was made, and there had been daring possession taken of a mince-pie,
the goodly share of which transformed into a part of Binns might have
caused a procession of the ghosts of all his grandmothers since the
Flood to walk across his counterpane that night. And Binns ate and
drank, and actually made several little jokes, and apropos of the
pastry he sang:
“When Washington was but a boy
As big as you or I,
He climbed his mother’s cupboard,
And he stole her apple-pie,”
appearing to Roxy as he sang as delightful a personage as an end man.
And when he went away Roxy bent and put her arms about his neck, and
gave him a good fair kiss on his mouth, as any girl should kiss her
sweetheart.
It was not in these days Binns dealt Roxy the hearty smack, and
received the no less hearty slap in return; that was when smacks and
slaps meant nothing, and in the innocence of his heart Binns was
treating Roxy as he did most of the other kitchen girls upon his
rounds. Later on, when the nature of Roxy’s attentions, and of her
intentions too, became more pointed, these little occurrences were
susceptible of misconstruction; and Binns had even been embarrassed
as to the return he should make for her tarts and jellies, without,
however, being able to forego the dainties offered by the assiduous
charmer. But now--well, if one must be kissed, Roxy’s was a sweet and
wholesome mouth, and that whip of frothy cream with plum preserve at
the bottom of it was sweet and wholesome too.
It was generally understood in the household now that Roxy and Binns
were “keeping company,” and no one was surprised to see Roxy always,
in the afternoon hours, with a piece of white cloth in her hand,
sometimes a part of what appeared to be an elaborate trousseau made
chiefly of tucks and insertings and edgings, sometimes a table-cloth
she was hemming, or towels she was fringing, with a pride of possession
that needed no bashful concealment. She had a sewing-machine of her own
in her attic chamber, and who would have had the heart to stop its low
melodious thunder, long after every soul in the house was in bed? If
it were Gladys, softly stitching folds of lace on sheer lawn, and you
saw the light in her lattice, she would indeed have been a subject of
romantic interest.
It was not exactly a pleasant thing, all this unreserve of Roxy’s.
And it was really a relief to know that it had its side of maidenly
delicacy and diffidence. This was exhibited in some faint degree when
one afternoon Binns, who had been belated, stopped at the door, with a
cargo of up-country calves, to take the order for next day’s provision,
and suddenly there was a hurrying and scurrying, and Roxy was hiding
something white and bunchy under her apron, and then throwing it under
the table, very red in the face herself, half giggling, half crying,
and Kitty, making a dive, was drawing the article from its temporary
refuge, and holding it up in the face of all creation.
“What’s that?” said Binns.
“Oh my, Kitty! Oh, don’t! How can you, Kitty? Ain’t you ’shamed?” cried
Roxy. And up went the apron across the hair, making a muss of all the
crimps that had cost her an hour over kerosene lamp and slate-pencil
when the kitchen work was done.
“Why, what’s all the fuss about that?” said Binns, good-naturedly, with
Kitty’s contagious laugh.
“As if you didn’t know!” said Kitty.
“I don’t see anything particular in a cotton bag,” said Binns.
“It’s house-keeping goods, you stupid!” cried Kitty. “Isn’t it, Roxy?”
“Well, what if it is?”
“Oh, Binns!” cried Roxy, pulling down the apron and showing a face
where the mismated eyes were full of liquid brightness, and the ruddy
cheeks were redder still with blushes. “It’s--it’s ours!”
“Ours!”
“And I’ve got a dozen of them!”
“A dozen--”
“I’ve a dozen of everything,” cried Roxy, exultantly, all barriers
burned away, “except towels, and I’ve six dozen of them. I sent up to
the great sale where Rivers is running linen goods against Black’s
running of gloves, and got ’em for ninepence apiece. Think of that!”
A long whistle escaped from Binns’s pursed-up lips, round as which his
eyes had opened, and then, without another syllable, the astonished
bridegroom and prospective householder darted down the back steps and
into his cart, and galloped away, looking as nearly like one of the
calves inside the rack as a human being could.
It must have been a rather tremendous moment for Binns. Up to that
interview with one of the dozen of them he had been comparatively a
free man, with nothing definitely pledged, with everything that was
really decisive so far away that he could look at it without shutting
his eyes, and with all the contingencies of time and space between.
But now--house-keeping goods! Bought and paid for! Every article of
them was like a winding-sheet that bound him hand and foot. He felt
himself fettered, with all the world for witness; and even if he could
have escaped otherwise, here in some mysterious manner, a complication
of moral forces, were the great firm of Rivers and the great firm of
Black, in the great metropolis, brought in as restraining influences.
Something like this must have wrought on Binns’s inner consciousness as
nothing ever did before, for he wound himself up to the pitch of coming
that very evening for a voluntary and unappointed call upon Roxy, who,
sitting on the back steps--for it was late in the spring--had just put
the last thread that she could see into her hemstitching.
“Roxy,” said Binns, after a preliminary skirmish, “you’re a great
seamstress. But don’t you think, say--that--that this is a little
previous?”
“I’m so glad you feel so, Binns,” said Roxy, demurely, taking only the
latest usage of the word. And then, looking up with her happiest smile,
she added, “I think it’s a little previous myself.”
“Then what in the world are you doing it for?” blurted out Binns.
“Doing it for?” said Roxy, in amazement. “Why, for our house--for us.”
“Don’t you think we’re a couple of fools, Roxy?” he said, in a
tremulous voice, looking in the direction of Europe or Africa, or
anything but Roxy.
“A--couple--of--fools?”
“Not to let well enough alone,” he contrived to add before his voice
failed and went out.
“I don’t know what you mean, Binns,” said Roxy.
“Well,” said Binns, moistening his lips in order to articulate, “I
mean--you’re very well off as you be, and so’m I at home. And how are
we going--to live--with nothing--to live on? And where? And what’s the
use of all your house-keeping goods?”
“Binns!” cried Roxy. And there was ominous silence for a moment
before the flood-gates of her eloquence were opened. “When we only
want three rooms!” she cried. “And can hire them in your own mother’s
house. And I’ve money enough put by for a carpet and a cooking-stove
and a rocking-chair. And I’ve got a chamber-set of my own, and a
sewing-machine, and a dozen napkins, and six table-cloths, and a dozen
sheets, and a dozen pillow cases, and six dozen towels, and four
blankets, and a comforter I made myself, and patchwork quilts enough
to make a circus tent, and two worked motters, and no end of braided
mats--for I’ve always, always been getting ready! And there’s all
the wedding presents yet, and clothes enough to last me a couple of
years and more, and I’ll never come upon you for any. And you with six
dollars a week and some hens, and I able to run a kitchen-garden myself
while you’re at the shop, and raise all the vegetables we’ll use, and
the ladies of the house here going to give me their clear-starching to
do, anyway, and you to have your clothes mended and your washing done
with no expense, and no board to pay--”
“I don’t pay board now,” stammered Binns, his words a straw upon the
flood.
“And after a little we could take a couple of boarders, you know, or I
would have shoes to bind from the shop, or we could do both, and have
the cheerfulest kind of evenings, and you could get your butcher’s meat
first cost, of course.”
“How many turnovers and whips and jellies and sangarees and hearts and
rounds and doughnuts do you think we could get on six dollars a week?”
asked Binns, with courageous sarcasm.
“Well, I guess we sha’n’t go without doughnuts,” answered Roxy,
scornfully. “And as for turnovers, there’s apple-trees right in your
mother’s yard.”
“But they’re mother’s.”
“What if they are?”
“I guess you’d find out if you went to picking mother’s apples for your
sauce.”
“Well, then, we can set some out ourselves. And as for sangarees, I
rather think I know how to make them as cheap as the next. And maybe
we can keep a cow after a little. _I’ll_ milk her, Binns. And I’m sure
I mean to have a couple of little black pigs. And by-and-by, if we can
manage to raise turkeys, it will be money in our pockets. Yes, Binns,
there isn’t any doubt about it--it will be money in our pockets to go
to house-keeping right away, and I make no question I will have silver
spoons given me here, and money and everything. And then, Binns, you’re
nothing now but McMasters’s butcher-boy--but then you’ll be a married
man--McMasters’s man; and they won’t be calling you by your given name,
and ordering you round. You’ll be somebody, and receive consideration;
and I think the sooner we set the day the better, on account of getting
the garden started. What do you say to this day fortnight? That’ll give
me time for the cake.”
“I--I’ll see,” cried the agonized Binns, who may have felt as if an
anaconda had swallowed him. And he stood up and listened to a lad
whistling as he went up the road unseen behind the high garden wall,
his hands in his pockets, a free spirit, while he--
He turned and looked at Roxy. She was not attractive-looking, she
was only good-natured; her teeth were uneven, although her mouth
was wholesome, her skin was rough and red, her hair was frowsy, her
snapping eyes were not a pair. He sat down upon the steps again, and
hid his face in his hands, and groaned aloud. “I--I don’t see how I can
leave my mother,” he said.
Poor Binns. He was no beauty himself, with his red head and his
freckles, his pale eyes and lips, and his dwarfish stature; and it is
doubtful if another girl in town would have thought of him as lover and
husband. But what did he care for that? He had not thought of another
girl. Nor of this one either. And how it had all come about he was sure
he did not know. It seemed to him as if he were in a dreadful dream,
where one thing happens and another follows without any relation, till
it all becomes a nightmare.
The next day no Binns arrived to take the dinner order. And on the
following day a tall, thin fellow, who looked like Binns pulled out and
flattened, appeared at the storm-door in his place; and on the third
day we learned that Binns was sick in bed at home.
Anything like Roxy’s importance and bustle now was seldom seen in the
house. At first her reddish hue waned, and then she went about her work
with one tear trickling after another along her nose and glittering
suspended on its tip. At last, however, nature gave way, and Roxy sat
down in a corner of the kitchen and gave way too.
“Well, if ever!” said Kitty. “If you ain’t as big a baby as Binns is!”
“I guess you’d cry,” whimpered Roxy, “if--if--your--”
“Well? My--”
“Your--sweetheart was--suffering--at home--and he might as well be in
Egypt, with that mother of his--and you didn’t know--”
“As if ’twas worse for Binns than for the rest of us to have a
toothache or his head hurt him! What on earth are you worrying about
it for, anyway?”
“Because it’s my duty to,” said Roxy, severely. And it being her
afternoon out, she put on her things and stalked up the road to Binns’s
home, where she made herself and her errand known, and remained till
after nightfall; to everybody’s surprise Binns himself returning with
her.