AN ERRAND OF MYSTERY.
It was some months afterward. Cherokee, gowned in violet and gold, was
on her way to the Chrysanthemum Show, where she felt sure of meeting
some of her friends. She was walking briskly, when she was importuned
by an old man for help. Dropping some coins into his entreating palm,
she passed on.
How little we know whom we may meet when we leave our doors, and before
entering them again. Often one’s whole life is changed between the exit
and entrance of a home.
“Ah, my dear Mrs. Milburn, how pleased I am to meet you here. Are you
out for pleasure?”
Whose voice could that be but Willard Frost’s, sounding in her ears
like clods on a coffin.
“Yes, I presume one would call it pleasure, going to the Chrysanthemum
Show and to get some flowers for hospital patients. You know the sick
love these little attentions.”
“There, that’s an illustration of what I am contemplating. Do you know
I think you are just the person I wanted to meet this morning?”
“Why?” she asked, indifferently.
“Because you can do a great kindness as well as give pleasure to some
one who is in need of both, if you will?”
“You want me to help some one who is in distress?”
“I do. Will you?”
“How much does the person need?”
“Your presence would be more good than any service you could render.”
“Then I will go and get my husband to accompany us. He is charitable,
and likes to do these things with me.”
“I have just come from his studio; he is very busy now, and I think he
would prefer not being interrupted. I have been down all the morning
giving a few criticisms on that ‘Seaweed Gatherer.’ That is truly a
work of art. But surely you will not refuse me that friendly service.”
“Where would you have me go, and whom to see?”
“A young girl who is dying without a kind word.”
“A woman--has she no friends or means?”.
“I am the only friend she has, the pure, noble, unfortunate,” he said,
aiming at tenderness.
“Indeed, I never refuse to help anyone, when I can, but really I prefer
someone to be the bearer.”
“Yes, but she has requested me to bring you; this desire comes from a
dying human being.”
“But, pray what does she know of me; I do not understand?” she asked,
disapprovingly. “You might get yourself and me into a scrape.”
“She has been a model for Robert as well as myself; you have seen her
at the studio, and she fairly worships your beauty, your gentleness.”
“Strange my husband has never mentioned her reduced condition. I fail
to recall her,” and she drew back with a sinking of heart; she wanted
to do what was right, always.
“Oh, think again. I am sure you saw her when you and Robert came to see
my ‘Madonna’; I was working on her then.”
“Yes, I do recall a beautiful girl who was posing that day. If it is
from her, this request, I will go.”
“Thank you, thank you; she will be so nearly happy, for she has never
failed to speak of you whenever I have seen her. I shall never forget
how she raved when she saw you, and a question she asked.”
“What was that?”
“‘Does her heart fulfill the promise of her eyes?’ she asked me, as
though the answer was of great importance.
“I asked what she meant.
“She answered, ‘They promise to make some one happy; to remove all
troubles and cares, making a heavenly paradise upon this earth?’ She
wanted to see you, so that you might swear that this promise would be
kept.”
“She must be an enthusiast,” Cherokee reflected, losing all sense of
the strangeness of this question for the time.
They started on in the direction that Frost wanted to go. She felt as
though she was walking through yellow rustling leaves, as she had done
back in her lesson-days, when she was trying to steal away from the
teacher or playmates on the lawn.
More than once, as she hurried along, Cherokee asked herself if
she were not imitating the leopard, and developing another spot of
foolishness.
When they reached the place there was nothing strange or unusual about
it. He opened the door and walked in, as though he was accustomed to
going there; then he softly pushed an inner door and peeped in.
“She is sleeping now, poor tired soul; her greatest blessing is
sleep”--offering Cherokee a chair, “we will wait awhile.”
She nervously looked about her. Her beautiful eyes, so pure, so clear,
so unshadowed by any knowledge of sin, knew nothing of the misery that
had been in the enclosure of these walls.
Presently a frail, crooked woman came in, abruptly. Cold and bitter was
her gaze:
“Why did you not come sooner?” she demanded of Frost, sternly.
“It was impossible; am I not in good time?”
“Yes, for you a very good time--she is dead,” and a short, quick gasp
came from the withered frame.
“Do you mean it?” he said, looking at the woman who seemed quite
overcome, in spite of her hard, cruel face.
“Go and see for yourself,” and she pointed to the room he had entered
before.
Cherokee stood silent, and bowed, as became the house of mourning.
“No, if she is dead, we need not go in,” Frost said, quickly.
But the old woman recoiled a step: “I understand you are ashamed of
her.”
“No, not that, but it is now too late to grant her request.”
“I would know it, and it would do no harm for me to know that you could
keep your word.”
“Then we will go in; you lead the way.”
Cherokee hesitated, and the miserable woman, seeing this, cried in
sudden excitement:
“Is your wife afraid of her, now that she is dead?”
Willard Frost, at the mention of wife, started. He had, after all,
forgotten to explain that to Cherokee.
“Do not heed her wild fancy,” he whispered, as he motioned her to go in
front.
Instinctively the hag folded her wasted hands; most piteously she
raised her bewildered eyes, imploringly, to Cherokee.
“Won’t you please go in, for if she can see from the other world to
this, she will be pleased.”
“If it pleases you, I will go in for your sake.” As they entered the
waiting doorway, Frost walked to the low lounge--he was more deeply
moved than he cared to show. There, before him, lay the pulseless clay,
the features horribly distorted, the hands and limbs terribly drawn.
“This,” he said to Cherokee, “was caused by paralysis. Nature was once
a kind mother to her.”
He shook his head, musingly, and ran his fingers over the sleeper’s
hands. At first he did it with a sort of tentativeness, as if waiting
for something that eluded him. All at once he leaned over and kissed
the hands--he seemed moved by a powerful impulse. Through his mind
there ran a thousand incidents of his life, one growing upon the other
without sequence; phantasmagoria, out of the scene-house of memory.
He saw a vast stretch of lonely forest in the white coverlet of winter,
through which a man followed a desolate track. He saw a scanty home,
yet mirthful, and warm from the winter wood. Again he saw that home,
when even in the summer height it was chilled and blighted. Then,
there, he saw a child with red-gold curls, and he wondered how fate
would deal with that baby--a laughing, dimpled romper, without a name.
These are a few of the pictures he saw.
Cherokee, ever gentle in her ministries, spoke kind words to the old
woman, whom she supposed was the mother.
She had come too late for another good; the dead do not answer even
the most loving, the sweetest voices, and this girl had joined the
mysteries. So, what was left but to offer prayers and tears for the
living?
While Cherokee talked, the woman sat very still, her face ruled to
quietness. At length she said:
“She is better dead.”
The comforter looked surprised; what a strange way for a mother to
speak.
“Let us go, now,” urged Frost, impulsively. As they passed out, he
placed money in the woman’s hand.
“Put her away nicely.”
Motioning him back, the woman caught his arm and whispered:
“By the right of a life-long debt, I now ask for peace.”
“Is that all?” he sneered.
“And I hope you will be a better man,” she added.
They were on their way home. A flush crept slowly up Willard Frost’s
face, then, heaving a sigh and quickly repenting of it, he tried to
laugh, to drive away the impression of it.
It had been dismal within, but it was lovely without. The gray
transparency of the atmosphere lent a glamour to the autumn hues, like
flimsy gauze over the face of some Eastern beauty, and the seductive
harmony of the colors acted like magic music on the spirit.
“That dead girl was once the most exquisite piece of flesh I ever saw.
This is truly a legend of the beautiful. She supported herself by
posing for artists, as long as her beauty lasted,” so Frost began his
story, “but six months ago she was stricken with paralysis, which so
misused her that it took the bread from her mouth, and but for me they
would have starved.
“I had great sympathy for the girl, and from her face I had made many
hundreds, so I considered it my duty to look after her in this dark
hour of affliction.”
“That was just and noble,” said Cherokee, forgetting for a moment the
record of the man.
He went on: “She loved me devotedly, though she knew I was married,
and during her illness she fancied she would be perfectly happy if she
convinced herself that I was not ashamed to present her to my wife.”
“Then it was your wife she wanted to see, and I was to be presented
under false colors,” she demanded, rather sternly.
“It would have been all the same to her, she never would have been
wiser.”
“Mr. Frost, I believe you would do anything, and let me say, just here,
my courtesy to you is not real. I do it because, strange to say, my
husband likes you.”
Just then they reached her stopping place. There was considerable
commotion on the car, Frost caught her arm:
“Wait a moment, until they put that drunken brute off.”
Suddenly, Cherokee wrenched herself away, and stepped quickly,
unassisted, to the street.
In front of her was the man they had assisted from the car. A gentle
arm was passed through his:
“Come, Robert, we will go home together.”
She never looked back, although Willard Frost stood and watched them, a
mingled smile of pity and triumph upon his sinister face.