DOROTHY GAINS IN WISDOM
"Why, mother! Why--why--_mother_!" cried the astonished Dorothy, sitting
up in her cot and smiling back into the happy face before her, yet
wondering at its happiness and her own heartlessness, in being glad
while her father was so ill. Then she realized that her neck was very
stiff and that when she tried to turn her head it moved with a painful
wrench, so sank back again, but still gazed at Mrs. Chester with a
grieved amazement.
Seeing which, the lady bent over the cot and kissed the little girl,
then promptly explained:
"You needn't be troubled, dearie, this is the very best thing that could
have happened to us. Your father tired of waiting for you, his head was
dizzy, and when he tried to walk home he fell. They hurried him
here--his uniform showed he was somebody important--and into that
emergency place. There the doctors examined him and they say, O Dorothy
C.! they say that there is a chance, a chance of his sometime _getting
well_! Think of that! John may get well! All those other outside
doctors, that he paid so much to, told him he never could. He'd just
grow worse and worse till--till he died. These don't. They say he has a
chance. He's to stay here and be built up on extra nourishments, for
awhile, and then he's to go into the country and live. Oh! I'm the
happiest woman in Baltimore, this day! And how is my little girl? Though
the nurse tells me there's nothing much the matter with you, and that
you'll be able to go home with me as soon as you have had your
breakfast. Such a late breakfast, Dorothy C., for a schoolgirl! Lucky
it's a Saturday!"
Dorothy had never seen her mother like this. At home, when trifles went
wrong, she was apt to be a bit sharp-tongued and to make life
uncomfortable for father John and their daughter, but now, that this
real trouble had befallen, she was so gay! For, even if there was hope
that the postman might sometime recover, was he not still helpless in a
hospital? And had she forgotten that they had no money except his
salary? which would stop, of course, since he could no longer earn it.
It was certainly strange; and seeing the gravity steal into the childish
face which was so dear to her, mother Martha stooped above it and, now
herself wholly grave, explained:
"My dear, don't think I'm not realizing everything. But, since I've been
once face to face with the possibility that death--_death_--was coming
to our loved one and now learn that he will still live, as long as I do,
maybe, I don't care about anything else. God never shuts one door but He
opens another; and we'll manage. Some way we'll manage, sweetheart, to
care for father John who has so long cared for us. Now, enough of talk.
Here comes a maid with your breakfast; and see. There are your clothes,
as fresh and clean as if I had laundered them myself. Maybe you should
dress yourself before you eat. Then you are to see your father for a few
minutes; and then we'll go home to pack up."
It was long since Mrs. Chester had helped Dorothy to dress, except on
some rare holiday occasion, but she did so now, as if the girl were
still the baby she had found upon her doorstep. She, also, made such
play of the business that the other became even more gay than herself,
and chattered away of all that had befallen her, from her discovery of
the deserted home till now.
Then came the nice breakfast, so heartily enjoyed that the nurse smiled,
knowing there could be nothing seriously amiss with so hungry a patient.
Afterward, a quiet walk through long corridors and spacious halls, from
which they caught glimpses of cots with patients in them, and passed by
wheeled chairs in which convalescents were enjoying a change.
"It's so still! Does nobody ever speak out loud?" whispered Dorothy to
her mother, half-afraid of her own footfalls, though she now wore a pair
of felt slippers in place of the shoes she had yesterday discarded.
"It's the biggest, cleanest, quietest place I could even dream of!"
But Mrs. Chester did not answer, save by a nod and a finger upon lip;
and so following the guide assigned them, they came to one of the open
bridges connecting two of the hospital buildings, and there was father
John, in a rolling chair, wearing a spotless dressing-gown, and holding
out both hands toward them, while his eyes fairly shone with delight. An
orderly, in a white uniform, was pushing the chair along the bridge,
which was so wide and looked down upon such beautiful grounds that it
reminded Dorothy of Bellevieu, and he stopped short at their approach.
He even stepped back a few paces, the better to leave them free for
their interview.
But if there was any emotion to be displayed at that meeting, it was not
of a gloomy sort; and it was almost in his wife's very words that the
postman exclaimed:
"To think I should get impatient, lose my head, tumble down, and--up
into this fine place! Where I've heard the best of news and live like a
lord! Who wouldn't give his legs a rest, for a spell, if he could have
such a chair as this to loll in while another man does his walking for
him! Well, how's the girl? Why, since when have you taken to wearing
slippers so much too big for you? I should think they'd bother you in
walking as much as my limpsy feet did me."
Nothing escaped this cheery hospital patient even now, and before Mrs.
Chester could interpose, Dorothy had told her own tale and how she had
been a hospital patient herself. How now she had been "discharged" and
was ready to go home with all her legs and arms intact, a thing she had
feared might not be the case when she had ventured thither.
"To think I should have been so silly as to believe that poor boy! Or
that, if I had followed his wrong directions, I shouldn't have gotten
here at all. Oh! isn't it beautiful! What makes some of the women dress
all in white and some in blue? When I grow up I believe I'll be a
hospital nurse myself."
"Good idea. Excellent. Stick to it. See if you can make that notion last
as long as that other one about being a great artist; or, yes, the next
scheme was to write books--books that didn't 'preach' but kept folks
laughing all the way through."
"Now, father! You needn't tease, and you haven't answered, about the
different dresses. Do you know, already?" protested Dorothy, kissing his
hand that rested on the arm of his chair.
"Oh! yes, I know. The orderly explained, for I wasn't any wiser than you
before he did. The blue girls are 'probationers,' or under-graduates.
They have to study and take care of cranky sick folks for three whole
years before they can wear those white clothes. Think of that, little
Miss Impatience, before you decide on the business! Three years. That's
a long time to be shut up with aches and pains and groans. But a noble
life. One that needs patience; even more than the Peabody course!"
They all laughed, even Dorothy who was being teased. After any new
experience, it was her propensity immediately to desire to continue the
delightful novelty. After a visit to a famous local picture gallery, she
had returned home fully intent upon becoming an artist who should be,
also, famous. To that end she had wasted any number of cheap pads and
pencils, and had littered her mother's tidy rooms with "sketches"
galore. When she had gone with a schoolmate to a Peabody recital, she
had been seized with the spirit of music and had almost ruined a
naturally sweet voice--as well as the hearers' nerves--by a
self-instructed course of training, which her teasing father had
sometimes likened to a cat concert on a roof. However, upon learning
that it required many years of steady practise and that her life must be
filled with music--music alone--if she ever hoped to graduate from the
Institute, she abandoned the idea and aspired to literature.
So from one ambition to another, her almost too active mind veered; but
her wise guardians allowed it free scope, believing that, soon or late,
it would find the right direction and that for which nature had really
fitted her. The greatest disappointment the postman had felt, concerning
these various experiments, was about the music. He was almost
passionately fond of it, and rarely passed even a street organ without
a brief pause to listen. Except, of course, when he had been upon his
rounds. Then he forced himself past the alluring thing, even if he had
himself to whistle to keep it out of mind. This habit of his had gained
for him the nickname, along his beat, of the "whistling postman"; and,
had he known it, there were many regrets among those who had responded
to his whistle as promptly as to his ring of the bell that they should
hear the cheerful sound no more.
The news of his collapse had quickly spread, for a new postman was
already on his route, and it was only at Bellevieu, where "Johnnie"
would be most missed, that it was not known.
The eagle-gate was shut. Ephraim was not to drive his fat horses through
it that morning, nor for many more to come. During the night Mrs. Cecil
had been taken ill with one of her periodical bronchial attacks, of
which she made so light, but her physician and old Dinah so much. To
them her life seemed invaluable; for they, better than anybody else,
knew of her wide-spread yet half-hidden charities, and they would keep
her safely in her room, as long as this were possible.
After a time, the invalid would take matters into her own hands and
return to her beloved piazza; for she was the only one not frightened by
her own condition, and was wont to declare:
"I shall live just as long, and have just as many aches, as the dear
Lord decrees. When He's through with me here He'll let me know, and all
your fussing, Dinah, won't avail. My father was ninety, my mother
ninety-seven when they died. We're tough old Maryland stock, not easily
killed."
Indeed, frail though Mrs. Cecil looked, it was the fragility of extreme
slenderness rather than health; and it was another pride of Dinah's that
her Miss Betty had still almost the figure of a girl. Occasionally, even
yet, the lady would sit to read with a board strapped across her
shoulders, as she had been used when in her teens, to keep them erect;
and it was her boast that she had kept her "fine shape" simply because
never, in all her life, had she suffered whalebone or corset to
interfere with nature.
This Saturday morning, therefore, a colored boy waited beneath the
eagles, to receive his mistress's mail and to prevent the ringing of the
gate-bell, which might disturb her. In passing him, on her way home,
Dorothy noticed the unusual circumstance and thought how much the
gossip-loving dame would miss her ever-welcome "Johnnie." But she was
now most fully engrossed by her own affairs and did not stop to
enlighten him.
After leaving the hospital, Mrs. Chester and she had gone downtown to
replace the shoes and stockings so recklessly discarded the day before;
Dorothy hobbling along in the felt slippers and declaring that she would
suffer less if she were barefooted. But her mother had answered:
"No, indeed! I'd be ashamed to be seen with such a big girl as you in
that condition. Besides, I must get some new things for John. So, while
I select the nightshirts and wrapper he needs, you go into the shoe
department and buy for yourself."
"Oh, mother! May I? I never bought any of my clothes alone. How nice
and grown-up I feel! May I get just what I like?"
"Yes. Only, at the outside, you must not pay more than two dollars for
the shoes, nor above a quarter for the stockings. I could scold you for
spoiling your old ones, if I were not too thankful about your father to
scold anybody."
So they parted by the elevator in the great store, and with even more
than her native enthusiasm Dorothy plunged into these new delights of
shopping. The clerk first displayed a substantial line of black shoes,
as seemed most suitable to a young girl in the plainest of gingham
frocks; but the small customer would have none of these. Said she:
"No, I don't like that kind. Please show me the very prettiest ties you
have for two dollars a pair," and she nodded her head suggestively
toward a glass case wherein were displayed dainty slippers of varying
hues. There were also white ones among them, and Dorothy remembered that
her chum, Mabel Bruce, had appeared at Sunday school the week before,
wearing such, and had looked "too lovely for words." But then, of
course, Mabel's frock and hat were also white and her father was the
plumber. When Dorothy had narrated the circumstance to father John, and
had sighed that she was "just suffering for white shoes," he had laughed
and declared that:
"Plumbers were the only men rich enough to keep their daughters shod
that way!"
But she saw now that he was mistaken. These beauties which the rather
supercilious clerk was showing her didn't cost a cent more than the
limit she had been allowed. Indeed, they were even less. They were
marked a "special sale," only one dollar ninety-seven cents. Why, she
was saving three whole cents by taking them, as well as pleasing
herself.
The transaction was swiftly closed. White stockings were added to the
purchase, on which, also, the shopper saved another two cents, so that
she felt almost a millionaire as she stepped out of the shoe department
and around to the elevator door, where she was to meet her mother. The
lady promptly arrived but had not finished her own errands; nor, in the
crowd, could she see her daughter's feet and the manner of their
clothing. She simply held out her front-door key to the girl and bade
her hurry home, to put the little house in order for the coming Sabbath.
Thus Dorothy's fear that her mother might disapprove her choice was
allayed for the time being. She would not be sent back to that clerk,
who had jested about the felt slippers in a manner the young shopper
felt was quite ill-bred, to ask him to exchange the white shoes for
black ones. So she stepped briskly forth, keeping her own gaze fixed
admiringly upon the snowy tips which peeped out from beneath her short
skirts, and for a time all went well. She managed to avoid collision
with the bargain-morning shoppers all about her and she wholly failed to
see the amused faces of those who watched her.
On the whole, Dorothy C. was as sensible a girl as she was a bright one;
but there's nobody perfect, and she was rather unduly vain of her
shapely hands and feet. They were exceedingly small and well-formed, and
though the hands had not been spared in doing the rough tasks of life,
which fall to the lot of humble bread-earners, her father John had
insisted that his child's feet should be well cared for. He, more than
Martha, had seen in their adopted daughter traces of more aristocratic
origin than their own; and he had never forgotten the possibility that
sometime she might be reclaimed.
Usually Dorothy walked home from any downtown trip, to market or
otherwise, and set out briskly to do so now. But, all at once, a
horrible pain started in the toes of her right foot! She shook the toes,
angrily, as if they were to blame for the condition of things; and thus
resting all her weight upon her left foot that, likewise, mutinied and
sent a thrill of torture through its entire length. Did white shoes
always act that way?
She stopped short and addressed the misbehaving members in her sternest
tones:
"What's the matter with you to make you hurt so? Never before has a new
shoe done it; I've just put them on and walked out of the store as
comfortably as if they were old ones. Hmm! I guess it's all imagination.
They aren't quite, not _quite_ so big as my old ones were, but they fit
ex-quis-ite-ly! Ouch!"
"Excruciatingly" would have been the better word, as Dorothy presently
realized; but, also, came the happy thought that she had "saved" enough
money on her purchases to pay her car-fare home. She knew that mother
Martha would consider her extravagant to ride when she had no market
basket to carry but--Whew! Ride she must! That pain, it began to make
her feel positively ill! Also, it rendered her entrance of the car a
difficult matter; so that, instead of the light spring up the step she
was accustomed to give, she tottered like an old woman and was most
grateful for the conductor's help as he pulled her in. She sank into the
corner seat with a look of agony on her pretty face and her aching toes
thrust straight out before her, in a vain seeking for relief; nor did it
add to her composure to see the glances of others in the car follow hers
to the projecting feet while a smile touched more faces than one.
Poor Dorothy never forgot her first purchase, "all alone"; and her
vanity received a pretty severe lesson that day. So severe that as she
finally limped to the steps of No. 77 she sat down on the bottom one,
unable to ascend them till she had removed her shoes. The misery which
followed this act was, at first, so overpowering that she closed her
eyes, the better to endure it; and when she opened them again there
stood a man before her, looking at her so sharply that she was
frightened; and who, when she would have risen, stopped her by a gesture
and a smile that were even more alarming than his stare.
"Well, what is it?" demanded the little girl, suddenly realizing that in
this broad daylight, upon an open street, nobody would dare to hurt her.
The stranger's unlovely smile deepened into a gruff laughter, as he
answered:
"Humph! You don't appear to know me. But I know you. I know you better
than the folks who've brought you up. I can help you to a great fortune
if you'll let me. Hey?"
"You--can? Oh! how!" cried Dorothy, springing up, and in her amazement
at this statement forgetting her aching feet. "A fortune!" And that was
the very thing that father John now needed.