The notion of a dance for the following night to celebrate the
success of the house in the coaching parade came to Mrs. Milray over a
welsh-rarebit which she gave at the close of the evening. The party was
in the charge of Gregory, who silently served them at their orgy with an
austerity that might have conspired with the viand itself against their
dreams, if they had not been so used to the gloom of his ministrations.
He would not allow the waitresses to be disturbed in their evening
leisure, or kept from their sleep by such belated pleasures; and when
he had provided the materials for the rarebit, he stood aloof, and left
their combination to Mrs. Milray and her chafing-dish.
She had excluded Clementina on account of her youth, as she said to
one of the fall and winter months, who came in late, and noticed
Clementina's absence with a “Hello! Anything the matter with the Spirit
of Summer?” Clementina had become both a pet and a joke with these
months before the parade was over, and now they clamored together, and
said they must have her at the dance anyway. They were more tepidly
seconded by the spring and summer months, and Mrs. Milray said, “Well,
then, you'll have to all subscribe and get her a pair of dancing
slippers.” They pressed her for her meaning, and she had to explain
the fact of Clementina's destitution, which that additional fold of
cheese-cloth had hidden so well in the coaching tableau that it had
never been suspected. The young men entreated her to let them each buy a
pair of slippers for the Spirit of Summer, which she should wear in turn
for the dance that she must give each of them; and this made Mrs. Milray
declare that, no, the child should not come to the dance at all, and
that she was not going to have her spoiled. But, before the party broke
up, she promised that she would see what could be done, and she put it
very prettily to the child the next day, and waited for her to say, as
she knew she must, that she could not go, and why. They agreed that the
cheese-cloth draperies of the Spirit of Summer were surpassingly fit for
the dance; but they had to agree that this still left the question of
slippers untouched. It remained even more hopeless when Clementina tried
on all of Mrs. Milray's festive shoes, and none of her razorpoints
and high heels would avail. She went away disappointed, but not yet
disheartened; youth does not so easily renounce a pleasure pressed to
the lips; and Clementina had it in her head to ask some of the table
girls to help her out. She meant to try first with that big girl who had
helped her put on the shoeman's bronze slippers; and she hurried through
the office, pushing purblindly past Fane without looking his way, when
he called to her in the deference which he now always used with her,
“Here's a package here for you, Clementina--Miss Claxon,” and he gave
her an oblong parcel, addressed in a hand strange to her. “Who is
it from?” she asked, innocently, and Fane replied with the same
ingenuousness: “I'm sure I don't know.” Afterwards he thought of having
retorted, “I haven't opened it,” but still without being certain that he
would have had the courage to say it.
Clementina did not think of opening it herself, even when she was alone
in her little room above Mrs. Atwell's, until she had carefully felt
it over, and ascertained that it was a box of pasteboard, three or four
inches deep and wide, and eight or ten inches long. She looked at the
address again, “Miss Clementina Claxon,” and at the narrow notched
ribbon which tied it, and noted that the paper it was wrapped in was
very white and clean. Then she sighed, and loosed the knot, and the
paper slipped off the box, and at the same time the lid fell off, and
the shoe man's bronze slippers fell out upon the floor.
Either it must be a dream or it must be a joke; it could not be both
real and earnest; somebody was trying to tease her; such flattery of
fortune could not be honestly meant. But it went to her head, and she
was so giddy with it as she caught the slippers from the floor, and ran
down to Mrs. Atwell, that she knocked against the sides of the narrow
staircase.
“What is it? What does it mean? Who did it?” she panted, with the
slippers in her hand. “Whe'e did they come from?” She poured out the
history of her trying on these shoes, and of her present need of them
and of their mysterious coming, to meet her longing after it had almost
ceased to be a hope. Mrs. Atwell closed with her in an exultation hardly
short of a clapping the hands. Her hair was gray, and the girl's hair
still hung in braids down her back, but they were of the same age in
their transport, which they referred to Mrs. Milray, and joined with
her in glad but fruitless wonder who had sent Clementina the shoes.
Mrs. Atwell held that the help who had seen the girl trying them on had
clubbed together and got them for her at the time; and had now given
them to her for the honor she had done the Middlemount House in the
parade. Mrs. Milray argued that the spring and summer months had
secretly dispatched some fall and winter month to ransack the stores at
Middlemount Centre for them. Clementina believed that they came from the
shoe man himself, who had always wanted to send them, in the hope that
she would keep them, and had merely happened to send them just then
in that moment of extremity when she was helpless against them. Each
conjecture involved improbabilities so gross that it left the field free
to any opposite theory.
Rumor of the fact could not fail to go through the house, and long
before his day's work was done it reached the chef, and amused him as a
piece of the Boss's luck. He was smoking his evening pipe at the kitchen
door after supper, when Clementina passed him on one of the many errands
that took her between Mrs. Milray's room and her own, and he called to
her: “Boss, what's this I hear about a pair o' glass slippas droppin'
out the sky int' youa lap?”
Clementina was so happy that she thought she might trust him for once,
and she said, “Oh, yes, Mr. Mahtin! Who do you suppose sent them?” she
entreated him so sweetly that it would have softened any heart but the
heart of a tease.
“I believe I could give a pootty good guess if I had the facts.”
Clementina innocently gave them to him, and he listened with a
well-affected sympathy.
“Say Fane fust told you about 'em?”
“Yes. 'He'e's a package for you,' he said. Just that way; and he
couldn't tell me who left it, or anything.”
“Anybody asked him about it since?”
“Oh, yes! Mrs. Milray, and Mrs. Atwell, and Mr. Atwell, and everybody.”
“Everybody.” The chef smiled with a peculiar droop of one eye. “And he
didn't know when the slippas got into the landlo'd's box?”
“No. The fust thing he knew, the' they we'e!” Clementina stood
expectant, but the chef smoked on as if that were all there was to say,
and seemed to have forgotten her. “Who do you think put them thea, Mr.
Mahtin?”
The chef looked up as if surprised to find her still there. “Oh! Oh,
yes! Who d' I think? Why, I know, Boss. But I don't believe I'd betta
tell you.”
“Oh, do, Mr. Mahtin! If you knew how I felt about it--”
“No, no! I guess I betta not. 'Twouldn't do you any good. I guess I
won't say anything moa. But if I was in youa place, and I really wanted
to know whe'e them slippas come from--”
“I do--I do indeed--”
The chef paused before he added, “I should go at Fane. I guess what he
don't know ain't wo'th knowin', and I guess nobody else knows anything.
Thea! I don't know but I said mo'n I ought, now.”
What the chef said was of a piece with what had been more than once in
Clementina's mind; but she had driven it out, not because it might not
be true, but because she would not have it true. Her head drooped;
she turned limp and springless away. Even the heart of the tease was
touched; he had not known that it would worry her so much, though he
knew that she disliked the clerk.
“Mind,” he called after her, too late, “I ain't got no proof 't he done
it.”
She did not answer him, or look round. She went to her room, and sat
down in the growing dusk to think, with a hot lump in her throat.
Mrs. Atwell found her there an hour later, when she climbed to the
chamber where she thought she ought to have heard Clementina moving
about over her own room.
“Didn't know but I could help you do youa dressin',” she began, and then
at sight of the dim figure she broke off: “Why, Clem! What's the matte?
Ah' you asleep? Ah' you sick? It's half an hour of the time and--”
“I'm not going,” Clementina answered, and she did not move.
“Not goin'! Why the land o'--”
“Oh, I can't go, Mrs. Atwell. Don't ask me! Tell Mrs. Milray, please!”
“I will, when I got something to tell,” said Mrs. Atwell. “Now, you just
say what's happened, Clementina Claxon!” Clementina suffered the woful
truth to be drawn from her. “But you don't know whether it's so or not,”
the landlady protested.
“Yes, yes, I do! It was the last thing I thought of, and the chef
wouldn't have said it if he didn't believe it.”
“That's just what he would done,” cried Mrs. Atwell. “And I'll give him
such a goin' ova, for his teasin', as he ain't had in one while. He just
said it to tease. What you goin' to say to Mrs. Milray?”
“Oh, tell her I'm not a bit well, Mrs. Atwell! My head does ache,
truly.”
“Why, listen,” said Mrs. Atwell, recklessly. “If you believe he done
it--and he no business to--why don't you just go to the dance, in 'em,
and then give 'em back to him after it's ova? It would suv him right.”
Clementina listened for a moment of temptation, and then shook her head.
“It wouldn't do, Mrs. Atwell; you know it wouldn't,” she said, and Mrs.
Atwell had too little faith in her suggestion to make it prevail. She
went away to carry Clementina's message to Mrs. Milray, and her task
was greatly eased by the increasing difficulty Mrs. Milray had begun
to find, since the way was perfectly smoothed for her, in imagining the
management of Clementina at the dance: neither child nor woman, neither
servant nor lady, how was she to be carried successfully through it,
without sorrow to herself or offence to others? In proportion to the
relief she felt, Mrs. Milray protested her irreconcilable grief; but
when the simpler Mrs. Atwell proposed her going and reasoning with
Clementina, she said, No, no; better let her alone, if she felt as she
did; and perhaps after all she was right.