FOR some occult reason, the successful merchant in small towns and
villages is the confidant, if not father-confessor, of a large number of
his patronesses. It may be that his flattering air of personal interest,
assumed for purely business purposes, loosens not only the purse-strings
but the spring that works the panorama of private affairs. Or it may be
an idiosyncrasy of some classes of the mind feminine, to make no
distinction between a bargain counter and a confessional. Whatever the
cause, many an honest merchant can testify that it is no uncommon thing
for a woman to air her domestic troubles while she buys a skirt braid,
or to drag out her family skeleton with the sample of sewing silk she
wishes to match.
The Cross-Roads had had its share of confidences, although as a rule the
women who disposed of their butter and eggs in trade to Bowser were of
the patient sort, grown silent under the repressing influence of
secluded farm life. Still, Bowser, quick to see and keen to judge, had
gained a remarkable insight into neighbourhood affairs in fifteen years'
dealings with his public. "All things come to him who waits" if he wears
an air of habitual interest and has a sympathetic way of saying "Ah!
indeed!"
It was with almost the certainty of foreknowledge that Bowser counted
his probable patrons as he spread out his valentines on the morning of
the fourteenth of February. He had selected his comic ones with a view
to the feud that existed between the Hillock and Bond families, well
knowing that a heavy cross-fire of ugly caricatures and insulting rhymes
would be kept up all day by the younger members of those warring
households. It was with professional satisfaction he smiled over the
picture of a fat man with a donkey's head, which he was as sure would be
sent by Pete Hillock to old man Bond, as if he had heard Pete's penny
dropping into the cash-drawer.
"Nothing like supplying the demand," he chuckled.
It was with more than professional interest that he arranged the
lace-paper valentines in the show-case, for the little embossed Cupids
had a strong ally in this rustic haberdasher, whose match-making
propensities had helped many a little romance to a happy issue. Drawing
on his fund of private information, acquired in his role of confidant to
the neighbourhood gossips, he set out his stock of plump red hearts,
forget-me-nots, and doves; and with each addition to the festal array he
nodded his head knowingly over the particular courtship it was designed
to speed, or the lovers' quarrel that he hoped might be ended thereby.
* * * * *
There had been two weeks of "February thaw." Melting snow had made the
mud hub-deep in places. There was a velvety balminess in the touch of
the warm wind, and faint, elusive odours, prophetic of spring, rose from
the moist earth and sap-quickened trees.
The door of the Cross-Road store stood open, and behind it, at the
post-office desk, sat Marion Holmes, the old miller's granddaughter.
Just out of college and just into society, she had come to spend Lent in
the old place that had welcomed her every summer during her childhood.
The group around the stove stared covertly at the pretty girl in the
tailor-made gown, failing to recognise in the tall, stylish figure any
trace of the miller's "little Polly," who used to dangle her feet from
the counter and munch peppermint drops, while she lisped nursery rhymes
for their edification.
She had come for the letters herself, she told Bowser, because she was
expecting a whole bag full, and her grandfather's rheumatism kept him at
home. Installed in the post-office chair, behind the railing that
enclosed the sanctum of pigeon-holes, she amused herself by watching the
customers while she waited for the mail-train.
"It's like looking into a kaleidoscope," she told Bowser in one of the
pauses of trade. "Every one who comes in gives me a different point of
view and combination of opinions. Now, those valentines! I was thinking
what old-fashioned things those little lace-paper affairs are, and
wondering how anybody could possibly get up any thrills over them, when
in walked Miss Anastasia Dill. Prim and gentle as ever, isn't she? Still
getting her styles from _Godey's Lady's Books_ of the early sixties; she
must draw on their antiquated love stories for her sentiment, too, for
she seemed lost in admiration of those hearts and darts. What _do_ you
suppose is Miss Anastasia's idea of a lover?"
Marion rattled on with all of a debutante's reckless enthusiasm for any
subject under discussion. "Wouldn't he be as odd and old-fashioned as
the lace valentines themselves? She'd call him a _suitor_, wouldn't she?
I wonder if she ever had one."
Then Bowser, piecing together the fragmentary gossip of fifteen years,
told Marion all he knew of Miss Anastasia's gentle romance; and Marion,
idly clasping and unclasping the little Yale pin on her jacket, gained
another peep into the kaleidoscope of human experiences.
"I have read of such devotion to a memory," she said when the story was
done, "but I never met it in the flesh. What a pity he died while he was
on such a high pedestal in her imagination. If he had lived she would
have discovered that there are no such paragons, and all the other sons
of Adam needn't have suffered by comparison. So she's an old maid simply
because she put her ideal of a lover so high in the clouds nobody could
live up to it! Dear old Miss Anastasia!"
Bowser pulled his beard. "Such couples make me think of these here lamps
with double wicks," he said. "They hardly ever burn along together
evenly. One wick is sure to flare up higher than the other; you either
have to keep turning it down and get along with a half light or let it
smoke the chimney--maybe crack it--and make things generally
uncomfortable. But here comes somebody, Miss Marion, who's burned along
pretty steady, and that through three administrations. It's her brag
that she's had three husbands and treated them just alike, even to the
matter of tombstones. 'Not a pound difference in the weight nor a dollar
in the price,' she always says."
The newcomer was a fat, wheezy woman, spattered with mud from the hem
of her skirt to the crown of her big crape bonnet, which had tipped on
one side with the jolting of the wagon.
"Well, Jim Bowser!" she exclaimed, catching sight of the valentines. "Ef
you ain't got out them silly, sentimental fol-de-rols again! My nephew,
Jason Potter,--that's my second husband's sister's son, you know,--spent
seventy-five cents last year to buy one of them silly things to send to
his girl; and I says to him, 'Jason,' says I, 'ef _I'd_ been Lib
Meadows, that would 'uv cooked your goose with _me_! Any man simple
enough to waste his substance so, wouldn't make a good provider.' I
ought to know--I've been a wife three times."
This, like all other of Mrs. Power's conversational roads, led back to
the three tombstones, and started a flow of good-natured badinage on the
subject of matrimony, which continued long after she had taken her noisy
departure. "Well!" exclaimed Bud Hines, as the big crape bonnet went
jolting down the road, "I guess there's three good men gone that could
tell why heaven is heaven."
"Why?" asked Cy Akers.
"Because there's no marryin' or givin' in marriage there."
"Bud speaks feelingly!" said Cy, winking at the others. "He'd better get
a job on a newspaper to write Side Talks with Henpecked Husbands."
"Shouldn't think _you'd_ want to hear any extrys or supplements,"
retorted Bud. "You get enough in your own daily editions."
* * * * *
"St. Valentine has been generous with my little Polly," said the old
miller, looking up fondly at the tall, graceful girl, coming into his
room, her face aglow and her arms full of packages.
"But what's the good of it all, grandfather?" answered Marion. "I've
been looking into Cupid's kaleidoscope through other people's eyes this
afternoon, and nothing is rose-coloured as I thought. Everything is
horrid. 'Marriage is a failure,' and sentiment is a silly thing that
people make flippant jokes about, or else break their hearts with, like
Mr. Bowser's double-wick lamps, that flare up and crack their chimneys.
I've come to the conclusion that St. Valentine has outlived his
generation."
She broke the string which bound one of the boxes that she had dropped
on the table, and took out a great dewy bunch of sweet violets. As their
fragrance filled the room, the old man looked around as if half
expecting to see some familiar presence; then dropped his white head
with a sigh, and gazed into the embers on the hearth, lost in a tender
reverie.
Presently he said, "I wish you would hand me that box on my wardrobe
shelf, little girl." As Marion opened the wardrobe door, something
hanging there made her give a little start of surprise. It was an old
familiar gray dress, with the creases still in the bent sleeves just as
they had been left when the tired arms last slipped out of them. That
was ten years ago; and Marion, standing there with a mist gathering in
her eyes, recalled the day her grandfather had refused to let any one
fold it away. It had hung there all those years, the tangible reminder
of the strong, sweet presence that had left its imprint on every part of
the household.
"It is like my life since she slipped out of it," the old man had
whispered, smoothing the empty sleeve with his stiff old fingers. "Like
my heart--set to her ways at every turn, and left just as she rounded it
out--but now--so empty!"
He lifted an old dog-eared school-book from the box that Marion brought
him, a queer little "Geography and Atlas of the Heavens," in use over
fifty years ago. Inside was a tiny slip of paper, time-yellowed and
worn. The ink was faded, until the words written in an unformed girlish
hand were barely legible:
"True as grapes grow on a vine,
I will be your Valentine."
"I had put a letter into her Murray's grammar," he explained, holding
up another little book. "Here is the page, just at the conjugation of
the verb 'to love.' You see I was a big, shy, overgrown boy that lost my
tongue whenever I looked at her, although she wasn't fifteen then, and
only reached my shoulder. This valentine was the answer that she slipped
into my atlas of the heavens. I thought the sky itself had never held
such a star. We walked home across the woodland together that day, never
saying a word. It was the last of the February thaw, and the birds were
twittering as if it were really spring. Just such a day as this. All of
a sudden, right at my feet, I saw something smiling up at me, blue as
the blue of my Polly's eyes. I stooped and brushed away the leaves, and
there were two little violets.
"As I gave them to her I wanted to say, 'There will always be violets
in my heart for you, my Polly,' but I couldn't speak a word. I know she
understood, for long years after--when she was dead--I found them here.
She had pinned them on the page where my letter had lain, here on the
conjugation that says, 'we love,' and she had added the word '_for
ever_.'"
A tear dropped on the dead violets as the old man reverently closed the
book, and sat gazing again into the dying embers. There was a tremulous
smile on his face. Was it backward over the hills of their youth he was
wandering, or ahead to those heights of Hope, where love shall "put on
immortality?"
Marion laid her warm cheek against her violets, still fragrant with the
sweetness of their fresh, unfaded youth. Then taking a cluster from the
great dewy bunch, she fastened it at her throat with the little Yale
pin.