himself with satisfaction. “Just the things to work in, good and easy.
I’ll go on now, and you can think what else you want done, and tell me
when I come back.” He stopped to take the letters from the grey-clad
postman, who had just come up with the one mail of a holiday. “Here’s one
for me from Tom. I’ll read it as I go along. Good-bye!”
Mr. Harlow, who had put on his hat, took it off in courtesy to his wife,
as he looked back and smiled a last affectionate farewell to her from
the other side of the gate. Her eyes watched his large form, with its
firm stride, until it disappeared round the corner. She loved his little
politenesses of manner to her.
The wind touched the purple clusters of wistaria above her head, and
shook out a sweet perfume from them. The grass around the house was close
cut and velvety, but next door the lawn-mower was click-clicking busily,
and the sky was as blue as a summer sky.
Mrs. Harlow, slender and trim in a freshly washed lilac cambric gown that
matched the wistaria, sat on the piazza opening her letters with the true
holiday feeling of the suburbanite.
Nothing whatever of interest presented itself for her amusement, but the
mere fact that her husband was at home for the day seemed to breathe a
pleasant sense of confusion and excitement that disqualified her for any
connected occupation, in spite of the big pile of sewing up-stairs.
“Any letters, mother?”
Betty, the daughter of the house, who had come out in a white shirt-waist
and a straw hat decked with last year’s blue corn-flowers, perched
herself on the end of the piazza. “I’m going to the train to meet Sylvia,
but it isn’t time yet. I’m so glad she’ll be here! I haven’t seen her for
weeks.”
“There’s a letter from your Aunt Kitty,” said the mother. “She says your
Uncle Tom is going to retire from business. They want to take Lutie
abroad for change of air. She must be nearly eight years old now. She’s
been so well lately they’re afraid of a reaction. I can’t quite make
out where they’re going first; it looks like Himalaya. Oh, I see! It’s
Edinburgh.”
“It might as well be Himalaya. Lutie’s never had anything but changes of
air since she was born,” said Betty, crossly. “How some people do travel!
They seem to have money for everything, while we—well, things can’t go on
like this much longer! I’m going to work and earn something just as soon
as I can now. And Jack says he wants to leave school and go in an office
like Herbert. It’s too bad to leave so much on father. Don’t you think he
has had more on his mind lately?”
“I’m afraid he has,” said Mrs. Harlow, with a sigh. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh, something so horrid happened yesterday! I meant to keep it to
myself, but I can’t.” Betty’s cheeks were red, her eyes were flashing.
“I was at Mrs. Kennedy’s, with those books, and she asked if there was
anything the matter with father, he had been looking so worn lately.
She thought outsiders always noticed those things more quickly than the
family.”
“The idea!” said Mrs. Harlow, indignantly.
“Then when I was in the hall I heard them talking; I couldn’t help it.
They said—she and Mrs. Bradley—what a pity it was when a man didn’t get
on well in business, and Mrs. Tower said she was always so sorry for
the wife of an unsuccessful man; it must be so dreadful, if you had any
ambition, to see your husband a failure. She said she never could really
respect a man who showed himself deficient. I was so angry I could hardly
walk home. I went up-stairs and cried. I wanted to burst right in and
tell them how nobly father had behaved when that old Johnson absconded,
and how he was trying to pay up all the back debts. But I knew it wasn’t
any use——”
“Deficient!” Mrs. Harlow’s eyes glittered. “Your father’s brain—well,
your father’s brain is far beyond most people’s. How he can make all
those calculations the way he does——” She paused. Her own education dated
back of the modern era. She was sound on the arithmetic of her butcher’s
and grocer’s books, but beyond that all figures looked to her much like a
drop of water seen through a microscope.
“There’s the whistle!” said Betty, suddenly jumping up and making for the
train to meet her best friend.
The subject of this conversation had meanwhile been wending his way to
the town. He perhaps had looked forward to a time of pecuniary ease and
leisure, when, instead of tinkering round the house, he might play golf.
But no one, not even his wife, quite understood what a holiday meant to
Mr. Harlow.
To escape for a solid block of sunlit secular hours out of the grimy,
artificially lighted, badly ventilated office, with its white,
tired-looking clerks, and its association of intricate, harassing toil—to
escape from this to the peacefulness of green grass, and the click of the
lawn-mower, and the flickering of shade from the new leaves of the elms
that arched the street, and the sweet voices of little children calling
to one another, was to go back into a little corner of the emerald fields
of boyhood.
Mr. Harlow was not in the least old; he was indeed barely middle-aged;
yet there were moments when he knew that he was not so young as he had
been. On the spring morning of a holiday the thought, even if it came,
was robbed of its shadow.
His face had the kind smile that children always trusted, as he stopped
to pick up a tiny, curly-haired girl who had fallen in his way. The
action showed him the letter, which he had forgotten, still in his hand.
He opened and read it as he walked, stopped short and read it again
with knitted brows. Then he walked on and on, as one deep in thought,
until he came to the other side of the village. He did not go near the
stores, but strolled instead towards a large, unoccupied house that stood
surrounded by lawns and trees, well apart from its neighbours. There was
a clear view of the hills from the porch. Mr. Harlow walked round the
house and through the garden, and sat on the porch steps, still deep in
thought.
“I did not know what had become of you,” said his wife, running down
the walk to meet him as he once more came in through the gate. “Why,
it’s after twelve o’clock! I was afraid something had happened to you!
I suppose you’ve been talking all this time to somebody.” She did not
give him an opportunity to answer, but drew him up beside her to one of
the piazza chairs. “I know you won’t have time to mend all those things
I asked you to, without taking up all your afternoon, and I don’t want
you to do that. But I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to fix the leg of the
refrigerator.”
“It would be better to buy a new one, wouldn’t it?” asked Mr. Harlow,
impartially.
“‘Better to buy a new one!’ I only wish I could. How queer you act,
David! Aren’t you going to put the netting on the screens now? I think
you’ll have time before dinner; it’s to be at one o’clock to-day.”
“I can’t do the screens now, Min. The store was shut when I went to buy
the nails. Who’s that talking to Betty?”
“It’s Sylvia; she has come out for a couple of days. And, O David, a
telegram came for Betty while you were gone, from Harry Leroy. He’ll
be on to-night, and he’s not going back to Indiana any more. He has a
position here with his cousin.”
“Hum!” Mr. Harlow looked doubtfully considerate. “How old is Betty?
Fifteen?”
“She will be nineteen in September.”
“Oh, well, she’s nothing but a child yet,” said Mr. Harlow, in a tone
that defied denial.
“Nothing but a child,” assented his wife, cheerfully.
There was a pause. “How old were you when we were married, Min?”
“Twenty. It was entirely too young.”
“I remember,” Mr. Harlow’s voice was reflective, “my mother told me she
was married at seventeen and my grandmother was married at fifteen; and I
had an aunt who——”
“If you remember any more I’ll go in the house!” said his wife,
indignantly. “What is the matter with you, David? Where have you been
this morning?”
“Well, Min, I’ve something to tell you. I——” he stopped, his voice
altered and his eyes became suddenly alert. “Hello! What’s that over
there?”
“Smoke, isn’t it?” she answered, her gaze following his towards the
horizon. “It seems to me I can smell it.”
“Looks like a fire, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, but I don’t hear any fire-bells.”
Mr. Harlow rose. “Two-thirds of our beloved volunteer fire department are
off on a picnic or a procession or something to-day. I’m going over to
that smoke on the old bicycle, and find out what’s the matter.”
“You’d a great deal better stay at home!” his wife called after him, but
he was gone.
She still sat on the piazza. A few moments later a rider sped past, and
then another. Then the fire-bells began to ring at last—clang! clang!
clang, clang, clang!
The fire was on the outskirts of the village, in a different direction
from that which Mr. Harlow had taken in the morning. The smoke rose a
blacker and blacker column in the distance, interspersed with sudden
bursts of flame. The crackling sound of burning wood, the occasional
sound of something falling, and hoarse voices calling to one another were
borne faintly yet unmistakably upon the air.
“I’m going to the fire!” It was Betty, hat in hand, who had rushed
down-stairs breathless. “Come on, Syl! Oh, isn’t it exciting! Just look
at that blaze! There go our boys!”
The street was filled with an outpouring of bicycles with their riders,
and with boys and men coming in from the various games, Herbert in one
set, Jack in another. The village was rapidly becoming deserted. Mrs.
Harlow began to wish she might go, too, but she guaged the distance and
forbore.
The fire had started in some outhouses, and helped by a sudden breeze,
had leaped merrily over intervening space towards a large barn that
stretched out red and imposing over one end of the field. Beyond that was
a dwelling-house. The barn, which was new, while piled at one end with
fodder, was as yet untenanted by any animals, as Mr. Harlow thankfully
discovered on reaching the place.
The stir in the village had not extended to these outlying fields, which
were all deserted, as became a holiday. A woman stood in the doorway of
the house, watching the blaze. One man was running off, shouting for
help, and another was carrying two buckets of water towards the barn.
He came up to Mr. Harlow and put the buckets on the ground.
“There ain’t any use in carryin’ water,” he said, “not a mite o’ use,
only it seemed sort o’ natural to do it. Just look at those flames!”
“The engine ought to hurry up if it’s going to do any good,” said Mr.
Harlow.
“Can’t do a particle of good if it does come. There ain’t any water
here—that is, not more than a teacupful; well and cistern’s dry as a
bone.”
“The house will not catch,” said Mr. Harlow; “the wind is the other way.
You are sure there was no one in the barn?”
“Sure,” said the man.
They were gazing at the flames, which enveloped one end of the structure.
Another moment, and there was a deafening crash through the roar of the
fire; half of the barn had fallen in, and revealed beyond, high up on one
of the big beams of the rafters, the white faces and crouching forms of
six little children, huddled close together. Playing in the loft, they
had climbed higher and higher back, to get out of reach of the flames.
A cry of horror broke from the two onlookers. The next instant the man,
wildly shrieking for help, followed Mr. Harlow, who sped towards the barn.
The flames that had left one part of the building still untouched were
rapidly curling round it, lighting up the faces of the children. The
roof sloped with a sharp pitch, but there were a couple of projecting
ledges below it.
Mr. Harlow had been an athlete in his day. In spite of his large, heavily
built frame, he was still quick of motion, sure of foot, keen of eye. He
took off his coat and threw it on the ground, and then in some way he was
climbing up the barn.
He disappeared, then reappeared again inside. Swinging himself up on a
blackened rafter, he held with one hand to a support above, and with the
other lifted one half-insensible child from her perch, and swung her
over into the waiting grasp of a fireman below, for the engine had come
up, and the field was black with the whole swarming village population,
gathering larger and larger forces each minute.
Six times did Mr. Harlow’s strong arm plunge forward and encircle a
helpless, drooping little form in the sight of the field of breathless
spectators.
As the last one was safely handed over, a sharp breath of relief came
from the crowd. Then there was a leaping flame, and a cloud of smoke
surged up and hid him from view.
* * * * *
“The doctor says he’ll be all right soon. Really, mother, we’re not
keeping anything from you.”
Betty, with high-keyed voice, flaming cheeks and wild eyes, was under the
impression that she was pacifically calm of demeanour. She had been taken
home in a friend’s buggy.
“There’s not the least cause for worry. He’s only suffocated a little,
you know, from the smoke, and of course his hands are burned a little,
and his feet; and he’s not quite conscious yet, but he’s all right. I was
to tell you that particularly, but you’re always so nervous! They’ll have
him home here soon. Herbert’s with him, and Syl is bringing his coat.
And—O mother!”
Betty fell into Mrs. Harlow’s arms, and they wept together.
“It was the most glorious thing you ever saw!” said the daughter,
brokenly. “Syl and I reached the field just after Herbert and Jack, and
we heard some one saying, ‘Yes, six children in there, but there’s a man
trying to get them out.’
“And then we saw a figure in the barn, through the smoke, and Herbert
cried, ‘It’s father! it’s father!’ and ran forward, and Jack and I just
screamed, ‘It’s father! Oh, it’s father!’ And oh, you ought to have heard
everybody, mother,—I’ll never forget it,—and Jack cheered, but I could
only cry, ‘It’s father!’ And then there was a sort of a crash, and then
lots of people came up and told us he’d be all right soon, and Mr. Nevin
put me in his buggy and brought me home. But if you’d seen how surprised
everybody was to find it was father! What’s the matter with you, mother?”
“Oh, nothing,” said the mother. She had drawn her form from her
daughter’s embrace and was standing erect. “It doesn’t surprise me in the
least. I always knew how brave your father was. Why, when we were engaged
he saved a man from—O Betty, Betty, here they come!”
It was a cavalcade led by Jack, with outriders on bicycles and followers
on foot, surrounding an ancient barouche, on one seat of which Mr. Harlow
was solicitously propped up by his son Herbert, his white face, grotesque
with scorched hair, smiling quizzical encouragement at his wife.
“I’m all right,” he said, in response to her faltering, “O David!” “Such
nonsense! I don’t know what all this fuss is about.”
“We know, Mrs. Harlow,” said the doctor, as he helped his charge out of
the carriage and up-stairs, still protesting, with bandages on his hands
and feet. He professed himself as fit as a fighting cock to the wife
who sat by his side and gazed at him, while Betty and Herbert received
visitors and reporters below with the condescension of those of the
blood to the lesser nobility.
“Yes, it’s the third time.” Betty’s voice had become attuned to the
recital as the afternoon wore on towards dusk. “Once he rescued a man
from the rapids in the St. Lawrence River—my uncle said it was one of
the most daring deeds he ever witnessed; and another time he stopped a
runaway horse, and saved two women from being dashed against a stone
wall. And another time, when he was quite a boy, he had a fight with two
burglars in the dark, and forced them—— What is it Herbert wants, Syl?
I’ll go up-stairs and see. Will you just take this jelly that Mrs. Scovel
brought over, and put it where Jack can’t get at it?”
“Mother!” She opened the door of the ‘throne-room,’ where the invalid,
propped, up among his pillows, with a napkin under his chin, had the air
of an enormous infant as his wife fed him with beef tea.
“Mother, there’s another reporter down-stairs. Herbert says he wants one
of father’s pictures. There’s the telegraph boy riding up—it’s the sixth
message we’ve had. Jack, bring it to me here! I’ll open it. It says,
‘Just heard the news. Love and congratulations for our hero.’ It’s from
Aunt Kitty. Herbert wired her at once.”
“It’s the most fool business I ever heard of,” said the man in the bed,
helplessly. “If I’d done anything, I wouldn’t mind, but——”
“Yes, dear, don’t excite yourself,” said his wife, in soothing tone.
“Betty——” She gave her daughter a warning glance.
“I hope we’re through with all this tommy rot,” said Mr. Harlow, as
Betty’s footsteps retreated.
He did not hear her voice again going on fluently to a fresh batch of
visitors: “Once he rescued a man on the St. Lawrence River from a stone
wall—I mean the rapids, one of the most daring deeds——”
“Min!”
“Yes, David.”
“Get my coat. Who’s that at the door now?”
It was Herbert’s voice this time. “What year was father born in?”
“Great Scott!” moaned the invalid. “Go down and tell ’em you don’t
know. Shut that door! Get my coat, Min, and in the inner left-hand side
pocket—don’t hold it upside down; you’ll let all my keys fall out; there,
I told you so—some of that change rolled under the bed—never mind,
look for it later. The left-hand pocket, I said——” Twenty-one years of
matrimony had not availed to teach Mrs. Harlow the intricacy of her
husband’s pockets. “Not that one; there, now you’ve hit it! Take that
letter out.”
“Why, it’s the one you got from Tom this morning!”
“Yes; open it, and read for yourself. Tell me how it strikes you.”
As Mrs. Harlow read, the colour rose in her face. “Tom wishes to retire
from active business—yes, that’s what Kitty’s letter said. I should think
he’d have to, when—O David, he says if you’ll take his place in the
firm—he has long been thinking of such an arrangement—David!”
“Ah, don’t take my hand, dear!” He winced instinctively, but his tone was
very gentle. “Foolish woman, stop kissing those bandages.”
“O David, now your worries will all be over at last! The children had
been planning how they could help you. I wonder what it will seem like
to be able to buy anything new once more. And perhaps we could take the
Morris house!”
“That’s just what I had been thinking of. I was over there prowling round
the place this morning. I thought we’d go down and look at it again
together after dinner. And I’m glad for your sake, Min, that I’m not such
a failure as it seemed, after all, dear. You won’t have to be ashamed of
your husband. What’s that noise?”
There was the roll of drums and the sound of flying footsteps, mingled
with Betty’s hysterical tones:
“O mother! O mother! Look out of the window! The procession is stopping
outside!”
Like the Lady of Shalott, Mrs. Harlow made three paces through the room
to look beyond her threshold. Before her dazed vision rose ranks and
ranks of men, crowding the street before her doorway, with the flag in
front.
Some one was waving the flag, and Herbert was speaking, and then there
was a cheer, and another, and another, and yet another; but she was not
standing by the window; her face was down by her husband’s.
“Oh,” she breathed, with a loving scorn in her choking voice, as she
touched the bandaged hand that tried to seek hers, “I don’t need to have
you climb up burning barns and rescue children, I don’t need to have you
‘successful,’ as they call it, to know who you are! If every one despised
you, if you were so poor you had to—dig—wells, I’d still know you were
the dearest, the bravest, the best, the most wonderful man in all the
world! I’m just too proud of you to live!”
The Portion of the Youngest
The Portion of the Youngest
“Big weddings are horrid. I think it’s a great deal nicer to elope—my
grandmother eloped, and she was only sixteen at the time, nearly two
years younger than I.”
“That is a very foolish way to talk, Tina; times are quite different,
now.”
“I don’t see why! Anyway, I hate weddings. I only care for dances.
Momsey, aren’t you going to let me go to this dance? What difference does
it make if I’m _not_ out? All my friends are to be there—the Clarks, and
Edith Bayne and Francis Fanshawe. Daddy said I could go before he went
away, and I’ve been counting on it all the time, and now you won’t let
me!”
Tina sat on an ottoman in the centre of the big, mahogany-furnished,
old-fashioned room, with her light hair falling over one ear and her
large, clear, blue eyes fixed tragically on the face of the parent who
sat busily sewing. Tina’s slim shoulders were hunched forward and her
feet crossed in the attitude which always brought forth her mother’s
rebuke:
“Don’t sit that way, dear; it’s very unladylike. How often have I told
you, Tina, that if you get in the habit of sitting like that when we’re
alone you’ll do it when you don’t realize it.”
Mrs. Malison’s voice had the tone of a well-worn persistency. She was a
young-looking woman for her years, and still handsome enough to make the
resemblance to her youngest daughter very apparent even to the obstinate
little curve of the short upper lip. The answer was almost as automatic:
“I wouldn’t _care_! Momsey, why won’t you let me go to the dance?”
“Now, Tina, what is the use of teasing mother any more about that?” said
the second daughter, coming into the room. Elinor was small and dark,
with finely marked eyebrows, regular features, and an expression of great
intelligence, wrecked at times by a shattering wave of nervousness. At
the moment she carried in her hand a bird’s bathtub, filled with water,
destined for the cage over by the window, where a brown and dishevelled
canary hung mopingly from a perch. She went on:
“You know perfectly well that mother thinks you’ve been staying up a
great deal too late in the evening. You cannot study and go out at the
same time. And she told you she didn’t approve of your being so much
with Francis Fanshawe—none of us do. He may be a nice enough boy, but
he isn’t our kind. We all of us think you’d better let the acquaintance
drop.”
“Oh, if you don’t want me to do _anything_!” Tina’s eyes began to sparkle
ominously. “It doesn’t make the slightest difference to me when you talk
that way about my friends. I like them, no matter what you and Annette
say. You’ve always been down on Francis! And I don’t care whether I keep
on with my studies or not.”
“Tina!” Elinor carefully inserted the bathtub in the cage before flinging
herself volubly upon the subject. “Tina, you can’t mean that—you want
to be educated, I hope! Besides, you’ll enjoy coming out into society a
great deal more later, and if you’re seen everywhere now, people will be
taking you for much older than you are.”
“I wouldn’t care!” Tina’s defiant tone took on an increasing rapidity.
“I don’t see what good it does to be educated, anyway. People like you
just as well when you’re silly. I think it’s dreadfully stupid to go to
college the way you did and get so critical, and never see any fun in
things, and analyze everybody the way you do Robert Harper, so that you
never know whether you like him or not. I wish you’d take enough interest
in him to get him to shave off that horrid, little, black mustache—it
makes him look so sleek! I don’t care for what they teach in books. It
doesn’t do me any good to learn about the ancient Egyptians and the
battles of the Civil War, and write Enoch Arden over upside down; I hate
Enoch Arden, he makes me so _cross_—— I care for automobiles, and skating
and having a good time with my friends, and _dancing_. And it’s no use
telling me I’ll enjoy myself more later. I want to enjoy myself now!
Maybe there won’t _be_ any ‘later’; maybe I’ll be dead.”
“I wonder how you make a bird take a bath,” said Elinor in an absorbed
tone. She regarded the canary with a baffled eye. “I’ve had the water
warm and I’ve had it cold; I’ve put the tub in every position I can think
of, and left it there for half a day at a time, and he only hops around
and looks at it.” Her voice rose in sudden, nervous excitement. “I don’t
know _what_ to do. He hasn’t taken a bath in a week. He _must_ take a
bath!”