PINK ROSES
At five K. Stuyvesant and John started for the Sound house. The sun
beat down cruelly with the same murky, hot-damp feel. The car wove
between the traffic of the crowded streets like a huge shuttle. Both
men in it were silent--Stuyvesant breathless and afraid to trust his
hope, yet hoping; John despondent over Stuyv's going away. All that
that gentleman had done came to John with a new force,--came when the
possibility of losing Stuyv even for a few months was thrust before
him.
Stuyvesant spoke:
"Takes so long to get out to-day," he said; "we seem to crawl. Look
at that fellow ahead. Won't let us get past; have to crawl! Lord!
Say, John, let me drive."
"I will not!" replied John with decision. "I have a distinct
fondness for life. What's wrong with you?"
"Nothing," answered Stuyvesant loudly, "nothing at all!" Then he
began to speak of certain affairs downtown, talking quickly, as if
afraid of silence. John looked at him with wonder. It was very
unlike Stuyvesant to be hectic. He recalled the mentioned
disappointment. That, also, brought wonder. Stuyvesant didn't seem
to care for girls. In business he seemed to get what he wanted.
What could it be? Suddenly an idea, which seemed to John almost
insane, flew across his mind.
He couldn't recognise it in the face of Cecilia's and Stuyvesant's
open avoidance of each other, but in spite of that, the idea clung.
"Got to see her, got to----" echoed in John's ears. He swallowed
convulsively. If it were true! And it was not Marjory after
all,--well, wouldn't he be the happiest fellow on earth? Well,
rather!
The last months had brought John to a state of adoration of Cecilia
and Stuyvesant. More than love it was. To be as sure of Stuyv's
always closeness,--to have Cecilia so cared for.... "Can't you let
her out a little?" he heard Stuyvesant say impatiently. John
answered with a gentleness absolutely new, but it was not noticed.
He ran the car faster and well, and his best efforts were greeted
with: "This thing seems to crawl to-night. Darned if I don't want to
get out and push!"
"You're in a hurry!" said John bravely.
"Oh, no, no!" answered Stuyvesant, looking on John suspiciously.
Then he mopped his forehead, leaving it streaked with the dust that
came off. "Hot," he said.
They rounded the last hill before the Madden gateway, and through a
gap in some stately poplars they caught a glimpse of a white speck on
an upper terrace.
"Cecilia!" blurted out Stuyvesant. "Oh, gosh! John, is my tie, that
is, do I look----"
"Sure, you do," said John, comfortingly. Stuyvesant mopped some
more. His face looked like a futurist painting of "The Dancers" or
some one's aunt.
They rounded up the hill slowly. Evangeline bounded from the
shrubbery and barked welcome.
"Evangeline," said Stuyvesant, as one in a trance.
"Yes," answered John; "Norah named him for Cecilia. Norah is an old
family servant." Had Stuyvesant heard, he might have smiled, but
Stuyvesant was past hearing.
"You poor boys!" said Cecilia. "How hot and tired you must be!"
Then she looked at Stuyvesant and laughed. "I judge it was dusty?"
she said.
"No, that is, I mean quite so," stuttered Stuyvesant. He stood
before her silent, openly staring.
When John saw Cecilia flush he put his hand on Stuyvesant's arm.
"Come on," he said. "We'll go brush up."
John's manner was as gentle as Cecilia's. Stuyvesant followed him.
On the broad porch he paused and looked back.
Evangeline was telling Cecilia that he loved her, in dog fashion--wag
code.
Cecilia patted him.
"Gosh!" said Stuyvesant, and then he mopped his forehead, making
another picture in the dust.
Dusk came before dinner time. It crept down stealthily, like the
thief it is of day. Shadows darkened and lengthened. Greens grew
black. Cecilia in the half light on a wide porch watched a certain
big and unusually gruff man. Something, she could see, was making
him like a wistful boy--a boy so heart-set on his want that he fears
the risk of refusal.
Cecilia thought of Marjory across the seas. There was a chance to
play traitor--a chance to rekindle the little spark she had once
fired in Stuyvesant. The idea danced about her soul and burnt its
edges.
"Father McGowan-dear," she appealed inside, "please help me! I am
trying, but I _am_ so little!" A breeze from the Sound came with a
swish and moaned gently in and out among the loving arms of trees.
The lights in the dining room were soft. They shone gently down on a
large bowl of pink roses which were in the centre of the table.
Their hearts were a deeper colour and they nodded and seemed to talk
when the steps of two pompous persons who passed things shook them.
Stuyvesant looked at Cecilia and then quickly away. He did not know
what kind of a frock she wore except that it was white. He knew that
she looked good, gentle and pure; that her eyes held the depths that
hurts bring and the deep loyalty of love. There was a little droop
to her lips that made him ache to see. He wondered at it, dared to
hope that it had come because of him, and then he put the thought
away. Unbelievably sweet it seemed.
And Cecilia?
"Marjory across the seas," she thought, "to subdue Jeremiah just a
little----" She closed her eyes. "Oh dear!" she thought, "what _is_
the matter with me? These awful thoughts!" She opened them again
and saw Jeremiah leaning on the table. His fists were closed about
his knife and fork, and he held them upright, the handle ends resting
on the cloth. John, curiously enough, did not seem bothered by this.
He was watching Stuyvesant, who sat opposite.
"After that I started makin' bricks instead of layin' 'em. (Celie,
ask that young feller to loan me a piece of bread. I want bread with
my supper. I don't care what the style is.) So I begin to make
bricks, an' when I look around and think that bricks done it all----"
Jeremiah's voice faded. He left the rest to the imaginations of his
listeners, while he laid a piece of bread flat on the table, and
spread it _en masse_.
"I wisht my wife could have saw it," said Jeremiah as he loosened the
piece of bread from the cloth. "She deserved everything. I never
gave her nothing."
"You gave her a great deal," disagreed Cecilia. "You know you did!
We were happy in that little flat. I remember that. We loved each
other and we had enough to eat."
Cecilia was aware of Stuyvesant's eyes. They were so dear! She
wondered if it was very wicked to love them, for she knew she always
would.... And he had intimated that if Jeremiah were less
prominent--Cecilia swallowed hard. The gods are visited with
temptations, and too often they come to little humans. Cecilia was
meeting hers. For the minute she felt anything possible, justifiable
for the end she craved, and in the middle of her minute the white
spark in her little heart flared.
"Papa," she said, "please tell Mr. Twombly about the time you hit the
boss on the ear with a brick."
The request of that tale was her crucifixion on the cross of loyalty
... her proof beyond all doubt that her heart was in Jeremiah's rough
old hands. Jeremiah looked pleased. His face lit rather
pathetically. Cecilia answered his happy smile, and then she looked
down at her plate. Her throat felt full and stiff. She found it
hard to swallow.
Through a numbed consciousness she heard a long and much loved tale.
"I love him, I love him!" she chanted inside. "He and John are
_everything_!" She looked up and found Stuyvesant looking at her.
The way he looked made her gasp a little, and below the table she
closed her small hands so tightly that her nails hurt her palms.
"An' then I sez, 'Yuh can lay yer own bricks,'" came in the voice of
Jeremiah. "'An' here's one to begin with.' (It took him on the
ear.)" He ended in parenthesis.
"Your stand for liberty--was--well--timed. It was--certainly the
best thing you could have done," commented Stuyvesant in jerks. He
was trying very hard not to look at Cecilia, and it was work not to.
"Celie," said Jeremiah, "what _has_ this fellow did to the potatoes?
He does be-devil 'em so. He puts on so many airs that yuh hardly
recognise 'em fer potatoes!"
"I don't know, dear," answered Cecilia, "but I'll see about it
to-morrow."
"Mebbe Celie couldn't fry potatoes!" said Jeremiah. He smacked his
lips loudly in remembrance. "These here furriners," he went on,
"that we hire to cook,--poor things, _they_ don't know no better!"
And thus Jeremiah disposed of French chefs. The lips of one of the
pompous persons curled a little. The roses nodded and bobbed.
To Stuyvesant, who stared resolutely on them, they all whispered,
"Cecilia!"
To Cecilia they shouted "Keefer, the butler."
To John they were lovelier that night from a new hope, and, of his
father, a new understanding.
But to Jeremiah Madden they brought back only the heat of an
overcrowded flat--the woman who held his heart dying by inches, when
money might have made her live.... Money! ... A little tired-eyed
girl struggling under a woman's load. A little boy who always cried
for things he couldn't have.
"The bunnit with pink roses."
Life's question mark,--Fate's smile,--or God's hand?
Jeremiah looked away from the roses, and absently stuck the corner of
his napkin in his collar. Then he looked about to see if any one had
noticed, and hastily took it out.
Cecilia saw and her heart leaped with love. It seemed to her that
the Saints had made Jeremiah do that then. Do it to show the little
earth maiden her work in life. The taking from her father the shame
which a son would have him feel, and giving him a substitute for the
love that left him too soon,--too hungering.
They got up at last. Cecilia took a bobbing rose from the
centrepiece. She began to break the thorns from it, but Stuyvesant's
hands took it from her. He removed them methodically, and
surely,--as he would. When he gave it back to her, there was nothing
left to hurt.
"Thank you," she said.
"I wish I could take them out of the world for you," he answered
gruffly. She shook as she crossed the room to where her father and
John waited at the door. Her temptation was past. Her heart was
strong, but she prayed that he would not say such things so much as
if he meant them. It made it too hard.
"I am so weak," she thought, "so weak!"
Stuyvesant walked laggingly across the soft grass. John had said
that he would find her by a white wall with a Greek relief, that that
was her favourite spot. Stuyvesant knew that he dreamed of that spot
because of her, but his connection with it influencing her, he never
thought of. His spirit, always humble with her, knelt.
He thought of John's understanding, and whispering, "Good luck,
Stuyv, dear!" and of his gasping, "John,--you'd be willing?" John
had whacked him on the back and had answered convincingly. Then he'd
gone unsteadily down the steps, and had lagged across the
close-clipped grass. He wanted as he had never wanted anything to
see her, but he was shaken and unsure ... sick from longing and fear.
Ahead of him in the half light he saw the stretch of wall standing
out among the shadows.
He stopped, heart pounding, at the corner of the hedge-sheltered
path. The little Irish maiden who was his key to heaven sat on the
wall. Behind her the Sound was black. The soft stillness enveloped
everything. The half night throbbed. Cecilia looked up, and saw the
tall shadow in the shadows.
"John, dear?" she queried. Stuyvesant didn't answer for his voice
was gone, but he stepped toward her. He put out a hand and laid it
on a white wall. The world was reeling for him.
"Oh," she said, "I thought it was John, but--but you wanted to see
me?"
He nodded.
"Marjory----" she began, then scolded herself for a too abrupt start.
She drew a quick breath, and tried to control reason and tact. "She
is so lovely, Mr. Stuyvesant," she went on, "but sometimes she
doesn't let people know when she likes them. She's like that."
Cecilia stopped and gasped. It was harder than she had dreamed.
"Has she been a good friend to you?" asked Stuyvesant in a queer,
tight voice.
"Oh, yes!" answered Cecilia, "so good! I do love her so much! I
would do anything to make her happy!"
"You _darling_!" said K. Stuyvesant. He spoke loudly, but his words
shook, for his heart was pounding with a sickening speed. With his
words Cecilia caught her breath so deeply that it seemed a sob.
Doubts vanished,--seemed incredible,--but she spoke what would always
be her truth, though her heart famished from it. She looked
Stuyvesant squarely in the eyes: "I love my father," she said, "and I
am proud of him. I am proud to be his daughter."
"Of course you are," he answered. "You should be. Cecilia, I am
very little, but I am large enough to see what you love in him. Have
you misunderstood what I thought?"
She nodded. White, she was, and her eyes were on his face, imploring
in their new hope.
"I loved you," said Stuyvesant, "on the boat. I saw how wonderful
you were, but, Cecilia,--when I saw you here! When I see you turn
and kiss your father when his eyes grow hurt because of John's
unkindness.... Oh, my dear! Every instant of this year I've loved
you, and more and more. I love you so ... No one could be worthy of
you, but, little Saint,--no one could love you more! No one."
He stopped, choked. "I dream on my knees," he went on: "I'll dream
of you until I die. But,--what's the use of saying all this? I love
you! I love you so! That's everything."
He put a hand out toward her, then drew back. "Cecilia," he
whispered, "you are so sweet!"
He looked down and drew his breath sharply. He wondered if she would
ever speak.
He heard her slip from the wall.... Perhaps she would leave him
without a word. Dully, he wondered how he could go on living if she
did that.
And then the world turned over and then it ceased to be, for
Cecilia's hands lay on his shoulders. He felt them move and creep up
and around his neck. It was true.... He felt a wonderful, shaken
strength.
"Cecilia! Cecilia!" she heard him gasp.
After a time she pushed him away and laughed tremulously. "Dearest
Keefer Stuyvesant," she whispered shakily, "whose tears are these?
Yours or mine?"
There was no room for laughter in Keefer Stuyvesant's soul. He drew
her close again and answered gruffly: "There is no yours nor mine any
more, little saint. They're ours, dearest,--ours. Oh, Cecilia,
_gosh_, how I _love_ you!"
THE END
* * * * * * * *
CHARMING BOOKS FOR GIRLS
May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list
WHEN PATTY WENT TO COLLEGE, By Jean Webster.
Illustrated by C. D. Williams.
One of the best stories of life in a girl's college that has ever
been written. It is bright, whimsical and entertaining, lifelike,
laughable and thoroughly human.
JUST PATTY, By Jean Webster.
Illustrated by C. M. Relyea.
Patty is full of the joy of living, fun-loving, given to ingenious
mischief for its own sake, with a disregard for pretty convention
which is an unfailing source of joy to her fellows.
THE POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL, By Eleanor Gates.
With four full page illustrations.
This story relates the experience of one of those unfortunate
children whose early days are passed in the companionship of a
governess, seldom seeing either parent, and famishing for natural
love and tenderness. A charming play as dramatized by the author.
REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM, By Kate Douglas Wiggin.
One of the most beautiful studies of childhood--Rebecca's artistic,
unusual and quaintly charming qualities stand on midst a circle of
austere New Englanders. The stage version is making a phenomenal
dramatic record.
NEW CHRONICLES OF REBECCA, By Kate Douglas Wiggin.
Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.
Additional episodes in the girlhood of this delightful heroine that
carry Rebecca through various stages to her eighteenth birthday.
REBECCA MARY, By Annie Hamilton Donnell.
Illustrated by Elizabeth Shippen Green.
This author possesses the rare gift of portraying all the grotesque
little joys and sorrows and scruples of this very small girl with a
pathos that is peculiarly genuine and appealing.
Her Book and Heart, By George Madden Martin,
Illustrated by Charles Louis Hinton.
Emmy Lou is irresistibly lovable, because she is so absolutely real.
She is just a bewitchingly innocent, hugable little maid. The book
is wonderfully human.
STORIES OF RARE CHARM BY
GENE STRATTON-PORTER
MICHAEL O'HALLORAN, Illustrated by Frances Rogers.
Michael is a quick-witted little Irish newsboy, living in Northern
Indiana. He adopts a deserted little girl, a cripple. He also
assumes the responsibility of leading the entire rural community
upward and onward.
LADDIE. Illustrated by Herman Pfeifer.
This is a bright, cheery tale with the scenes laid in Indiana. The
story is told by Little Sister, the youngest member of a large
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the love affairs of older members of the family. Chief among them is
that of Laddie and the Princess, an English girl who has come to live
in the neighborhood and about whose family there hangs a mystery.
THE HARVESTER. Illustrated by W. L. Jacobs.
"The Harvester," is a man of the woods and fields, and if the book
had nothing in it but the splendid figure of this man it would be
notable. But when the Girl comes to his "Medicine Woods," there
begins a romance of the rarest idyllic quality.
FRECKLES. Illustrated.
Freckles is a nameless waif when the tale opens, but the way in which
he takes hold of life; the nature friendships he forms in the great
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to the charm of his engaging personality; and his love-story with
"The Angel" are full of real sentiment.
A GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST. Illustrated.
The story of a girl of the Michigan woods; a buoyant, loveable type
of the self-reliant American. Her philosophy is one of love and
kindness towards all things; her hope is never dimmed. And by the
sheer beauty of her soul, and the purity of her vision, she wins from
barren and unpromising surroundings those rewards of high courage.
AT THE FOOT OF THE RAINBOW. Illustrations in colors.
The scene of this charming love story is laid in Central Indiana.
The story is one of devoted friendship, and tender self-sacrificing
love. The novel is brimful of the most beautiful word painting of
nature, and its pathos and tender sentiment will endear it to all.
THE SONG OF THE CARDINAL.
Profusely illustrated.
A love ideal of the Cardinal bird and his mate, told with delicacy
and humor.
GROSSET & DUNLAP, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK