could hardly expect them to be married by now, or even engaged
perhaps. But at least they must be awfully interested! How about
your poor hardworking young doctor _now_?" she gloated; "couldn't
take the tiniest holiday for a poor old gray-haired, crippled
creature like me! But has got time to burn when it comes to some
little soft dark-eyed thing with a creak in her singing-voice!"
"Love is sure some pranks," admitted Solvei.
"_A_ prank," corrected Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"A prank," repeated Solvei with perfect docility.
From the increasing sweetness of her day dreams Mrs. Tome Gallien
turned idly to the calendar on the table by her bedside. The
week's page had not been torn off, nor the week before that,
if the whole truth must be known.
"Why, Good Lack!" she jerked suddenly. "To-day is Tuesday!"
"So?" jumped Solvei.
Both women turned simultaneously toward the clock.
"It will take you half an hour to make the mainland and that
train!" cried Mrs. Tome Gallien. "And for goodness sake, brush
your hair! And change those old sea-faring clothes."
"I will not brush the hair," tossed Solvei's bright wind-blown
head. "Always it is my preference to wear it thus hither-and-hang!
Nor will I part ever from my friend this old blue jersey! And even
so--if the sun does not fade between the here and the mainland I
may yet achieve three new freckles on my nose!"
"Don't argue!" fumed Mrs. Tome Gallien. "Just hurry!"
"It is only when one hurries that one has time to argue," persisted
the girl.
"Oh, stop your nonsense!" ordered Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"Whose nonsense will then be left to us?" flared Solvei. "But do
not thus make all this extra worrisome," she admonished with sudden
gentleness. "Time is always more fat than you think! But for two
such fancy fine packages as I go now to fetch," she flared again
ever so slightly, "there will not be room also in the boat for
the face of the wrangle boat man nor yet for the legs of the boy.
It is alone I insist that I should go!"
"For mercy's sake!" fretted Mrs. Tome Gallien. "I don't care how
you go, if you'll only go!"
Without further parleying, Solvei started for the stairs. In
another minute with a few jumps and slides she had reached the
front door. Once outside, it took but a fraction more of time to
settle the wrangle boat man and boy.
"Sitting here in perfect peace on the shore," she admonished them,
"watch thus how one isolated person with no words but oil can
make a boat prance on the waves! All aboard!" she called back
exultantly to them.
With a chug like a great, pounding heartthrob the wrangle boat
sprang for the sea. Just for a moment then at the last signaling
point Solvei lifted her hand in unfailing cheeriness to the sick
woman and the deaf woman left behind, and turned her own
inordinately sharpened young senses toward the mainland.
But when the ructious little wrangle boat drew up a half hour
later alongside the dilapidated mainland wharf before an admiring
audience of jet black pickaninnies and mangy hounds there was
only one passenger waiting impatiently there, and that passenger
was Dr. Sam Kendrue.
"How do you do, Dr. Sam Kendrue?" said Solvei.
"How do _you_ do, Miss Solvei Kjelland?" grinned Doctor Kendrue.
With more agility than one might have dared to hope for from
one who boasted so much winter in his blood, the Young Doctor
snatched up his valise, jumped down into the wrangle boat and
pushed off.
To avoid running into a sunken rowboat and a floating snag, Solvei
was compelled to start her engine, and turn sharply out to sea.
"Where then is your Mrs. Kendrue?" she called a bit breathlessly
above the lap of wind and water.
"It is my Mrs. Kendrue that I have come to get!" said the Young
Doctor.
With a little oil can poised abruptly in midair, Solvei opened
the same old bewildered blue eyes at him.
"Oh, no," she hastened to disillusion him. "Your Mrs. Kendrue is
not yet on our island."
"No, of course she isn't," laughed the Young Doctor. "And there's
a jolly good reason why, and the reason is--because she's right
here in the boat!"
"What?" stammered Solvei. With frenzied haste she began very
suddenly to oil everything in reach. "What?" she repeated vaguely.
"I mean just what I say," said the Young Doctor, and made a slight
move as of one who would cross one cramped knee over the other.
With all the joy of a foreigner easing his dictional panic with
an idiom, Solvei snatched out at the first phrase she could think
of that had a familiar word in it.
"Sit down! You're rocking the boat!" she screamed.
"Silly!" said the Young Doctor. "I was once in a boat before!"
Quite wretchedly he began then and there to try and recover his
old manner, the irony, the mocking. "Really, Miss Kjelland," he
ducked as a great cloud of spray went by him. "Really Miss
Kjelland, you're awfully rough with boats! Oh, but Solvei," he
broke through again in spite of himself. "You understand what I'm
trying to say, now don't you?"
"No, I don't," said Solvei Kjelland with her great blue eyes
staring straight ahead through the veil of her windblown hair
at some far focal point just over the wrangle boat's prancing bow.
Once again a great cloud of spray missed the Young Doctor by the
width only of his dodge.
"And how is it then about Mrs. Kendrue's Mrs. Kendrue?" asked
Solvei quite suddenly out of the gusty sky.
"Oh!" said the Young Doctor with the most surprising revival of
cheerfulness. "Why--why she's gone on down to investigate her new
duck blind with the rest of her party. There's a tenor, it seems,
who is rather,--well, contenting. You could hardly use any other
word with her, she's so awfully inexpressive. Anyway it's a
diverting friendship for her, though whether the tenor can
hit a high duck as niftily as he can hit a high note, remains
of course to be seen."
"S-o?" said Solvei with indifferent interest. "And is the piano
well?"
"Oh, fairly well," conceded the Young Doctor. "But if ever I saw
a piano that needed a mother's care! I had to board it out,
you know?"
"S-o?" crooned Solvei's sweet low voice.
It was astonishing though how soon the sea calmed down after
that. At least there was no more spray.
Skirting round at last along the sunny sheltered side of the
little island instead of splashing boldly up to the regular
landing as was her usual custom, it seemed indeed as though
Solvei was suddenly trying to feed out serenity to the man
before her. The floating gray moss of the live-oak trees was
certainly serene, the twitter of birds, the soft, warm drone
of insect. Without an interrupting word she drove the boat's
nose into a roughly improvised harbor of floating logs and a
raft, jumped out upon the raft and beckoned the Young Doctor to
follow her.
But at the first soft-padded thud of his foot on the turf it was
the Young Doctor himself who broke the vocal silence.
"Oh, but Solvei!" he protested. "You've got to know that you are
the only Mrs. Kendrue that I want!"
"S-o?" queried Solvei, glancing back with a vaguely skeptical smile
across her blue jersey shoulder.
"Oh, of course," admitted the Young Doc tor, "just right away
at the very first I didn't know it perhaps. You were so--so,--well,
so sort of unusual," he flushed, "and so awfully independent! About
the Adventure and the Little Widow and everything, you made it so
perfectly plain you didn't need me that it wasn't till you'd actually
gone that I half woke up to the fact how much I needed you! Why,
Solvei, after you ran away the city was like a gray fog with no
light in it, no laughter, no anything! The days were a week long,
the nights, a month! Is it any wonder that I should feel as though
I'd loved you for almost ever and ever? Why, if it hadn't been for
my work, and the knowledge that work and work only could bring me
to you--? Oh, I know it's awfully sudden and everything!" he persisted
desperately. "But why people prate so everlastingly about 'Love at
first sight' and never make any talk at all about 'Love at first
absence'! Solvei you've simply got to understand!" he cried out.
In her few steps lead of him the girl stopped suddenly and turned
around.
"But of what good is it that I should understand?" she asked with
a little appealing gesture of her hands. "In my far Norway is it
not that I have still the cause of the little brother? And here?"
she puzzled, "How could I yet leave Elizabeth?"
"Elizabeth?" questioned the Young Doctor.
"Mrs. Tome Gallien," explained the girl.
"Elizabeth?" repeated the Young Doctor with increasing astonishment.
"You mean you are such friends as that?"
"Yes," nodded the girl. "I am such friends as that."
Across the lovely earnestness of her face sun and shadow flickered
intermittently. Softly her blue eyes brooded. Her bright gold hair
was like a flame. In all that sunny, singing island there was no
radiance like her unless perhaps it was the blue bird who flashed
through the gray moss just beyond her.
"I cannot leave the little brother," she said. "Nor can I leave
the Elizabeth." As though kindled by the spring's own sweet her
whole musing face flamed suddenly with joy. "Nor yet.--I am so
greedy!" she cried, "_nor yet can I leave you_!"
All unbeknown then to Mrs. Tome Gallien or even to Martha, they
crept up the stairs at last to Mrs. Tome Gallien's room, where
with the poor Young Doctor relegated ignominiously behind her,
Solvei chose for her own whimsical purposes to make her dramatic
entrance.
"Good afternoon to you, then, Elizabeth!" she hailed casually to
the impatient Sick Woman on the bed. "This of a surety is
'One time when meadows, groves, also streams,
To me--did seems
A--apparelled in celestial lightings!'"
"What?" gasped Mrs. Tome Gallien. "Why, what makes your cheeks
so red?" she demanded suddenly.
"I got kissed again," said Solvei.
"What?" snapped Mrs. Tom Gallien.
"They did not come," said Solvei. "No such Kendrues combination
as you suggested. Nothing came!" said Solvei. "Except just one
big package for me!"
"For you?" frowned Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"For me!" shrugged Solvei. "And though it should be hard yet to
tell just what livings it shall lead to--it shall at least lead
to much lovings."
"What?" puzzled Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"This is it!" said Solvei, and dragged the Young Doctor into the room.
"_What_?" screamed Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"It is for _me_! You understand?" beamed the girl.
In the convulsive laughter that overtook the Young Doctor he did
not at the moment notice Mrs. Tome Gallien's face.
But there was no laughter of any kind in Mrs. Tome Gallien's face,
only shock, and a most furious rage.
"So it is thus you have been deceiving me?" she cried out to Solvei.
"All this time that you knew what my heart was fixed on, my hopes,
my everything! All this time that you have been here a guest in my
house! And quite safe I supposed from any such----"
"Oh, now really, Mrs. Gallien!" interposed the Young Doctor's
grimmest, sternest voice.
"Oh, of what a nonsense!" laughed Solvei. "There is no blames
anywhere--unless it should be to this Montessori theory! Out of
the whole wide world is it not that a child must gravitate to his
own wantings? It cannot be chosen for him?"
Then with all the young laughter gone from her face she reached
out her slim brown hand to the Young Doctor's reassuring clasp and
led him to the bed.
"Elizabeth," she said. "You are rich and you are sick and you are
sometimes very cross. But you cannot buy the loving! Here then are
two children who would love you all your life long--all their lives
long. If you thus furiously so refuse the gift, who then is the
stingy receiver?"
"What?" stammered Mrs. Tome Gallien. "What?" Across her haggard,
rage-stricken face a smile of incredulous enlightenment flickered
suddenly. "What?" she surrendered. "You--you--_rascals_!" And held
out her aching arms to them.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Stingy Receiver, by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott