about the dog. And I compliment you heartily on your
shrewdness. But I must confess,--even though it makes you
very angry with me, that I have deceived you absolutely
concerning my own name. Will you forgive me utterly if I
hereby promise never to deceive you again? Why what could I
possibly, possibly do with a great solemn name like
'Meredith'? My truly name, Sir, my really, truly,
honest-injun name is 'Molly Make-Believe'. Don't you know
the funny little old song about 'Molly Make-Believe'? Oh,
surely you do:
"'Molly, Molly Make-Believe,
Keep to your play if you would not grieve!
For Molly-Mine here's a hint for you,
Things that are true are apt to be blue!'
"Now you remember it, don't you? Then there's something
about
"'Molly, Molly Make-a-Smile,
Wear it, swear it all the while.
Long as your lips are framed for a joke,
Who can prove that your heart is broke?'
"Don't you love that 'is broke'! Then there's the last
verse--my favorite:
"'Molly, Molly Make-a-Beau,
Make him of mist or make him of snow,
Long as your DREAM stays fine and fair,
_Molly, Molly what do you care!_'"
"Well, I'll wager that her name _is_ 'Meredith' just the same," vowed
Stanton, "and she's probably madder than scat to think that I hit it
right."
Whether the daily overtures from the Serial-Letter Co. proved to be
dogs or love-letters or hot-water bottles or funny old songs, it was
reasonably evident that something unique was practically guaranteed to
happen every single, individual night of the six weeks' subscription
contract. Like a youngster's joyous dream of chronic Christmas Eves,
this realization alone was enough to put an absurdly delicious thrill
of expectancy into any invalid's otherwise prosy thoughts.
Yet the next bit of attention from the Serial-Letter Co. did not
please Stanton one half as much as it embarrassed him.
Wandering socially into the room from his own apartments below, a
young lawyer friend of Stanton's had only just seated himself on the
foot of Stanton's bed when an expressman also arrived with two large
pasteboard hat-boxes which he straightway dumped on the bed between
the two men with the laconic message that he would call for them again
in the morning.
"Heaven preserve me!" gasped Stanton. "What is this?"
Fearsomely out of the smaller of the two boxes he lifted with much
rustling snarl of tissue paper a woman's brown fur-hat,--very soft,
very fluffy, inordinately jaunty with a blush-pink rose nestling deep
in the fur. Out of the other box, twice as large, twice as rustly,
flaunted a green velvet cavalier's hat, with a green ostrich feather
as long as a man's arm drooping languidly off the brim.
"Holy Cat!" said Stanton.
Pinned to the green hat's crown was a tiny note. The handwriting at
least was pleasantly familiar by this time.
"Oh, I say!" cried the lawyer delightedly.
With a desperately painful effort at nonchalance, Stanton shoved his
right fist into the brown hat and his left fist into the green one,
and raised them quizzically from the bed.
"Darned--good-looking--hats," he stammered.
"Oh, I say!" repeated the lawyer with accumulative delight.
Crimson to the tip of his ears, Stanton rolled his eyes frantically
towards the little note.
"She sent 'em up just to show 'em to me," he quoted wildly. "Just
'cause I'm laid up so and can't get out on the streets to see the
styles for myself.--And I've got to choose between them for her!" he
ejaculated. "She says she can't decide alone which one to keep!"
"Bully for her!" cried the lawyer, surprisingly, slapping his knee.
"The cunning little girl!"
Speechless with astonishment, Stanton lay and watched his visitor,
then "Well, which one would you choose?" he asked with unmistakable
relief.
The lawyer took the hats and scanned them carefully. "Let--me--see" he
considered. "Her hair is so blond--"
"No, it's red!" snapped Stanton.
With perfect courtesy the lawyer swallowed his mistake. "Oh, excuse
me," he said. "I forgot. But with her height--"
"She hasn't any height," groaned Stanton. "I tell you she's little."
"Choose to suit yourself," said the lawyer coolly. He himself had
admired Cornelia from afar off.
The next night, to Stanton's mixed feelings of relief and
disappointment the "surprise" seemed to consist in the fact that
nothing happened at all. Fully until midnight the sense of relief
comforted him utterly. But some time after midnight, his hungry mind,
like a house-pet robbed of an accustomed meal, began to wake and fret
and stalk around ferociously through all the long, empty, aching,
early morning hours, searching for something novel to think about.
By supper-time the next evening he was in an irritable mood that made
him fairly clutch the special delivery letter out of the postman's
hand. It was rather a thin, tantalizing little letter, too. All it
said was,
"To-night, Dearest, until one o'clock, in a cabbage-colored
gown all shimmery with green and blue and September
frost-lights, I'm going to sit up by my white birch-wood
fire and read aloud to you. Yes! Honest-Injun! And out of
Browning, too. Did you notice your copy was marked? What
shall I read to you? Shall it be
"'If I could have that little head of hers
Painted upon a background of pale gold.'
"or
'Shall I sonnet-sing you about myself?
Do I live in a house you would like to see?'
"or
'I am a Painter who cannot paint,
----No end to all I cannot do.
_Yet do one thing at least I can,
Love a man, or hate a man!_'
"or just
'Escape me?
Never,
Beloved!
While I am I, and you are you!'
"Oh, Honey! Won't it be fun? Just you and I, perhaps, in all
this Big City, sitting up and thinking about each other.
Can you smell the white birch smoke in this letter?"
[Illustration: "Well I'll be hanged," growled Stanton, "if I'm going
to be strung by any boy!"]
Almost unconsciously Stanton raised the page to his face.
Unmistakably, up from the paper rose the strong, vivid scent--of a
briar-wood pipe.
"Well I'll be hanged," growled Stanton, "if I'm going to be strung by
any boy!" Out of all proportion the incident irritated him.
But when, the next evening, a perfectly tremendous bunch of yellow
jonquils arrived with a penciled line suggesting, "If you'll put these
solid gold posies in your window to-morrow morning at eight o'clock,
so I'll surely know just which window is yours, I'll look up--when I
go past," Stanton most peremptorily ordered the janitor to display the
bouquet as ornately as possible along the narrow window-sill of the
biggest window that faced the street. Then all through the night he
lay dozing and waking intermittently, with a lovely, scared feeling in
the pit of his stomach that something really rather exciting was about
to happen. By surely half-past seven he rose laboriously from his bed,
huddled himself into his black-sheep wrapper and settled himself down
as warmly as could be expected, close to the draughty edge of the
window.
V
"Little and lame and red-haired and brown-eyed," he kept repeating to
himself.
Old people and young people, cab-drivers and jaunty young girls, and
fat blue policeman, looked up, one and all with quick-brightening
faces at the really gorgeous Spring-like flame of jonquils, but in a
whole chilly, wearisome hour the only red-haired person that passed
was an Irish setter puppy, and the only lame person was a
wooden-legged beggar.
Cold and disgusted as he was, Stanton could not altogether help
laughing at his own discomfiture.
"Why--hang that little girl! She ought to be s-p-a-n-k-e-d," he
chuckled as he climbed back into his tiresome bed.
Then as though to reward his ultimate good-nature the very next mail
brought him a letter from Cornelia, and rather a remarkable letter
too, as in addition to the usual impersonal comments on the weather
and the tennis and the annual orange crop, there was actually one
whole, individual, intimate sentence that distinguished the letter as
having been intended solely for him rather than for Cornelia's
dressmaker or her coachman's invalid daughter, or her own youngest
brother. This was the sentence:
"Really, Carl, you don't know how glad I am that in spite of
all your foolish objections, I kept to my original purpose
of not announcing my engagement until after my Southern
trip. You've no idea what a big difference it makes in a
girl's good time at a great hotel like this."
This sentence surely gave Stanton a good deal of food for his day's
thoughts, but the mental indigestion that ensued was not altogether
pleasant.
Not until evening did his mood brighten again. Then--
"Lad of Mine," whispered Molly's gentler letter. "Lad of
Mine, _how blond your hair is_!--Even across the
chin-tickling tops of those yellow jonquils this morning, I
almost laughed to see the blond, blond shine of you.--Some
day I'm going to stroke that hair." (Yes!)
"P. S. The Little Dog came home all right."
With a gasp of dismay Stanton sat up abruptly in bed and tried to
revisualize every single, individual pedestrian who had passed his
window in the vicinity of eight o'clock that morning. "She evidently
isn't lame at all," he argued, "or little, or red-haired, or anything.
Probably her name isn't Molly, and presumably it isn't even
'Meredith.' But at least she did go by: And is my hair so very
blond?" he asked himself suddenly. Against all intention his mouth
began to prance a little at the corners.
As soon as he could possibly summon the janitor, he despatched his
third note to the Serial-Letter Co., but this one bore a distinctly
sealed inner envelope, directed, "For Molly. Personal." And the
message in it, though brief was utterly to the point. "Couldn't you
_please_ tell a fellow who you are?"
But by the conventional bed-time hour the next night he wished most
heartily that he had not been so inquisitive, for the only
entertainment that came to him at all was a jonquil-colored telegram
warning him--
"Where the apple reddens do not pry,
Lest we lose our Eden--you and I."
The couplet was quite unfamiliar to Stanton, but it rhymed sickeningly
through his brain all night long like the consciousness of an
over-drawn bank account.
It was the very next morning after this that all the Boston papers
flaunted Cornelia's aristocratic young portrait on their front pages
with the striking, large-type announcement that "One of Boston's
Fairest Debutantes Makes a Daring Rescue in Florida waters. Hotel Cook
Capsized from Row Boat Owes His Life to the Pluck and Endurance--etc.,
etc."
With a great sob in his throat and every pulse pounding, Stanton lay
and read the infinite details of the really splendid story; a group of
young girls dallying on the Pier; a shrill cry from the bay; the
sudden panic-stricken helplessness of the spectators, and then with
equal suddenness the plunge of a single, feminine figure into the
water; the long hard swim; the furious struggle; the final victory.
Stingingly, as though it had been fairly branded into his eyes, he
saw the vision of Cornelia's heroic young face battling above the
horrible, dragging-down depths of the bay. The bravery, the risk, the
ghastly chances of a less fortunate ending, sent shiver after shiver
through his already tortured senses. All the loving thoughts in his
nature fairly leaped to do tribute to Cornelia. "Yes!" he reasoned,
"Cornelia was made like that! No matter what the cost to herself--no
matter what was the price--Cornelia would never, never fail to do her
_duty_!" When he thought of the weary, lagging, riskful weeks that
were still to ensue before he should actually see Cornelia again, he
felt as though he should go utterly mad. The letter that he wrote to
Cornelia that night was like a letter written in a man's own
heart-blood. His hand trembled so that he could scarcely hold the pen.
Cornelia did not like the letter. She said so frankly. The letter did
not seem to her quite "nice." "Certainly," she attested, "it was not
exactly the sort of letter that one would like to show one's mother."
Then, in a palpably conscientious effort to be kind as well as just,
she began to prattle inkily again about the pleasant, warm, sunny
weather. Her only comment on saving the drowning man was the mere
phrase that she was very glad that she had learned to be a good
swimmer. Never indeed since her absence had she spoken of missing
Stanton. Not even now, after what was inevitably a heart-racking
adventure, did she yield her lover one single iota of the information
which he had a lover's right to claim. Had she been frightened, for
instance--way down in the bottom of that serene heart of hers had she
been frightened? In the ensuing desperate struggle for life had she
struggled just one little tiny bit harder because Stanton was in that
life? Now, in the dreadful, unstrung reaction of the adventure, did
her whole nature waken and yearn and cry out for that one heart in all
the world that belonged to her? Plainly, by her silence in the matter,
she did not intend to share anything as intimate even as her fear of
death with the man whom she claimed to love.
It was just this last touch of deliberate, selfish aloofness that
startled Stanton's thoughts with the one persistent, brutally nagging
question: After all, was a woman's undeniably glorious ability to save
a drowning man the supreme, requisite of a happy marriage?
Day by day, night by night, hour by hour, minute by minute, the
question began to dig into Stanton's brain, throwing much dust and
confusion into brain-corners otherwise perfectly orderly and sweet and
clean.
Week by week, grown suddenly and morbidly analytical, he watched for
Cornelia's letters with increasingly passionate hopefulness, and met
each fresh disappointment with increasingly passionate resentment.
Except for the Serial-Letter Co.'s ingeniously varied attentions there
was practically nothing to help him make either day or night bearable.
More and more Cornelia's infrequent letters suggested exquisitely
painted empty dishes offered to a starving person. More and more
"Molly's" whimsical messages fed him and nourished him and joyously
pleased him like some nonsensically fashioned candy-box that yet
proved brimming full of real food for a real man. Fight as he would
against it, he began to cherish a sense of furious annoyance that
Cornelia's failure to provide for him had so thrust him out, as it
were, to feed among strangers. With frowning perplexity and real
worry he felt the tingling, vivid consciousness of Molly's personality
begin to permeate and impregnate his whole nature. Yet when he tried
to acknowledge and thereby cancel his personal sense of obligation to
this "Molly" by writing an exceptionally civil note of appreciation to
the Serial-Letter Co., the Serial-Letter Co. answered him tersely--
"Pray do not thank us for the jonquils,--blanket-wrapper, etc., etc.
Surely they are merely presents from yourself to yourself. It is your
money that bought them."
And when he had replied briefly, "Well, thank you for your brains,
then!" the "company" had persisted with undue sharpness, "Don't thank
us for our brains. Brains are our business."
VI
It was one day just about the end of the fifth week that poor
Stanton's long-accumulated, long-suppressed perplexity blew up noisily
just like any other kind of steam.
It was the first day, too, throughout all his illness that he had made
even the slightest pretext of being up and about. Slippered if not
booted, blanket-wrappered if not coated, shaven at least, if not
shorn, he had established himself fairly comfortably, late in the
afternoon, at his big study-table close to the fire, where, in his low
Morris chair, with his books and his papers and his lamp close at
hand, he had started out once more to try and solve the absurd little
problem that confronted him. Only an occasional twitch of pain in his
shoulder-blade, or an intermittent shudder of nerves along his spine
had interrupted in any possible way his almost frenzied absorption in
his subject.
Here at the desk very soon after supper-time the Doctor had joined
him, and with an unusual expression of leisure and friendliness had
settled down lollingly on the other side of the fireplace with his
great square-toed shoes nudging the bright, brassy edge of the fender,
and his big meerschaum pipe puffing the whole bleak room most
deliciously, tantalizingly full of forbidden tobacco smoke. It was a
comfortable, warm place to chat. The talk had begun with politics,
drifted a little way toward the architecture of several new city
buildings, hovered a moment over the marriage of some mutual friend,
and then languished utterly.
With a sudden narrowing-eyed shrewdness the Doctor turned and watched
an unwonted flicker of worry on Stanton's forehead.
"What's bothering you, Stanton?" he asked, quickly. "Surely you're not
worrying any more about your rheumatism?"
"No," said Stanton. "It--isn't--rheumatism."
For an instant the two men's eyes held each other, and then Stanton
began to laugh a trifle uneasily.
"Doctor," he asked quite abruptly, "Doctor, do you believe that any
possible conditions could exist--that would make it justifiable for a
man to show a woman's love-letter to another man?"
"Why--y-e-s," said the Doctor cautiously, "I think so. There might
be--circumstances--"
Still without any perceptible cause, Stanton laughed again, and
reaching out, picked up a folded sheet of paper from the table and
handed it to the Doctor.
"Read that, will you?" he asked. "And read it out loud."
With a slight protest of diffidence, the Doctor unfolded the paper,
scanned the page for an instant, and began slowly.
"Carl of Mine.
"There's one thing I forgot to tell you. When you go to buy
my engagement ring--I don't want any! No! I'd rather have
two wedding-rings instead--two perfectly plain gold
wedding-rings. And the ring for my passive left hand I want
inscribed, 'To Be a Sweetness More Desired than Spring!' and
the ring for my active right hand I want inscribed, 'His
Soul to Keep!' Just that.
"And you needn't bother to write me that you don't
understand, because you are not expected to understand. It
is not Man's prerogative to understand. But you are
perfectly welcome if you want, to call me crazy, because I
am--utterly crazy on just one subject, and _that's you_.
Why, Beloved, if--"
"Here!" cried Stanton suddenly reaching out and grabbing the letter.
"Here! You needn't read any more!" His cheeks were crimson.
The Doctor's eyes focused sharply on his face. "That girl loves you,"
said the Doctor tersely. For a moment then the Doctor's lips puffed
silently at his pipe, until at last with an almost bashful gesture, he
cried out abruptly: "Stanton, somehow I feel as though I owed you an
apology, or rather, owed your fiancée one. Somehow when you told me
that day that your young lady had gone gadding off to Florida
and--left you alone with your sickness, why I thought--well, most
evidently I have misjudged her."
Stanton's throat gave a little gasp, then silenced again. He bit his
lips furiously as though to hold back an exclamation. Then suddenly
the whole perplexing truth burst forth from him.
"That isn't from my fiancée!" he cried out. "That's just a
professional love-letter. I buy them by the dozen,--so much a week."
Reaching back under his pillow he extricated another letter. "_This_
is from my fiancée," he said. "Read it. Yes, do."
"Aloud?" gasped the Doctor.
Stanton nodded. His forehead was wet with sweat.
"DEAR CARL,
"The weather is still very warm. I am riding horseback
almost every morning, however, and playing tennis almost
every afternoon. There seem to be an exceptionally large
number of interesting people here this winter. In regard to
the list of names you sent me for the wedding, really, Carl,
I do not see how I can possibly accommodate so many of your
friends without seriously curtailing my own list. After all
you must remember that it is the bride's day, not the
groom's. And in regard to your question as to whether we
expect to be home for Christmas and could I possibly arrange
to spend Christmas Day with you--why, Carl, you are
perfectly preposterous! Of course it is very kind of you to
invite me and all that, but how could mother and I possibly
come to your rooms when our engagement is not even
announced? And besides there is going to be a very smart
dance here Christmas Eve that I particularly wish to attend.
And there are plenty of Christmases coming for you and me.
"Cordially yours,
"CORNELIA.
"P. S. Mother and I hope that your rheumatism is much
better."
"That's the girl who loves me," said Stanton not unhumorously. Then
suddenly all the muscles around his mouth tightened like the facial
muscles of a man who is hammering something. "I mean it!" he insisted.
"I mean it--absolutely. That's the--girl--who--loves--me!"
Silently the two men looked at each other for a second. Then they
both burst out laughing.
"Oh, yes," said Stanton at last, "I know it's funny. That's just the
trouble with it. It's altogether too funny."
Out of a book on the table beside him he drew the thin gray and
crimson circular of The Serial-Letter Co. and handed it to the Doctor.
Then after a moment's rummaging around on the floor beside him, he
produced with some difficulty a long, pasteboard box fairly bulging
with papers and things.
"These are the--communications from my make-believe girl," he
confessed grinningly. "Oh, of course they're not all letters," he
hurried to explain. "Here's a book on South America.--I'm a rubber
broker, you know, and of course I've always been keen enough about the
New England end of my job, but I've never thought anything so very
special about the South American end of it. But that girl--that
make-believe girl, I mean--insists that I ought to know all about
South America, so she sent me this book; and it's corking reading,
too--all about funny things like eating monkeys and parrots and
toasted guinea-pigs--and sleeping outdoors in black jungle-nights
under mosquito netting, mind you, as a protection against prowling
panthers.--And here's a queer little newspaper cutting that she sent
me one blizzardy Sunday telling all about some big violin maker who
always went out into the forests himself and chose his violin woods
from the _north_ side of the trees. Casual little item. You don't
think anything about it at the moment. It probably isn't true. And to
save your soul you couldn't tell what kind of trees violins are made
out of, anyway. But I'll wager that never again will you wake in the
night to listen to the wind without thinking of the great
storm-tossed, moaning, groaning, slow-toughening forest
trees--learning to be violins!... And here's a funny little old silver
porringer that she gave me, she says, to make my 'old gray gruel taste
shinier.' And down at the bottom of the bowl--the ruthless little
pirate--she's taken a knife or a pin or something and scratched the
words, 'Excellent Child!'--But you know I never noticed that part of
it at all till last week. You see I've only been eating down to the
bottom of the bowl just about a week.--And here's a catalogue of a
boy's school, four or five catalogues in fact that she sent me one
evening and asked me if I please wouldn't look them over right away
and help her decide where to send her little brother. Why, man, it
took me almost all night! If you get the athletics you want in one
school, then likelier than not you slip up on the manual training,
and if they're going to schedule eight hours a week for Latin, why
where in Creation--?"
Shrugging his shoulders as though to shrug aside absolutely any
possible further responsibility concerning, "little brother," Stanton
began to dig down deeper into the box. Then suddenly all the grin came
back to his face.
"And here are some sample wall papers that she sent me for 'our
house'," he confided, flushing. "What do you think of that bronze one
there with the peacock feathers?--say, old man, think of a
library--and a cannel coal fire--and a big mahogany desk--and a
red-haired girl sitting against that paper! And this sun-shiny tint
for a breakfast-room isn't half bad, is it?--Oh yes, and here are the
time-tables, and all the pink and blue maps about Colorado and Arizona
and the 'Painted Desert'. If we can 'afford it,' she writes, she
'wishes we could go to the Painted Desert on our wedding trip.'--But
really, old man, you know it isn't such a frightfully expensive
journey. Why if you leave New York on Wednesday--Oh, hang it all!
What's the use of showing you any more of this nonsense?" he finished
abruptly.