persisted a trifle wistfully. "I guess--I guess it takes a man to
really run a business with any sort of financial success, 'cause you
see a man never puts anything except his head into his business. And
of course if you only put your head into it, then you go right along
giving always just a little wee bit less than 'value received'--and so
you can't help, sir, making a profit. Why people would think you were
plain, stark crazy if you gave them even one more pair of poor rubber
boots than they'd paid for. But a woman! Well, you see my little
business was a sort of a scheme to sell sympathy--perfectly good
sympathy, you know--but to sell it to people who really needed it,
instead of giving it away to people who didn't care anything about it
at all. And you have to run that sort of business almost entirely with
your heart--and you wouldn't feel decent at all, unless you delivered
to everybody just a little tiny bit more sympathy than he paid for.
Otherwise, you see you wouldn't be delivering perfectly good sympathy.
So that's why--you understand now--that's why I had to send you my
very own woolly blanket-wrapper, and my very own silver porringer, and
my very own sling-shot that I fight city cats with,--because, you see,
I had to use every single cent of your money right away to pay for the
things that I'd already bought for other people."
"For other people?" quizzed Stanton a bit resentfully.
"Oh, yes," acknowledged the girl; "for several other people." Then,
"Did you like the idea of the 'Rheumatic Nights Entertainment'?" she
asked quite abruptly.
"Did I like it?" cried Stanton. "Did I _like_ it?"
With a little shrugging air of apology the girl straightened up very
stiffly in her chair.
"Of course it wasn't exactly an original idea," she explained
contritely. "That is, I mean not original for you. You see, it's
really a little club of mine--a little subscription club of rheumatic
people who can't sleep; and I go every night in the week, an hour to
each one of them. There are only three, you know. There's a youngish
lady in Boston, and a very, very old gentleman out in Brookline, and
the tiniest sort of a poor little sick girl in Cambridge. Sometimes I
turn up just at supper-time and jolly them along a bit with their
gruels. Sometimes I don't get around till ten or eleven o'clock in the
great boo-black dark. From two to three in the morning seems to be the
cruelest, grayest, coldest time for the little girl in Cambridge....
And I play the banjo decently well, you know, and sing more or
less--and tell stories, or read aloud; and I most always go dressed up
in some sort of a fancy costume 'cause I can't seem to find any other
thing to do that astonishes sick people so much and makes them sit up
so bravely and look so shiny. And really, it isn't such dreadfully
hard work to do, because everything fits together so well. The short
skirts, for instance, that turn me into such a jolly prattling
great-grandchild for the poor old gentleman, make me just a perfectly
rational, contemporaneous-looking play-mate for the small Cambridge
girl. I'm so very, very little!"
"Only, of course," she finished wryly; "only, of course, it costs such
a horrid big lot for costumes and carriages and things. That's what's
'busted' me, as the boys say. And then, of course, I'm most dreadfully
sleepy all the day times when I ought to be writing nice things for my
Serial-Letter Co. business. And then one day last week--" the vivid
red lips twisted oddly at one corner. "One night last week they sent
me word from Cambridge that the little, little girl was going to
die--and was calling and calling for the 'Gray-Plush Squirrel Lady'.
So I hired a big gray squirrel coat from a furrier whom I know, and I
ripped up my muff and made me the very best sort of a hot, gray,
smothery face that I could--and I went out to Cambridge and sat three
hours on the footboard of a bed, cracking jokes--and nuts--to beguile
a little child's death-pain. And somehow it broke my heart--or my
spirit--or something. Somehow I think I could have stood it better
with my own skin face! Anyway the little girl doesn't need me any
more. Anyway, it doesn't matter if someone did need me!... I tell you
I'm 'broke'! I tell you I haven't got one single solitary more thing
to give! It isn't just my pocket-book that's empty: it's my head
that's spent, too! It's my heart that's altogether stripped! _And I'm
going to run away! Yes, I am!_"
Jumping to her feet she stood there for an instant all out of breath,
as though just the mere fancy thought of running away had almost
exhausted her. Then suddenly she began to laugh.
"I'm so tired of making up things," she confessed; "why, I'm so tired
of making up grandfathers, I'm so tired of making up pirates, I'm so
tired of making-up lovers--that I actually cherish the bill collector
as the only real, genuine acquaintance whom I have in Boston.
Certainly there's no slightest trace of pretence about him!... Excuse
me for being so flippant," she added soberly, "but you see I haven't
got any sympathy left even for myself."
"But for heaven's sake!" cried Stanton, "why don't you let somebody
help you? Why don't you let me--"
"Oh, you _can_ help me!" cried the little red-lipped voice excitedly.
"Oh, yes, indeed you can help me! That's why I came here this evening.
You see I've settled up now with every one of my creditors except you
and the youngish Boston lady, and I'm on my way to her house now.
We're reading Oriental Fairy stories together. Truly I think she'll be
very glad indeed to release me from my contract when I offer her my
coral beads instead, because they are dreadfully nice beads, my real,
unpretended grandfather carved them for me himself.... But how can I
settle with you? I haven't got anything left to settle with, and it
might be months and months before I could refund the actual cash
money. So wouldn't you--couldn't you please call my coming here this
evening an equivalent to one week's subscription?"
[Illustration: "Oh! Don't I look--gorgeous!" she stammered]
Wriggling out of the cloak and veil that wrapped her like a
chrysalis she emerged suddenly a glimmering, shimmering little
oriental figure of satin and silver and haunting sandalwood--a
veritable little incandescent rainbow of spangled moonlight and
flaming scarlet and dark purple shadows. Great, heavy, jet-black curls
caught back from her small piquant face by a blazing rhinestone
fillet,--cheeks just a tiny bit over-tinted with rouge and
excitement,--big, red-brown eyes packed full of high lights like a
startled fawn's,--bold in the utter security of her masquerade, yet
scared almost to death by the persistent underlying heart-thump of her
unescapable self-consciousness,--altogether as tantalizing, altogether
as unreal, as a vision out of the Arabian Nights, she stood there
staring quizzically at Stanton.
"_Would_ you call it--an--equivalent? _Would_ you?" she asked
nervously.
Then pirouetting over to the largest mirror in sight she began to
smooth and twist her silken sash into place. Somewhere at wrist or
ankle twittered the jingle of innumerable bangles.
"Oh! Don't I look--gorgeous!" she stammered. "O--h--h!"
VIII
Everything that was discreet and engaged-to-be-married in Stanton's
conservative make-up exploded suddenly into one utterly irresponsible
speech.
"You little witch!" he cried out. "You little beauty! For heaven's
sake come over here and sit down in this chair where I can look at
you! I want to talk to you! I--"
Pirouetting once more before the mirror, she divided one fleet glance
between admiration for herself and scorn for Stanton.
"Oh, yes, I felt perfectly sure that you'd insist upon having me
'pretty'!" she announced sternly. Then courtesying low to the ground
in mock humility, she began to sing-song mischievously:
"So Molly, Molly made-her-a-face,
Made it of rouge and made it of lace.
Long as the rouge and the lace are fair,
Oh, Mr. Man, what do you care?"
"You don't need any rouge or lace to make _you_ pretty!" Stanton
fairly shouted in his vehemence. "Anybody might have known that that
lovely, little mind of yours could only live in a--"
"Nonsense!" the girl interrupted, almost temperishly. Then with a
quick, impatient sort of gesture she turned to the table, and picking
up book after book, opened it and stared in it as though it had been a
mirror. "Oh, maybe my mind is pretty enough," she acknowledged
reluctantly. "But likelier than not, my face is not becoming--to me."
Crossing slowly over to Stanton's side she seated herself, with much
jingling, rainbow-colored, sandalwood-scented dignity, in the chair
that the Doctor had just vacated.
"Poor dear, you've been pretty sick, haven't you?" she mused gently.
Cautiously then she reached out and touched the soft, woolly cuff of
his blanket-wrapper. "Did you really like it?" she asked.
Stanton began to smile again. "Did I really like it?" he repeated
joyously. "Why, don't you know that if it hadn't been for you I should
have gone utterly mad these past few weeks? Don't you know that if it
hadn't been for you--don't you know that if--" A little over-zealously
he clutched at the tinsel fringe on the oriental lady's fan. "Don't
you know--don't you know that I'm--engaged to be married?" he finished
weakly.
The oriental lady shivered suddenly, as any lady might shiver on a
November night in thin silken clothes. "Engaged to be married?" she
stammered. "Oh, yes! Why--of course! Most men are! Really unless you
catch a man very young and keep him absolutely constantly by your
side you cannot hope to walk even into his friendship--except across
the heart of some other woman." Again she shivered and jingled a
hundred merry little bangles. "But why?" she asked abruptly, "why, if
you're engaged to be married, did you come and--buy love-letters of
me? My love-letters are distinctly for lonely people," she added
severely.
"How dared you--How dared you go into the love-letter business in the
first place?" quizzed Stanton dryly. "And when it comes to asking
personal questions, how dared you send me printed slips in answer to
my letters to you? Printed slips, mind you!... How many men are you
writing love-letters to, anyway?"
The oriental lady threw out her small hands deprecatingly. "How many
men? Only two besides yourself. There's such a fad for nature study
these days that almost everybody this year has ordered the 'Gray-Plush
Squirrel' series. But I'm doing one or two 'Japanese Fairies' for sick
children, and a high school history class out in Omaha has ordered a
weekly epistle from William of Orange."
"Hang the High School class out in Omaha!" said Stanton. "It was the
love-letters that I was asking about."
"Oh, yes, I forgot," murmured the oriental lady. "Just two men besides
yourself, I said, didn't I? Well one of them is a life convict out in
an Illinois prison. He's subscribed for a whole year--for a
fortnightly letter from a girl in Killarney who has got to be named
'Katie'. He's a very, very old man, I think, but I don't even know his
name 'cause he's only a number now--'4632'--or something like that.
And I have to send all my letters over to Killarney to be mailed--Oh,
he's awfully particular about that. And it was pretty hard at first
working up all the geography that he knew and I didn't. But--pshaw!
You're not interested in Killarney. Then there's a New York boy down
in Ceylon on a smelly old tea plantation. His people have dropped him,
I guess, for some reason or other; so I'm just 'the girl from home' to
him, and I prattle to him every month or so about the things he used
to care about. It's easy enough to work that up from the social
columns in the New York papers--and twice I've been over to New York
to get special details for him; once to find out if his mother was
really as sick as the Sunday paper said, and once--yes, really, once I
butted in to a tea his sister was giving, and wrote him, yes, wrote
him all about how the moths were eating up the big moose-head in his
own front hall. And he sent an awfully funny, nice letter of thanks to
the Serial-Letter Co.--yes, he did! And then there's a crippled French
girl out in the Berkshires who is utterly crazy, it seems, about the
'Three Musketeers', so I'm d'Artagnan to her, and it's dreadfully hard
work--in French--but I'm learning a lot out of that, and--"
"There. Don't tell me any more!" cried Stanton.
Then suddenly the pulses in his temples began to pound so hard and so
loud that he could not seem to estimate at all just how loud he was
speaking.
"Who are you?" he insisted. "Who are you? Tell me instantly, I say!
_Who are you anyway?_"
The oriental lady jumped up in alarm. "I'm no one at all--to you," she
said coolly, "except just--Molly Make-Believe."
Something in her tone seemed to fairly madden Stanton.
"You shall tell me who you are!" he cried. "You shall! I say you
shall!"
Plunging forward he grabbed at her little bangled wrists and held them
in a vise that sent the rheumatic pains shooting up his arms to add
even further frenzy to his brain.
"Tell me who you are!" he grinned. "You shan't go out of here in ten
thousand years till you've told me who you are!"
Frightened, infuriated, quivering with astonishment, the girl stood
trying to wrench her little wrists out of his mighty grasp, stamping
in perfectly impotent rage all the while with her soft-sandalled,
jingling feet.
"I won't tell you who I am! I won't! I won't!" she swore and reswore
in a dozen different staccato accents. The whole daring passion of
the Orient that costumed her seemed to have permeated every fiber of
her small being.
Then suddenly she drew in her breath in a long quivering sigh. Staring
up into her face, Stanton gave a little groan of dismay, and released
her hands.
"Why, Molly! Molly! You're--crying," he whispered. "Why, little girl!
Why--"
Backing slowly away from him, she made a desperate effort to smile
through her tears.
"Now you've spoiled everything," she said.
"Oh no, not--everything," argued Stanton helplessly from his chair,
afraid to rise to his feet, afraid even to shuffle his slippers on the
floor lest the slightest suspicion of vehemence on his part should
hasten that steady, backward retreat of hers towards the door.
Already she had re-acquired her cloak and overshoes and was groping
out somewhat blindly for her veil in a frantic effort to avoid any
possible chance of turning her back even for a second on so dangerous
a person as himself.
"Yes, everything," nodded the small grieved face. Yet the tragic,
snuffling little sob that accompanied the words only served to add a
most entrancing, tip-nosed vivacity to the statement.
"Oh, of course I know," she added hastily. "Oh, of course I know
perfectly well that I oughtn't to have come alone to your rooms like
this!" Madly she began to wind the pink veil round and round and round
her cheeks like a bandage. "Oh, of course I know perfectly well that it
wasn't even remotely proper! But don't you think--don't you think that
if you've always been awfully, awfully strict and particular with
yourself about things all your life, that you might have
risked--safely--just one little innocent, mischievous sort of a half
hour? Especially if it was the only possible way you could think of to
square up everything and add just a little wee present besides? 'Cause
nothing, you know, that you can _afford_ to give ever seems exactly like
giving a really, truly present. It's got to hurt you somewhere to be a
'present'. So my coming here this evening--this way--was altogether the
bravest, scariest, unwisest, most-like-a-present-feeling-thing that I
could possibly think of to do--for you. And even if you hadn't spoiled
everything, I was going away to-morrow just the same forever and ever
and ever!"
Cautiously she perched herself on the edge of a chair, and thrust her
narrow, gold-embroidered toes into the wide, blunt depths of her
overshoes. "Forever and ever!" she insisted almost gloatingly.
"Not forever and _ever_!" protested Stanton vigorously. "You don't
think for a moment, do you, that after all this wonderful, jolly
friendship of ours, you're going to drop right out of sight as though
the earth had opened?"
Even the little quick, forward lurch of his shoulders in the chair
sent the girl scuttling to her feet again, one overshoe still in her
hand.
Just at the edge of the door-mat she turned and smiled at him
mockingly. Really it had been a long time since she had smiled.
"Surely you don't think that you'd be able to recognize me in my
street clothes, do you?" she asked bluntly.
Stanton's answering smile was quite as mocking as hers.
"Why not?" he queried. "Didn't I have the pleasure of choosing your
winter hat for you? Let me see,--it was brown, with a pink
rose--wasn't it? I should know it among a million."
With a little shrug of her shoulders she leaned back against the door
and stared at him suddenly out of her big red-brown eyes with singular
intentness.
"Well, _will_ you call it an equivalent to one week's subscription?"
she asked very gravely.
Some long-sleeping devil of mischief awoke in Stanton's senses.
"Equivalent to one whole week's subscription?" he repeated with mock
incredulity. "A whole week--seven days and nights? Oh, no! No! No! I
don't think you've given me, yet, more than about--four days' worth to
think about. Just about four days' worth, I should think."
Pushing the pink veil further and further back from her features, with
plainly quivering hands, the girl's whole soul seemed to blaze out at
him suddenly, and then wince back again. Then just as quickly a droll
little gleam of malice glinted in her eyes.
"Oh, all right then," she smiled. "If you really think I've given you
only four days' and nights' worth of thoughts--here's something for
the fifth day and night."
Very casually, yet still very accurately, her right hand reached out
to the knob of the door.
"To cancel my debt for the fifth day," she said, "do you really
'honest-injun' want to know who I am? I'll tell you! First, you've
seen me before."
"What?" cried Stanton, plunging forward in his chair.
Something in the girl's quick clutch of the door-knob warned him quite
distinctly to relax again into his cushions.
"Yes," she repeated triumphantly. "And you've talked with me too, as
often as twice! And moreover you've danced with me!"
Tossing her head with sudden-born daring she reached up and snatched
off her curly black wig, and shook down all around her such a great,
shining, utterly glorious mass of mahogany colored hair that Stanton's
astonishment turned almost into faintness.
"What?" he cried out. "What? You say I've seen you before? Talked with
you? Waltzed with you, perhaps? Never! I haven't! I tell you I
haven't! I never saw that hair before! If I had, I shouldn't have
forgotten it to my dying day. Why--"
With a little wail of despair she leaned back against the door. "You
don't even remember me _now_?" she mourned. "Oh dear, dear, dear! And
I thought _you_ were so beautiful!" Then, woman-like, her whole
sympathy rushed to defend him from her own accusations. "Oh, well, it
was at a masquerade party," she acknowledged generously, "and I
suppose you go to a great many masquerades."
Heaping up her hair like so much molten copper into the hood of her
cloak, and trying desperately to snare all the wild, escaping tendrils
with the softer mesh of her veil, she reached out a free hand at last
and opened the door just a crack.
"And to give you something to think about for the sixth day and
night," she resumed suddenly, with the same strange little glint in
her eyes, "to give you something to think about the sixth day, I'll
tell you that I really was hungry--when I asked you for your toast. I
haven't had anything to eat to-day; and--"
[Illustration: "What?" cried Stanton, plunging forward in his chair]
Before she could finish the sentence Stanton had sprung from his
chair, and stood trying to reason out madly whether one single more
stride would catch her, or lose her.
"And as for something for you to think about the seventh day and
night," she gasped hurriedly. Already the door had opened to her hand
and her little figure stood silhouetted darkly against the bright,
yellow-lighted hallway, "here's something for you to think about for
_twenty_-seven days and nights!" Wildly her little hands went
clutching at the woodwork. "I didn't know you were engaged to be
married," she cried out passionately, "and I _loved_ you--_loved_
you--_loved_ you!"
Then in a flash she was gone.
IX
With absolute finality the big door banged behind her. A minute later
the street door, four flights down, rang out in jarring reverberation.
A minute after that it seemed as though every door in every house on
the street slammed shrilly. Then the charred fire-log sagged down into
the ashes with a sad, puffing sigh. Then a whole row of books on a
loosely packed shelf toppled over on each other with soft jocose
slaps.
Crawling back into his Morris chair with every bone in his body aching
like a magnetized wire-skeleton charged with pain, Stanton collapsed
again into his pillows and sat staring--staring into the dying fire.
Nine o'clock rang out dully from the nearest church spire; ten
o'clock, eleven o'clock followed in turn with monotonous, chiming
insistency. Gradually the relaxing steam-radiators began to grunt and
grumble into a chill quietude. Gradually along the bare, bleak
stretches of unrugged floor little cold draughts of air came creeping
exploringly to his feet.
And still he sat staring--staring into the fast graying ashes.
"Oh, Glory! Glory!" he said. "Think what it would mean if all that
wonderful imagination were turned loose upon just one fellow! Even if
she didn't love you, think how she'd play the game! And if she did
love you--Oh, lordy; Lordy! LORDY!"
Towards midnight, to ease the melancholy smell of the dying lamp, he
drew reluctantly forth from his deepest blanket-wrapper pocket the
little knotted handkerchief that encased the still-treasured handful
of fragrant fir-balsam, and bending groaningly forward in his chair
sifted the brittle, pungent needles into the face of the one glowing
ember that survived. Instantly in a single dazzling flash of flame the
tangible forest symbol vanished in intangible fragrance. But along the
hollow of his hand,--across the edge of his sleeve,--up from the
ragged pile of books and papers,--out from the farthest, remotest
corners of the room, lurked the unutterable, undestroyable sweetness
of all forests since the world was made.
Almost with a sob in his throat Stanton turned again to the box of
letters on his table.
By dawn the feverish, excited sleeplessness in his brain had driven
him on and on to one last, supremely fantastic impulse. Writing to
Cornelia he told her bluntly, frankly,
"DEAR CORNELIA:
"When I asked you to marry me, you made me promise very
solemnly at the time that if I ever changed my mind
regarding you I would surely tell you. And I laughed at you.
Do you remember? But you were right, it seems, and I was
wrong. For I believe that I have changed my mind. That
is:--I don't know how to express it exactly, but it has been
made very, very plain to me lately that I do not by any
manner of means love you as little as you need to be loved.
"In all sincerity,
"CARL."
To which surprising communication Cornelia answered immediately; but
the 'immediately' involved a week's almost maddening interim,
"DEAR CARL:
"Neither mother nor I can make any sense whatsoever out of
your note. By any possible chance was it meant to be a joke?
You say you do not love me 'as little' as I need to be
loved. You mean 'as much', don't you? Carl, what do you
mean?"
Laboriously, with the full prospect of yet another week's agonizing
strain and suspense, Stanton wrote again to Cornelia.
"DEAR CORNELIA:
"No, I meant 'as little' as you need to be loved. I have no
adequate explanation to make. I have no adequate apology to
offer. I don't think anything. I don't hope anything. All I
know is that I suddenly believe positively that our
engagement is a mistake. Certainly I am neither giving you
all that I am capable of giving you, nor yet receiving from
you all that I am capable of receiving. Just this fact
should decide the matter I think.
"CARL."
Cornelia did not wait to write an answer to this. She telegraphed
instead. The message even in the telegraph operator's handwriting
looked a little nervous.