"SOMETHING'S HAPPENED."
SALLIE CALKINS sat in a common little rocking-chair and rocked; and
while she rocked she sewed, setting neat stitches in a brown coat which
was already patched and darned, and was threadbare in many places.
There was a look of deep content on Sallie's face. There were many
reasons for it.
Dr. Everett had that morning pronounced Mark's broken limb to be
healing rapidly. He had also reported that Mark's place was to be held
open for him by his employers. At this present moment Mark, arrayed in
a clean shirt, was resting on a very white sheet, his head reposing
on a real feather pillow dressed in white and frilled. Over him was
carefully spread another of those wonderful sheets, and, to make the
crowning glory, a white quilt, warm and soft, tucked him in on every
side. How could Sallie but rejoice?
All about the room there had been changes. A neat little table stood
at the bed-side. It was covered with a white cloth, and a china bowl
set thereon, with a silver spoon beside it; a delicate goblet and china
pitcher also, both carefully covered with a napkin. Did Mrs. Roberts
know how homely Sallie gloried in the thinness of that china and the
fineness of that napkin? How does it happen that some of the very poor
seem born with such æsthetic tastes?
Mrs. Roberts had intuitions, and was given to certain acts, concerning
which she could not give to others satisfactory explanations;
therefore, she sometimes left china where others would have judged the
plainest stoneware more prudent and sensible.
A bit of bright carpet was spread at the side of the bed; a fire glowed
in the neatly-brushed stove; a white muslin curtain hung at the window;
and the chair in which Sallie rocked and sewed was new and gaily
painted.
There were other traces of Mrs. Roberts. You might not have noticed
them, but it seemed to Sallie that her fingers had touched everywhere.
Yet the lady herself thought that she had done very little. She had
held her inclinations in check with severe judgment.
The door opened softly, and a mass of golden hair, from out of which
peered great eyes, peeped cautiously in.
"Alone?" it said, nodding first toward the figure on the bed, and
intimating that she was aware of Mark's presence, and did not mean him.
"Yes," said Sallie; "come in. Mark's asleep, but you won't disturb him.
He don't disturb easy; he sleeps just like a baby since the doctor
stopped that pain in his knee. There's my new chair; just try it, and
see how nice it is."
Saying which, she got herself out of the little rocker in haste, and
pushed it toward her guest, meantime taking a plain wooden chair, also
new, and adding, "Did you hear of anybody like her before?"
"Something's happened," said Mart Colson, ignoring the reference to the
mysterious pronoun—her voice so full of a new and strange meaning, that
had Sallie been acquainted with the word she might have said it was
filled with awe.
As it was, she only exclaimed, "What?" in an intensely interested tone.
"Why, look here! I brought it along to show you."
Whereupon she produced from under her piece of torn shawl a large
broken-nosed pitcher, a piece of brown paper carefully tied over the
top. She untied the bit of calico string with fingers that shook from
excitement.
"Look in there!" she exclaimed at last, triumph in her tone, reaching
forward the pitcher.
Sallie looked, and drew in her breath with a long, expressive "O—h!"
There, reposing in stately beauty, lay the great white lily with its
golden bell.
"Yes, I should think so," Mart said, satisfied with the expression.
"Did you ever see anything like that before? It ain't made of wax, nor
anything else that folks ever made. It's alive. I felt of it. It looks
like velvet and satin and all them lovely store things; but it doesn't
feel so: it feels alive, and it grew. But, Sallie Calkins, if you
should live a hundred years, and guess all the time, you never could
guess where I got it. Sallie Calkins, if you'll believe it, Dirk gave
it to me!"
"Dirk?"
"Yes, he did!"
Who would have supposed Mart Colson's voice capable of such a
triumphant ring!
[Illustration: THE LILY.]
"You see the way of it was: last night he didn't come for his supper
at all, and that always scares me dreadful. I'm expecting something
to happen, you know. Father, he didn't come either; for the matter of
that, he hasn't come yet. And mother, she was awful tired, and hadn't
had no dinner to speak of, and she just broke down and took on awful.
Mother don't often cry; and it's good she don't, for she just goes into
it with all her might when the time comes. It wasn't about father—she's
used to him, you know, and don't expect nothing else; but Dirk drives
her wild with what may happen to him. I was worried about him too, but
I was mad at him; it seemed too awful mean in him to stay away and
scare mother. At last I got her to go to bed, and she was all tuckered
out and went to sleep.
"Then I wrapped myself in the quilt and sat down to wait; but I got
asleep, and I dreamed I saw 'her.' She had wings to each side of her,
and she flew over the tops of all these houses, and made them turn
white like the snow looks when it is coming down before it drops into
the gutters. Wasn't that queer? Well, some noise woke me up. I was
sitting flat on the floor by mother, and I sat up straight all of a
tremble. And there was the old stool, and the brown pitcher on it
half-full of water; and this wonderful thing stood in it looking at me.
And Dirk, he stood off the other side looking at it.
"'It's for you, and she sent it.' That's what he said to me; and I
wasn't real wide awake, you know. I suppose that's what made his voice
sound so queer.
"And what do you think I said? I was thinking of my dream, and says
I,—'Did she have her wings on?'
"Then Dirk made a queer noise; it was a laugh, but it sounded most like
a cry.
"'I guess so,' says he. And then he turned and went off to bed.
"And I can't get any more out of him; he is as snarly when I ask any
questions as though he was mad about it all. If it hadn't been for
this great white thing, I might have thought this morning that it all
belonged to the dream. But Dirk brought this home from somewhere, and
put it in the pitcher, and gave it to me his own self; that's sure."
The story closed in triumph.
"It is beautiful!" said Sallie, the brown jacket slipping to the floor,
while she bent over the lily. "It is beautiful all of it, and it looks
just like her, and sounds like her, wings and all. Of course she sent
it."
"And Dirk brought it!" That part of the story Mart Colson did not
forget.
Sometimes it seems to me a pity that hearts are not laid bare to the
gaze of others. What, for instance, might not this little incident have
done for Dirk Colson had he known how the starved heart of his sister
fed on the thought that he brought her the flower?
Still, on the other hand, I don't know what the effect would have been
on Mart had she known what a tremendous amount of courage it had taken
to present the flower to her. A dozen times on the way home had Dirk
been on the point of consigning it to the gutter. "He" carry home a
flower! If it had been a loaf of bread, he thought it would have been
more consistent. Some way he recognized a fine sarcasm in the thought
that he, who had never in his life contributed towards the necessities
of the family should carry to that dreary home a flower!
Yet the fair lily did its work well during that long walk from East
Fifty-fifth Street to the shadow of the alley. It made Dirk Colson tell
it fiercely that he hated himself; that he was a brute and a loafer—a
blot on the earth, and ought not to live. Why didn't he go to work? Why
didn't he have things to bring home to Mart every little while, as Mark
Calkins did to Sallie? Hadn't he seen Mark, only a few evenings before
he was hurt, with a pair of girl's shoes strung over his shoulder, and
heard him whistle as he ran, two steps at a time, up the rickety stairs?
What would Mart think if he should bring her home a pair of shoes?
What would she think of his bringing her a flower? She would sneer, of
course; and, in the mood which then possessed him, Dirk said angrily
that she had a right to sneer, and would be a fool not to; and yet he
hated the thought of it. There was nothing in life that Dirk hated more
than sneers; and he had been fed on them ever since he could remember.
He was altogether unprepared for the reception which the lily received.
That suggestion about wings, which seemed so apt, had brought the
"queer" sound to his voice that Mart had noticed. If only she had
understood and not spoiled, next morning, the effect of her words!
In the prosaic daylight, the illusion of "wings" being banished, she
was bent on knowing how Dirk came into possession of the lily.
"Who sent it, Dirk? I don't believe anybody told you to give it to me.
Who would care about my having a flower? Where did you get it?"
"Where do you s'pose?" Dirk's voice was ominously gruff.
It is a painful truth that by daylight he was ashamed of his part of
the transaction.
"I told you she sent it. It's noways likely that I'd take the trouble
to make up a lie about that weed. How do I know what she wanted you to
have it for? Maybe she thought it matched your looks."
There was a bitter sneer in Dirk's voice; yet all the time he heard the
sweet, low voice saying, "That girl with the beautiful golden hair."
Suppose he should tell Mart that? Why not? Let me tell you that Dirk
Colson would not have repeated that sentence for the world! And yet he
did not know why.
Mart's face burned red under his sneer.
"How am I to know who 'she' is?" she said in bitter scorn. "Some of
your bar-room beauties, for whom you dance and whistle, I suppose. You
can tell her I would rather have my shawl out of pawn, or some shoes
for my feet, enough sight. What do I care for a great flower mocking at
me."
"Pitch it into the fire, then; and it will be many a long day before I
bring you anything else," said Dirk, pushing himself angrily back from
the table, where he had been eating bread dipped in choice pork fat.
"There isn't a bit of danger of my doing that," she called after him
mockingly. "There isn't a spunk of fire, nor likely to be to-day,
unless some of your admirers send me a shovel of coal. Mercy knows, I
wish they would."
He mercifully lost part of this sentence, for the reason that before it
was concluded, he was moving with long, angry strides up the alley.
And then Mart took the broken-nosed pitcher away into the farthermost
corner, although she was alone in the room, and laid her face against
the cool, pure lily, and wept into it great burning tears. Poor,
ignorant soul! She wanted—oh how she "wanted"!—Dirk to be brave and
good like Mark Calkins, her one type of manhood. Yet she did not know
that she was crushing out the germ which might have grown in his heart.
True, she knew herself to be very different from Sallie; but she
thought, poor soul that that was because Mark was so different from
Dirk.
Isn't it a pity that the sweet-faced lily could not have told its
tender story to both these ignorant ones?