She erected herself in the chair, threw back her shoulders, and her wide
mouth curved and lifted at the corners with the humour that never long
deserts this woman.
"Yep! That light flooded out its golden rays on the reprehensible person
of C. Wilbur Todd," she crisply announced. "And like they say in the
stories, little remains to be told.
"I let out a kind of strangled yell, and Wilbur beat it right across my
new lawn, and I beat it downstairs. But that girl was like a
sleepwalker--not to be talked to, I mean, like you could talk to
persons.
"'Aunty,' she says in creepy tones, 'I have brought myself to the
ultimate surrender. I know the chains are about me, already I feel the
shackles, but I glory in them.' She kind of gasped and shivered in
horrible delight. 'I've kissed the cross at last,' she mutters.
"I was so weak I dropped into a chair and I just looked at her. At first
I couldn't speak, then I saw it was no good speaking. She was free,
white, and twenty-one. So I never let on. I've had to take a jolt or two
in my time. I've learned how. But finally I did manage to ask how about
Chet Timmins.
"'I wronged dear Chester,' she says. 'I admit it freely. He has a heart
of gold and a nature in a thousand. But, of course, there could never be
anything between him and a nature like mine; our egos function on
different planes,' she says. 'Dear Chester came to see it, too. It's
only in the last week we've come to understand each other. It was really
that wonderful song that brought us to our mutual knowledge. It helped
us to understand our mutual depths better than all the ages of eternity
could have achieved.' On she goes with this mutual stuff, till you'd
have thought she was reading a composition or something. 'And dear
Chester is so radiant in his own new-found happiness,' she says. 'What!'
I yells, for this was indeed some jolt.
"'He has come into his own,' she says. 'They have eloped to Spokane,
though I promised to observe secrecy until the train had gone. A very
worthy creature I gather from what Chester tells me, a Miss
Macgillicuddy--'
"'Not the manicure party?' I yells again.
"'I believe she has been a wage-earner,' says Nettie. 'And dear Chester
is so grateful about that song. It was her favourite song, too, and it
seemed to bring them together, just as it opened my own soul to Wilbur.
He says she sings the song very charmingly herself, and he thought it
preferable that they be wed in Spokane before his father objected. And
oh, aunty, I do see how blind I was to my destiny, and how kind you were
to me in my blindness--you who had led the fuller life as I shall lead
it at Wilbur's side.'
"'You beat it to your room,' I orders her, very savage and disorganized.
For I had stood about all the jolts in one day that God had meant me
to. And so they was married, Chester and his bride attending the
ceremony and Oscar Teetz' five-piece orchestra playing the--" She
broke off, with a suddenly blazing glance at the disk, and seized it
from the table rather purposefully. With a hand firmly at both edges she
stared inscrutably at it a long moment.
"I hate to break the darned thing," she said musingly at last. "I guess
I'll just lock it up. Maybe some time I'll be feeling the need to hear
it again. I know I can still be had by it if all the circumstances is
right."
Still she stared at the thing curiously.
"Gee! It was hot getting them calves out to-day, and old Safety First
moaning about all over the place how he's being stuck with 'em, till
more than once I come near forgetting I was a lady--and, oh, yes"--she
brightened--"I was going to tell you. After it was all over, Wilbur, the
gallant young tone poet, comes gushing up to me and says, 'Now, aunty,
always when you are in town you must drop round and break bread with
us.' Aunty, mind you, right off the reel. 'Well,' I says, 'if I drop
round to break any bread your wife bakes I'll be sure to bring a
hammer.' I couldn't help it. He'll make a home for the girl all right,
but he does something sinful to my nerves every time he opens his face.
And then coming back here, where I looked for God's peace and quiet, and
being made to hear that darned song every time I turned round!
"I give orders plain enough, but say, it's like a brush fire--you never
know when you got it stamped out."
From the kitchen came the sound of a dropped armful of stove wood. Hard
upon this, the unctuous whining tenor of Jimmie Time:
Oh-h-h mem-o-reez thu-hat blu-hess and bu-hurn!
"You, Jimmie Time!" It is a voice meant for Greek tragedy and a theatre
open to the heavens. I could feel the terror of the aged vassal.
"Yes, ma'am!" The tone crawled abasingly. "I forgot myself."
I was glad, and I dare say he had the wit to be, that he had not to face
the menace of her glare.