Almost at once a light flashed from an upper window in response to
Charlotte's knock and ring. Anderson himself had been in New York
that night with Henry Edgecomb to the theatre. A celebrated play was
on, in which a celebrated actress figured, and the two had taken one
of their rather infrequent excursions. Consequently, Anderson had not
been in the house more than an hour, and during that hour had been
writing some letters which he wished to get off in the early mail.
His room was at the back of the house, a long room extending nearly
the whole width, consequently his own brightly shining light had not
been visible to Charlotte coming up the street.
As he was not undressed, he lost no time in opening his door and
entering with his lamp the front hall. As he did so his mother's door
opened, and her delicate, alarmed old face, frilled with white
cambric, appeared.
"Oh, who is it at this time of night, do you suppose, Randolph?" she
whispered.
"I don't know, mother dear; don't be frightened."
But she came quite out in her white night draperies, which made her
appear singularly massive. "Oh, do you suppose there are burglars in
the store?" she said.
"No. Don't worry, mother."
"Do you suppose it is fire?"
"No; there is no alarm."
"Randolph, you won't open the door until you have asked who it is.
Promise me."
"It is nobody to be afraid of, mother."
"Promise me."
"It is probably Henry come back for something. Harriet may have
locked him out, and he forgotten his night-key." That was actually
what had flashed through Randolph's mind when he heard the knock and
ring.
"Well, I shouldn't wonder if it was," said Mrs. Anderson, in a
relieved tone.
"Go back to bed, mother, or you will catch your death of cold."
"But you will ask?"
"Yes, yes."
Anderson hurried down-stairs, and in consideration of his mother's
listening ears of alarm, he did call out, "Who is there?" at the same
time unlocking the door. It was manifest to his masculine
intelligence, unhampered by nerves, that no one with evil intent
would thus strive to enter a house with a clang of knocker and peal
of bell. He, therefore, having set the lamp on the hall-table, at
once unlocked the door, and Charlotte pulled herself to her feet and
her little, pretty, woe-begone face, in which was a new look for him
and herself, confronted him. Anderson did not say a word. He
somehow--he never remembered how--laid hold of the little thing, and
she was in the house, in the sitting-room, and in his arms, clinging
to him.
"Papa didn't come. Papa didn't come home," she sobbed, but so softly
that Mrs. Anderson, who was listening, did not hear.
Anderson laid his cheek down against the girl's soft, wet one, as if
it were the most natural thing in the world, as if he had been used
to so doing ever since he could remember anything. There was no
strangeness for either of them in it. He patted her poor little head,
which felt cold from the frosty night air.
"There, there, dear," he said.
"He didn't come home," she repeated, piteously, against his breast,
and it was almost as if she were accusing him because of it.
"Poor little girl!"
"Not on the last train. Papa didn't come on the last train,
and--there was no telegram, and I--I was all alone in the house,
and--and--I came." She sobbed convulsively.
Anderson kissed her cheek softly, he continued to smooth the little,
dark, damp head. "You did quite right," he whispered--"quite right,
dear. You are safe now. Don't!"
"Papa!"
"Oh, some business detained him in the City."
"What has happened to papa?" demanded Charlotte, in a shrill voice,
and it was again as if she were unconsciously accusing Anderson. When
a heart becomes confident of love, it is filled with wonder at any
evil mischance permitted, and accuses love, even the love of God.
"What has happened to papa? Where is he?" she demanded again. And it
was then that Mrs. Anderson, unseen by either of them, stood in the
doorway with an enormous purple-flowered wrapper surging over her
nightgown.
"Hush, dear!" whispered Anderson. "I am sure nothing has happened."
"Why are you sure?"
"If anything had happened I should have heard of it. I came out on
the last train myself. If there had been an accident I should
certainly have heard."
"Would you?"
"I surely should have. Don't, dear. Your father has just been
detained by business."
"Then why didn't papa telegraph?"
"He did not get it in the office in season. The office closes at
half-past eight," said Anderson, lying cheerfully.
"Does it?"
"Of course! There is nothing for you to worry about. Now I'll tell
you what we will do. My mother is awake. I will speak to her, and you
must go straight to bed, and go to sleep, and in the morning your
father will be along on the first train. He must have been as much
worried as you."
"Poor papa," said Charlotte.
"So you were all alone in the house, and you came down here all alone
at this time," said Anderson, in a tone which his mother had never
heard. But it was then that she spoke.
"Didn't her father come home?" she asked.
When the girl turned like a flash and saw her she seemed to realize
for the first time that she had been, and was, doing something out of
the wonted. A great, burning blush surged all over her. She shrank
away from the man who held her. She cowered before the other woman.
"No, papa didn't come," she stammered, "and--I didn't know what to
do, and I came here."
"You did quite right, you precious child," said Mrs. Anderson,
suddenly, in a voice of the tenderest authority. She held out her
arms and Charlotte fled to them. Mrs. Anderson looked over the girl's
head at her son with the oddest and most inexplicable reproach. "You
go up and see if the heat is turned on in that little room out of
mine," she commanded, "and then you go into the kitchen and see if you
can't find the milk, and set some on the stove to warm. You can pour
a little hot water in it to hurry it. If the fire isn't good, open
the dampers. And, Randolph, you get my hot-water bag out of my bed,
and fill it from the tea-kettle--that water will be hotter than the
bath-room, this time of night--and you bring it right up; be as quick
as you can." Then all in the same breath she was comforting
Charlotte. "Your father is all right, dear child. Don't you worry one
mite--not one mite. I remember once, when I was a girl, my father
didn't come home, and mother and I were almost crazy, and he came in
laughing the next morning. He had lost his last train because there
was a block on account of the ice. The river was frozen over. There
is nothing for you to worry about. Now come right up-stairs and go to
bed. There is a little room out of mine, as warm as toast, and you
won't be a bit afraid. There you were all alone in that great house,
you poor, blessed child."
Charlotte sobbed, but now with a certain comfort.
"I should have been so afraid, I should have lost my senses, all
alone in a house at your age," said Mrs. Anderson, all the time
gently impelling the girl along with her. "Of course there is nothing
to be afraid of, but one imagines things; and you came here all alone
at this time of the night!"
"Yes," responded Charlotte, with a gasp of the intensest self-pity,
sure of an echo.
Randolph ran up-stairs before his mother and Charlotte and snatched
the hot-water bottle out of his mother's bed, and was out the
opposite door, which connected with the back stairs leading to the
kitchen. As he went out he heard his mother say: "All that way alone
this time of night, you poor, precious child!" and Charlotte's
little, piteous, yet comforted sob in response, exactly as a hurt
baby might respond to commiserations. He felt his own knees tremble
as he went down-stairs, carrying the hot-water bottle, which had
always struck him as a rather absurd article, to be regarded with the
concessions which a man should make to the little, foolish devices
for the comfort of a softer and slighter sex. He hunted up the milk
in the ice-box, and warmed it with solicitude in a china cup, which,
luckily, did not break. The fire was still very good, and the water
in the tea-kettle quite boiling. It was not long before he knocked at
his mother's door, bearing the water-bottle dangling on one wrist,
and carrying the cup of milk. His mother opened the door just wide
enough to receive the articles.
"Is the milk hot?" she asked.
Randolph meekly replied that it had almost boiled.
"The water-bottle is hot, too," said his mother, in a satisfied tone.
"She is undressed. I got one of my nightgowns for her, and it is
quite warm in the little room. Now I am going to take this in to her,
and make her drink the milk, and I hope she will get to sleep."
"I hope she will," replied Randolph, in a sort of dazed fashion, and
there was a foolish radiance over his face, and he did not meet his
mother's eyes.
"I'm coming into your room a minute, after I see to her," said his
mother, and if the man had been a child the tone would have sounded
ominous.
"All right, mother," replied Anderson. He crossed the hall to his
room lined with books, with the narrow couch. It hardly seemed like a
bedroom, and indeed he spent much of his time, when not at the store,
there. He resumed his seat in the well-worn easy-chair beside his
hearth, upon which smouldered a fire, and waited. He still felt
dazed. He had that doubt of his own identity which comes to us at
times, and which is primeval under stress of a great surprise. The
old nursery rhyme of the old woman who had her petticoats clipped and
was not sure of herself, has a truth in it which dates from the
beginning of things. Anderson, sitting precisely as he had been
sitting before in the same chair by the same hearth--he had even
taken up the same book in which he had thought to read a chapter
after his letters were finished, before retiring--was as completely
removed from his former state as if he had been translated into
another planet. He looked around the long room, which had a dark,
rich coloring from the backs of old books, and some dark red
hangings, and even that had a curious appearance of unsubstantiality
to him. Or was it substantiality. Suddenly it seemed to him that
heretofore he had seen it all through a glass, and now with his
natural eyes. He had attained a height a nature whence the prospect
is untrammelled by imaginations and shows in the clear light of
reality. He thought of the girl whom his mother was coddling, tucking
into bed as if she were a baby, and such a wave of tenderness and
protection came over him that he felt newly vivified by it. It was as
if his very soul put forth arms and wings of love and defence.
"The dear little girl!" he thought to himself--"the dear little girl!"
The thought that she was safe under his roof, away from all fancied
and real terror, filled him with such a joy that he could scarcely
contain it. He imagined her nestling in that warm little bed out of
his mother's room, and the satisfaction that he might have felt had
she been his child instead of his sweetheart, filled him with pure
delight. He tried to imagine her terrors, her young-girl terrors,
alone in that house, her panic running alone through the night
streets, and he even magnified it through inability to understand it.
He said to himself that she might have almost gone mad, and again
that sublime joy, that immense sense of the protection and tenderness
of love, filled his soul, which seemed to put forth wings. Then the
door opened and his mother entered softly, slipping through in her
voluminous, purple-flowered draperies, with glimpses of white frills
and large padding feet in purple-knitted slippers. She still wore her
frilled nightcap, and her face confronted him from the white setting
with a curious severity. Her hair was put up on crimping-pins, and
her high forehead gave her a rather intellectual and stern
appearance, and she looked much older.
Randolph rose. "Sit down, mother," he said.
"No; I am not going to stop a minute. I am going back to her. She
seemed real quiet, and I think she'll go to sleep, but if she should
wake up and find herself alone she might be frightened."
Mrs. Anderson spoke as if of a baby in arms.
"Yes, she might; she has had a terrible shock," Anderson said, in
what he essayed to render a natural tone.
"Terrible shock! I should think she had, poor child!" said Mrs.
Anderson, and she seemed to reproach him.
"It was a long way for her to come alone," said Anderson, as if he
were trying to excuse himself.
"I should think it was. It's a good mile, and that wasn't the worst
of it. Worrying about her father, and all alone in the house! I was
always scared to death alone in a house, and I know what it means."
She still seemed reproachful.
"She must have been frightened."
"I should rather think she would have been." Suddenly his mother's
face regarding his took on a different expression; it became shrewd
and confidential. "Do you suppose her father has taken this way
of--?" she said.
"No," answered Randolph, emphatically.
"You don't?"
"No, I do not. I don't know the man very well, and I don't suppose
his record is to be altogether justified, but, if I know anything, he
would no more go voluntarily and leave that child alone all night to
worry over him than I would."
"Then you think something has happened to him?"
"I am afraid so."
"Do you think there has been an accident?"
"I don't know, mother."
His mother continued to look at him shrewdly. "Do you suppose he has
got into any trouble?" she asked, bluntly.
"I don't know, mother."
Then Mrs. Anderson's face suddenly resumed its old, reproachful
expression. "Well, I don't care if there has," said she. She
whispered, but her voice was intense. "I don't care if there has. I
don't care if he is in state-prison. That child has got to caring
about you, and you ought to--"
Anderson turned and looked at his mother, and her severe face
softened and paled. He looked to her at that moment more like his
father than himself. He was accusing her.
"Mother, do you think, if she cares, that I would ever desert her,
any more than father would have deserted you?" he demanded.
It was her turn to excuse herself. "I know you are honorable,
Randolph," she said, "but I saw when I came in, and I don't see how
you have seen enough of her to have it happen; but I know girls, and
I can see how she feels, and I didn't know but you might think if her
father--"
"What difference do you think her father makes to me, mother?" asked
Anderson.