could a woman gently born and bred conceive of the horrible ignominy
of such a life? She was dragged hither and yon, to this and that little
town. She traveled through sweltering heat on jolting trains; she slept
in tents; she lived--she, Margaret Lee--on terms of equality with the
common and the vulgar. Daily her absurd unwieldiness was exhibited to
crowds screaming with laughter. Even her faith wavered. It seemed to her
that there was nothing for evermore beyond those staring, jeering faces
of silly mirth and delight at sight of her, seated in two chairs, clad
in a pink spangled dress, her vast shoulders bare and sparkling with a
tawdry necklace, her great, bare arms covered with brass bracelets, her
hands incased in short, white kid gloves, over the fingers of which she
wore a number of rings--stage properties.
Margaret became a horror to herself. At times it seemed to her that she
was in the way of fairly losing her own identity. It mattered little
that Camille and Jack were very kind to her, that they showed her the
nice things which her terrible earnings had enabled them to have.
She sat in her two chairs--the two chairs proved a most successful
advertisement--with her two kid-cushiony hands clenched in her pink
spangled lap, and she suffered agony of soul, which made her inner self
stern and terrible, behind that great pink mask of face. And nobody
realized until one sultry day when the show opened at a village in a
pocket of green hills--indeed, its name was Greenhill--and Sydney Lord
went to see it.
Margaret, who had schooled herself to look upon her audience as if they
were not, suddenly comprehended among them another soul who understood
her own. She met the eyes of the man, and a wonderful comfort, as of a
cool breeze blowing over the face of clear water, came to her. She knew
that the man understood. She knew that she had his fullest sympathy. She
saw also a comrade in the toils of comic tragedy, for Sydney Lord was in
the same case. He was a mountain of flesh. As a matter of fact, had
he not been known in Greenhill and respected as a man of weight of
character as well as of body, and of an old family, he would have
rivaled Margaret. Beside him sat an elderly woman, sweet-faced, slightly
bent as to her slender shoulders, as if with a chronic attitude of
submission. She was Sydney's widowed sister, Ellen Waters. She lived
with her brother and kept his house, and had no will other than his.
Sydney Lord and his sister remained when the rest of the audience had
drifted out, after the privileged hand-shakes with the queen of
the show. Every time a coarse, rustic hand reached familiarly after
Margaret's, Sydney shrank.
He motioned his sister to remain seated when he approached the stage.
Jack Desmond, who had been exploiting Margaret, gazed at him with
admiring curiosity. Sydney waved him away with a commanding gesture. “I
wish to speak to her a moment. Pray leave the tent,” he said, and Jack
obeyed. People always obeyed Sydney Lord.
Sydney stood before Margaret, and he saw the clear crystal, which was
herself, within all the flesh, clad in tawdry raiment, and she knew that
he saw it.
“Good God!” said Sydney, “you are a lady!”
He continued to gaze at her, and his eyes, large and brown, became
blurred; at the same time his mouth tightened.
“How came you to be in such a place as this?” demanded Sydney. He spoke
almost as if he were angry with her.
Margaret explained briefly.
“It is an outrage,” declared Sydney. He said it, however, rather
absently. He was reflecting. “Where do you live?” he asked.
“Here.”
“You mean--?”
“They make up a bed for me here, after the people have gone.”
“And I suppose you had--before this--a comfortable house.”
“The house which my grandfather Lee owned, the old Lee mansion-house,
before we went to the city. It was a very fine old Colonial house,”
explained Margaret, in her finely modulated voice.
“And you had a good room?”
“The southeast chamber had always been mine. It was very large, and the
furniture was old Spanish mahogany.”
“And now--” said Sydney.
“Yes,” said Margaret. She looked at him, and her serious blue eyes
seemed to see past him. “It will not last,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I try to learn a lesson. I am a child in the school of God. My lesson
is one that always ends in peace.”
“Good God!” said Sydney.
He motioned to his sister, and Ellen approached in a frightened fashion.
Her brother could do no wrong, but this was the unusual, and alarmed
her.
“This lady--” began Sydney.
“Miss Lee,” said Margaret. “I was never married. I am Miss Margaret
Lee.”
“This,” said Sydney, “is my sister Ellen, Mrs. Waters. Ellen, I wish you
to meet Miss Lee.”
Ellen took into her own Margaret's hand, and said feebly that it was a
beautiful day and she hoped Miss Lee found Greenhill a pleasant place
to--visit.
Sydney moved slowly out of the tent and found Jack Desmond. He was
standing near with Camille, who looked her best in a pale-blue summer
silk and a black hat trimmed with roses. Jack and Camille never really
knew how the great man had managed, but presently Margaret had gone away
with him and his sister.
Jack and Camille looked at each other.
“Oh, Jack, ought you to have let her go?” said Camille.
“What made you let her go?” asked Jack.
“I--don't know. I couldn't say anything. That man has a tremendous way
with him. Goodness!”
“He is all right here in the place, anyhow,” said Jack. “They look up to
him. He is a big-bug here. Comes of a family like Margaret's, though he
hasn't got much money. Some chaps were braggin' that they had a bigger
show than her right here, and I found out.”
“Suppose,” said Camille, “Margaret does not come back?”
“He could not keep her without bein' arrested,” declared Jack, but he
looked uneasy. He had, however, looked uneasy for some time. The fact
was, Margaret had been very gradually losing weight. Moreover, she was
not well. That very night, after the show was over, Bill Stark, the
little dark man, had a talk with the Desmonds about it.
“Truth is, before long, if you don't look out, you'll have to pad her,”
said Bill; “and giants don't amount to a row of pins after that begins.”
Camille looked worried and sulky. “She ain't very well, anyhow,” said
she. “I ain't going to kill Margaret.”
“It's a good thing she's got a chance to have a night's rest in a
house,” said Bill Stark.
“The fat man has asked her to stay with him and his sister while the
show is here,” said Jack.
“The sister invited her,” said Camille, with a little stiffness. She was
common, but she had lived with Lees, and her mother had married a Lee.
She knew what was due Margaret, and also due herself.
“The truth is,” said Camille, “this is an awful sort of life for a woman
like Margaret. She and her folks were never used to anything like it.”
“Why didn't you make your beauty husband hustle and take care of her and
you, then?” demanded Bill, who admired Camille, and disliked her because
she had no eyes for him.
“My husband has been unfortunate. He has done the best he could,”
responded Camille. “Come, Jack; no use talking about it any longer.
Guess Margaret will pick up. Come along. I'm tired out.”
That night Margaret Lee slept in a sweet chamber with muslin curtains
at the windows, in a massive old mahogany bed, much like hers which had
been sacrificed at an auction sale. The bed-linen was linen, and smelled
of lavender. Margaret was too happy to sleep. She lay in the cool,
fragrant sheets and was happy, and convinced of the presence of the God
to whom she had prayed. All night Sydney Lord sat down-stairs in his
book-walled sanctum and studied over the situation. It was a crucial
one. The great psychological moment of Sydney Lord's life for
knight-errantry had arrived. He studied the thing from every point of
view. There was no romance about it. These were hard, sordid, tragic,
ludicrous facts with which he had to deal. He knew to a nicety the
agonies which Margaret suffered. He knew, because of his own capacity
for sufferings of like stress. “And she is a woman and a lady,” he said,
aloud.
If Sydney had been rich enough, the matter would have been simple. He
could have paid Jack and Camille enough to quiet them, and Margaret
could have lived with him and his sister and their two old servants. But
he was not rich; he was even poor. The price to be paid for Margaret's
liberty was a bitter one, but it was that or nothing. Sydney faced it.
He looked about the room. To him the walls lined with the dull gleams of
old books were lovely. There was an oil portrait of his mother over
the mantel-shelf. The weather was warm now, and there was no need for a
hearth fire, but how exquisitely home-like and dear that room could
be when the snow drove outside and there was the leap of flame on the
hearth! Sydney was a scholar and a gentleman. He had led a gentle and
sequestered life. Here in his native village there were none to gibe and
sneer. The contrast of the traveling show would be as great for him as
it had been for Margaret, but he was the male of the species, and she
the female. Chivalry, racial, harking back to the beginning of nobility
in the human, to its earliest dawn, fired Sydney. The pale daylight
invaded the study. Sydney, as truly as any knight of old, had girded
himself, and with no hope, no thought of reward, for the battle in the
eternal service of the strong for the weak, which makes the true worth
of the strong.
There was only one way. Sydney Lord took it. His sister was spared the
knowledge of the truth for a long while. When she knew, she did not
lament; since Sydney had taken the course, it must be right. As for
Margaret, not knowing the truth, she yielded. She was really on the
verge of illness. Her spirit was of too fine a strain to enable her body
to endure long. When she was told that she was to remain with Sydney's
sister while Sydney went away on business, she made no objection. A
wonderful sense of relief, as of wings of healing being spread under her
despair, was upon her. Camille came to bid her good-by.
“I hope you have a nice visit in this lovely house,” said Camille, and
kissed her. Camille was astute, and to be trusted. She did not betray
Sydney's confidence. Sydney used a disguise--a dark wig over his
partially bald head and a little make-up-and he traveled about with the
show and sat on three chairs, and shook hands with the gaping crowd,
and was curiously happy. It was discomfort; it was ignominy; it was
maddening to support by the exhibition of his physical deformity a
perfectly worthless young couple like Jack and Camille Desmond, but it
was all superbly ennobling for the man himself.
Always as he sat on his three chairs, immense, grotesque--the more
grotesque for his splendid dignity of bearing--there was in his soul
of a gallant gentleman the consciousness of that other, whom he was
shielding from a similar ordeal. Compassion and generosity, so great
that they comprehended love itself and excelled its highest type,
irradiated the whole being of the fat man exposed to the gaze of his
inferiors. Chivalry, which rendered him almost god-like, strengthened
him for his task. Sydney thought always of Margaret as distinct from her
physical self, a sort of crystalline, angelic soul, with no encumbrance
of earth. He achieved a purely spiritual conception of her. And
Margaret, living again her gentle lady life, was likewise ennobled by a
gratitude which transformed her. Always a clear and beautiful soul, she
gave out new lights of character like a jewel in the sun. And she also
thought of Sydney as distinct from his physical self. The consciousness
of the two human beings, one of the other, was a consciousness as of two
wonderful lines of good and beauty, moving for ever parallel, separate,
and inseparable in an eternal harmony of spirit.
CORONATION
JIM BENNET had never married. He had passed middle life, and possessed
considerable property. Susan Adkins kept house for him. She was a
widow and a very distant relative. Jim had two nieces, his brother's
daughters. One, Alma Beecher, was married; the other, Amanda, was not.
The nieces had naively grasping views concerning their uncle and his
property. They stated freely that they considered him unable to care for
it; that a guardian should be appointed and the property be theirs at
once. They consulted Lawyer Thomas Hopkinson with regard to it; they
discoursed at length upon what they claimed to be an idiosyncrasy of
Jim's, denoting failing mental powers.
“He keeps a perfect slew of cats, and has a coal fire for them in the
woodshed all winter,” said Amanda.
“Why in thunder shouldn't he keep a fire in the woodshed if he wants
to?” demanded Hopkinson. “I know of no law against it. And there isn't a
law in the country regulating the number of cats a man can keep.” Thomas
Hopkinson, who was an old friend of Jim's, gave his prominent chin an
upward jerk as he sat in his office arm-chair before his clients.
“There is something besides cats,” said Alma
“What?”
“He talks to himself.”
“What in creation do you expect the poor man to do? He can't talk to
Susan Adkins about a blessed thing except tidies and pincushions. That
woman hasn't a thought in her mind outside her soul's salvation and
fancy-work. Jim has to talk once in a while to keep himself a man. What
if he does talk to himself? I talk to myself. Next thing you will want
to be appointed guardian over me, Amanda.”
Hopkinson was a bachelor, and Amanda flushed angrily.
“He wasn't what I call even gentlemanly,” she told Alma, when the two
were on their way home.
“I suppose Tom Hopkinson thought you were setting your cap at him,”
retorted Alma. She relished the dignity of her married state, and
enjoyed giving her spinster sister little claws when occasion called.
However, Amanda had a temper of her own, and she could claw back.
“YOU needn't talk,” said she. “You only took Joe Beecher when you had
given up getting anybody better. You wanted Tom Hopkinson yourself. I
haven't forgotten that blue silk dress you got and wore to meeting. You
needn't talk. You know you got that dress just to make Tom look at you,
and he didn't. You needn't talk.”
“I wouldn't have married Tom Hopkinson if he had been the only man on
the face of the earth,” declared Alma with dignity; but she colored
hotly.
Amanda sniffed. “Well, as near as I can find out Uncle Jim can go on
talking to himself and keeping cats, and we can't do anything,” said
she.
When the two women were home, they told Alma's husband, Joe Beecher,
about their lack of success. They were quite heated with their walk and
excitement. “I call it a shame,” said Alma. “Anybody knows that poor
Uncle Jim would be better off with a guardian.”
“Of course,” said Amanda. “What man that had a grain of horse sense
would do such a crazy thing as to keep a coal fire in a woodshed?”
“For such a slew of cats, too,” said Alma, nodding fiercely.
Alma's husband, Joe Beecher, spoke timidly and undecidedly in the
defense. “You know,” he said, “that Mrs. Adkins wouldn't have those cats
in the house, and cats mostly like to sit round where it's warm.”
His wife regarded him. Her nose wrinkled. “I suppose next thing YOU'LL
be wanting to have a cat round where it's warm, right under my feet,
with all I have to do,” said she. Her voice had an actual acidity of
sound.
Joe gasped. He was a large man with a constant expression of wondering
inquiry. It was the expression of his babyhood; he had never lost it,
and it was an expression which revealed truly the state of his mind.
Always had Joe Beecher wondered, first of all at finding himself in the
world at all, then at the various happenings of existence. He probably
wondered more about the fact of his marriage with Alma Bennet than
anything else, although he never betrayed his wonder. He was always
painfully anxious to please his wife, of whom he stood in awe. Now he
hastened to reply: “Why, no, Alma; of course I won't.”
“Because,” said Alma, “I haven't come to my time of life, through all
the trials I've had, to be taking any chances of breaking my bones over
any miserable, furry, four-footed animal that wouldn't catch a mouse if
one run right under her nose.”
“I don't want any cat,” repeated Joe, miserably. His fear and awe of the
two women increased. When his sister-in-law turned upon him he fairly
cringed.
“Cats!” said Amanda. Then she sniffed. The sniff was worse than speech.
Joe repeated in a mumble that he didn't want any cats, and went out,
closing the door softly after him, as he had been taught. However, he
was entirely sure, in the depths of his subjugated masculine mind, that
his wife and her sister had no legal authority whatever to interfere
with their uncle's right to keep a hundred coal fires in his woodshed,
for a thousand cats. He always had an inner sense of glee when he heard
the two women talk over the matter. Once Amanda had declared that she
did not believe that Tom Hopkinson knew much about law, anyway.
“He seems to stand pretty high,” Joe ventured with the utmost mildness.
“Yes, he does,” admitted Alma, grudgingly.
“It does not follow he knows law,” persisted Amanda, “and it MAY follow
that he likes cats. There was that great Maltese tommy brushing round
all the time we were in his office, but I didn't dare shoo him off for
fear it might be against the law.” Amanda laughed, a very disagreeable
little laugh. Joe said nothing, but inwardly he chuckled. It was
the cause of man with man. He realized a great, even affectionate,
understanding of Jim.
The day after his nieces had visited the lawyer's office, Jim was
preparing to call on his friend Edward Hayward, the minister. Before
leaving he looked carefully after the fire in the woodshed. The
stove was large. Jim piled on the coal, regardless outwardly that the
housekeeper, Susan Adkins, had slammed the kitchen door to indicate her
contempt. Inwardly Jim felt hurt, but he had felt hurt so long from the
same cause that the sensation had become chronic, and was borne with a
gentle patience. Moreover, there was something which troubled him more
and was the reason for his contemplated call on his friend. He evened
the coals on the fire with great care, and replenished from the pail in
the icebox the cats' saucers. There was a circle of clean white saucers
around the stove. Jim owned many cats; counting the kittens, there were
probably over twenty. Mrs. Adkins counted them in the sixties. “Those
sixty-seven cats,” she said.
Jim often gave away cats when he was confident of securing good homes,
but supply exceeded the demand. Now and then tragedies took place
in that woodshed. Susan Adkins came bravely to the front upon these
occasions. Quite convinced was Susan Adkins that she had a good home,
and it behooved her to keep it, and she did not in the least object
to drowning, now and then, a few very young kittens. She did this with
neatness and despatch while Jim walked to the store on an errand and was
supposed to know nothing about it. There was simply not enough room in
his woodshed for the accumulation of cats, although his heart could have
held all.
That day, as he poured out the milk, cats of all ages and sizes and
colors purred in a softly padding multitude around his feet, and
he regarded them with love. There were tiger cats, Maltese cats,
black-and-white cats, black cats and white cats, tommies and females,
and his heart leaped to meet the pleading mews of all. The saucers were
surrounded. Little pink tongues lapped. “Pretty pussy! pretty pussy!”
cooed Jim, addressing them in general. He put on his overcoat and hat,
which he kept on a peg behind the door. Jim had an arm-chair in the
woodshed. He always sat there when he smoked; Susan Adkins demurred at
his smoking in the house, which she kept so nice, and Jim did not dream
of rebellion. He never questioned the right of a woman to bar tobacco
smoke from a house. Before leaving he refilled some of the saucers.
He was not sure that all of the cats were there; some might be afield,
hunting, and he wished them to find refreshment when they returned. He
stroked the splendid striped back of a great tiger tommy which filled
his armchair. This cat was his special pet. He fastened the outer shed
door with a bit of rope in order that it might not blow entirely open,
and yet allow his feline friends to pass, should they choose. Then he
went out.
The day was clear, with a sharp breath of frost. The fields gleamed with
frost, offering to the eye a fine shimmer as of diamond-dust under the
brilliant blue sky, overspread in places with a dapple of little white
clouds.
“White frost and mackerel sky; going to be falling weather,” Jim said,
aloud, as he went out of the yard, crunching the crisp grass under heel.
Susan Adkins at a window saw his lips moving. His talking to himself
made her nervous, although it did not render her distrustful of his
sanity. It was fortunate that Susan had not told Jim that she disliked
his habit. In that case he would have deprived himself of that slight
solace; he would not have dreamed of opposing Susan's wishes. Jim had a
great pity for the nervous whims, as he regarded them, of women--a
pity so intense and tender that it verged on respect and veneration.
He passed his nieces' house on the way to the minister's, and both were
looking out of windows and saw his lips moving.
“There he goes, talking to himself like a crazy loon,” said Amanda.
Alma nodded.
Jim went on, blissfully unconscious. He talked in a quiet monotone; only
now and then his voice rose; only now and then there were accompanying
gestures. Jim had a straight mile down the broad village street to walk
before he reached the church and the parsonage beside it.
Jim and the minister had been friends since boyhood. They were graduates
and classmates of the same college. Jim had had unusual educational
advantages for a man coming from a simple family. The front door of the
parsonage flew open when Jim entered the gate, and the minister stood
there smiling. He was a tall, thin man with a wide mouth, which either
smiled charmingly or was set with severity. He was as brown and dry as a
wayside weed which winter had subdued as to bloom but could not entirely
prostrate with all its icy storms and compelling blasts. Jim, advancing
eagerly toward the warm welcome in the door, was a small man, and bent
at that, but he had a handsome old face, with the rose of youth on the
cheeks and the light of youth in the blue eyes, and the quick changes of
youth, before emotions, about the mouth.
“Hullo, Jim!” cried Dr. Edward Hayward. Hayward, for a doctor of
divinity, was considered somewhat lacking in dignity at times; still,
he was Dr. Hayward, and the failing was condoned. Moreover, he was
a Hayward, and the Haywards had been, from the memory of the oldest
inhabitant, the great people of the village. Dr. Hayward's house was
presided over by his widowed cousin, a lady of enough dignity to make up
for any lack of it in the minister. There were three servants, besides
the old butler who had been Hayward's attendant when he had been a young
man in college. Village people were proud of their minister, with his
degree and what they considered an imposing household retinue.
Hayward led, and Jim followed, to the least pretentious room in
the house--not the study proper, which was lofty, book-lined, and
leather-furnished, curtained with broad sweeps of crimson damask, but a
little shabby place back of it, accessible by a narrow door. The little
room was lined with shelves; they held few books, but a collection of
queer and dusty things--strange weapons, minerals, odds and ends--which
the minister loved and with which his lady cousin never interfered.
“Louisa,” Hayward had told his cousin when she entered upon her post,
“do as you like with the whole house, but let my little study alone.
Let it look as if it had been stirred up with a garden-rake--that little
room is my territory, and no disgrace to you, my dear, if the dust rises
in clouds at every step.”
Jim was as fond of the little room as his friend. He entered, and sighed
a great sigh of satisfaction as he sank into the shabby, dusty hollow
of a large chair before the hearth fire. Immediately a black cat leaped
into his lap, gazed at him with greenjewel eyes, worked her paws,
purred, settled into a coil, and slept. Jim lit his pipe and threw the
match blissfully on the floor. Dr. Hayward set an electric coffee-urn at
its work, for the little room was a curious mixture of the comfortable
old and the comfortable modern.
“Sam shall serve our luncheon in here,” he said, with a staid glee.