Mary was radiant as the sunny morning in a little red tam, and her
cheeks as red as her hat from the drive across country. She appeared at
the kitchen door quite in her accustomed way just as Miss Marilla was
lifting the dainty tray to carry her boy’s breakfast up-stairs, and she
almost dropped it in her dismay.
“I’ve had the grandest time!” breezed Mary gayly. “You don’t know how
beautiful the country is, all wonderful bronze and brown with a purple
haze, and a frost like silver lace this morning when I started. You’ve
simply got to put on your wraps and come with me for a little while. I
know a place where the shadows melt slowly, and the frost will not be
gone yet. Come quick! I want you to see it before it’s too late. You’re
not just eating your breakfast, Auntie Rill! And on a tray, too! Are
you sick?”
Miss Marilla glanced guiltily down at the tray, too transparent even to
evade the question.
“No, why--I--he--my neph----” then she stopped in hopeless confusion,
remembering her resolve not to tell a lie about the matter, whatever
came.
Mary Amber stood up and looked at her, her keen young eyes searching
and finding the truth.
“You don’t mean to tell me _that man_ is here yet? And you waiting on
him!”
There were both sorrow and scorn in the fine young voice.
In the upper hall the sick soldier in a bathrobe was hanging over the
banisters in a panic, wishing some kind fairy would arrive and waft
him away on a breath. All his perfidy in getting sick on a strange
gentlewoman’s hands and lying lazily in bed, letting her wait on him,
was shown up in Mary Amber’s voice. It found its echo in his own strong
soul. He had known all along that he had no business there, that he
ought to have gone out on the road to die rather than betray the sweet
hospitality of Miss Marilla by allowing himself to be a selfish, lazy
slob--that was what he called himself as he hung over the banisters.
“Mary! Why, he has been very _sick_!”
“Sick?” There was a covert sneer in Mary Amber’s incredulous young
voice; and then the conversation was suddenly blanketed by the closing
of the hall door, and the sick soldier padded disconsolately back to
bed, weak and dizzy, but determined. This was as good a time as any. He
ought to have gone before!
He trailed across the room in the big flannel nightgown that hung out
from him with the outlines of a fat old auntie and dragged down from
one bronzed shoulder rakishly. His hair was sticking up wildly, and he
felt of his chin fiercely, and realized that he was wearing a growth of
several days.
In a neat pile on a chair he found his few clean garments, and
struggled into them. His carefully ironed uniform hung in the closet;
and he braced himself, and struggled into the trousers. It seemed a
tremendous effort. He longed to drop back on the pillows, but wouldn’t.
He sat with his head in his hands, his elbows on his knees, trying to
get courage to totter to the bathroom and subdue his hair and beard,
when he heard Miss Marilla coming hastily up the stairs, the little
coffee-pot sending on a delicious odor, and the glass of milk tinkling
against the silver spoons as she came.
He had managed his leggings by this time, and looked up with an attempt
at a smile, trying to pass it off in a jocular way.
“I thought it was high time I was getting about,” he said, and broke
down coughing.
Miss Marilla paused in distress, and looked at his hollow eyes.
Everything seemed to be going wrong this morning. Oh, why hadn’t Mary
Amber stayed away just one day longer? But of course he had not heard
her.
“Oh, you’re not fit to be up yet!” she exclaimed. “Do lie down and rest
till you’ve had your breakfast.”
“I can’t be a baby having you wait on me any longer,” he said. “I’m
ashamed of myself. I ought not to have stayed here at all!” His tone
was savage, and he reached for his coat, and jammed it on with a
determined air in spite of his weakness and the sore shivers that
crept shakily up his back. “I’m perfectly all right, and you’ve been
wonderful; but it’s time I was moving on.”
He pushed past her hurriedly to the bathroom, feeling that he must get
out of her sight before his head began to swim. The water on his face
would steady him. He dashed it on, and shivered sickly, longing to
plunge back to bed, yet keeping on with his ablutions.
Miss Marilla put down her tray, and stood with tears in her eyes,
waiting for him to return, trying to think what she could say to
persuade him back to bed again.
Her anxious expression softened him when he came back, and he agreed
to eat his breakfast before he went anywhere, and sank gratefully into
the big chair in front of the Franklin heater, where she had laid
out his breakfast on a little table. She had lined the chair with
a big comfortable, which she drew unobtrusively about his shoulders
now, slipping a cushion under his feet, and quietly coddling him into
comfort again. He looked at her gratefully, and, setting down his
coffee-cup, reached out and patted her hair as she rose from tucking up
his feet.
“You’re just like a mother to me!” he choked, trying to keep back the
emotion from his voice. “It’s been great! I can’t tell you!”
“You’ve been just like a dear son,” she beamed, touching the dark hair
over his forehead shyly. “It’s like getting my own back again to have
you come for this little while, and to be able to do for you. You see
it wasn’t as if I really had anybody. Dick never cared for me. I used
to hope he would when he grew up. I used to think of him over there in
danger, and pray for him, and love him, and send him sweaters; but now
I know it was really you I thought of and prayed for. Dick never cared.”
He looked at her tenderly, and pressed her hand gratefully.
“You’re wonderful!” he said. “I shall never forget it.”
That little precious time while he was eating his breakfast made it all
the harder for what he meant to do. He saw that he could never hope
to do it openly, either; for she would fling herself in his path to
prevent him from going out until he was well; so he let her tuck him
up carefully on the spread-up bed, and pull down the shades for him to
take a nap after the exertion of getting dressed; and he caught her
hand, and kissed it fervently as she was leaving him; and cherished her
murmured “Dear child!” and the pressure of her old-rose-leaf fingers in
parting. Then he closed his eyes, and let her slip away to the kitchen
where he knew she would be some time preparing something delicious for
his dinner.
When she was safely out of hearing, rattling away at the kitchen stove,
he threw back the covers vigorously, set his grim determination against
the swimming head, stalked over to the little desk, and wrote a note on
the fine note-paper he found there.
“Dear, wonderful little mother,” he wrote, “I can’t stay here any
longer. It isn’t right. But I’ll be back some day to thank you if
everything goes all right. Sincerely, YOUR BOY.”
He tiptoed over, and laid it on the pillow; then he took his old
trench-cap, which had been nicely pressed and was hanging on the corner
of the looking-glass, and stealthily slid out of the pleasant, warm
room, down the carpeted stairs, and out the front door into the crisp,
cold morning. The chill air met him with a challenge as he closed the
front door, and dared him not to cough; but with an effort he held his
breath, and crept down the front walk to the road, holding in control
as well the long, violent shivers that seized him in their grasp. The
sun met him, and blinded his sensitive eyes; and the wind with a tang
of winter jeered at his thin uniform, and trickled up his sleeves and
down his collar, penetrating every seam. But he stuffed his hands into
his pockets, and strode grimly ahead on the way he had been going when
Miss Marilla met him, passing the tall hedge where Mary Amber lived,
and trying to hold his head high. He hoped Mary Amber saw him _going
away_!
For perhaps half a mile past Mary Amber’s house his courage and his
pride held him, for he was a soldier, who had slept in a muck-pile
under the rain, and held his nerve under fire, and gone on foot ten
miles to the hospital after he was wounded. What was a little grippe
and a walk in the cold to the neighboring village? He wished he knew
how far it was, but he had to go, for it would never do to send the
telegram he must send from the town where Miss Marilla lived.
The second half-mile he lagged and shivered, with not energy enough to
keep up a circulation; the third half mile and the fourth were painful,
and the fifth was completed in a sick daze of weakness; for the cold,
though stimulating at first, had been getting in its work through his
uniform, and he felt chilled to the very soul of him. His teeth were
chattering, and he was blue around the lips when he staggered into the
telegraph-office of Little Silverton. His fingers were almost too stiff
to write, and his thoughts seemed to have congealed also, though he had
been repeating the message all the way, word for word, with a vague
feeling that he might forget it forever if he did not keep it going.
“Will you send that collect?” he asked the operator when he had
finished writing.
The girl took the blank, and read it carefully.
“Arthur J. Watkins, Esq.,
“LaSalle Street, Chicago, Ill.
“Please negotiate a loan of five hundred dollars for me, using
old house as collateral. Wire money immediately Little Silverton.
Entirely out of funds. Have been sick.
“LYMAN GAGE.”
The girl read it through again, and then eyed him cautiously.
“What’s your address?” she asked, giving a slow speculative chew to her
gum.
“I’ll wait here,” said the big blue soldier, sinking into a
rush-bottomed chair by the desk.
“It might be some wait,” said the girl dryly, giving him another
curious “once-over.”
“I’ll wait!” he repeated fiercely, and dropped his aching head into his
hands.
The little instrument clicked away vigorously. In his fevered brain he
fancied it writing on a typewriter at the other end of the line, and
felt a curious impatience for his lawyer to read it and reply. How he
wished it would hurry!
The morning droned on, the telegraph instrument chattered breezily,
with the monotony of a sunny child that knows no larger world and is
happy. Sometimes it seemed to Gage as if every click pierced his head
and he was going crazy. The shivers were keeping in time running up and
down his back, and chilling his very heart. The room was cold, cold,
_cold_! How did that fool of a girl stand it in a pink transparent
blouse, showing her fat arms huskily? He shivered. Oh, for one of Miss
Marilla’s nice thick blankets, and a hot-water bag! Oh, for the soft,
warm bed, the quiet room, and Miss Marilla keeping guard! But he was a
man--and a soldier! And every now and then would come Mary Amber’s keen
accusing voice: “_Is that man_ here yet? And you _waiting on him_!”
It was that that kept him up when he might have given way. He _must_
show her he was a man, after all. “_That man!_” What had she meant?
Did she, then, suspect him of being a fraud and not the real nephew?
Well--shiver, shiver--what did he care? Let Mary Amber go to thunder!
Or, if she didn’t want to go, he would go to thunder himself. He felt
himself there already.
Two hours went by. Now and then some one came in with a message, and
went out again. The girl behind the desk got out a pink sweater she was
knitting, and chewed gum in time to her needles. Sometimes she eyed
her companion curiously, but he did not stir nor look up. If there
hadn’t been prohibition, she might have thought him drunk. She began to
think about his message and weave a crude little romance around him.
She wondered whether he had been wounded. If he had given her half a
chance, she would have asked him questions; but he sat there with his
head in his hands like a stone image, and never seemed to know she was
in the room. After a while it got on her nerves; and she took up her
telephone, and carried on a gallery conversation with a fellow laborer
somewhere up the line, giggling a good deal and telling about a movie
she went to the night before. She used rare slang, with a furtive
glance at the soldier for developments; but he did not stir. Finally
she remarked loudly that it was getting noontime, and “so-longed” her
friend, clicking the receiver into place.
“I gotta go to lunch now,” she remarked in an impersonal tone. “I have
a hour off. This office is closed all noontime.”
He did not seem to hear her; so she repeated it, and Gage looked up
with bloodshot, heavy eyes.
“What becomes of the message if it comes while you’re away?” he asked
feverishly.
“Oh, it’ll be repeated,” she replied easily. “You c’n cumbback bime-by,
’bout two o’clock er later,’n’ mebbe it’ll be here. I gotta lock up
now.”
Lyman Gage dragged himself to his feet, and looked dazedly about him;
then he staggered out on the street.
The sun hit him a clip in the eyes again that made him sick, and
the wind caught at his sleeves, and ran down his collar gleefully.
The girl shut the door with a click, and turned the key, eyeing him
doubtfully. He seemed to her very stupid for a soldier. If he had given
her half a chance, she would have been friendly to him. She watched
him drag down the street with an amused contempt, then turned to her
belated lunch.
Lyman Gage walked on down the road a little way, and then began to
feel as if he couldn’t stand the cold a second longer, though he knew
he must. His heart was behaving queerly, seeming to be absent from his
body for whole seconds at a time, and then returning with leaps and
bounds that almost suffocated him. He paused and looked around for a
place to sit down, and, finding none, dropped down on the frozen ground
at the roadside. It occurred to him that he ought to go back now while
he was able, for he was fast getting where from sheer weakness he
couldn’t walk.
He rested a moment, and then stumbled up and back toward Little
Silverton. Automobiles passed him, and he remembered thinking that,
if he weren’t so sick and queer in his head, he would try to stand in
the road and stop one, and get them to carry him somewhere. He had
often done that in France, or even in this country during the war. But
just now it seemed that he couldn’t do that, either. He had set out to
prove to Mary Amber that he was a man and a soldier, and holding up
automobiles wouldn’t be compatible with that idea. Then he realized
that all this was crazy thinking, that Mary Amber had gone to thunder,
and so had he, and it didn’t matter, anyway. All that mattered was for
him to get that money and go back and pay Miss Marilla for taking care
of him; and then for him to take the next train back to the city, and
get to a hospital. If he could only hold out long enough for that.
But things were fast getting away from him. His head was hot and in a
whirl, and his feet were so cold he thought they must be dead.
Without realizing it he walked by the telegraph-office and on down the
road toward Purling Brook again.
The telegraph-girl watched him from the window of the tiny bakery where
she ate her lunch.
“There goes that poor boob _now_!” she said with her mouthful of pie a
la mode. “He gets my goat! I hope he doesn’t come back. He’ll never
get no answer to that telegram he sent. People ain’t goin’ round
pickin’ up five hundred dollarses to send to broke soldiers these days.
They got’um all in Liberty Bonds. Say, Jess, gimme one more o’ them
chocolate éclairs, won’t you? I gotta get back.”
About that time Lyman Gage had found a log by the wayside, and sunk
down permanently upon it. He had no more breath to carry him on, and no
more ambition. If Mary Amber had gone to thunder, why should he care
whether he got an answer to his telegram or not? She was only another
girl, anyway, GIRL, his enemy! And he sank into a blue stupor, with his
elbows on his cold, cold knees and his face hidden in his hands. He had
forgotten the shivers now. They had taken possession of him, and made
him one with them. It might be, after all, that he was too hot and not
too cold; and there was a strange burning pain in his chest when he
tried to breathe, so he wouldn’t breathe. What was the use?