LEAF SEVENTH
DASHED!
I do believe God gave that wise angel charge concerning me lest I get dashed, but I just got dashed anyway, and its my own fault, not the angel's. I have suffered this day until I want to lay my face down against the hem of His garment and wait in the dust for Him to pick me up. I shall never be able to do it myself, and how He's going to do it I can't see, but He will.
That dinner-party last night was bad enough, but to-day's been worse. I didn't sleep until long after daylight and then Judy came in before eight o'clock with a letter for me that looked like a state document. I felt in my trembly bones that it was some sort of summons affair from Judge Wade; and it was. I looked into the first paragraph and then decided that I had better get up and dress and have a cup of coffee and a single egg before I tried to read it.
Incidental to my bath and dressing, I weighed and found that I had lost all four of those last surplus pounds and two more in three days. Those two extra pounds might be construed to prove love, but exactly on whom I was utterly unprepared to say. I didn't even enjoy the thinness, but took a kind of already-married look in my glass and tried to slip the egg past my bored lips and get myself to chew it down. It was work; and then I took up the judge's letter, which also was work and more of it.
He started in at the beginning of everything, that is at the beginning of the tuberculosis girl and I cried over the pages of her as if she had been my own sister. At the tenth page we buried her and took up Alfred and I must say I saw a new Alfred in the judge's bouquet-strewn appreciation of him, but I didn't want him as bad as I had the day before when I read his own new and old letters, and cried over his old photographs. I suppose that was the result of some of what the judge manages the juries with. He'd be apt to use it on a woman and she wouldn't find out about it until it was too late to be anything but mad. Still when he began on me at page sixteen I felt a little better, though I didn't know myself any better than I did Alfred when I got to page twenty.
What I am, is just a poor foolish woman, who has a lot more heart than she can manage with the amount of brains she got with it at birth. I'm not any star in a rose-colored sky, and I don't want to inspire anybody; it's too much of a job. I want to be a healthy happy woman and a wife to a man who can inspire himself and manage me. I want to marry a thin man and have from five to ten thin children, and when I get to be thirty I want my husband to want me to be as fat as Aunt Bettie, but not let me. An inspiration couldn't be fat and I'm always in danger from hot muffins and chicken gravy. However, if I should undertake to be all the things Judge Wade said in that letter he wanted me to be to him, I should soon be skin and bones from mental and physical exercise. Still, he does live in Hillsboro and I won't let myself know how my heart aches at the thought of leaving my home—and other things. It's up in my throat and I seem always to be swallowing it, the last few days.
All the men who write me letters seem to get themselves wound up into a skyrocket and then let themselves explode in the last paragraph and it always upsets my nerves. I was just about to begin to cry again over the last words of the judge when the only bright spot in the day so far suddenly happened. Pet Buford blew in with the pinkest cheeks and the brightest eyes I had seen since I looked in the mirror the night of the dance. She was in an awful hurry.
"Molly, dear," she said, with her words literally falling over themselves, "Tom says you'll give us some of your dinner left-overs to take for lunch in the Hup, for we are going way out to Wayne County to see some awfully fine tobacco he has heard is there. I don't want to ask mother, for she won't let me go; and his mother, if he asked her, will begin to talk about us. Tom said come to you and you would understand and fix it quick. He said kiss you for him and tell you he said 'Come on in, the water's fine.' Isn't he a joke?" And we kissed and laughed and packed a basket, and kissed and laughed again for good-by. I felt amused and happy for a few minutes—and also deserted. It's a very good thing for a woman's conceit to find out how many of her lovers are just make-believes. I may have needed Tom's deflection.
Anyway, I don't know when I ever was so glad to see anybody as I was when Mrs. Johnson came in the front door. A woman who has proved to her own satisfaction that marriage is a failure is at times a great tonic to other women. I needed a tonic badly this morning and I got it.
"Well, from all my long experience, Molly," she said as she seated herself and began to hem a dish-towel with long steady stabs, "husbands are just stick candy in different jars. They may look a little different, but they all taste alike and you soon get tired of them. In two months you won't know the difference in being married to Al Bennett and Mr. Carter and you'll have to go on living with him maybe fifty years. Luck doesn't strike twice in the same place and you can't count on losing two husbands. Al's father was Mr. Johnson's first cousin and had more crochets and worse. He had silent spells that lasted a week and family prayers three times a day, though he got drunk twice a year for a month at a time. Al looks very much like him."
"Mrs. Johnson," I said after a minute's silence, while I had decided whether or not I had better tell her all about it. If a woman's in love with her husband you can't trust her to keep a secret, but I decided to try Mrs. Johnson. "I really am not engaged exactly to Alfred Bennett, though I suppose he thinks so by now if he has got the answer to that telegram. But—but something has made me—made me think about Judge Wade—that is he—what do you think of him, Mrs. Johnson?" I concluded in the most pitifully perplexed tone of voice.
"All alike, Molly; all as much alike as peas in a pod; all except John Moore, who's the only exception in all the male tribe I ever met! His marrying once was just accidental and must be forgiven him. She fell in love with him while he was treating her for typhoid, when his back was turned as it were, and it was God's own kindness in him that made him marry her when he found out how it was with the poor thing. There's not a woman in this town who could marry, that wouldn't marry him at the drop of his hat—but, thank goodness, that hat will never drop and I'll have one sensible man to comfort and doctor me down into my old age. Now, just look at that! Mr. Johnson's come home here in the middle of the morning and I'll have to get that old paper I hunted out of his desk for him last night. I wonder how he came to forget it!" It's funny how Mrs. Johnson always knows what Mr. Johnson wants before he knows himself and gets it before he asks for it!
As she went out the gate the postman came in and at the sight of another letter my heart again slunk off into my slippers, and my brain seemed about to back up in a corner and refuse to work. In a flash it came to me that men oughtn't to write letters to women very much—they really don't plow deep enough, they just irritate the top soil. I took this missive from Alfred, counted all the fifteen pages, put it out of sight under a book, looked out the window and saw the ginger barber coming dejectedly around to the side gate from the kitchen—I knew the scene he had had with Judy, about the bottle encounters of the night before—saw Mr. Johnson shooed off down the street by Mrs. Johnson; saw the doctor's car go chucking hurriedly in the garage and then my spirit turned itself to the wall and refused to be comforted. I tried my best, but failed to respond to my own remonstrances with myself, and tears were slowly gathering in a cloud of gloom when a blue gingham, rompers-clad sunbeam burst into the room.
"Git your night-gown and your toothbresh quick, Molly, if you want to pack 'em in my trunk!" he exclaimed with his eyes dancing and a curl standing straight up on the top of his head, as it has a habit of doing when he is most excited. "You can't take nothing but them 'cause I'm going to put in a rope to tie the whale with when I ketch him, and it'll take up all the rest of the room. Git 'em quick!"
"Yes, lover, I'll get them for you, but tell Molly where it is you are going to sail off with her in that trunk of yours?" I asked, dropping into the game as I have always done with him, no matter what game of my own pressed when he called.
"On the ocean where the boats go 'cross and run right over a whale. Don't you remember you showed me them pictures of spout whales in a book, Molly? Doc says they comes right up by the ship and you can hear 'em shoot water and maybe a iceberg, too. Which do you want to ketch most, Molly, a iceberg or a whale?" His eager eyes demanded instant decision on my part of the nature of capture I preferred. My mind quickly reverted to those two ponderous and intense epistles I had got within the hour and I lay back in my chair and laughed until I felt almost merry.
"The iceberg, Billy, every time," I said at last. "I just can't manage whales, especially if they are ardent, which word means hot. I like icebergs, or I think I should if I could catch one."
"I don't believe you could, Molly, but maybe Doc will let you put a rope and a long hook in his trunk to try with if your clothes go into mine. His is a heap the biggest anyway and Nurse Tilly said he oughter put my things in his, but I cried and then he went up-stairs and got out that little one for me. Come see 'em!"
"What do you mean, Billy?" I asked, while a sudden fear shot all over me like lightning. "You're just playing go-away, aren't you?"
"No, I ain't playing, Molly!" he exclaimed excitedly. "Me and you and Doc is a-going across the ocean for a long, long time away from here. Doc ast me about it this morning and I told him all right and you could come with us, if you was good. He said couldn't I go without you if you was busy and couldn't come and I told him you would put things down and come if I said so. Won't you, Molly? It won't be no fun without you and you'd cry all by yourself with me gone." His little face was all drawn up with anxiety and sympathy at my lonely estate with him out of it and a cry rose up from my heart with a kind of primitive savagery at what I felt was coming down upon me.
Without waiting to take him with me, or think, or do anything but feel deadly savage anger, I hurried across the garden and into Doctor Moore's office, where he was just laying off his gloves and dust coat.
"What do you mean, John Moore, by daring, daring to think you can go and take Billy away from me?" I demanded looking at him with what must have been such fear and madness in my face that he was startled as he came close to the table against which I leaned. His face had grown white and quiet at my attack and he waited to answer for a long horrible minute that pulled me apart like one of those inquisition machines they used to torture women with when they didn't know any better modern way to do it.
"I didn't know Bill would tell you so soon, Mrs. Molly," he said at last gently, looking past me out of the window into the garden. "I was coming over just as soon as I got back from this call to talk with you about it, even if it did seem to intrude Bill's and my affairs into a day that—that ought to be all yours to be—be happy in. But Bill, you see, is no respecter of—of other people's happy days if he wants them in his."
"Billy's happy days are mine and mine are his and he has the heart not to leave me out even if you would have him!" I exclaimed, a sob gathering in my heart at the thought that my little lover hadn't even taken in a situation that would separate him from me across an ocean.
"Bill is too young to understand when he is—is being bereaved, Molly," he said and still he didn't look at me. "I have been appointed a delegate to represent the State Medical Association at the Centennial Congress in London the middle of next month—and somehow I—feel a bit pulled lately and I thought I would take the little chap and have—have a wander-jahr. You won't need him now, Mrs. Peaches, and I couldn't go without him, could I?" The sadness in his voice would have killed me if I hadn't let it madden me instead.
"Won't need Billy any more!" I exclaimed with a rage that made my voice literally scorch past my lips. "Was there ever a minute in his life that I haven't needed Billy? How dare you say such a thing to me? You are cruel, cruel, and I have always known it, cold and cruel like all other men who don't care how they wring the life blood out of women's hearts and are willing to use their children to do it with. Even the law doesn't help us poor helpless creatures and you can take our children and go with them to the ends of the earth and leave us suffering. I have gone on and believed that you were not like what the women say all men are and that you cared whether you hurt people or not, but now I see that you are just the same and you'll take my baby away if you want to—and I can do nothing to prevent it—nothing in the wide world—I am completely and absolutely helpless—you coward, you!"
When that awful word, the worst word that a woman can use to a man, left my lips, a flame shot up into his eyes that I thought would burn me up, but in a half-second it was extinguished by the strangest thing in the world—for the situation—a perfect flood of mirth. He sat down in his chair and shook all over with his head in his hands until I saw tears creep through his fingers. I had calmed down so suddenly that I was about to begin to cry in good earnest when he wiped his eyes and said with a low laugh in his throat:
"The case is yours, Molly, settled out of court, and the 'possession-nine-points-of-the-law clause' works in some cases for a woman against a man. Generally speaking, anyway, the pup belongs to the man who can whistle him down and you can whistle Bill from me any day. I'm just his father and what I think or want doesn't matter. You had better take him and keep him!"
"I intend to." I answered haughtily, uncertain as to whether I had better give in and be agreeable or stay prepared to cry in case there was further argument. But suddenly a strange diffidence came into his eyes and he looked away from me as he said in queer hesitating words:
"You see, Mrs. Molly, I thought from now on your life wouldn't have exactly a place for Bill. Have you considered that you have trained him to demand you all the time and all of you? How would you manage Bill—and—and other claims?"
And if there is a contagious thing in this world it is embarrassment. I never felt anything worse in all my life than the shame that swept over me in a great hot wave when that look came into his eyes and made me realize just exactly what I had been saying to him, about what, and how I had said it. I stood perfectly still, shook all over like a leaf, and wondered if I would ever be able to raise my eyes from the ground. A dizzy nauseated feeling for myself rose up in me against myself and I was just about to turn on my heels and leave him, I hoped for ever, when he came over and laid his hand on my shoulder.
"Molly," he said in a voice that might have come down from heaven on dove wings, "you can't for a moment feel or think that I don't realize and appreciate what you have been to the motherless little chap, and for life I am yours at command, as he is. I really thought it would be a relief to you to have him taken away from you for just a little while right now, and I still think it is best; but not unless you consent. You shall have him back whenever you are ready for him, and at all times both he and I are at your service to the whole of our kingdoms. Just think the matter over, won't you, and decide what you want me to do?"
Something in me died for ever, I think, when he spoke to me like that. He's not like other men and there aren't any other men on earth but him! All the rest are just bugs or bats or something worse. And I'm not anything myself. There's no excuse for my living and I wish I wasn't so healthy and likely to go on doing it. It was all over and there was nothing left for me to live for, and before I could stop myself I buried my face in my hands.
"Billy asked me to go with him on this awful whale hunt!" I sobbed out to comfort myself with the thought that somebody did care for me, regardless of just how I was further embarrassing and complicating myself in the affairs of the two men I had thought I owned and was now finding out that I had to give up. I wish I had been looking at him, for I felt him start, but he said in his big friendly voice that is so much—and never enough for me.
"Well, why not you and Al come along and make it a family party, if that is what suits Bill, the boss?"
If men would just buy good, sharp, kitchen knives and cut out women's hearts in a businesslike way it would be so much kinder of them. Why do they prefer to use dull weapons that mash the life out slowly? Everything is at an end for me to-night and that blow did it. It was a horrible cruel thing for him to say to me! I know now that I have been in love with John Moore for longer than my honor lets me admit and that I'll never love anybody else, and that also I have offered myself to him served up in every known enticement and have had to be refused at least twice a day for a year. A widow can't say she didn't understand what she was doing, even to herself, but— My humiliation is complete and the only thing that can make me ever hold up my head is to puzzle him by—by happily marrying Alfred Bennett—and quick!
Of course, he must suspect how I feel about him, for two people couldn't both be so ignorant as not to see such an enormous thing as my love for him is, and I was the blind one. But he must never, never know that I ever realized it, for he is so good that it would distress him. I must just go on in my foolish way with him until I can get away. I'll tell him I'm sorry I was so indignant to-night and say that I think it will be fine for him to take my Billy away from me with him. I must smile at the idea of having my very soul amputated, insist that it is the only thing to do, and pack up the little soul in a steamer trunk with the smile. Just smile, that is all! Life demands smiles from a woman even if she must crush their perfume from her own heart; and she generally has them ready.
Oh, Molly, Molly, is it for this you came into the world, twice to give yourself without love? What difference does it make that your arms are strong and white if they can't clasp him to the softness and fragrance of your breast? Why are your eyes blue pools of love if they are not for his questioning and what are your rose lips for if they quench not his thirst?
Yes, I know God is very tender with a woman and I think He understands, so if she crept very close to Him and caught at His sleeve to steady herself He would be kind to her until she could go on along her own steep way. Please, God, never let him find out, for it would hurt him to have hurt me!
LEAF EIGHT
MELTED
Some days are like the miracle flowers that open in the garden from plants you didn't expect to bloom at all. I might have been born, lived and died without having this one come into my life, and now that I have had it I don't know how to write it, except in the crimson of blood, the blue of flame, the gold of glory—and a tinge of light green would well express the part I have played. But it is all over at last and—
Ruth Chester was the unfolding of the first hour-petal and I got a glimpse of a heart of gold that I feel dumb with worship to think of. She's God's own good woman and He made her in one of His holy hours. I wish I could have borne her, or she me, and the tenderness of her arms was a sacrament. We two women just stood aside with life's artifices and concealments and let our own hearts do the talking.
She said she had come because she felt that if she talked with me I might be better able to understand Alfred when he came and that she had seen that the judge was very determined, and she thoroughly recognized his force of character. We stopped there while I gave her the document to read. I suppose it was dishonorable, but I needed her protection from it. I'm glad she had the strength of mind to walk with a head high in the air to Judy's range and burn it up. Anything might have happened if she hadn't. And even now I feel that only my marriage vows will close up the case for the judge—even yet he may— But when Ruth had got done with Alfred, she had wiped Judge Wade's appreciation of him completely off my mind and destroyed it in tender words that burned us both worse than Judy's fire burned the letter. She did me an awfully good service.
"And so you see, you lovely woman you, do you not, that God has made you for him as a tribute to his greatness and it is given to you to fulfil a destiny?" She was so beautiful as she said it that I had to turn my eyes away, but I felt as I did when those awful 'let-not-man-put-asunder'—from Mr. Carter—words were spoken over me by Mr. Raines, the Methodist minister. It made me wild, and before I knew it I had poured out the whole truth to her in a perfect cataract of words. The truth always acts on women as some hitherto untried drug, and you can never tell what the reaction is going to be. In this case I was stricken dumb and found it hard to see.
"Oh, dear heart," she exclaimed as she reached out and drew me into her lovely gracious arms, "then the privilege is all the more wonderful for you, as you make some sacrifice to complete his life. Having suffered this, you will be all the greater woman to understand him. I accept my own sorrow at his hands willingly, as it gives me the larger sympathy for his work, though he will no longer need my personal encouragement as he has for years. In the light of his love this lesser feeling for Doctor Moore will soon pass away and the accord between you will be complete." This was more than I could stand and feeling less than a worm, I turned my face into her breast and wailed. Now who would have thought that girl could dance as she did?
By this time I was in such a solution of grief that I would soon have had to be sopped up with a sponge if Pet hadn't run in bubbling over like a lovely, white, linen-clad glass of Rhine wine and seltzer. Happiness has a habit of not even acknowledging the presence of grief and Pet didn't seem to see our red noses, crushed draperies and generally damp atmosphere.
"Molly," she said with a deliciously young giggle, "Tom says for you to send him ten dollars to spend getting the brass band half drunk before the six o'clock train, on which your Mr. Bennett comes. He has spent five dollars paying the negroes to polish up their instruments and clean up the uniforms and it cost him twenty-five to bail the cornettist out of jail for roost robbing, and it takes a whole gallon of whisky to get any spirit into the drummer. He says tell you that as this is your shindig you ought at least to pay the piper. Hurry up, he's waiting for me, and here's the kiss he told me to put on your left ear!"
"I suppose you delivered that kiss straight from where he gave it to you, Pettie, dear," I had the spirit to say as I went over to the desk for my pocket-book.
"Why, Molly, you know me better than that!" she exclaimed from behind a perfect rose cloud of blushes.
"I know Tom better than I do you," I answered as she fled with the ten in her hand. I looked at Ruth Chester and we both laughed. It is true that a broader sympathy is one of the by-products of sorrow, and a week ago I might have resented Pet to a marked degree instead of giving her the ten dollars and a blessing.
"I'm going quick, Molly, with that laugh between us," Ruth said as she rose and took me into her arms again for just half a second, and before I could stop her, she was gone.
She met Billy toiling up the front step with a long piece of rusty iron gas-pipe, which took off an inch of paint as it bumped against the edge of the porch. She bent down and kissed the back of his neck, which theft was almost more than I could stand, and apparently more than Billy was prepared to accept.
"Go way, girl," he said in his rudest manner; "don't you see I'm busy?"
I met him in the front hall just in time to prevent a hopeless scar on my hardwood floor. He was hot, perspiring and panting, but full of triumph.
"I found it, Molly, I found it!" he exclaimed as he let the heavy pipe drop almost on the bare pink toes. "You can git a hammer and pound the end sharp and bend it so no whale we ketch can git away for nothing. You and Doc kin put it in your trunk 'cause it's too long for mine, and I can carry Doc's shirts and things in mine. Git the hammer quick and I'll help you fix it!" The pain in my breast was almost more than I could bear.
"Lover," I said as I knelt down by him in the dim old hall and put my arms around him as if to shield him from some blow I couldn't help being aimed at him, "you wouldn't mind much, would you, if just this time your Molly couldn't go with you? Your father is going to take good care of you and—and maybe bring you back to me some day."
"Why, Molly," he said, flaring his
astonished blue eyes at me, "'taint me to be took care of! I ain't a-going to leave you here, for maybe a bear to come out of a circus and eat you up, with me and Doc gone. 'Sides Doc ain't no good and maybe wouldn't help me hold the rope right to keep the whale from gitting away. He don't know how to do like I tell him like you do."
"Try him, lover, and maybe he will—will learn to—" I couldn't help the tears that came to stop my words.
"Now you see, Molly, how you'd cry with that kiss-spot gone," he said with an amused, manly, little tenderness in his voice that I had never heard before, and he cuddled his lips against mine in almost the only voluntary kiss he had given me since I had got him into his ridiculous little trousers under his blouses. "You can have most a hundred kisses every night if you don't say no more about not a-going and fix that whale hook for me quick," he coaxed against my cheek.
Oh, little lover, little lover, you didn't know what you were saying with your baby wisdom, and your rust-grimy, little paddie burned the sleep-place on my breast like a terrible white heat from which I was powerless to defend myself. You are mine, you are, you are! You are soul of my soul and heart of my heart and spirit of my spirit and—and you ought to have been flesh of my flesh!
I don't know how I managed to answer Mrs. Johnson's call from my front gate, but I sometimes think that women have a torture-proof clause in their constitutions.
She and Aunt Bettie had just come up the street from Aunt Bettie's house and the Pollard cook was following them with a large basket, in which were packed the things Aunt Bettie was contributing to the entertainment of the distinguished citizen. Mr. Johnson is Alfred's nearest kinsman in Hillsboro, and, of course, he is to be their guest while he is in town.
"He'll be feeding his eyes on Molly, so he'll not even know he's eating my Washington almond pudding with Thomas' old port in it," teased Aunt Bettie with a laugh as I went across the street with them.
"There's going to be a regular epidemic of love in Hillsboro, I do believe," she continued in her usual strain of sentimental speculation. "I saw Mr. Graves talking to Delia Hawes in front of the store an hour ago, as I came out from looking at the blue chintz to match Pet for the west wing, and they were both so absorbed they didn't even see me. That was what might have been called a conflagration dinner you gave the other night, Molly, in more ways than one. I wish a spark had set off Benton Wade and Henrietta, too. Maybe it did, but is just taking fire slowly."
I think it would be a good thing just to let Aunt Bettie blindfold every unmarried person in this town and marry them to the first person they touch hands with. It would be fun for her and then we could have peace and apparently as much happiness as we are going to have anyway. Mrs. Johnson seemed to be in somewhat the same state of mind as I found myself.
"Humph," she said as we went up the front steps, "I'll be glad when you are married and settled, Molly Carter, so the rest of this town can quiet down into peace once more, and I sincerely hope every woman under fifty in Hillsboro who is already married will stay in that state until she reaches that age. But I do believe if the law marched widows from grave number one to altar number two they would get into trouble and fuss along the road. But come on in, both of you, and help me get this marriage feast ready, if I must! The day is going by on greased wheels and I can't let Mr. Johnson's crotchets be neglected, Al Bennett or no Al Bennett!"
And from then on for hours and hours I was strapped to a torture wheel that turned and turned, minute after minute, as it ground spice and sugar and bridal meats and me relentlessly into a great suffering pulp. Could I ever in all my life have hungered for food and been able to get it past the lump in my throat that grew larger with the seconds? And if Alfred's pudding tasted of the salt of dead sea-fruit this evening, it was from my surreptitious tears that dripped into it.
It was late, very late before Mrs. Johnson realized it and shooed me home to get ready to go to the train along with the brass band and all the other welcomes.
I hurried all I could, but for long minutes I stood in front of my mirror and questioned myself. Could this slow, pale, dead-eyed, slim, drooping girl be the rollicking child of a Molly who had looked out of that mirror at me one short week ago? Where were the wings on her heels, the glint in her curls, the laugh on her mouth and the devil in her eyes?
Slowly at last I lifted the blue muslin, twenty-three-inch waist shroud and let it slip over my head and fall slimly around me. I had fastened the neck button and was fumbling the next one into the buttonhole when I suddenly heard laughing excited voices coming up the side street that ran just under my west window. Something told me that Alfred had come on the five-down train instead of the six-up and I fairly reeled to the window and peeped through the shutters.
They were all in a laughing group around him, with Tom as master of ceremonies, and Ruth Chester was looking up into his face with an expression I am glad I can never forget. It killed all my regrets on the score of his future.
It took two good looks to take him all in and then I must have missed some of him, for all in all, he was so large that he stretched your eyes to behold him. He's grown seven feet tall, I don't know how many pounds he weighs and I don't want anybody ever to tell me!
I had never thought enough about evolution to know whether I believed in it and woman's suffrage, but I do now! I know that millions of years ago a great, big, distinguished hippopotamus stepped out of the woods and frightened one of my foremothers so that she turned tail and fled through a thicket that almost tore her limb from limb, right into the arms of her own mate. That's what I did! I caught that blue satin belt together with one hand and ran through my garden right over a bed of savage tiger-lilies and flung myself into John Moore's office, slammed the door and backed up against it.
"He's come!" I gasped. "And I'm frightened to death, with nobody but you to run to. Hide me quick! He's fat and I hate him!" I was that deadly cold you can get when fear runs into your very marrow and congeals the blood in your arteries. "Quick, quick!" I panted.
He must have been as pale as I was, and for an eternity of a second he looked at me, then suddenly heaven shone from his eyes and he opened his arms to me with just one word.
"Here?"
I went.
He held me gently for a half-second, and then with a sob which I felt rather than heard, he crushed me to him and stopped my breath with his lips on mine. I understood things then that I never had before, and I felt that wise guardian man-angel take his fingers from mine and leave me safe at last. I raised my hand and pressed it against John's wet lashes until he could let me speak and I was melted into his very breast itself.
"Molly," he said when enough tenderness had come back into his arms to let me breathe, "you have almost killed me!"
"You!" I exclaimed, crowding still closer, or at least trying to. "It's not you; it's I that am killed, and you did it! I know you don't really want me, but I can't help that I'd rather you'd do the suffering with me than to do it myself away from you. I'm so hungry and thirsty for you that—that I can't diet any longer!" I put the case the strongest way I knew how and got a swooning, maddening, luscious result.
"Want you, Molly?" he almost sobbed, and I felt his heart pounding hard next to my shoulder.
"Yes, want me!" I answered with more spirit than breath left in me. "I refuse to believe you are as stupid as I am, and anybody with even an ordinary amount of brains must have seen how hard I was fighting for you. I feel sure I left no stone unturned. Some of them I can already think back and see myself tugging at, and it makes me hot all over. I'm foolish, and always was, so I'm to be excused for acting that awful way, but you are to blame for letting me do it. I'm going to be your punishment for life for not having been stern and stopped me. You had better stop me some now anyway, for if I go on loving you as I have been for the last few minutes it will make you uncomfortable."
"Peaches," he said, after he had hushed me with another broken dose of love, as large as he thought I could stand—I could have stood more!—"I am never going to tell you how long I have loved you, but that day you came to me all in a flutter with Al Bennett's letter in your hand it is going to take you a lifetime to settle for. You were mine—and Bill's! How could you—but women don't understand!" I felt him shudder in my arms as I held him close. I was repaid for all those tiresome exercises I had taken by the strength to crush him against my breast almost as hard as he crushed me. Our combined strength was terrific, dangerous to life and ribs, but—heavenly!
"Don't women know, John?" I managed to ask softly in memory of a like question he had put to me across that bread and jam with the rose a-listening from the dark.
What brought me to consciousness was his fumbling with the buttons at the waist of that blue muslin relict of a sentiment. I had fastened but one, and the lace had got caught on his sleeve buttons.
"Please don't button me into his possession," I laughed under his chin. "I'm still scared to death of him, and you haven't hid me yet!"
"Molly," he asked, this time with a heaven-laugh, "where could you be more effectually hid from Al Bennett than in my arms?"
I spent ten minutes telling Billy what a hippopotamus really looks like as I put him to bed, but later, much as I should have liked to, I couldn't consume that horrible dinner, that I had helped prepare at the Johnsons, in the shelter of John's arms, and I had to face Alfred. Ruth Chester was there, and she faced him too.
A man that can't be happy with a woman who is willing to "fulfil his destiny" doesn't deserve to be.
Then we came over here, and John had the most beautiful time persuading Aunt Adeline how a good man like Mr. Carter would want his young widow to be taken care of by being married to a safe friend of his instead of being flighty and having folks wondering whom she would marry.
"You know yourself how hard a time a beautiful young widow has, Mrs. Henderson," he said in the tone of voice that always makes his patients glad to take his worst doses. He got his blessing and me—with a warning.
A lovely night wind is blowing across my garden and bringing me congratulations from all my flower family. Flowers are a part of love and the wooing of it, and they understand. I am waiting for the light to go out behind the tall trees over which the moon is stealthily sinking. He promised me to put it out right away, and I'm watching the glow that marks the place where my own two men creatures are going to rest, with my heart in full song.
He needs rest, he is so very tired and worn. He confessed it as I stood on the step above him to-night, after he had taken his own good night from me out on the porch. When he explained to me how his agony over me for all these months had kept him walking the floor night after night, not knowing that I was waiting for the light to go out, I gave myself a sweetness that I am going to say a prayer for the last thing before I sleep. I took his head in my arms and pressed his cheek down against Billy's sleep-place on my breast over my heart and put my lips to that drake-tail kiss-spot that has tempted me for I won't say how long. Then I fled—and so did he!
I had about decided to burn this book, because I shan't need it any longer, for he says he and Billy and I are going to play so much golf and tennis that I shall keep as thin as he wants me to be without any more melting or freezing, or starving, but perhaps he would like to read the little red devil. Do you suppose he would?