The Wishing Carpet

NEVER before in all his life had he seen death. When his father died he was away at school, and by the time he reached home the primal mystery was merged in funeral solemnities. He had left a brisk, genial gentleman who had very little time for anything, and he came back to find a white and silent personage lying in chill state who appeared to have time and to spare, but the actual transition escaped him.

Nothing had escaped him here. One moment the wise, kindly little monkey-like countenance was a sentient thing, and the next moment it was a death-mask; one instant it asked questions and made wishes, and in another instant—were its questions answered and its wishes granted?

Although he had never seen death, he had looked many times into the bright face of danger in his happy and heedless wanderings. Danger added a fillip; death, he felt, had a gallant bearing, a clean and shining face. This was death with a difference, mean and sordid, sly and cheating; what old Norsemen called “a straw death.” This child had found death before ever she had found life; it was unfair. It made him uncomfortable, indignant, furious. After the frantic quarter of an hour of alarums and excursions, of telephoning and talking, the quiet which ensued was horrible to him. Miss Ada was waiting below to break the news to Glen, and he kept vigil beside Gloriana-Virginia in the prim little guest chamber upstairs, and there rose up in him a hot young rage of grief.

He had liked the quaint, ugly, little thing ... he had planned such jolly plans for her! He turned back the sheet and looked at her. The wise little simian face was as tired and as kind as ever, no more so, and no less. Here was no bidding for tears; to the unlovely pathos of her life had been added the unlovely pathos of her death, that was all. But to Mr. Peter Parker of Pasadena, sitting there in the deepest discomfort of his cheerful young life, things his mother had told him, articles she had read aloud to him by main force, paragraphs here and there, obtruded themselves into his consciousness. He wanted intensely to go away, but Miss Ada had taken it gravely for granted that he would remain until the child’s aunt arrived. He dropped the sheet over her again, but it seemed as if he could see through it, as clearly as through a window pane, and the small yellow face and the ugly, misshaped claws and the wizened body became the piercing mouthpiece of her kind—the rest of them in the mill—his mill—and other mills, and cotton fields, and beet fields, and factories and prune orchards, and oyster sheds.

Once he had seen in a private collection a very vivid and terrible painting in which the headless body of a young girl, surrounded by flaming torches, was borne through the streets of Paris to inflame the mob, and it came to him now that he would like to take Gloriana-Virginia’s body in that fashion and carry it through the length and breadth of the land, until he made all the—what had Glen Darrow called him?—idle-born, overfed, underworked people feel what he was feeling now! And Glen Darrow should go with him, and rouse them with him, and—and be with him! He had forgotten in the acute emotion of the last hour, the thing which had become quite clear to him that evening; he had been groping toward it, of course, ever since that first day, when she had faced him so gamely and gallantly and said—“I wrote it!”—but it had not assumed the final certainty until he had seen her going away with Luke Manders. He knew now, without any shadow of doubt, what he wanted, and whatever he had wanted, for more than twenty-two years, he had gotten. It would not be easy, perhaps, but he didn’t want it to be easy, for he was tired, tired to the marrow of his bones of easy things....

He came out of his meditation with a start to find her standing on the other side of the bed.

“Thank you,” she said very gently. “Thank you for staying. You can go now.” It was not a dismissal but a release. There were tears in her eyes but she was not crying. “M’liss’ will come, and I am here, now.” She lifted the sheet for an instant, and her firm chin which was like her truculent father’s quivered, and for a long moment Gloriana-Virginia Tolliver’s two friends stood on either side of her, looking down at her, wordlessly. Then Glen covered her again. “If only I hadn’t left her!”

“You mustn’t—it was—very quick,” he said clumsily. “I—I’m certain she never knew. She was wishing—on your Wishing Carpet—” he saw a tiny spasm of grief contort the girl’s face for an instant—“and then it—it was all over.” The fluent young man could not, apparently, find anything more fitting than the old rubber-stamp phrase. Perhaps, for the first time in his nimble-tongued experience, he was finding words inadequate for his needs, for he came slowly round the foot of the bed and stood very close to her, without speaking at all, in a gentle, companionable silence.

Gloriana-Virginia, who had worried so about their feud, might well be satisfied, there beneath her sheet; at last they were, as she had “honed” to have them—“sweet and mannerly.”

It would have delighted her to see him lean nearer, and lift one of Glen’s hands, and look at it gravely before he turned it over and placed one rather diffident kiss in its palm.

It would have surprised her to see the assured and flippant youth silent and shy; it would have astonished her still more to see Glen Darrow color slowly and softly, to see her mouth tremble, but she could not have seen, even with her wise little monkey eyes wide open, her first friend’s inner tumult. She could not even have surmised the wild, sweet panic with which Glen Darrow made the second great discovery of her life, namely, that she did not dislike being touched. It invalidated earlier statements to Luke Manders and convictions to herself; it gave the lie to that distressful scene in the lane, almost a year ago, on her nineteenth birthday. If it lifted her out of the classification of the queer and the strange and the abnormal, it did something else, likewise; it made it shockingly clear that it was only the person who mattered ... it started a trembling and a rumbling and a cracking at the foundations of a dream castle builded six years ago.

The color seeped out of her golden-olive face and left it as nearly white as it could ever be, and she drew her hand away. M’liss’ Tolliver was coming noisily up the stairs, very vocal in her grief.

“Let’s go down,” Peter Parker whispered. “There are a million things I must tell you, and ask you, and——”

Glen shook her head. He had asked her no question in words, but the downright truth of her was beyond any mincing maidenliness.

“No,” she said clearly, “I will stay here. It—is no use. You see, I promised my father when he was dying. I am going to marry Luke Manders next month—the day I am twenty years old.”

Mrs. Eugenia Parker rang the Darrow doorbell an hour later and Glen herself admitted her.

“My son told me,” the Federation President began at once, as if fearing she might be denied admission, “of the death of the little girl. He is greatly grieved, for he was deeply interested in her.”

“I know he was,” said Glen gently.

Mrs. Parker looked rather startled at her tone. “I came to see if I might be of service to you.”

“Thank you, no,” she said, still more gently. “Everything has been done. Her aunt was here, but she has gone home again. I asked them to leave her here.”

“You will have the funeral?”

“Yes—here. Day after to-morrow, because that will be Sunday, and her friends will be free to come.” Then, at what she saw in the older woman’s face, she said—“I’m not regretting Gloriana-Virginia, Mrs. Parker. She is infinitely better off, of course. But I am rebellious”—she did not know that she was giving voice to Peter’s bitter reflection beside Glory’s body—“because she had to die before she ever had a chance to live!”

“Yes, I know!” the president concurred with warm sympathy. “But there will be no more Glorys. I mean—conditions are steadily growing better, people are rousing——”

“That won’t bring her back,” said Glen, unsteadily.

“No. But—to our shame be it said—reforms are only born of human sacrifice!” she stopped short and looked at the girl. “You have your hat on— Am I keeping you?”

“I was going down to the mill.”

“I thought you were not running the mill at night this week.”

“We have not been, but the whistle blew just as I came home—I don’t understand it. I thought I had better go down.”

“Then, may I walk with you as far as the hotel?”

“Surely. I will just speak to Miss Ada—” She came back in an instant, and they set off down the hill together, and the doctor’s daughter was silent. What a night! Peter Parker under her roof, in her dear house; Luke Manders finding him there, and the terrible scene which had ensued, Glory’s death; the bewildering, breath-taking discovery that one might intensely dislike being touched by one person, and then, in the case of another person, not dislike it in the least, but on the contrary——

Mrs. Eugenia Parker was not silent. She talked heartily of conditions of working and living, North, East, South, and West, and paid warm tribute to the fine progress the Old South was making.

“And that is why it distresses me so to find my son’s mill—at least, the mill of which he is part owner—so far below standard! Mr. Carey’s cousin, a most charming young widow, Mrs. Tenafee—I daresay you know her? No? Well, she called upon me, and I found her thoroughly awake to the situation. The club women are accomplishing wonders, I understand.”

They had reached the entrance to the Bella Vista’s grounds, and halted.

“Good night,” said Glen, still with the new gentleness in her voice.

But the Federation President continued to talk. It was an exquisite night, windless and still, white beneath a fulling moon, and somewhere in the hotel’s gardens a mocking bird was singing, and the busy and purposeful lady seemed loath to call it a day.

“I have not yet visited the mill at night. I believe I shall go down for a little while. Peter is there, and I can come back with him.”

So they went forward again, side by side, companionably, Mrs. Eugenia Parker and the young woman who had penned the vitriolic editorial in The Torch about her son.