Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

“Of course I know it’s your only day at home—” Mrs. Belmore reverted to her occupation of deftly setting the chairs in their rightful places, and straightening the books on the tables. “I suppose I _ought_ to insist on your going—when you promised—but still—” She gave a sigh of relinquishment. “I suppose you _do_ need the rest,” she added. “We can have a nice afternoon together, anyway. You can finish reading that story aloud, and we’ll go out and take a good look at the garden. I think the beans were planted too close under the pear tree last year—that was the reason they didn’t come up right. Edith Barnes and Alan Wilson are coming out from town after dinner for the rest of the day, but that won’t make any difference to us.”

“_What?_”

“Now Herbert, how could I help asking them? You know the boarding house she and her mother live in. Edith never gets a chance to see him alone. They’re saving up now to get married—they’ve been engaged a year—so he can’t spend any more money for theaters and things, and they just have to walk and walk the streets, unless they go visiting, and they’ve been almost everywhere, Edith says. She wrote and asked me to have them for this Sunday; he’s been away for a whole week somewhere up in the State. I think it’s pathetic.” In the warmth of explanation Mrs. Belmore had unwittingly removed the pile of newspapers from the floor to an ottoman at the further end of the room. “Edith says she knows it’s the happiest time of their lives, and she does want to get some of the benefit of it, poor girl.”

“What do they want to be engaged for, anyway?”

“_Herbert!_ How ridiculous! You are the most unreasonable man at times for a sensible one that I ever laid my eyes on. Why did _we_ want to be engaged?”

“That was different.” Mr. Belmore’s tone conveyed a permanent satisfaction with his own case. “If every woman were like you, petty—I never _could_ stand Edith, she’s one of your clever girls; there’s something about her that always sets my teeth on edge. As for Wilson—oh, Wilson’s just a usual kind of a fool, like myself. Hello, where are my newspapers—and what in thunder makes it so cold? You don’t mean to say you’ve got the window open?”

Mrs. Belmore had a habit of airing the rooms in the morning, which her husband approved of theoretically, and combated intensely in practice. After the window was banged shut she could hear him rattling at the furnace below to turn on an extra flow of heat before settling down once more in comfort. Although the April sun was bright, there was still a chill in the air.

She looked in upon him, gowned and bonneted for church, sweet and placid of mien, followed by two little girls, brave in their Sunday best, all big hats and ribboned hair, and little starchy ruffles showing below their brown coats. Mrs. Belmore stooped over her husband’s chair to kiss him good-by.

“You won’t have to talk to Edith and Alan at all,” she said as if continuing the conversation from where they had left off. “All we have to do is to let them have the parlor or the library. They’ll entertain each other.”

“Oh, don’t you bother about that. Now go ahead or you’ll be late, and don’t forget to say your prayers for me, too. That’s right, always go to church with your mother, girlies.”

“I _wish_ you were going, too.” Mrs. Belmore looked at her husband lingeringly.

“I wish I were, petty,” said Mr. Belmore with a prompt mendacity so evidently inspired by affection that his wife condoned it at once.

She thought of him more than once during the service with generous satisfaction in his comfortable morning. She wished she had thought it right to remain at home, too, as she did sometimes, but there were the children to be considered. But she and Herbert would have the afternoon together, and take part of it to see about planting the garden, a plot twenty feet square in the rear of the suburban villa.

The Sunday visit to the garden was almost a sacrament. They might look at it on other days, but it was only on Sunday, beginning with the early spring, that husband and wife strolled around the little patch together, first planning where to start the summer crop of vegetables and afterwards watching the green things poking their spikes up through the mold, and growing, growing. He did the planting and working in the long light evenings after he came home, while she held the papers of seeds for him, but it was only on Sunday that he could really watch the green things grow, and learn to know each separate leaf intimately, and count the blossoms on the beans and the cucumbers. From the pure pleasure of the first radish, through all the various wiltings and shrivelings incident to amateur gardening in summer deluge and drought, to the triumphant survival of tomato plants and cucumber vines, running riot over everything in the fall of the year, the little garden played its old part as paradise to these two, who became more fully one in the watching of the miracle of growth. When they gathered the pears from the little tree in the corner of the plot, before the frost, and picked the few little green tomatoes that remained on the dwindling stems, it was like garnering a store of peaceful happiness. Every stage of the garden was a romance. Mrs. Belmore could go to church without her husband, but to have him survey the garden without her would have been the touch beyond.

It must be horrid, anyway, she thought, to have to go every morning into town in those smoky cars and crowded ferry-boats; just to run into town twice a week tired her out. Now he would have finished the paper—now little Dorothy would have come in, red cheeked from her walk, to kiss daddy before her nap—now he must be pottering around among his possessions and looking out for her. She knew so well how he would look when he came to the door to meet her. The sudden sight of either one to the other always shed a reflected light, like the glow of the sun. It was with a feeling of wonder that she marked its disappearance, after a brief gleam, as he not only opened the door, but came out on the piazza to greet her, and closed it behind him.

“They’re in there—Edith and Alan.” He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “I thought they weren’t coming until after dinner.”

“Why, they weren’t.”

“Well, they’re in the parlor, just the same. Came out over an hour ago. Great Scott, I wished I’d gone with you. I’m worn out.”

“You don’t mean to say you’ve stayed with them all the time!” Mrs. Belmore looked scandalized.

“I should say I had; I couldn’t lose ’em. Whichever room I went to they followed; at least, she did, and he came after. I went from pillar to post, I give you my word, petty, but Edith had me by the neck; she never let go her grip for an instant. They won’t speak to each other, you see, only to me. I haven’t had a chance to even finish the paper. I’ve had the deuce of a time! I don’t know what you are going to do about it.”

“Never mind, it will be all right now,” said Mrs. Belmore reassuringly. She pushed past him into the parlor where sat a tall, straight girl with straight, light brows, a long straight nose, and a straight mouth with a droop at the corners. In the room beyond, a thick set, dark young man with glasses and a nervous expression was looking at pictures. It did not require a Solomon to discover at a glance how the land lay.

If Mrs. Belmore had counted easily on her powers of conciliation she was disappointed this time. After the dinner, whereat the conversation was dragged laboriously around four sides of a square, except when the two little girls made some slight diversion, and the several futile attempts when the meal was over to leave the lovers alone together, Mrs. Belmore resigned herself, perforce, to the loss of her cherished afternoon.

“It’s no use, we’ll have to give up the reading,” she said to her husband rapidly, in one of her comings and goings. “Perhaps later, dear. But it’s really dreadful, here we’ve been talking of religion and beet-root sugar and smallpox, when anyone can see that her heart is breaking.”

“I think he is getting the worst of it,” said Mr. Belmore impartially.

“Oh, it won’t hurt _him_.”

“Well, you’ve given them plenty of opportunities to make up.”

“Yes, but he doesn’t know how.”

She added in a louder tone, “You take Mr. Wilson up to your den for a while, Herbert, Ethel and I are going to have a cozy little time with the children, aren’t we, dear?”

“Have a cigar?” said Mr. Belmore as the two men seated themselves comfortably in a couple of wooden armchairs in the sunny little apartment hung with a miscellaneous collection of guns, swords, and rods, the drawing of a bloated trout and a dusty pair of antlers.

“Thank you, I’m not smoking now,” said Mr. Wilson with a hungry look at the open box on the table beside him.

“Oh!” said his host genially, “so you’re at that stage of the game. Well, I’ve been there myself. You have my sympathy. But this won’t last, you know.”

“Does your wife like smoking?”

“Loves it,” said Mr. Belmore, sinking the fact of his official limit to four cigars a day. “That is, of course, she thinks it’s a dirty habit, and unhealthy, and all that sort of thing, you know, but it doesn’t make any _difference_ to her—not a pin’s worth. Cheer up, old fellow, you’ll get to this place too.”

“Looks like it,” said the other bitterly. “Here I haven’t seen her for a week—I came two hundred miles on purpose yesterday, and now she won’t even look at me. I don’t know what’s the matter—haven’t the least idea—and I can’t _get_ her to tell me. I have to be off to-morrow at seven o’clock, too—I call it pretty hard lines.”

“Let me see,” said Mr. Belmore judicially, knitting his brows as if burrowing into the past as he smoked. “Perhaps I can help you out. What have you been writing to her? Telling her all about what you’ve been doing, and just sending your love at the end? They don’t like that, you know.”

Mr. Wilson shook his head. “No, upon my soul I’ve done nothing but tell her how I—how I was looking forward to—oh, hang it, Belmore, the letters have been all _right_, I know that.”

“H’m,” said Mr. Belmore, “there’s got to be _something_ back of it, you know. Seen any girls since you’ve been gone?”

Mr. Wilson hastened to shake his head more emphatically than before. “Not one,” he asseverated with the relief of complete innocence. “Didn’t even meet a soul I knew, except Brower—you remember Dick Brower? I went into a jeweler’s to get my glasses mended and found him buying a souvenir spoon for his fiancée.”

“O—o—h!” said Mr. Belmore intelligently, “and did you buy a present for Edith?”

“No, I didn’t. She made me promise not to buy anything more for her; she thinks I’m spending too much money, and that I ought to economize.”

“And did you tell her about Brower?”

“Why, of course I did—as we were coming out this morning.”

Mr. Wilson stared blankly at his friend.

“Chump!” said Mr. Belmore. He bit off the end of a new cigar and threw it away. “Wilson, my poor fellow, you’re so besotted in ignorance that I don’t know how to let the light in on you. A man is a fool by the side of his fiancée, anyhow.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said the bewildered Wilson stiffly. “_I_ don’t know what I’m to do.”

“No, of course you don’t—but Edith does—you can just trust her for that. A girl _always_ knows what a man ought to do—she can give him cards and spades and beat him every time.”

“Then why doesn’t she _tell_ me what she wants? I asked her to, particularly.”

“Oh, no! She’ll tell you everything the opposite—that is, half the time. She’ll put every obstacle possible in your way, to see if you’re man enough to walk over ’em; that’s what she wants to find out; if you’re man enough to have your own way in spite of her; and, of course, if you aren’t, you’re an awful disappointment.”

“Are you sure?” said Mr. Wilson deeply, after an awestruck pause. “Half the time, you say. But how am I to find out when she means—I give you my word, Belmore, that I thought—I suppose I could have brought her a small present, anyway, in spite of what she said; a souvenir spoon—but she hates souvenir spoons.”

“You’ll have to cipher it out for yourself, old man,” said Mr. Belmore. “_I_ don’t set out to interpret any woman’s moods. I only give you cold, bare facts. But if I were you,” he added impartially, “I’d go down after a while and try and get her alone, you know, and say something. You can, if you try.” A swish of skirts outside of the open door made Mr. Wilson jump forward as Mrs. Belmore came in sight with her friend. The latter had her arm around the older woman, and her form drooped toward her as they passed the two men. The eyes of the girl were red, and her lips had a patient quiver. Mr. Wilson gave an exclamation and sprang forward as she disappeared in the further room.

It was some hours later that the husband and wife met unexpectedly upon the stairs with a glad surprise.

“You don’t mean to say it’s you—alone!” he whispered.

“Wait—is she coming up?” They clutched each other spasmodically as they listened to the sound of a deflecting footstep. There was a breathless moment, and then the chords of a funeral march boomed forth upon the air. The loud pedal was doing its best to supplement those long and strenuous fingers.

The listeners breathed a sigh of relief.

“He’s gone to the station for a time table,” whispered the husband with a delighted grin: “though I can stand _him_ all right. We had a nice walk with the little girls, after he got tired of playing hide and seek. I wished you were with us. You must be about used up. How are you getting along with her?”

“Oh, pretty well.” She let herself be drawn down on the hall window seat at the top of the landing. “You see, Edith really feels dreadfully, poor girl.”

“What about?”

“Herbert, she isn’t really sure that she loves him.”

“Isn’t sure! After they’ve been engaged for a year!”

“That’s just it. She says if they had been married out of hand, in the first flush of the novelty, she wouldn’t have had time, perhaps, to have any doubts. But it’s the seeing him all the time that’s made her think.”

“Made her think _what_?”

“Whether she loves him or not; whether they are really suited. I remember that I used to feel that way about you, dear. Oh, you know, Herbert, it’s a very serious thing for a girl. She says she knows her whole life is at stake; she thinks about it all the time.”

“How about his?”

“Well, that’s what I said,” admitted Mrs. Belmore. “She says that she feels that _he_ is so rational and self-poised that she makes little difference in his life either way—it has come to her all at once. She says his looking at everything in a matter-of-fact way just chills her; she longs for a whole-souled enthusiasm that can sweep everything before it. She feels that if they are married she will have to keep up the ideal for both of them, and she doesn’t know whether she can.”

“No, she can’t,” said Mr. Belmore.

“She says she could if she loved him enough,” pursued Mrs. Belmore. “It’s the _if_ that kills her. She says that when she wakes up in the morning that she feels as if she’d die if she didn’t see him before night, and when she _does_ see him it’s all a dreadful disappointment to her; she can’t talk to him at all, she feels perfectly hard and stony; then, the moment he’s gone, she’s crazy to have him back again. She cries herself thin over it.”

“She’s pretty bony, anyway,” said Mr. Belmore impartially.

“Even his appearance changes to her. She says sometimes he looks like a Greek god, so that she could go down on her knees to him, and at other times—Once she happened to catch a glimpse of him in a horrid red sweater, polishing his shoes, and she said she didn’t get over it for weeks, he looked positively _ordinary_, like some of the men you see in the trolley cars.”

“Oh, good gracious!” protested Mr. Belmore feebly. “Oh, good _gracious_, petty! This is _too_ much.”

“Hush—don’t laugh so loud—be quiet,” said his wife anxiously.

“If Wilson _ever_ looks like a Greek god to her, she’s all right, she loves him—you can tell her so for me. _Wilson!_ Here are we sitting up here like a pair of lovers, and they—Hello!”

The hall door opened and shut, the piano lid closed simultaneously with a bang, and there was a swirl of skirts again towards the staircase that scattered the guilty pair on the landing. The hostess heaved a patient sigh.

“They _shall_ speak,” said Mrs. Belmore when another hour had gone with the situation still unchanged. Her gentle voice had a note of determination. “I can’t understand why he doesn’t _make_ her. She is literally crying her eyes out, because the whole day has been lost. Why didn’t you send him into the parlor for a book as I told you to, when I came up to take care of Dorothy?”

“He wouldn’t go—he said he wasn’t doing the kindergarten act any more. Hang it, I don’t blame him. A man objects to being made a fool of before people, and he’s tired of it. Here he goes off again to-morrow for two weeks, and she with no more heart than—”

“Where is he now?” asked Mrs. Belmore.

“Upstairs in my room, smoking.”

“_Smoking!_ I thought he’d promised her solemnly not to.”

“Yes, he did; but he says he doesn’t care a—red apple; he’s going to have some comfort out of the day. I’ve left him with a box of cigars; good ones, too. He’s having the time of his life.”

“O—o—h!” said Mrs. Belmore with the rapt expression of one who sees beyond the veil. When she spoke it was with impressive slowness. “When you hear me come downstairs with Edith and go in the parlor, you wait a moment and then bring him down—_with his cigar_—into the library. Do you understand?”

“No,” said Mr. Belmore.

“Oh, Herbert! If she sees him _smoking_—! There’s no time to lose, for I have to get tea to-night. When I call you, leave him and come at once, do you hear? Don’t stop a minute—just come, before they get a chance to follow.”

“You bet I’ll come,” said Mr. Belmore, “like a bird to its—I will, really, petty.”

That he nearly knocked her down by his wildly tragic rush when she called from the back hall—“Herbert, please come at once! I can’t turn off the water,” was a mere detail—they clung to each other in silent laughter, behind the enshrouding porti—res, not daring to move. The footfall of the deserted Edith was heard advancing from the front room to the library, and her clear and solemn voice, as of one actuated only by the lofty dictates of duty, penetrated distinctly to the listeners.

“Alan Wilson, is it possible that you are _smoking?_ Have you broken your promised word?”

“Well, they’re at it, at last,” said Mr. Belmore, relapsing into a chair in the kitchen with a sigh of relief, and drawing a folded newspaper from his pocket. “I wouldn’t be in his shoes for a farm.”

“Oh, it will be all right now,” said Mrs. Belmore serenely. She added with some irrelevancy, “I’ve left the children to undress each other; they’ve been _so_ good. It’s been such a different day, though, from what we had planned.”

“It’s too bad that you have to get the tea.”

“Oh, I don’t mind that a bit.”

She had tucked up the silken skirt of her gown and was deftly measuring out coffee—after the swift, preliminary shaking of the fire with which every woman takes possession of a kitchen—pouring the water into the coffee-pot from the steaming kettle, and then vibrating between the kitchen closet and the butler’s pantry with the quick, capable movements of one who knows her ground thoroughly. “Really, it isn’t any trouble. Margaret leaves half of the things ready, you know. If you’ll just lift down that dish of salad for me—and the cold chicken is beside it. I hate to ask you to get up, but—Thank you. How good the coffee smells! I know you always like the coffee I make.”

“You bet I do,” said Mr. Belmore with fervor. “Say, petty, you don’t think you could come out now and take a look at the garden? I’m almost sure the peas are beginning to show.”

“No, I’m afraid there isn’t time. We’ll have to give it up for this Sunday.” She paused for a great effort. “If you’d like to go by yourself, dear—”

“Wouldn’t you mind?”

She paused again, looking at him with her clear-eyed seriousness.

“I don’t think I mind now, but I might—afterwards.”

If he had hesitated, it was for a hardly appreciable second. “And I don’t want to go,” he protested stoutly, “it wouldn’t be the same thing at all without you.”

——“Everything is ready now,” said his wife. “Though I do hate to disturb Edith and Alan. I’ll just run up and hear the children say their prayers before I put those things on the table. If you would just take a look at the furnace—” it was the sentence Mr. Belmore had been dreading—“and then you can come up and kiss the children good night.”

Mr. Belmore, on his way up from stoking, caught a glimpse projected from the parlor mirror through an aperture in the doorway which the porti—res had left uncovered. The reflection was of a girl, with tear-stained face and closed eyes, her head upon a young man’s shoulder, while his lips were touchingly pressed to her hair. The picture might have been called “After the Storm,” the wreckage was so plainly apparent. As Mr. Belmore turned after ascending the flight of stairs he came full in sight of another picture, spread out to view in the room at the end of the hall. He stood unseen in the shadow regarding it.

His wife sat in a low chair near one of the two white beds; little Dorothy’s crib was in their room, beyond. The three children were perched on the foot of the nearest bed, white-gowned, with rosy faces and neatly brushed hair. While he looked, the youngest child gave a birdlike flutter and jump, and lighted on the floor, falling on her knees, with her bowed head in the mother’s lap, her hands upraised. As she finished the murmured prayer, helped by the tender mother-voice, she rose and stood to one side, in infantine seriousness, while the next one spread her white plumes for the same flight, waiting afterwards in reverent line with the first as the third hovered down.

It was plain to see from the mother’s face that she had striven to put all earthly thoughts aside in the performance of this sacred office of ministering to innocence; her eyes must be holy when her children’s looked up at her on their way to God.

This was the little inner chapel, the Sanctuary of Home, where she was priestess by divine right. It would have been an indifferent man, indeed, who had not fallen upon his knees in spirit, in company with this little household of faith, in mute recognition of the love and peace and order that crowned his days.

He kissed the laughing children as they clung to him, before she turned down the light. When she came out of the room he was waiting for her. He put his arm around her as he said, with the darling tenderness that made her life,

“Come along, old sweetness. We’ve got to go down and stir up those lunatics again. Call _that_ ‘the happiest time of your life!’ _We_ know better than that, don’t we, petty? I’ll tell you what it is: I’ll go to church with you next Sunday, if you say so!”

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In the Married Quarters

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In the Married Quarters

MR. BROOKTON RIVERS watched the spark at the end of his cigar as he held the short stub between his thumb and forefinger. It was going out. While he had had that cigar to smoke his mind had been at rest, for he knew that he was going to sit in that particular angle in the piazza until he finished it, which would be about half-past eight. After that—what?

He threw away the cigar and leaned meditatively forward to catch a glimpse of the moon as it rose over the patch of straggling woods next to the Queen Anne cottage opposite him. It showed a deserted piazza, and a man and his wife and two small children walking past it. The man walked with the heavy, shuffling steps of a laborer, and the woman, in a white shirt-waist and a dragging skirt, held one child by the hand, while the other, in tiny trousers, toddled bow-leggedly behind. As they vanished down the street, two silent men on bicycles sped past, their little lamps twinkling in the shadows; then half a dozen more, laughing and calling to each other, then a swiftly driven buggy that sent the dust flying up on the vines that were already laden with it. The prevailing smell of the humid night was of damp weeds. It was also very hot.

There were no lights in the house opposite, nor in the one next to it, or in the one next to that, nor were there any, as he knew without seeing, in either of the houses next to his own. From farther down the street came the sound of a jangling piano, obstructed intermittently by the loud, unvaried barking of a melancholy dog. From nearer by the persistent wail of a very young infant, protesting already against existence in such a hot world, became more and more unbearable each instant. Mr. Rivers absent-mindedly killed three feasting mosquitoes at a blow, and rose to his feet with determination. He could stay here no longer. Should he go out, or retire to his room in the doubtful comfort of extreme negligee, and read?

It will, of course, be evident to the meanest suburban intelligence that the month was August, and that Mrs. Rivers was away, as were most of her immediate neighbors, enjoying a holiday by either mountains or seashore. Rivers could see in imagination how glorious this moonlight became as the waves rolled into its path and broke there on the wet sands into a delicious rush and swirl of silvery sparkling foam. He could smell the very perfume of the sea, and feel the cold breath that the water exhales with one’s face close down by it, no matter how warm the night. It had been a pretty bad day in town. He was glad, very glad, that Elizabeth had the change. She needed it. He had said this stoutly to himself many times in the last six weeks, and knew that it was true. She had protested against going, and only yielded at last for the children’s sake and in wifely obedience to lawful masculine authority. He had insisted on sleeping in the house alone, in defiance of her pleading, alleging an affinity for his own bed, his own belongings, and an individual bath tub. A woman came once a week to sweep and straighten up the house. He had repeatedly declared there would be really nothing to do after business hours but to go around and enjoy himself. He had made her almost envious of these prospective joys. He would take little trips to Manhattan Beach with “the boys” and go to Bronxville to see Tom Westfield, as he had been meaning to for five years, and visit the roof garden with the Danas, who were on from St. Louis, and take dinner at the Café Ruritania. On the between nights he would visit the neighbors. All these things he had done, more or less disappointingly, but what should he do to-night?

“I beg your pardon, Rivers, but have you any paregoric in the house? We’ve got to get something to quiet the baby.”

A tall, thin, wearied-looking young man had come up the steps, hidden by the vines in which dwellers in a mosquito country are wont to picturesquely embower themselves, defiant of results.

“Why, how are you, Parker?” said Rivers cordially. “Paregoric is it that you want? Come inside, and we’ll have a look for it, old man.” He led the way, scratching matches as he went to relieve the darkness, dropping them on the floor as they went out, and finally lighting the gas in the butler’s pantry.

“My wife keeps the medicines on the top shelf here to be out of the way of the children,” he explained. “I don’t know about the paregoric, though. I seem to remember that she didn’t believe much in using it for babies.”

“We’ve had a fight with the nurse about it,” said the other man, gnawing at a very light mustache as he leaned against the door, “but Great Scott, Rivers, we’ve got to do something. _I_ would have murdered anybody whose child cried like this one. We’ve been complained of as it is. That’s paregoric, isn’t it?”

“It was, but the bottle’s empty,” said Rivers, who was standing on the rung of a chair, holding out a vial now and then from an inner recess to read the name on it. “That’s another empty bottle—and here’s _another_ empty bottle—and, this is—another. Bottle of sewing machine oil. Prescription for neuralgia, 178, 902, empty. Bottle of glycerine—confound the thing! the cork was out of it; get my handkerchief for me out of my pocket, will you? Prescription for hair tonic; empty bottle—another empty prescription bottle—dregs of cough medicine. What in thunder does Bess want with all these empty bottles? I’m awfully sorry, Parker, but we don’t seem to have the stuff you want, or any other, for that matter.”

“Never mind,” said Parker. “I’ll ride down to the village and get some. I’d have gone there first, but the tire of my wheel wants blowing up.”

“I’d lend you my wheel, but it’s at the shop,” called Rivers as they disappeared out of the door.

He put the bottles back, upsetting, as he did so, a package of some white powder, out of which ran three cockroaches. As he stooped to gather it up again in the paper he disturbed a half-eaten peach which he remembered leaving there the night before, and a small colony of ants that had made their dwelling in it scuttled cheerily around. He uttered an exclamation of disgust, and shut the door of the butler’s pantry upon them. The whole house seemed given up to a plague of insects, utterly unknown in the reign of its careful mistress. In spite of screens, small stinging mosquitoes whizzed out from everything he touched; spiders hung down from webs in the ceiling, and a moth had flown from his closet that very morning. He kept the blinds and windows closed while he was away all day; he had begun by leaving them open, but a slanting shower had made havoc in his absence and also flooded the cellar through the open cellar door. It had not dried up since, and he was sure that there were fleas down there.

There was a deadly hot damp and silence in the dining-room and parlor as he came through them, and the same unnatural atmosphere in the rooms above as he drearily invaded them for a clean collar. Every place was shut up and in order; the tops of the dressing tables even were bare save for the clean towel laid over each. His own room was in an ugly, disheveled confusion, and though his windows were open, no air came through the wire screens. He opened a closet door inadvertently, and the sight of a pink kimono of his wife’s, and the hats of the two little boys hanging up neatly beside it, emphasized his solitude. His latent idea of spending the rest of the evening at home was gone from him—he felt that he could not get out of this accursed house quickly enough, although he had not made up his mind where to go; he did not feel up to cheering the sick man in the next street, or equal to a gentle literary conversation with the two elderly ladies beyond who had known his mother. He wanted to go somewhere where he could smoke and have some pleasing light drink for refreshment, and be cheered and amused himself.

The Callenders! If he only had his wheel—it was nine o’clock now, and the place was away over on the other side of town. Never mind, he would go, and chance their being at home and out of bed when he got there. Anything to get away from this loathsome place, although coming back to it again seemed suddenly an impossible horror. He wondered if he were getting ill. The night before—

As he walked, the shadows of the moonlight lengthened his long legs, and their dragging strides. His face, with its short brown beard and the hollows under his dark eyes, was bent forward. He figured out anew the income there would be from his insurance money, and how it might be supplemented for Bess and the children. Clearly, he would have to earn more before he died. And oh, the burden, the burden, the burden was his! The thought leaped out like a visible thing. Her sweet presence, her curling hair, her dimples, her loving feminine inconsequence, with the innocent, laughing faces of the little boys, overlaid the daily care for him, but with these appointed Lighteners of Life away it loomed up into a hideously exaggerated specter that seemed to have always had its hand upon his fearsome heart, and only pressed a little closer upon him now in this hot windless night. Even his wilted collar partook of the tragic; he might as well have kept on the first one.

“Hello! Hello! Where are you going? This is the place.” A shout of laughter accompanied the words. “Come up, brother, we’ve been waiting for you!”

He looked up to see that he was in front of Callender’s house, and that the piazza, a large square end of which was screened off into a room, held a company in jovial mood, under moonlight as bright as day. The women were in white, with half bare neck and arms, rocking and fanning themselves, and the men in tennis shirts and belts, two of them smoking pipes, and the other a cigar. A tray, holding a large crystal bowl and glasses, stood on a bamboo table at one side, half shielded by jars of palms whose spiked shadows carpeted the floor and projected themselves across the white dress and arms of Mrs. Callender, while she held the door open with one hand, and half welcomed, half dragged him in with the other, amid a chorus of voices,

“Come in, come in, you’re one of us.”

“If you let a mosquito in—Take that chair by Mrs. Weir if you feel up to it; she wants to be entertained.”

“I feel up to anything—now,” said Rivers, taking with alacrity the seat allotted to him, after shaking hands with pretty Mrs. Waring, who lived next door, and her cousin, Mrs. Weir. “Same old crowd, I see.”

The laughter broke out anew as his wandering eyes took tally of the group, and he said, “Where’s Callender? and Weir? What’s the joke?”

“Oh, don’t ask for any woman’s husband or any man’s wife,” said Mrs. Callender despairingly, with her graceful figure reclining back in the low chair. “Can’t you see that we’re all detached?” Her charming smile suddenly broke forth. “It’s really too absurd.”

“No!” said Rivers, a light dawning on him. “Nichols, you don’t mean that you are on the waiting list too?”

Mr. Nichols, a large man with a grizzled head, nodded and helped himself to the contents of the suggestive bowl. “The missus and the kids went off last week; I’m detained for a while longer. As for Callender; he got a summons from the company, and he’s half way to Chicago by this time, I hope. I came over on purpose to tell his last words to his wife, who didn’t want them.”

“Ned had already brought them,” said Mrs. Callender, turning to the tall, quiet man of the cigar, Mr. Atwood, who was her brother. “It’s such a mercy that he happened to come on, or I’d have been here all alone.”

“Looks like it,” said Mr. Porter, a stout fair gentleman with a cool gray eye, a bald head, and a gurgling laugh. “What do you think, Rivers, these girls here”—he waved his hand—“had been counting on seeing the whole lot of us to-night, and brewed that lemonade on purpose.”

“Everyone has come now but the Martindales,” said Mrs. Weir, a little woman with loosely piled dark hair, and a gentle, winning voice, occasionally diversified with a surprising shriek of laughter.

“The Martindales! Why, they only returned this evening—I met them on the boat,” said Rivers.

“Yes, we know that, but one of them will be over here just the same,” said Mrs. Callender placidly. “They’ll want to see what we’re doing. Do somebody pay a little attention to Mrs. Waring; she hasn’t said a word for half an hour. I believe she’s hoping that Henry’ll be too homesick to stay away.”

“Not quite,” said Mrs. Waring with a little tremble of her lower lip.

“Nice, kind little woman you are,” said Porter severely. “Want to enjoy yourself thinking how unhappy Waring is. Well, I’m _glad_ he went, and I hope he’ll stay until he’s well; if any man needed a change, he did.”

“He would have taken me with him if I could have left the children,” murmured Mrs. Waring.

“Yes, the children win every time,” said Porter with easy philosophy. “You think you’re important, my brothers, until you’re confronted with your own offspring, and then you’re not in it.”

“I don’t see,” said Mr. Nichols, filling his pipe again, “why a man’s family should stay in town and broil because he has to. It wouldn’t be any satisfaction to _me_, I know that. My little girls write to me every day.”

“I remember,” said Rivers, leaning forward, “once when Bess and I took a trip together we had to come home just when the fishing was at its height, because she imagined what it would be like if a menagerie broke loose and a tiger got at little Brook when he was asleep in his crib. She said she knew it was perfectly absurd, but she couldn’t stand it a moment longer. So we came home.”

He laughed tenderly at the reminiscence, and the other men laughed with him, but the women, even Mrs. Callender, who had no children, were serious, and Mrs. Weir said, as if speaking for the rest,

“Yes, one does feel that way sometimes.”

The men looked at each other and nodded, as in the presence of something known of old, something to be smiled at, and yet reverenced. The fierce maternal impulses of his wife were divine to Rivers, he loved her the more for her foolishness; it seemed fitting, and all he could expect, that the children should be her passion, as she was his. If he had once dreamed that it would be otherwise, he knew better now. Women were to be taken care of and loved for their very limitations, even if one bore a little sense of loss and soreness forever in one’s own heart. What could they know?

“Why don’t you take a vacation, Mr. Rivers?” asked Mrs. Weir later as the others had fallen into general conversation. “You look as if _you_ needed it. Mr. Nichols says it was dreadful in town to-day; forty-seven heat prostrations.”

“Oh, I can’t get off,” said Rivers with unconscious weariness in his voice. “It makes an awful lot of difference when you’re running the business yourself. If I were working for somebody else I’d take my little two weeks the way my own clerks do, without caring a hang what became of the concern in my absence. I thought I was going to get up to Maine over the Fourth, and after all I couldn’t leave in time. It’s quite a journey, you know. Bess and the boys were as disappointed as I was,” he added conscientiously. “But they’re getting along finely. Sam and Jack are learning to swim, she says—pretty good for little shavers of five and six! They’re as brown as Indians. She says—” he began to laugh as he repeated confidentially some anecdotes of their prowess to which Mrs. Weir apparently listened with the deeply interested attention that is balm to the family exile, only asking him after a while irrelevantly, as he pushed back the hair from his forehead,

“How did you get that ugly cut on your temple?”

Even in the moonlight she could see his face flush.

“Oh, come, Rivers,” said Atwood, who was passing, “make up some story, for the credit of mankind.”

“Then you might as well have the truth, I suppose,” said Rivers, laughing, yet embarrassed. “It’s really nothing, though; I felt dizzy and queer when I went to bed last night. I suppose it was just the heat, and I have had a good deal to carry in a business way lately. I found myself at daylight this morning lying on the floor with my head by the edge of the bureau, and I don’t know in the least how I got there. I have a faint memory that I started to go for some water. I’m all right to-day, though; it hasn’t bothered me a bit.”

“No, of course not,” said Mrs. Weir encouragingly. “And you don’t mind staying alone?” she dropped her voice.

“Oh, no, not at all. Only—I don’t mind telling _you_—” he looked at her with strange eyes—“I _hate_ the house! It’s got all the plagues of Egypt in it. And all the hours I’ve spent alone there are shut up in it too. I know just how it’s going to be when I open that front door and walk in.”

“Stay here to-night,” said Mrs. Weir smoothly. “Stay here with Mr. Atwood; Mrs. Callender will be delighted to have you.”

“Oh, I can’t, possibly,” said Rivers with decision. “I didn’t even lock the front door when I came away. I only remembered it a moment ago. And I won’t really mind a bit after I’m once back there—it’s only the plunge. You’re awfully good to me, Mrs. Weir,” he added gratefully; but he wanted his wife—he did not want to be confidential with anyone but her. No matter what enjoyment he had in this brief hour, it was bound to fail him at the end. One of the dearest pleasures of married life is the going home together after the outside pleasuring is over.

As they all trooped into the dining-room for the crabs and salad Mrs. Callender told of as in the ice-box, the figure of Elizabeth in her pink kimono seemed to weave in and out among the others, but in another moment he was laughing and talking uproariously with the men, while the women, on Mrs. Callender’s assertion that the servants were in bed, tucked up their gowns and descended the cellar stairs for the provisions, refusing all masculine assistance.

“I think it’s an eternal shame,” said Mrs. Callender as the three held an excited conclave in cellared seclusion by the open refrigerator. “It’s just as Celeste says, he’s ill—anyone can see it. Why, he starts whenever he’s spoken to. He told Mr. Callender the other day that he’d been horribly worried about business. He’s a nervous kind of a fellow, and he takes everything too hard. He ought not to be left alone in this way.”

“I think somebody ought to write to _her_,” said Mrs. Waring solemnly, resting the dish of salad on the top of the ice-box. “I think it’s perfectly heartless of her to go on enjoying herself when he’s ill.”

“She doesn’t know it,” interrupted Mrs. Callender with rare justice.

“That’s what I say, somebody ought to _tell_ her. She never seems to think about anything but herself, though—or the children, or clothes. If I thought that Henry—but I’d never leave him this way, never; _I_ wouldn’t have a bit of comfort. He’s so devoted to his home, just like Mr. Rivers.”

“Do you know—I have a dreadful feeling that something is going to happen to him to-night?”

“If you had heard him talk—” said Mrs. Weir with tragic impressiveness.

The three women looked at each other silently.

“Are we to have anything to eat to-night, or are you girls going to talk until morning?” came the steady tones of Porter from the head of the stairs. “It’s after eleven now.”

“Goodness!” said Mrs. Callender, hastily completing her preparations. “Yes! we’re coming. You can send Ned down now to crack some more ice, and then we’ll be ready.”

But she turned to say, “I think someone _ought_ to go home with him.”

“This is what I call comfort,” said Porter as they sat hilariously around the Flemish oak table, eating the cool viands and drinking anew from the iced bowl, a lacy square of white linen and a glass vase of scarlet nasturtiums gracing the center of the board. “Clear, clear comfort!”

“I feel at peace with all mankind—even with Atwood, who believes in an imperial policy.”

“Hush,” said Mrs. Callender, “who is that on the piazza?”

The door opened, a head was thrust in, and a shout arose.

“Martindale! Martindale, by all that’s holy! Come in, we’re expecting you.”

“That’s mighty good of you,” said the intruder, who seemed to be all red hair and smiles. “All the same, you don’t seem to have left me much of anything to eat.” He drew up a chair to the table and sat down.

“Where’s your wife?” asked Mrs. Weir.

“Oh, she had a headache this evening. I went out for a ride, and when I came back I saw you were on deck over here, so I thought I’d look in and see what was up.” He stopped, oblivious of the renewed laughter, and stared at Rivers. “Why, when did _you_ get here? I saw a light in your house ten minutes ago. I nearly dropped in on you.”

“A light in _my_ house!” exclaimed Rivers. He rose, and the others instinctively rose also, with startled glances at each other.

“Perhaps your family has come home,” suggested Mrs. Waring.

Rivers shook his head. “No, I had a letter from Bess to-day saying she had taken the rooms for two weeks more. It might have been Parker, but I don’t think so. Are you sure you saw a light?”

“On the lower floor,” asseverated Martindale. “Was the door locked when you came out?”

“No.”

“All right,” said Atwood briskly. “Porter and I’ll go back with you, Rivers. No, we don’t need you, Nichols, you’re tired. Come upstairs and choose from Callender’s arsenal.”

“Each of those women begged me secretly not to let _him_ get shot,” whispered Porter to his companion as they set off at a jog trot down the street, Rivers a little ahead. “I suppose they could sing our requiems with pleasure.”

“I know. They pounded it into me, too. They’ve got some kind of an idea between ’em that he’s coming to harm. Anything for an excitement. We’ll get ahead of him when we’re a little nearer to the house.”

It looked very dark and still as they reached it. The moon had set, and the patch of straggling woods stretched out weird and formless. The piano, the infant, the yelping dog had given place to an oppressive silence save for the dismal chirping of insects and the shuddering of a train of coal cars as it backed far off down the track. “There is no light now,” said Porter.

The three were drawn up in a line outside the house, and even while he spoke the gas flared up bright in the second story. The edge of a shadow wavered toward the back of the room; then it came forward and disappeared. The next moment the shade of the front window was partly drawn up and pulled down again by a round white arm, half clad in the loose sleeve of a pink kimono.

* * * * *

RIVERS sat in the big wicker chair with his arms around his little wife. Her head, with its light curls, lay on his shoulder, and both of her hands held one of his large ones as she talked.

“You are sure you do not mind my coming in this way?”

“No. No, my Betsy, I do not mind.” He touched his lips to her forehead, and smoothed the folds of her pink gown with the strong, unnecessarily firm touch of a man. “But where are the boys?”

“I left them with Alice”—Alice was her sister—“for another week. I couldn’t bring them back in this hot weather.”

“Left them with Alice!”

“Yes, don’t talk about it.” She colored nervously and then went on. “I know they’re all right, but if I think about it too much I’ll get silly—as I did about you. But, of course, it’s really different with them, for they have someone to look after them, and Alice will telegraph every day.”

“How did you get silly about me?”

She clasped and unclasped his hand. “I don’t know. Yes, I do. It was worse than the time I thought of little Brook and the tiger. I kept imagining and imagining dreadful things. Last night I thought you were—dead. I saw you fallen on the floor.” Her voice dropped to a note of horror, and her eyes grew dark as they stared at him. “Where did you get that cut on your forehead? Were you ill last night? _Did_ you have a fall?”

He nodded, gazing steadily at her.

“I’m all right now.”

“Oh,” she said with a long, shivering breath, and hid her face on his shoulder. Presently she fell to kissing his hand, holding it tight when he strove to draw it away. Then she went on in a smothered tone, with a little pause between each sentence,

“I got here at ten o’clock. I thought you’d _never_ come home. Of course, I _knew_ you were at the Callenders’. I went to work and cleared up the butler’s pantry, or I couldn’t have _slept_ here! The house is in a dreadful condition.”

“Yes. Don’t you care.”

“I don’t. I’ll have an army here cleaning to-morrow. But oh, Brookton—” she broke off suddenly—“don’t send me away again!” There was a new, passionate ring in her voice. “_Never_ send me away again. I’ve been wild, wild, _wild_ for you! Promise never to send me away again. Let me stay with you always—whatever happens—like this—until we die!” A sob caught her by the throat.

The strong and tender clasp of his arms answered her—her trembling ceased. After a silence, he said gently,

“I’m going downstairs now to lock up.”

She rose, flushing under his smiling eyes as he held her off at arm’s length to say,

“It seems to me you’ve reached a high pitch of romance after seven years, Mrs. Rivers!”

“Ah, don’t, don’t,” she deprecated. She raised her drooping head and flashed a reckless glance at him, half mirthful, half tragic.

“Oh, it’s dreadful to care so much for _any_ man! Goodness knows what I’ll get to in seven years more!”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mrs. Atwood’s Outer Raiment

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mrs. Atwood’s Outer Raiment

“HOW much will a new suit cost, Jo?” Mr. Atwood held his fingers reflectively on the rubber band of his pocketbook as he asked the question, and glanced as he did so at the round brunette face of his wife, which had suddenly become all flush and sparkle.

“Oh, Edward!”

“Well?”