Chapter II (2)

"See it?" flamed Solvei. "I _am_ it!" With the gesture of one who sought suddenly to hide her emotion she swung around abruptly toward the other side of the room. "What else is there then?" she asked, all laughter and mischief again. "That box so wooden, so busted at the top? Is that also a bridge to some other livings?"

"If you choose to call it so," nodded Mrs. Tome Gallien. A frankly quizzical invitation to explore was in the nod.

Solvei certainly needed no urging. In another instant down on her knees before the great wooden box, she was slowly extracting from wads of excelsior, piece after piece of the most exquisitely delicate and transparent turquoise blue china beaded in gold and airily overwrought with soaring sea gulls. There was a big breakfast cup, and a middle-sized breakfast cup, and a big plate, and a middle-sized plate, and a cereal saucer and another cereal saucer, and a most stately little coffee pot and all the other attendants and attendants to attendants which Fashion assigns to just that sort of a service.

"Oh, it is for the fairies then?" gasped Solvei. "Or a Princess?" Deftly as she spoke she pulled a great white sheet of paper to her and spread it on the floor as a cloth. "No!" she quickened. "It is for lovers! See? The first breakfast of the new home?" As cautiously as though she had been handling butterfly wings she began to dramatize the scene, the big plate there, the middle-sized plate here, a man's elbow-room, thus, a woman's daintiness, so! In the ingenuousness of her own visualization she lifted the bride's cup to her lips and sipped an ecstatic draught from it.

"Mocha or Java?" mocked Mrs. Tome Gallien.

"Joy!" said Solvei Kjelland.

In a sudden fit of abstraction then the girl struggled slowly to her knees and knelt thus staring very thoughtfully all around her.

"So is it then with all these boxes?" she asked. "That from this desert island lying so you would make constantly such little bridges across to other people's livings? In time, it is, I mean, as soon as you should bear to part with them you would build even these most Heavenish dishes across to some young happiness? But will such a young happiness ever take the troubles to cross back to you?" she demanded with sudden fierceness. "That is it, I say! That is it! A prattling note perhaps? A praise-you for being so rich? But do they ever yet write more late to tell that the gift is still well, that it has made new joy that very morning perhaps, that even yet after one month, six months, twenty, it is still so dear?"

"They never have," admitted Mrs. Tome Gallien.

In utter irrelevance the girl sank back on her heels and crossing her arms on her breast began to rock herself joyously to and fro.

"Oh, I do love this place so!" she confided. "I do love it so! And if you should then keep me," she beamed. "And I should be quite pleasant,--there is a lawn mower I read in yesterday's paper! Most wonderful it is, and runs by the gasolene, so that all one needs to do is to follow singing gaily. Could you send for such?"

"A lawn mower?" sniffed Mrs. Tome Gallien. "You noticed, I trust, that there was no nice grass whatsoever on this island?"

"Yes, that is most so," admitted Solvei. "Neither equally is there any young happinesses or bare-toed boys making for Latin. But if we were possessed of such a lawn mower and its wonderfulness we could at least make the fine green lawns in the mind."

"Solvei!" snapped Mrs. Tome Gallien, "I am dreadfully afraid that I am going to like you! But before I actually commit myself," she frowned, "I want to ask you one question. Are you in the habit of letting strange young men kiss you?"

"What?" jumped Solvei.

Very significantly Mrs. Tome Gallien repeated the question. "Strange young men?" she revised it. "Are you in the habit of letting strange young men kiss you?"

"Oh!" flushed Solvei. "It is then the Young Doctor that you mean? Was it so that he thus confessed it to you?" she questioned a bit bewilderedly. "So shamed he was, so worried, I had not just thought that he should tell. Yes, it is as you say he is one most strange young man."

"Yes, but you?" persisted Mrs. Tome Gallien. "How did you feel about it? That's what I want to know!"

"How should I feel?" laughed Solvei. "Why it was so mad I was, so strong, I could have crushed him on the steps! And then suddenly I see his face! Bah!" shrugged Solvei. "I have one father and nine brothers and all the world is most full of men! It is not from such a face as the Young Doctor's that any evil should come. It is just as I have said, one very sad accident!"

"It does not seem to be just the sadness of the accident that lingers longest in your mind," drawled Mrs. Tome Gallien.

With her chin tip-tilted and her eyes like stars the girl met the sarcasm without a flicker of resentment.

"No!" she laughed. "It is not the sadness of the accident that remains longest in the mind!"

"U-m-mmmm," mused Mrs. Tome Gallien. "All the same," she resumed with sharpness, "I certainly think it was most cruel, most brutal of him, not to make the trip down here with me! It would have done him good," she insisted. "Just the mere balmy change of it! He is so grim!"

"Oh, but he cannot help the being grim," flared Solvei. "He is so poor and so wanting things! How should he yet achieve them except by sticking close to that most saddest of all truths that the only ways to get ahead is to stay behind and attend to one's business?"

"Solvei!" asked Mrs. Tome Gallien quite abruptly. "Have you gotten the impression in any way that the Young Doctor was--was attracted at all to my little widow friend?"

"Oh, of a surety!" attested Solvei. "He is I think what one would say 'crazy' of her."

"Oh, I hardly dare to hope that," mused Mrs. Tome Gallien. "But of course--" In some far-away speculation the sentence faded suddenly off into silence. "She will of course be very rich some day, I suppose," she resumed a bit haughtily. "I shall, I suppose, make her my heir."

"S-o?" said Solvei Kjelland.

"Solvei!" snapped Mrs. Tome Gallien with another spurt of abruptness. "Speaking of 'attending to one's business,' if _you_ should decide to stay here and make _me_ your business, what do you think you could do for me?"

"Oh, I could do the reading aloud," brightened Solvei instantly. "And I could thus open the boxes! And I could run the wrangle boat!" she quickened and glowed. "And also if it should so seem best I could scrub the blue flannel crockings from the Wrangle Boy's neck!"

"On the whole--as a really steady employment," conceded Mrs. Tome Gallien, "suppose we begin on the reading aloud. I adore being read to."

"Oh, I am very fine on this reading aloud!" preened Solvei. "So dramatic is it that you say? So intensed?" With absolute self-assurance she picked up the only book in reach, it happened to be the "Golden Treasury," and just out of sheer temperamental eagerness selected the biggest-looking poem she could find. "It should be an 'Ode,' is it that you call it?" she confided. "And it is about--about--? I do not know such words," she faltered for a single second only and passed the page to Mrs. Tome Gallien.

"Oh," said Mrs. Tome Gallien, "Wordsworth, you mean. 'Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.'"

"S-o?" conceded Solvei. "All that? It is not certainly of a poetry sound but more--later perhaps it will tell. All the rest is most easy looking.

"There was--some time" (she began) "when--when
meadows, groves, also streams,
"The earth and all things perfectly--ordinary
"To me did--did seems
"Ap-pareled--"

I do not know that word and here is another--

"in ce--les--tial lightings,
"The----"

"Yes--anybody could see at once that you are a remarkable reader!" slashed Mrs. Tome Gallien's coolest, thinnest voice. "The picture it suggests of our long spring evenings together is----"

With a startled glance upward Solvei detected for the first time the actual glinting mockery in the older woman's eyes. "What is it?" she stammered. "What?" Still like some one more bewildered than hurt she struggled to her feet. "Even as from the first," she questioned, "is it that you are making the sport of me when I wish so hard to do the things that would please you? Through and through, is your heart then so cruel?" she demanded, "that it must make mockerings of the confused and the far-from-homes?"

"Oh, Solvei!" cried the older woman suddenly. "Smile again! Laugh again! I can't bear it! It's as though the sun had died! It's as though the moon had gone! If you are angry and leave me, I shall be left all alone again with just the fog and the sea! I am a brute, and I know it! But oh, if you will only just smile again! Even just once, I mean! Oh, my poor dear little girl," she implored her. "Oh, my poor dear touchy little blonde girl!"

"I am not a 'poor--poor little blonde girl,'" asserted Solvei with some spirit. "I am indeed as I said, very young, very strong. And very laughing," she insisted without even the remotest flicker of a smile.

"Are you young enough and strong enough and laughing enough to come over here and sit on my bed?" rallied Mrs. Tome Gallien.

"I am young enough and strong enough and laughing enough to do anything!" said Solvei Kjelland.

Stiff and stern as a ramrod she went over and sat on the side of the Sick Woman's bed.

Without an atom of self-consciousness or embarrassment both women began all over again to study each other's faces.

"Could I put my hand on your yellow hair?" asked Mrs. Gallien at last quite surprisingly.

"You could put your hand on my yellow hair," said Solvei.

"If I should apologize fairly decently for existing at all," experimented Mrs. Tome Gallien a little further, "would you be willing to kiss now?

"I should never be willing," sighed Solvei, "to kiss any lips that tasted of mockerings."

"What would you be willing to do?" ventured Mrs. Tome Gallien.

"What would you want me to do?" relaxed Solvei ever so slightly.

Through Mrs. Tome Gallien's busy brain a dozen possible answers tested themselves one against the other.

"Well, would you be willing to--to tell me a little story?" she chose as the most promising one.

"Tell you a little story?" queried Solvei. Once again her whole face darkened with suspicion.

"Yes, about my little island," hurried Mrs. Tome Gallien. "It was dark when I came and they put me right into this bed. I do not leave my bed, you know."

"What?" quivered Solvei. "This most beautiful little island, you have not seen it--since you came?" In the very tensity of the question all the blue seemed to surge back suddenly to her eyes, all the pink to her cheeks. "Why of a sureness," she cried, "will I tell you about this little island!" Softly then for a moment she patted her skirts and recrossed her slippered feet and fumbled with the big silk tie that closed her collar. Then quite geographically she began her narrative. "First of all," she explained, "it is a round little island."

"Really, you surprise me," said Mrs. Tome Gallien purely automatically. "So many islands are square."

"And there are fish upon it!" glowed the narrator.

"Oh, surely not upon it?" shivered Mrs. Tome Gallien.

"And there are seven monstrous what you call 'live-oak' trees dripping with gray beards,--it is most terrible," gloated the narrator. "And in one tree alone have I seen with my own eyes seven most scarlet birds and two blue birds. And in yet another tree there is a fine snake.--And all along by what you should call the edge of the porch blue violets are coming. And on the roof where the wrangle boat sleeps there is an green vine that shall yet be yellow and sweet, Martha tells. And--and--" Around the corners of the girl's red lips a faint little smile showed suddenly. "And there is one little black pig, so grunting!" she announced with rapture. "And--and----"

So the sweet, eager, revitalizing young voice ran on till Martha herself appeared to announce Sleeping Time, and Mrs. Tome Gallien whose "sleeping time" for years had been a farce of ghost and specter dozed off before she was even half undressed to dream like a child of budding violets and flitting birds and a glow that should be of jessamine instead of gold.

Hours fall so easily out of a day, days out of a week, weeks out of a month!

The jessamine glow did come in its own good time as did also various other things which Nature had ordained, March winds, March rains, March tides, March sunshine.

Other wonders came too that were of course Mrs. Tome Gallien's ordaining rather than Nature's fabulous shoppings from all the big marts of the world, and little pitiful, home made products from backwoods settlement or lonely prairie.

Once and for all time relieved of the hazardous task of reading aloud to a capricious invalid, Solvei came and went like a young Sea Breeze, whistling through the halls, singing through the rooms, sweeping across the island, frolicking on the water. If it was fair to rate her as a rather exceptionally clever and daring young navigator on the sea of fact it was only fair to acknowledge her equally clever, equally daring in the realms of fancy. Smiling knowingly into Martha's silences, laughing at the wrangle boat man or boy, waving a slim hand in and out of Mrs. Tome Gallien's narrow sea-blue vista, scudding to and from the mainland on interminable errands, or curled up for long cozy evenings on the foot of Mrs. Tome Gallien's bed to visualize their mutual magic path across one new box or another into "other people's livings," Solvei Kjelland as a companion was frankly a success.

Then one day very late in March, or even the first of April, something came which was partly of Nature's ordaining and partly of Mrs. Tome Gallien's, though most thoroughly a surprise to the latter one concerned.

It was a letter from Dr. Sam Kendrue. And very Northern. Whatever the New York winter had been it was plainly evident that the New York spring was still exceedingly cold.

MRS. TOME GALLIEN,

DEAR MADAM (said the letter):

As it seems best to me at just this time that Mrs. Kendrue should supplement her treatment with a trip South, it is my intention to accompany her. In view of this fact I will take the liberty of calling upon you on Tuesday next. Trusting that your island experience has proved beneficial to your health,

I am, Yours truly, etc., etc.

"U-m-mmmm," smiled Mrs. Tome Gallien. But before the dull, fretted bewilderment in Solvei Kjelland's face, her smile sharpened suddenly into impatience. "Why surely, Solvei," she scolded. "With all your English you might at least understand that."

"N-o," shifted Solvei from one slim ankle to the other. "It does not seem to me of any understanding whatever--whether it should be Dr. Sam Kendrue's Mrs. Kendrue who comes or just Mrs. Kendrue's Mrs. Kendrue?"

"O-h, of course," rallied Mrs. Tome Gallien's good nature. "One could hardly expect them to be married by now, or even engaged perhaps. But at least they must be awfully interested! How about your poor hardworking young doctor _now_?" she gloated; "couldn't take the tiniest holiday for a poor old gray-haired, crippled creature like me! But has got time to burn when it comes to some little soft dark-eyed thing with a creak in her singing-voice!"

"Love is sure some pranks," admitted Solvei.

"_A_ prank," corrected Mrs. Tome Gallien.

"A prank," repeated Solvei with perfect docility.

From the increasing sweetness of her day dreams Mrs. Tome Gallien turned idly to the calendar on the table by her bedside. The week's page had not been torn off, nor the week before that, if the whole truth must be known.

"Why, Good Lack!" she jerked suddenly. "To-day is Tuesday!"

"So?" jumped Solvei.

Both women turned simultaneously toward the clock.

"It will take you half an hour to make the mainland and that train!" cried Mrs. Tome Gallien. "And for goodness sake, brush your hair! And change those old sea-faring clothes."

"I will not brush the hair," tossed Solvei's bright wind-blown head. "Always it is my preference to wear it thus hither-and-hang! Nor will I part ever from my friend this old blue jersey! And even so--if the sun does not fade between the here and the mainland I may yet achieve three new freckles on my nose!"

"Don't argue!" fumed Mrs. Tome Gallien. "Just hurry!"

"It is only when one hurries that one has time to argue," persisted the girl.

"Oh, stop your nonsense!" ordered Mrs. Tome Gallien.

"Whose nonsense will then be left to us?" flared Solvei. "But do not thus make all this extra worrisome," she admonished with sudden gentleness. "Time is always more fat than you think! But for two such fancy fine packages as I go now to fetch," she flared again ever so slightly, "there will not be room also in the boat for the face of the wrangle boat man nor yet for the legs of the boy. It is alone I insist that I should go!"

"For mercy's sake!" fretted Mrs. Tome Gallien. "I don't care how you go, if you'll only go!"

Without further parleying, Solvei started for the stairs. In another minute with a few jumps and slides she had reached the front door. Once outside, it took but a fraction more of time to settle the wrangle boat man and boy.

"Sitting here in perfect peace on the shore," she admonished them, "watch thus how one isolated person with no words but oil can make a boat prance on the waves! All aboard!" she called back exultantly to them.

With a chug like a great, pounding heartthrob the wrangle boat sprang for the sea. Just for a moment then at the last signaling point Solvei lifted her hand in unfailing cheeriness to the sick woman and the deaf woman left behind, and turned her own inordinately sharpened young senses toward the mainland.

But when the ructious little wrangle boat drew up a half hour later alongside the dilapidated mainland wharf before an admiring audience of jet black pickaninnies and mangy hounds there was only one passenger waiting impatiently there, and that passenger was Dr. Sam Kendrue.

"How do you do, Dr. Sam Kendrue?" said Solvei.

"How do _you_ do, Miss Solvei Kjelland?" grinned Doctor Kendrue.

With more agility than one might have dared to hope for from one who boasted so much winter in his blood, the Young Doctor snatched up his valise, jumped down into the wrangle boat and pushed off.

To avoid running into a sunken rowboat and a floating snag, Solvei was compelled to start her engine, and turn sharply out to sea.

"Where then is your Mrs. Kendrue?" she called a bit breathlessly above the lap of wind and water.

"It is my Mrs. Kendrue that I have come to get!" said the Young Doctor.

With a little oil can poised abruptly in midair, Solvei opened the same old bewildered blue eyes at him.

"Oh, no," she hastened to disillusion him. "Your Mrs. Kendrue is not yet on our island."

"No, of course she isn't," laughed the Young Doctor. "And there's a jolly good reason why, and the reason is--because she's right here in the boat!"

"What?" stammered Solvei. With frenzied haste she began very suddenly to oil everything in reach. "What?" she repeated vaguely.

"I mean just what I say," said the Young Doctor, and made a slight move as of one who would cross one cramped knee over the other.

With all the joy of a foreigner easing his dictional panic with an idiom, Solvei snatched out at the first phrase she could think of that had a familiar word in it.

"Sit down! You're rocking the boat!" she screamed.

"Silly!" said the Young Doctor. "I was once in a boat before!" Quite wretchedly he began then and there to try and recover his old manner, the irony, the mocking. "Really, Miss Kjelland," he ducked as a great cloud of spray went by him. "Really Miss Kjelland, you're awfully rough with boats! Oh, but Solvei," he broke through again in spite of himself. "You understand what I'm trying to say, now don't you?"

"No, I don't," said Solvei Kjelland with her great blue eyes staring straight ahead through the veil of her windblown hair at some far focal point just over the wrangle boat's prancing bow.

Once again a great cloud of spray missed the Young Doctor by the width only of his dodge.

"And how is it then about Mrs. Kendrue's Mrs. Kendrue?" asked Solvei quite suddenly out of the gusty sky.

"Oh!" said the Young Doctor with the most surprising revival of cheerfulness. "Why--why she's gone on down to investigate her new duck blind with the rest of her party. There's a tenor, it seems, who is rather,--well, contenting. You could hardly use any other word with her, she's so awfully inexpressive. Anyway it's a diverting friendship for her, though whether the tenor can hit a high duck as niftily as he can hit a high note, remains of course to be seen."

"S-o?" said Solvei with indifferent interest. "And is the piano well?"

"Oh, fairly well," conceded the Young Doctor. "But if ever I saw a piano that needed a mother's care! I had to board it out, you know?"

"S-o?" crooned Solvei's sweet low voice.

It was astonishing though how soon the sea calmed down after that. At least there was no more spray.

Skirting round at last along the sunny sheltered side of the little island instead of splashing boldly up to the regular landing as was her usual custom, it seemed indeed as though Solvei was suddenly trying to feed out serenity to the man before her. The floating gray moss of the live-oak trees was certainly serene, the twitter of birds, the soft, warm drone of insect. Without an interrupting word she drove the boat's nose into a roughly improvised harbor of floating logs and a raft, jumped out upon the raft and beckoned the Young Doctor to follow her.

But at the first soft-padded thud of his foot on the turf it was the Young Doctor himself who broke the vocal silence.

"Oh, but Solvei!" he protested. "You've got to know that you are the only Mrs. Kendrue that I want!"

"S-o?" queried Solvei, glancing back with a vaguely skeptical smile across her blue jersey shoulder.

"Oh, of course," admitted the Young Doc tor, "just right away at the very first I didn't know it perhaps. You were so--so,--well, so sort of unusual," he flushed, "and so awfully independent! About the Adventure and the Little Widow and everything, you made it so perfectly plain you didn't need me that it wasn't till you'd actually gone that I half woke up to the fact how much I needed you! Why, Solvei, after you ran away the city was like a gray fog with no light in it, no laughter, no anything! The days were a week long, the nights, a month! Is it any wonder that I should feel as though I'd loved you for almost ever and ever? Why, if it hadn't been for my work, and the knowledge that work and work only could bring me to you--? Oh, I know it's awfully sudden and everything!" he persisted desperately. "But why people prate so everlastingly about 'Love at first sight' and never make any talk at all about 'Love at first absence'! Solvei you've simply got to understand!" he cried out.

In her few steps lead of him the girl stopped suddenly and turned around.

"But of what good is it that I should understand?" she asked with a little appealing gesture of her hands. "In my far Norway is it not that I have still the cause of the little brother? And here?" she puzzled, "How could I yet leave Elizabeth?"

"Elizabeth?" questioned the Young Doctor.

"Mrs. Tome Gallien," explained the girl.

"Elizabeth?" repeated the Young Doctor with increasing astonishment. "You mean you are such friends as that?"

"Yes," nodded the girl. "I am such friends as that."

Across the lovely earnestness of her face sun and shadow flickered intermittently. Softly her blue eyes brooded. Her bright gold hair was like a flame. In all that sunny, singing island there was no radiance like her unless perhaps it was the blue bird who flashed through the gray moss just beyond her.

"I cannot leave the little brother," she said. "Nor can I leave the Elizabeth." As though kindled by the spring's own sweet her whole musing face flamed suddenly with joy. "Nor yet.--I am so greedy!" she cried, "_nor yet can I leave you_!"

All unbeknown then to Mrs. Tome Gallien or even to Martha, they crept up the stairs at last to Mrs. Tome Gallien's room, where with the poor Young Doctor relegated ignominiously behind her, Solvei chose for her own whimsical purposes to make her dramatic entrance.

"Good afternoon to you, then, Elizabeth!" she hailed casually to the impatient Sick Woman on the bed. "This of a surety is

'One time when meadows, groves, also streams,

To me--did seems

A--apparelled in celestial lightings!'"

"What?" gasped Mrs. Tome Gallien. "Why, what makes your cheeks so red?" she demanded suddenly.

"I got kissed again," said Solvei.

"What?" snapped Mrs. Tom Gallien.

"They did not come," said Solvei. "No such Kendrues combination as you suggested. Nothing came!" said Solvei. "Except just one big package for me!"

"For you?" frowned Mrs. Tome Gallien.

"For me!" shrugged Solvei. "And though it should be hard yet to tell just what livings it shall lead to--it shall at least lead to much lovings."

"What?" puzzled Mrs. Tome Gallien.

"This is it!" said Solvei, and dragged the Young Doctor into the room.

"_What_?" screamed Mrs. Tome Gallien.

"It is for _me_! You understand?" beamed the girl.

In the convulsive laughter that overtook the Young Doctor he did not at the moment notice Mrs. Tome Gallien's face.

But there was no laughter of any kind in Mrs. Tome Gallien's face, only shock, and a most furious rage.

"So it is thus you have been deceiving me?" she cried out to Solvei. "All this time that you knew what my heart was fixed on, my hopes, my everything! All this time that you have been here a guest in my house! And quite safe I supposed from any such----"

"Oh, now really, Mrs. Gallien!" interposed the Young Doctor's grimmest, sternest voice.

"Oh, of what a nonsense!" laughed Solvei. "There is no blames anywhere--unless it should be to this Montessori theory! Out of the whole wide world is it not that a child must gravitate to his own wantings? It cannot be chosen for him?"

Then with all the young laughter gone from her face she reached out her slim brown hand to the Young Doctor's reassuring clasp and led him to the bed.

"Elizabeth," she said. "You are rich and you are sick and you are sometimes very cross. But you cannot buy the loving! Here then are two children who would love you all your life long--all their lives long. If you thus furiously so refuse the gift, who then is the stingy receiver?"

"What?" stammered Mrs. Tome Gallien. "What?" Across her haggard, rage-stricken face a smile of incredulous enlightenment flickered suddenly. "What?" she surrendered. "You--you--_rascals_!" And held out her aching arms to them.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Stingy Receiver, by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott