Part 8 (1/2)

”I am a coward,” he broke down at last. ”I'll spare you the trouble of saying so. But oh, Ruth, you don't know how I dread a scene! You go and tell her. I can't. I couldn't even write it.”

”How unselfish you are! Spare yourself at all hazards, Charlie, for of course it was not your fault that things got into such a state.”

”Oh, Ruth, don't!”

”Well, I won't. But do you realize how I should insult her if I went to her? It's bad enough for you, the man she loves, to tell her. From any one else it would be unforgivable. Do as you like. You promised to follow my advice. Take it and do as you will with it. But I will guarantee the result if you will do as I say. Come, Charlie. One hour, and it will all be over, and you can marry Frankie.”

It was like getting him into a dentist's chair. I felt a wholesome self-contempt as I thus sugar-coated his pill, but he was so abject in his misery.

Charlie brightened up perceptibly at the alluring prospect. He shut his eyes to the dark path which led to happiness, and was revelling in its glory.

”Ruth, you dear thing! I don't see how I ever can thank you enough,” he said, taking both my hands in his. ”I ought to have stuck to you, that's what I ought to have done. You would have kept me straight. Do you know, I used to be awfully in love with you. You really were my first love. I was about eighteen then. You don't look a day older, and you are just as sweet as ever.”

I laughed outright.

”What did I tell you?” I cried. ”You can't help making love to save your life. Your grat.i.tude is getting you into deeper water every minute. Go home, do. Run for your life, or you'll be engaged to me too. _Then_ who'll help you out?”

He acted upon my suggestion and went hastily.

Tabby, did you ever? He never was in love with me, never on this earth.

Whatever possessed him to say such a thing? He loses his head, that's what he does. I hope he won't meet any woman younger than his grandmother before he gets home, or he might propose to her.

My heart stands still when I think of Louise King.

IX

THE MADONNA OF THE QUIET MIND

”It is not true that love makes all things easy, but it makes us choose what is difficult.”

Across the street, in plain view from my window, has come to dwell a little brown wren of a woman with her five babies. The house, hitherto inconspicuous among its finer neighbors, at the advent of the Mayo family suddenly bloomed into a home. The lawn blossomed with living flowers and the windows framed faces which shamed, in their dimpling loveliness, the painted cherubs on the wall.

It was a delight to see Nellie Mayo in the midst of her children. Hers were all babies, such dear, amiable, kissable babies, each of whom seemed personally anxious to prove to every one how much sweetness one small morsel of humanity could hold. But with five of them, bless me! the house was one glowing radiance of suns.h.i.+ne, in which the little mother lived and loved, until they absorbed each other's personality, and it was difficult to think of one without the others.

Sometimes in a street-car or on the elevated train I have seen women who I felt convinced had little babies at home. It is because of the peculiar look they wear, the rapturous mother-look, which has its home in the eyes during the most helpless period of babyhood--an indescribable look, in which dreams and prophecy and heaven are mingled. It is the sweetest look which can come to a woman's face, saying plainly, ”Oh, I have such a secret in my heart! Would that every one knew its rapture with me!” It wears off sooner or later, but with Nellie Mayo, whether because there always was a baby, or because each was welcomed with such a world of love, the look remained until it seemed a part of her face.

Long ago we knew her as an unworldly girl, whose peachblow coloring gave to her face its chief beauty, although her plaintive blue eyes and smooth brown hair called forth a certain protective faith in her simplicity and goodness. Sometimes girlhood is a mysterious chaos of traits, out of which no one can foretell what sort of cosmos will follow, or whether there will be a cosmos at all or only intelligent chaos to the end. But this girl seemed to carry her future in her face. She was a little mother to us all.

It was a tribute to her gentleness and dignity that, although she was a poor girl among a bevy of rich ones, she was a favorite; unacknowledged perhaps, but still a favorite. She always stood ready with her unostentatious help. She was everybody's understudy. Flossy Carleton, as she was then, fastened herself like a leech upon Nellie's capacity for aid, and was a likely subject for the exercise of Nellie's swifter brain and willing feet; for to see any one's unspoken need was to her like a thrilling cry for help, and was the only thing which could completely draw her from her shy reserve. The chief reason she was popular was that she had a faculty of keeping herself in the shadow. You never knew where she was until you wanted her, when she would seem to rise out of the earth to your side. But, in spite of your intense grat.i.tude at the moment, you really found yourself taking her as a matter of course. She was one of those who are fully appreciated only when they are dead, and who then call forth the bitterest remorse that we have not made them know in life how dear they were and how painfully necessary to our happiness.

It is rather a sad commentary upon those same girls, who accepted Nellie's a.s.sistance most readily, to record that, when they were launched into society and were deep in the mysteries of full-fledged young-ladyhood, little Nellie Maddox was seldom invited to their most fas.h.i.+onable gatherings, but came in, at first, before their memory grew too rusty, for the simpler luncheons and teas.

This is not a history of intentional or systematic neglect, but a mere statement of the way things drifted along. Not one of the girls would wilfully have omitted her, if she had been in the habit of being asked; but it was easy to let her name slip when all the rest did it, and so gradually it came to pa.s.s that we seldom saw her. Then she married Frank Mayo, who would not be offended if he heard a newsboy refer to him as ”a gent,” or a maid-servant describe him as ”a pretty man.” Of such a one it is scarcely necessary to add that he was selfish, inordinately conceited, and, to complete the description, a trifle vulgar. He never suspected his wife's cleverness nor appreciated her wors.h.i.+p. It almost made me doubt her cleverness to see how she idolized him, but this instance went far towards proving that love, with some women, is entirely an affair of the heart. It irritates Rachel to hear any one say so. She says it argues ignorance of a nice distinction in terms, and that when the brain is not concerned it should be called by a baser name.

I doubt if she could have brought herself to say so if she had been looking into Nellie Mayo's blue eyes, which looked tired and a little less blue than as I remembered them. They had pathetic purple shadows under them, which told of sleepless nights with the babies, and there were fine lines around her mouth; but her light-brown hair was as smooth and her dress as plain and neat as ever.

It was like watching a nest of birds. I felt my own love expand to see the wealth of affection Nellie had for her precious family. Her unselfish zeal never flagged. She flitted from one want to another as naturally as she breathed and with as little consciousness of the process. Her household machinery ran no more smoothly than many another's, but Nellie met and surmounted all obstacles with an unruffled brow. Her outward calm was the result of some great inward peace. She simply had developed naturally from the girl we had known before we grew up and went away to be ”finished by travel.”