The Romance of a Plain Man Part 46

"I can't do that, George," I said quietly, "but I'm grateful to you all the same. You're a first-rate chap."

We shook hands with a grip, and while he still lingered to strike a match and light the fresh cigar he had taken from his case, the little yellow flame followed, like an illuminated pointer, the expression of suffering violence which showed so strangely upon his face. Then, tossing the match into the gutter, he went on his way, while I pa.s.sed the great scarred body of the sycamore and hurried down the long hill, which I never descended without recalling, as the General had said, that I had once "toted potatoes for John Chitling."

At the beginning of the next block, I saw the miniature box hedge and the clipped yew in the little garden of Dr. Theophilus, and as I turned down the side street, the face of the old man looked at me from the midst of some leafless red currant bushes that grew in clumps at the end of the walk.

"Come in, Ben, come in a minute," he called, beaming at me over his lowered spectacles, "there's a thing or two I should like to say."

As I entered the garden and walked along the tiny path, bordered by oyster sh.e.l.ls, to the red currant bushes beyond, he laid his pruning-knife on the ground, and sat down on an old bench beside a little green table, on which a sparrow was hopping about. On his seventy-fifth birthday he had resigned his profession to take to gardening, and I had heard from no less an authority than the General that "that old fool Theophilus was spending more money in roses than Mrs. Clay was making out of pickles."

"What is it, doctor?" I asked, for, oppressed by my own burdens, I waited a little impatiently to hear "the thing or two" he wanted to say.

"You see I've given up people, Ben, and taken to roses," he began, while I stood grinding my heel into the gravelled walk; "and it's a good change, too, when you come to my years, there's no doubt of that. If you weed and water them and plant an occasional onion about their roots you can make roses what you want--but you can't people--no, not even when you've helped to bring them into the world. No matter how straight they come at birth, they're all just as liable as not to take an inward crank and go crooked before the end." He looked thoughtfully at the sparrow hopping about on the green table, and his face, beautiful with the wisdom of more than seventy years, was illumined by a smile which seemed in some way a part of the April sunshine flooding the clumps of red currant bushes and the miniature box. "George--I mean old George--was telling me about you, Ben," he went on after a minute, "and as soon as I heard of your troubles, I said to Tina--'We've got a roof and we've got a bite, so they'll come to us.' What with Tina's pickling and preserving we manage to keep a home, my boy, and you're more than welcome to share it with us--you and Sally and your little Benjamin--"

"Doctor--doctor--" was all I could say, for words failed me, and I, also, stood looking thoughtfully at the sparrow hopping about on the green table, with eyes that saw two small brown feathered bodies in the place where, a minute before, there had been but one.

"Come when you're ready, come when you're ready," he repeated, "and we'll make you welcome, Tina and I."

I grasped his hand without speaking, and as I wrung it in my own, I felt that it was long and fine and nervous,--the hand, not of a worker, but of a dreamer. Then tearing my gaze from the sparrow, I went back through the clump of red currant bushes, and between the shining rows of oyster sh.e.l.ls, to the busy street which led to a busy world and my office door.

A fortnight later the house was sold over our heads, and when I came up in the afternoon, I found a red flag flying at the gate, and the dusty buggies of a few real estate men tied to the young maples on the sidewalk. Upstairs Sally was sitting on a couch, in the midst of the scattered furniture, while George Bolingbroke stood looking ruefully at a pile of silver and bric-a-brac that filled the centre of the floor.

"Are you laughing now, Sally?" I asked desperately, as I entered.

"Not just this minute, dear, because that awful man and a crowd of people have been going over the house, and Aunt Euphronasia and I locked ourselves in the nursery. I'll begin again, however, as soon as they've gone. All these things belong to George. It was silly of him to buy them, but he says he had no idea of allowing them to go to strangers."

"Well, George as well as anybody, I suppose," I responded, moodily.

Beside the window Aunt Euphronasia was rocking slowly back and forth, with little Benjamin fast asleep on her knees, and her great rolling eyes, rimmed with white, pa.s.sed from me to George and from George to me with a defiant and angry look.

"I ain' seen nuttin' like dese yer doin's sence war time," she grumbled; "en hit's wuss den war time, caze war time hit's fur all, en dish yer hit ain't fur n.o.body cep'n us."

Throwing herself back on the pillow, Sally lay for a minute with her hand over her eyes.

"I can laugh now," she said at last, raising her head, and she, also, as she sat there, pale and weary but bravely smiling, glanced from me to George with a perplexed, inscrutable look. A minute later, when George made some pleasant, comforting remark and went down to join the crowd gathered before the door, her gaze still followed him, a little pensively, as he left the room. The bruise throbbed again; and walking to the window, I stood looking through the partly closed blinds to the street below, where I could see the dusty buggies, the switching tails of the horses, bothered by flies, and the group of real estate men, lounging, while they spat tobacco juice, by the red flag at the gate. In the warm air, which was heavy with the scent of a purple catalpa tree on the corner, the drawling voice of the auctioneer could be heard like the loud droning of innumerable bees. A carriage pa.s.sed down the street in a cloud of dust, and the very dust, as it drifted toward us, was drenched with the heady perfume of the catalpa.

"That tree makes me dizzy," I said; "it's odd I never minded it before."

"You aren't well--that's the trouble--but even if you were, the voice of that man down there is enough to drive any sane person crazy. He sounds exactly as if he were intoning a church service over our misfortunes.

That is certainly adding horror to humiliation," she finished with merriment.

"At any rate he doesn't humiliate you?"

"Of course he doesn't. Imagine one of the Blands and the Fairfaxes being humiliated by an auctioneer! He amuses me, even though it is our woes he is singing about. If I were Aunt Mitty, I'd probably be seated on the front porch with my embroidery at this minute, bowing calmly to the pa.s.sers-by, as if it were the most matter-of-fact occurrence in the world to have an auctioneer selling one's house over one's head."

"Dear old enemy, I wonder what she thinks of this?"

"She hasn't heard it, probably. A newspaper never enters her doors, and do you believe she has a relative who would be reckless enough to break it to her?"

"I hope she hasn't, anyhow."

"They haven't had time to go to her. They have all been here. People have been coming all day with offers of help--even Jessy's Mr.

Cottrel--and oh, Ben, she told me she meant to marry him! Bonny Page," a little sob broke from her, "Bonny Page wanted to give up her trip to Europe and have me take the money. Then everybody's been sending me luncheons and jellies and things just exactly as if I were an invalid."

"Hit's de way dey does in war time, honey," remarked Aunt Euphronasia, shaking little Benjamin with the slow, cradling movement of the arms known only to the negroes.

Downstairs the auction was over, the drawling monologue was succeeded by a babel of voices, and glancing through the blinds, I saw the real estate men untying their horses from the young maples. A swirl of dust laden with the scent of the catalpa blew up from the street.

"But we can't take help, Sally," I said, almost fiercely.

"No, we can't take help, I told them so--I told them that we didn't need it. In a few years we'd be back where we were, I said, and I believed it."

"Do you believe it after listening to that confounded fog-horn on the porch?"

"Well, it's a trial to faith, as Aunt Mitty would say, but, oh, Ben, I really _do_ believe it still."

CHAPTER XXVII

WE CLOSE THE DOOR BEHIND US

It was a warm spring afternoon when we closed the door behind us for the last time, and took the car for Church Hill, where we had rented several rooms on the first floor of the house with the enchanted garden. As the car descended into the neighbourhood of the Old Market, with its tightly packed barrooms, its squalid junk shops, its strings of old clothes waving before darkened, ill-smelling doorways, I seemed to have stepped suddenly backward into a place that was divided between the dream and the actuality. I remembered my awakening on the pile of straw, with the face of John Chitling beaming down on me over the wheelbarrow of vegetables; and the incidents of that morning--the long line of stalls giving out brilliant flashes from turnips and onions, the sharp, fishy odour from the strings of mackerel and perch, the very bloodstains on the ap.r.o.n and rolled-up sleeves of the butcher--all these things were more vivid to my consciousness than were the faces of Sally and of Aunt Euphronasia, or the fretful cries of little Benjamin, swathed in a blue veil, in the old negress's lap. I had meant to make good that morning, when I had knelt there sorting the yellow apples. I had made good for a time, and yet to-day I was back in the place from which I had started.

Well, not in the same place, perhaps, but my foot had slipped on the ladder, and I must begin again, if not from the very bottom, at least from the middle rung. The market wagons, covered with canvas, were still standing with empty shafts in the littered street, as if they had waited there, a shelter for prowling dogs, until my return. Mrs. Chitling's slovenly doorstep I could not see, but as we ascended the long hill on the other side, I recognised the musty "old clothes" shop, in which I had stumbled on "Sir Charles Grandison" and Johnson's Dictionary. That minute, I understood now, had been in reality the turning-point in my career. In that close-smelling room I had come to the cross-roads of success or failure, and swerving aside from the dull level of ignorance, I had rushed, almost by accident, into the better way. The very odour of the place was still in my nostrils--a mixture of old clothes, of stale cheese, of overripe melons. A sudden dizziness seized me, and a wave of physical nausea pa.s.sed over me, as if the intense heat of that past summer afternoon had gone to my head.

The car stopped at the corner of old Saint John's; we got out, a.s.sisting Aunt Euphronasia, and then turned down a side street in the direction of our new home. As we mounted the curving steps, Sally pa.s.sed a little ahead of me, and looked back with her hand on the door.

"I am happy, Ben," she said with a smile; and with the words on her lips, she crossed the threshold and entered the wide hall, where the moth-eaten stags' heads, worn bare of fur, still hung on the faded plaster.

My first impression upon entering the room was that the strange surroundings struck with a homelike and familiar aspect upon my consciousness. Then, as bewilderment gave place before a closer scrutiny, I saw that this aspect was due to the presence of the objects by which I had been so long accustomed to see Sally surrounded. Her amber satin curtains hung at the windows; the deep couch, with the amber lining, upon which she rested before dressing for dinner, stood near the hearth; and even the two crystal vases, which I had always seen holding fresh flowers upon her small, inlaid writing desk, were filled now with branching cl.u.s.ters of American Beauty roses. Beyond them, and beyond the amber satin curtains at the long window, I saw the elm boughs arching against a pale gold sunset into which a single swallow was flying. And I remember that swallow as I remember the look, swift, expectant, as if it, also, were flying, that trembled, for an instant, on Sally's face.

"It is George," she said, turning to me with radiant eyes; "George has done this. These are the things he bought, and I wondered so what he would do with them." Then before something in my face, the radiance died out of her eyes. "Would you rather he didn't do it? Would you rather I shouldn't keep them?" she asked.

A struggle began within me. Through the window I could see still the pale gold sunset beyond the elms, but the swallow was gone, and gone, also, from Sally's face was the look as of one flying.

"Would you rather that I shouldn't keep them?" she asked again, and her voice was very gentle.

At that gentleness the struggle ceased as sharply as it had begun.

"Do as you choose, darling, you know far better than I," I replied; and bending over her, I raised her chin that was lowered, and kissed her lips.

A light, a bloom, something that was fragrant and soft as the colour and scent of the American Beauty roses, broke over her as she looked up at me with her mouth still opening under my kiss.

"Then I'll keep them," she answered, "because it would hurt him so, Ben, if I sent them back."

The colour and bloom were still there, but in my heart a chill had entered to drive out the warmth. My ruin, my failure, the poverty to which I had brought Sally and the child through my inordinate ambition, and the weight of the two hundred thousand dollars of debt on my shoulders--all these things returned to my memory, with an additional heaviness, like a burden that has been lifted only to drop back more crushingly. And as always in my thoughts now, this sense of my failure came to me in the image of George Bolingbroke, with his air of generous self-sufficiency, as if he needed nothing because he had been born to the possession of all necessary things.