Chapter 7

Mr. Hines seemed in no hurry to go. With his elegantly lacquered cane, he picked at the sod, undecidedly. His chill, veiled eyes roved about the open space. He lifted his pearl-gray derby, and, for lack of a handkerchief, wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Although the May day was cool and brisk with wind, his knuckles glistened when they descended. I began to suspect that, despite his stony self-command, Mr. Hines's nerves were not all that they should be.

"Perhaps you'd like me to introduce you to Mr. Storrs," I hazarded.

The cold and filmy eyes gleamed with an instant's dim warmth. "Dominie, you're a good guy," responded Mr. Hines. "If a dead cinch at ten to one, all fruited up for next week, the kind of thing you don't hand on to your own brother, would be any use to you--No? I'm off again," he apologized. "Well--let's go."

We went. At the doorstep of Bartholomew Storrs's office he paused.

"This sexton-guy," he said anxiously, "he don't play the ponies, ever, I wouldn't suppose?"

"No more often than he commits murder or goes to sleep in church," I smiled.

"Yeh?" he answered, disheartened. "I gotta get to him some other way. On the poetry--and that's out of my line."

"I don't quite see what your difficulty is."

"By what you tell me, it's easier to break into a swell Fifth Avenue Club than into this place."

"Except for those having the vested right, as your wife has."

"And this sexton-guy handles the concession for--he's got the say-so," he corrected himself hastily--"on who goes in and who stays out. Is that right?"

"Substantially."

"And he'd rather keep 'em out than let 'em in?"

"Bartholomew," I explained, "considers that the honor of God's Acre is in his keeping. He has a fierce sort of jealousy about it, as if he had a proprietary interest in the place."

"I get you!" Mr. Hines's corded throat worked painfully. "You don't suppose the old goat would slip Min a blackball?" he gulped.

"How can he? As an 'Inalienable'--"

"Yeh; I know. But wasn't there something about a clean record? I'll tell _you_, Dominie"--Mr. Hines's husky but assured voice trailed away into a miserable, thick whisper--"as to what he said--about her feet taking hold on hell--I guess there was a time--I guess about one more slip--I guess I didn't run across her any too quick. But there never was a straighter, truer girl than Min was with me. I gotta get her planted _right_, Dominie. I gotta do it," he concluded with pathetic earnestness.

"I see no difficulty," I assured him. "The charter specifies '_died_ in honorable estate.' Matrimony is an honorable estate. How she lived before that is between her and a gentler Judge than Bartholomew Storrs."

"Give her a straight course and a fair judge and I'll back Min to the limit," said Mr. Hines so simply and loyally that no suggestion of irreverence could attach to him.

Nevertheless, doubt was mingled with determination in his florid face as he rang the bell. Bartholomew Storrs opened to us, himself. When he saw me, he hastily pocketed a Rhyming Dictionary. I introduced my companion, stating, by way of a favorable opening, that he was interested in memorial poetry.

"Very pleased," said Bartholomew Storrs in his deep, lugubrious tones. "Bereaved husband?"

Mr. Hines nodded.

"Here's a tasty thing I just completed," continued the poet, and, extending a benignant hand toward the visitor he intoned nasally:

"Together we have lived our life Till thou hast gone on high. But I will come to thee, dear Wife, In the sweet bye-and-bye."

"That style five dollars," he said.

"You're on," barked Mr. Hines. "I'll take it."

"To be published, I suppose, on the first anniversary of death. Shall I look after the insertion in the papers?" queried the obliging poet, who split an advertising agent's percentage on memorial notices placed by him.

"Sure. Got any more? I'd spend a hundred to do this right."

With a smile of astounded gratification, Bartholomew accepted the roll of bills, fresh and crisp as the visitor himself. To do him justice, I believe that his pleasure was due as much to the recognition of his genius as to the stipend it had earned.

"Perhaps you'd like a special elegy to be read at the grave," he rumbled eagerly. "When and where did the interment take place?"

The other glared at him in stony surprise. "It ain't taken place. It's to-morrow. Ain't you on? I'm Hines."

A frown darkened the sexton's heavy features. He shook a reprehensive head. "An unfortunate case," he boomed; "most unfortunate. I will not conceal from you, Mr. Hines, that I have consulted our attorneys upon this case, and unhappily--unhappily, I say--they hold that there is no basis for exclusion provided the certificate is in form. You have it with you?"

Impassive and inscrutable, Mr. Hines tapped his breast-pocket.

The conscience of a responsible sexton being assuaged, Bartholomew's expression mollified into that of the flattered poet.

"Such being the case," he pursued, "there can be no objection to the reading of an elegy as part of the service. Who is to officiate?"

"The Reverend Doctor Hackett."

"He has retired these two years," said the sexton doubtfully. "He is very old. His mind sometimes wanders."

"She wouldn't have any one else," asserted the hard, pink Mr. Hines. "She was as particular about that as about being buried yonder." He jerked his head toward the window.

"Very well. I will be at the grave. I always am. Trust me to guide the reverend gentleman over any breach in his memory. Excuse me for a moment while I look up my elegies."

"Say," said Mr. Hines in his hoarse, confidential croak, as the poet-sexton retired, "this is dead easy. Why, the guy's on the make. For sale. He'll stand for anything. Passing out this stuff for other folks to sign! He's a crook!"

"Make no such mistake," I advised. "Bartholomew is as honest a man as lives, in his own belief."

"Very likely. That's the worst kind," pronounced the expert Mr. Hines.

Further commentary was cut off by the return of the sexton-poet. "If you will kindly give me the death certificate of the late lamented," said he.

"What becomes of it after I deliver it?" asked Mr. Hines.

"Read, attested, and filed officially."

"Any one else but you see it?"

"Not necessarily."

"That's all right, then."

Hardly had Bartholomew Storrs glanced at the document received from Mr. Hines than he lifted a stiffening face.

"What is this?" he challenged.

"What's what?"

The official tapped the paper with a gaunt finger. "'Minna Merivale, aged twenty-five,'" he read.

"That's the name she went by."

"_Unmarried_" read Bartholomew Storrs in a voice of doom.

"Well?"

In the sexton's eyes gleamed an unholy savagery of satisfaction. "Take her away."

"_What_?"

"Bury her somewhere else. Do not think that you can pollute the ground--"

"Bartholomew!" I broke in, stepping hastily in front of Mr. Hines, for I had seen all the pink ebb out of his face, leaving it a dreadful sort of gray; and I had no desire to be witness of a murder, however much I might deem it justified.

"I'll handle him," said Mr. Hines steadily. "Now; you! You got my hundred in your jeans, ain't you!"

"Bribery!" boomed the sexton. He drew out the roll of bills and let it fall from his contaminated fingers.

"Sure! Bribery," railed the other. "What'd you think? Ain't it enough for what I'm asking?" The two men glared at each other.

I broke the silence. "Exactly what are you asking, Mr. Hines?"

"File that"--he touched the document--"and forget it. Let Min rest out there as my wife, like she ought to have been."

"Why didn't you make her your wife?" thundered the accuser.

Some invisible thing gripped the corded throat of Mr. Hines. "Couldn't," he gulped. "There was--another. She wouldn't divorce me."

"Your sin has found you out," declared the self-constituted judge of the dead with a dismal sort of relish.

"Yeh? That's all right. _I'll_ pay for it. But she's paid already."

"As she lived so she has died, in sin," the inexorable voice answered. "Let her seek burial elsewhere."

Mr. Hines leaned forward. His expression and tone were passionless as those of a statistician proffering a tabulation: his words were fit to wring the heart of a stone.

"She's dead, ain't she?" he argued gently. "She can't hurt any one, can she? 'Specially if they don't know."

Bartholomew Storrs made a gesture of repulsion.

"Well, who'll she hurt?" pursued the other, in his form of pure and abstract reasoning. "Not her mother, I guess. Her mother's waiting for her; that's what Min said when she was--was going. And her father'll be on the other side of her. And that's all. Min never harmed anybody but herself when she was alive. How's she going to do 'em any damage now, just lying there, resting? Be reasonable, man!"

Be pitiful, oh, man! For there was a time not so long past when you, with all your stern probity and your unwinking conscience, needed pity; yes, and pleaded for it when the mind was out of control. Think back, Bartholomew Storrs, to the day when you stood by another grave, close to that which waits to-day for the weary sleeper--Bartholomew Storrs rested, opened the door and stood by it, grimly waiting. Mr. Hines turned to me.

"What is this thing, Dominie; a man or a snake? Will I kill it?"

"Bartholomew," I began. "When we--"

"Not a word from you, Dominie. My mind is made up."

"The girl is Isabel Munn's daughter."

I saw a tremor shake the gaunt frame.

"When we buried Isabel Munn, you came back in the night to weep at her grave."

He thrust out a warding hand toward me.

"Why did you weep over Isabel Munn's grave, Bartholomew?"

"Speak no evil of the dead," he cried wildly.

"It is not in my mind. She was a good and pure woman. What would she have been if she had listened to you?"

"What do you know? Who betrayed me?"

"You, yourself. When you came down with pneumonia after the burial, I sat with you through a night of delirium."

Bartholomew Storrs bowed his head.

"My sin hath found me out," he groaned. "God knows I loved her, and--and I hadn't the strength not to tell her. I'd have given up everything for her, my hope of heaven, my--my--I 'd have given up my office and gone away from God's Acre! And that was twenty years ago. I--I don't sleep o' nights yet, for thinking."

"Well, you ain't the only one," said the dull voice of Mr. Hines.

"You're tempting me!" Bartholomew Storrs snarled at him. "You're trying to make me false to my trust."

"Just to let her lie by her mother, like her mother would ask you if she could."

"Don't say it to me!" He beat his head with his clenched hand. Recovering command of himself, he straightened up, taking a deep breath: "I must be guided by my conscience and my God," he said professionally, and I noted a more reverent intonation given to the former than to the latter. A bad sign.

"Isabel Munn's daughter, Bartholomew," I reminded him.

Instead of replying he staggered out of the door. Through the window we saw him, a moment later, posting down the street, bareheaded and stony-eyed, like one spurred by tormenting thoughts.

"Will he do it, do you think?" queried the anxious-visaged Mr. Hines.

I shook my head in doubt. With a man like Bartholomew Storrs, one can never tell.

Old memories are restless companions for the old. So I found them that night. But there is balm for sleeplessness in the leafy quiet of Our Square. I went out to my bench, seeking it, and found an occupant already there.

"We ain't the only ones that need a jab of dope, Dominie," said Mr. Hines, hard and pink and hoarsely confidential as when I first saw him.

"No? Who else?" Though I suspected, of course.

"Old Gloom. He's over in the Acre."

"Did you meet him there? What did he say?"

"I ducked him. He never saw me. He was--well, I guess he was praying," said Mr. Hines shamefacedly.

"Praying? At the Munn grave?"

"That's it. Groaning and saying, 'A sign, O Lord! Vouchsafe thy servant a sign!' Kept saying it over and over."

"For guidance to-morrow," I murmured. "Mr. Hines, I'm not sure that I know Bartholomew Storrs's God. Nor can I tell what manner of sign he might give, or with what meaning. But if I know my God, whom I believe to be the true God, your Minnie is safe with him."

"Yeh? You're a good guy, Dominie," said Mr. Hines in his emotionless voice.

I took him home with me to sleep. But we did not sleep. We smoked.

Minnie Munn's funeral morning dawned clear and fresh. No word came from Bartholomew Storrs. I tried to find him, but without avail.

"We'll go through with it," said Mr. Hines quietly.

How small and insignificant seemed our tiny God's Acre, as the few mourners crept into it behind Minnie Munn's body; the gravestones like petty dots upon the teeming earth, dwarfed by the overshadowing tenements, as if death were but an incident in the vast, unhasting, continuous sweep of life, as indeed perhaps it is. Then the grandeur of the funeral service, which links death to immortality, was bodied forth in the aged minister's trembling voice, and by it the things which are of life were dwarfed to nothingness. But my uneasy mind refused to be bound by the words; it was concerned with Bartholomew Storrs, standing grim, haggard, inscrutable, beside the grave, his eyes upturned and waiting. Too well I knew for what he was waiting; his sign. So, too, did Mr. Hines, still hard, still pink, still impeccably tailored, and still clinging to his elegant lacquered cane, as he supported little, broken Mr. Munn, very pathetic and decorous in full black, even to the gloves.

The sonorous beauty and simplicity of the rite suddenly checked, faltered. Bartholomew Storrs leaned over anxiously to the minister. The poor, gentle, worn-out old brain was groping now in semi-darkness, through which shot a cross-ray of memory. The tremulous voice took on new confidence, but the marrow of my spine turned icy as I heard the fatally misplaced and confused words that followed:

"If any man know--know just and good cause why this woman--why this woman--should not--"

Bartholomew Storrs's gaunt hand shot upward, high in air, outspread in the gesture of forbiddance. His deep voice rang, overbearing the stumbling accents of the clergyman.

"A sign! A sign from on High! O God, thou hast spoken through thy servant to forefend a sore offense. Listen, ye people. This woman--"

He stopped as there rose, on the opposite side of the open grave another figure, with hands and voice lifted to heaven in what must surely have been the most ingenuous supplication that ever ascended to the throne of Pity and Understanding. All the passion which, through the bitter hours, had been repressed in the self-commanding soul of the hard and pink Mr. Hines, swelled and cried aloud in his plea:

"O God! have a heart!"

Bartholomew Storrs's hand fell. His eyes faltered. His lips trembled. He stood once more, agonized with doubt. And in that moment the old minister came to his rightful senses.

"Peace, my friends," he commanded with authority. "Let no man disturb the peace of the dead."

And, unwaveringly, he went on to the end of the service.

So little Minnie Munn rests beside the mother who waited for her. No ghosts have risen to protest her presence there. The man who loved her comes back to Our Square from time to time, at which times there are fresh flowers on Minnie's mound, below the headstone reading: "Beloved Wife of Christopher Hines." But the elegiac verse has never appeared. I must record also the disappearance of that tiny bronze cockleshell, outward bound for "Far Ports," from the Bonnie Lassie's window, though Mr. Hines was wrong in his theory that it could be bought--like all else --"at a price." By the way, I believe that he has modified that theory.

As for Bartholomew Storrs, he is prone to take the other side of the Square when he sees me on my accustomed bench. In repose his face is as grim as ever, but I have seen him smile at a child. Probably the weight of our collective sins upon his conscience is less irksome, now that he has a crime of his own to balance them. For forgery and falsification of an official record is a real crime, which might send him to jail. But even that grim and judicial God of his worship ought to welcome him into heaven on the strength of it.

I believe that Bartholomew sleeps o' nights now.

FOR MAYME, READ MARY

I

Mayme Mccartney was a bad little good girl. She inspired (I trust) esteem for her goodness. But it was for her hardy and happy impudence, her bent for ingenious mischief, her broad and catholic disrespect for law, conventions, proprieties and persons, and the glint of the devil in her black eyes that we really loved her. Such is the perversity of human nature in Our Square. I am told that it is much the same elsewhere.

She first came into public notice by giving (unsolicited) a most scandalous and spirited imitation of old Madame Tallafferr, aforetime of the Southern aristocracy, in the act of rebuking her landlord, the insecticidal Boggs ("Boggs Kills Bugs" in his patent of nobility), for eating peanuts on his own front steps. She then (earnestly solicited by a growing audience) put on impromptu sketches of the Little Red Doctor diagnosing internal complications in a doodle-bug; of MacLachan (drunk) singing "The Cork Leg" and MacLachan (sober) repenting thereof; of Bartholomew Storrs offering samples of his mortuary poesy to a bereaved second-cousin; and, having decked out her chin in cotton-batten whiskers (limb of Satan!), of myself proffering sage counsel and pious admonitions to Our Square at large. Having concluded, she sat down on a bench and coughed. And the Little Red Doctor, who, from the shelter of a shrub had observed her presentation of his little idiosyncrasies, drew nearer and looked at her hard. For he disliked the sound of that cough. He suspected that his old friend and opponent, Death, with whom he fought an interminable campaign, was mocking him from ambush. It wasn't quite fair play, either, for the foe to use the particular weapon indicated by the cough on a mere child. With her lustrous hair loose and floating, and her small, eager, flushed face, she looked far short of the mature and self-reliant seventeen which was the tally of her experienced years.

"Hello," greeted the Little Red Doctor, speaking with the brusque informality of one assured of his place as a local celebrity. "I don't know you, do I?"

Mayme lifted her eyes. "If you don't," she drawled, "it ain't for lack of tryin'. Is your hat glued on?"

"Good Lord!" exclaimed the Little Red Doctor indignantly. "Do you think I'm trying to flirt with you? Why, you're only a kid."

"Get up to date," advised Mayme. "I'm old enough to be your steady. Only, I'm too lucky."

"That's a bad cough you've got," said the Little Red Doctor hastily.

"I've got a better one at home. Like to hear it some day?"

"Bring it over to my office and let's look at the thing," suggested the Little Red Doctor, smiling.

As Mayme McCartney observed that smile with the shrewd judgment of men which comes early, in self-protection, to girls of her environment, the suspicion and impudence died out of her face, which became wistful.

"D'you think it means anything?" she asked.

"Any cough means something. I couldn't tell without examination."

"How much?" inquired the cautious Mayme.

The Little Red Doctor is a willing liar in a good cause. "No charge for first consultation. Come over to my office."

When the test was finished, the Little Red Doctor looked professionally non-committal. "Live with your parents?" he asked.

"No. With my aunt. 'Round in the Avenue."

"Where do you work?"

"The Emporium," answered the girl, naming the great and still fashionable downtown department store, half a mile to the westward.

"You ought to quit. As soon as possible."

"And spoil my delicate digestion?"

"Who said anything about your digestion?"

"I did. If I quit workin', I quit eatin'. And that's bad for me. I tried it once."

"I see," said the Little Red Doctor, recognizing a condition by no means unprecedented in local practice. "Couldn't you get a job in some better climate?"

"Where, for instance?"

"Well, if you knew any one in California."

"How's the walkin'?" asked Mayme.

"It's long," replied the Little Red Doctor, "seeing" again. "Anyway, you've got to have fresh air."

"They serve it fresh, every morning, right here in Our Square," Mayme pointed out.

"Good idea. Get up early and fill your lungs full of it for an hour every day." He gave some further instructions.

Mayme produced a dollar, and delicately placed it on the mantel.

"Take it away," said the Little Red Doctor. "Didn't I tell you--"

"Go-wan!" said Mayme. "Whadda you think you are; Bellevue Hospital? I pay as I go, Doc."

The Little Red Doctor frowned austerely.

"What's the matter? Face hurt you?" asked the solicitous Mayme.

"People don't call me 'Doc,'" began the offended practitioner in dignified tones.

"Oh, that's because they ain't on to you," she assured him. "I wouldn't call you 'Doc' myself if I didn't know you was a good sport back of your bluff."

The Little Red Doctor grinned, looking first at Mayme and then at the dollar. "You aren't such a bad sport yourself," he admitted. "Well, we'll call this a deal. But if I see you in the Square and give you a tip about yourself now and again, that doesn't count. That's on the side. Understand?"

She considered it gravely. "All right," she agreed at length. "Between pals, yes? Shake, Doc."

So began the quaint friendship between our hard-worked, bluff, knightly-hearted practitioner, and the impish and lovable little store-girl. Also another of the innumerable tilts between him and his old friend, Death.

"He's got the jump on me, Dominie," complained the Little Red Doctor to me. "But, at that, we're going to give him a fight. She's clear grit, that youngster is. She's got a philosophy of life, too. I don't know where she got it, or just what it is, but it's there. Oh, she's worth saving, Dominie."

"If I hadn't reason to think you safeguarded, my young friend," said I, "I'd give you solemn warning."

"Why, she's an infant!" returned the Little Red Doctor scornfully. "A poor, little, monkey-faced child. Besides--" He stopped and sighed.

"Yes; I know," I assented. There was at that time a "Besides" in the Little Red Doctor's sorrowful heart which bulked too large to admit of any rivalry. "Nevertheless," I added, "you needn't be so scornful about the simian type in woman. It's a concentrated peril to mankind. I've seen trouble caused in this world by kitten faces, by pure, classic faces, by ox-eyed-Juno faces, by vivid blond faces, by dreamy, poetic faces, by passionate Southern faces, but for real power of catastrophe, for earthquake and eclipse, for red ruin and the breaking up of laws, commend me to the humanized, feminized monkey face. I'll wager that when Antony first set eyes on Cleopatra, he said, 'And which cocoa palm did she fall out of?' Phryne was of the beautified baboon cast of features, and as for Helen of Troy, the best authorities now lean to the belief that the face that launched a thousand ships and fired the topless towers of Ilium was a reversion to the arboreal. I tell you, man that is born of woman cannot resist it. Give little Mayme three more years--"

"I wish to God I could," said the Little Red Doctor.

"Can't you?" I asked, startled. "Is it as bad as that?"

"It isn't much better. How's your insomnia, Dominie?"

"Insomnia," said I, "is a scientific quibble for unlaid memories. I take mine out for the early morning air at times, if that's what you mean."

"It is. Keep an eye on the kid, and do what you can to prevent that busy little mind of hers from brooding."