Part 15

"No, I won't, not for no such a purpose--to go down to see our Danny's clerk when he don't give you dare to. You're near worrying my poor brother to death with the way you act!"

"Please let go my arm, Jennie."

"You pass me your promise, then, that you'll behave yourself. You're _all_ the time raising excitements in our peaceful home that gives Sadie the indigestion!"

Margaret wrenched herself free and went to the front door; but Jennie got there first, turned the key and removed it from the lock.

"I ain't leaving you disgrace us with our neighbours!" she indignantly affirmed.

Margaret, looking white but resolute, went to a side window, raised it, and called into the Kaufmans' dining-room where the family was then breakfasting, while Jennie and Sadie, foiled, but horrified and incredulous of her audacity, fell back.

"Will you please be so very kind, Mrs. Kaufman," Margaret called across the space between the two windows, when Mrs. Kaufman had raised hers, "as to 'phone for a taxicab for me at once. I have to hurry down to Mr. Leitzel's office. I shall be so much obliged, and I'm very sorry to trouble you at breakfast."

"We're just done, Mrs. Leitzel, and I'll be very glad to oblige you. Nothing wrong, I hope?"

"No, but I _must_ get to the office as quickly as I can. Will you please tell them to hurry with the taxicab, Mrs. Kaufman?"

"Yes, of course I will--don't mention it! Your telephone out of order?"

"I can't use it," said Margaret, and with a nod and a smile, she closed the window.

She turned slowly and looked at her sisters-in-law. They, almost leaning upon each other for support, were regarding her as though she were a dangerous lunatic. Without a word, she went past them and upstairs to get her wraps. When she came down five minutes later the taxicab was at the door and Jennie was at the 'phone calling up Daniel's office.

Margaret found, however, that the front door was now unlocked. They evidently felt too uncertain of her to try her any further.

XX

Margaret wondered whether, if Jennie succeeded in warning Daniel of her coming, he would again contrive to prevent Catherine's seeing her.

"Wouldn't it make a good Movie! I might have it copyrighted!" she shrugged.

But she told the chauffeur to hurry, hoping that she might, even yet, get to the office before Daniel got there.

"If I don't, and if he tries to keep Catherine from coming down to me--well, if I didn't look such a sight, I would go right up into the office!"

When, however, the taxicab drew up before the building of which the second floor was occupied by Daniel's law offices, and she leaned for an instant out of the cab window, she saw her husband coming down the street. Jennie, then, had been too early for him. Margaret looked about hastily for Catherine, but she saw nothing of her. She shrank far back, then, in the cab to prevent Daniel's seeing her, for he was now close by.

She saw him hesitate at the door of the building and glance inquiringly at the cab; then, curiosity moving him, for Daniel had the petty curiosity of an unoccupied woman, he came over to the curb and looked into the window of the cab.

Margaret met his glance calmly. All she cared about was that he should not prevent her meeting Catherine.

"Why, Margaret! You out of doors! What for? You came for me? Is anything wrong?"

"I came out for some fresh air."

"But to come out on the street!" he protested, scandalized.

"I'm not exposed to view."

"But the chauffeur has seen you!" whispered Daniel, actually colouring with embarrassment.

"He doesn't mind it nearly as much as you do, Daniel. I think he'll recover; he looks robust."

"But what have you come down to my office for?"

As Margaret at this moment saw Catherine coming out of the building, she promptly answered, "To see Miss Hamilton and clear matters up with her. Here she is now."

Daniel turned about sharply, and Catherine, nodding a cheerful good-morning to him, stepped into the cab and bent over Margaret to kiss her.

"But, Miss Hamilton," cried Daniel as his clerk settled Herself comfortably beside his wife, "why are you not at your desk?"

"I left a note on your desk, Mr. Leitzel, asking you to excuse me for an hour. I shall be back before ten," she replied, drawing the cab door shut and speaking to him through the open window.

"To the park," Margaret ordered the chauffeur. "Good-bye, Daniel."

"Miss Hamilton," faltered Daniel, but before he could collect his wits to decide _how_ he ought to meet so unprecedented a situation, the car started and whirled down the street.

Slowly and thoughtfully he turned into his office building. Never before in all his life had his will been so frustrated as by this young wife of his hearth and home upon whom he showered every comfort, every luxury and indulgence. That any one whom he supported should disobey, defy, and thwart him! It was beyond belief. How did she dare to do it?

"But _what's_ a man to do with a wife who doesn't care for his displeasure any more than if he were an old cat!" he raged. "Oh, well," he tried to console himself, "it won't be long, now, until the baby comes, and then surely she'll be different. She'll have to be! I'll find _some_ means of teaching her that my wishes can't be disregarded!"

Miss Hamilton's note which he found on his desk stated succinctly that she had an imperative engagement this morning which would make her an hour late.

Daniel, sinking limply into his desk-chair, crushed the note in his long, thin fingers and tossed it into his waste-basket, with the murderous wish that it was his clerk's head he was smashing.

"What will they be when they get the vote?" he groaned. "Women," he said spitefully but epigrammatically, "are the pest of men's lives!"

Margaret, meantime, without once directly referring to her husband and his sisters, had managed to convey to Catherine an explanation of the silence and desolation that had existed between them during the past two weeks; and she was now making a compact with her which she felt must insure them both against any future misunderstanding.

"Tell me first, Catherine, that our friendship means more to you than--than any petty considerations! Please, Catherine, tell me that it does! For I just must have you, you know! You are more to me than I can possibly be to you, for you have your mother, while I----"

She hesitated and Catherine said, "And you, Margaret, will soon have your child. Will that make you need me any less? I don't believe it will, dear. And _my_ other dear ones can't in the least fill your place in my life. I can't give you up any more than you can spare me. Nothing," she said with decision, "shall separate us."

"Then," said Margaret, pressing Catherine's hand, "hereafter, when you come to see me, ring the bell four times by twos, and I, knowing about the hour to look for you, will be on hand to let you in myself."

"All right. I will."

"Catherine! You _are_ large-minded!"

"My dear!" protested Catherine, "'large-minded' to be indifferent to the eccentricities of--well," she closed her lips on the rest of her sentence, "two illiterate, vulgar old women," was what she had nearly said; but she left it to Margaret's imagination to finish her remark.

"While you are ill in bed, I suppose I shan't be able to get near you," she ventured. "It will be dreadful if I have to wait nearly a month before I can see that baby! It's going to be awfully dear to me, Margaret! Next thing to having one of my own."

"I couldn't wait a whole month to show it to you. I'll ask the doctor to bring you to me."

"We'll manage somehow," affirmed Catherine.

Margaret, looking rather pale, did not answer, and Catherine suddenly put her arms about her and kissed her.

"You poor child!" she said tenderly.

"I'm not a good fighter," Margaret sadly shook her head. "And there are so many, many adjustments to be made, I----"

She stopped short and bit her lips to keep back the tears that sprang to her eyes.

"At least," said Catherine encouragingly, "you seem to be coming to your ordeal, dear, with plenty of courage; and that's the main thing just now."

"Oh, Catherine, I'm willing to go through a lot for the sake of holding a baby of my own to my heart!"

"Then you think, Margaret, that motherhood is going to be all that it's cracked up to be?"

"Under ideal conditions," said Margaret, "I can see nothing greater to be desired."

"But do the ideal conditions ever exist?"

"I suppose they seldom do."

"Sometimes I've had my doubts," said Catherine. "The male poets and painters exalt the beauty, the holiness of motherhood, and the women bear the burden and pain of it."

"But when women whose lives have had the largest horizon--women like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Margaret Fuller--have declared that their motherhood was the crown and climax of all their experiences of life, I suppose the poets and painters are not very wrong about it, Catherine."

"I hope they are not, since all my instincts about it are entirely primitive and I feel that nothing in the world will compensate me if I've got to go through life childless."

"There would be one compensation," said Margaret earnestly.

"What?"

"Sometimes, since I've known I was going to have a child, the responsibility, the almost crushing responsibility, has seemed more than I could bear. That's what I meant when I spoke of ideal conditions."

Catherine held back her mental reply to this, which was, "Yes, we _should_ be careful whom we marry, and _why_ did you tie up with a little rat like Danny Leitzel?"

What she did say was: "You didn't feel this crushing sense of responsibility until after you found yourself pregnant?"

"No. Before that I thought only of my own happiness in having a baby to cherish. But, Catherine, when we look about us and see what life can do to us, I wonder how we ever dare, under any conditions, to bring a child into this awful world!"

"We can't question the foundations of the universe, however."

"No, but we can question modern civilization, which produces a huge population of criminals, lunatics, degenerates, and incapables."

"Think of pleasant things, my dear!"

"I try to. To tell you the truth, in spite of my heavy sense of responsibility, I can hardly wait, Catherine, until I have my baby! I want to show you the lovely little embroidered dress Harriet sent me. Will you come in to see it and me this afternoon after four o'clock?"

"Yes."

"I'll be on the watch."

"All right," Catherine nodded.

"The baby received another present, the other day, which touched me very much," added Margaret. "A cunning pair of socks from its grandmother which she knit herself."

"Its grandmother? But----"

"I mean Mr. Leitzel's step-mother."

"Oh!"

"Did you ever happen to see her, Catherine?"

"Once. She came to the office once to see Mr. Leitzel."

Catherine's tone of withdrawal, as though she feared to be questioned, piqued Margaret's interest.

"What was your impression of her?"

"Margaret, your husband's mother has an unforgettable face! There's a benediction in it, such sweetness, refinement, and simplicity shine in her countenance. When she had talked to me for a while, I felt as a good Catholic must who has been blessed by the Pope. Just the sort of person (with a heart too tender to hurt a fly) to be herself easily victimized by the human vultures that prey upon the too confiding."

"Has anybody victimized her?" Margaret casually inquired.

Catherine hesitated an instant before she answered: "Righteousness _is_ sometimes a breastplate to protect the otherwise defenceless. It is that dear old woman's extraordinary conscientiousness that has saved her from being _entirely_ devoured by the vultures, though she has certainly been gnawed at pretty hard. I can't explain to you, now, just what I mean. Some day, perhaps."

"Oh, do tell me, Catherine."

Again Catherine hesitated before she replied: "She made a certain promise to her husband on his deathbed which her conscience has never allowed her to break, though she has always believed that she was acting against her own interests in keeping it. But it's her loyalty to her promise that's been her breastplate; that has saved her from the vultures."

Margaret considered in silence this suggestive bit of information. It was rather more lucid to her than Catherine suspected. But she was impressed with the sudden realization she had of her friend's intimate knowledge of Daniel's affairs and it flashed upon her that perhaps his seemingly unreasonable objections to their intimacy might have quite another explanation than that he had given it.

In this, however, she was mistaken. Daniel entirely trusted the discretion of his clerk. Not so much because he believed her bound in honour to keep his secrets as because it was the part of a first-class clerk (which she was) to be discreetly silent as to her employer's business operations.

"And now, my dear," Catherine broke in on her thoughts, "since we've threshed things out and have made a compact that we will not again misunderstand each other, I think I'd better get back to my 'job.'"

Margaret gave the order to the chauffeur; and when a little while later, alone in the taxicab on her way home, she found her heart overflowing with a sense of the fulness, the richness of life, and considered how strenuously Daniel and his sisters tried to take from her the comfort, the happiness, of companionship with Catherine and how impossible it would be to make them see what that companionship meant to her, she felt greatly strengthened in her resolve to resist, steadily and persistently, their aggressions upon her personal liberty.

At her own door, as she opened her purse to pay for the cab, she found she had remaining of her monthly allowance only two dollars and the chauffeur's price was three dollars. She hesitated an instant, then telling the man to charge the cab to Mr. Leitzel, she got out hastily and went indoors.

"Rather hard on Daniel to make him pay the costs of my plots gotten up to circumvent _his_ plots! He won't like it. Ah, I've a bright idea! I'll tell him to deduct the three dollars from my next 'allowance.' That will appease him."

But on second thoughts she realized that that same bright idea would surely occur to Daniel without any suggestion from her.

XXI

Margaret felt an impersonal curiosity as to what Daniel would say to her when he came home to his dinner at noon. Jennie and Sadie were also curious as to that. But Daniel himself was curious, too. How _was_ a husband to meet such unnatural behaviour in a wife? Did other men's wives so disregard their husbands' wishes and commands? If women got much more independent it would break up the holy estate of matrimony altogether.

He finally decided, on his homeward walk, that about the only course open to him was to take refuge in a dignified silence, though now that Margaret's time was drawing near, he felt sufficiently apprehensive of the outcome to be very leniently inclined toward her. Funny how he cared for her when she treated him the way she did! He could not help it, somehow. She certainly had a way with her! Well, when she was over her trial and quite herself again, he'd have another try at bringing her to a proper sense of the confederation to which he was accustomed and which was his due.

He wondered uneasily what the people of the town thought of this incongruous intimacy between his clerk and his wife. It certainly passed his comprehension as much as it did that of his sisters that a girl as "high-toned" as Margaret was should insist upon being intimate with his stenographer. That Miss Hamilton was equally "high-toned," he was incapable of recognizing. Jennie had voiced his own sentiments when a few days before she had exclaimed, "When she _could_ run with _any_body, she goes and picks out an office clerk! It's nothing else, Danny, but that she's bound to act con_tra_ry, to show us she don't care if she _didn't_ bring you a dollar to her name!"

However, a letter which he found on the hall table when he reached home diverted not only his own attention, but that of the whole household, from Margaret's case.

It was from the school teacher of Martz Township, who wrote in behalf of his step-mother; and after dinner, as the family sat together, as was their custom, in the sitting-room, for an hour before Daniel went again to his office--Jennie and Sadie fussing about him to make him comfortable, adjusting the window-blind, placing his chair, handing him the newspaper, retying his necktie, brushing his coat collar--Daniel presently opened and read the letter he had received.

Margaret listened to it and to the lengthy discussion which followed with an attention that was to bear early and abundant fruit.

"DEAR FRIEND:

"I am writing for Mrs. Leitzel, to leave you know she had it so bad in her lungs here the past couple weeks the neighbours thought it would give pneumonia, but she got better and now she's up again, but very weak, and I'm leaving you know that we think she ought not to live alone a half a mile away from her nearest neighbour, because if she got so sick that she couldn't help herself, she might die before her neighbours found it out yet that she needed help. And she's too feeble any more to make up her fires and fetch her water from the spring and chop her wood. The house not having any modern improvements, and so much out of repair, it makes it harder, too, for such an old woman. And she has hardly anything to live on. The neighbours say she had either ought to have some one with her, or you ought to take her to your home to live. If not, she'll have to go the poorhouse, and that of course you would not want, either.

"She is better now and says to tell you not to worry, but I warn you she may get down sick again any time, as old as what she is. And I think you have got good cause to worry, though I told her I'd tell you not to. If it hadn't been for the neighbours doing for her this last couple weeks, she'd have died.

"Yours truly, "MAYBELLE RAUCH.

"P.S. She says she sends her love to all and that you have got no need to worry."

But Daniel and his sisters did seem to think they had "need to worry" very much, at the startling revelations of this letter, not the revelations as to their step-mother's sufferings and needs, but as to the neighbourhood publicity given to their neglect of her.

"To think she'd go and have that busybody teacher and all her other neighbours in and complain to 'em all like this, so's they write to us yet and ask for help for her! Well, this beats all! She never went _this_ far before!" scolded Jennie.

"Yes, I don't see why she couldn't leave us know herself if she's got any complaints, and not put it out to the whole township like this!" Sadie worried.

"It certainly will make talk out there!" Daniel frowned.

"Enough to get into the newspapers if she doesn't watch out!"

"But how," Margaret ventured a question, "could she let you know except in the way she's taking, since she can't write herself? And how could she help having the neighbours in if she was ill and helpless and alone?"

"She could anyhow have sent us a postal card to say she was sick and wanted one of us to come out," said Jennie.

"Would you have gone to her?"

"Of course one of us would have gone."

"Maybe she couldn't even write a postal card, or get out to mail it if she did write it, if she's so old and feeble, and was ill."

"If that was the case," said Daniel, "then to avoid a repetition of the occurrence, I don't see what else we are to do but put her into a home."

"You know how she's against that, Danny," said Jennie. "If you decide to do it, you'll have a time with her! And those neighbours all taking her part!"

"This impertinent teacher," said Daniel, tapping the letter he held, "has the face to reproach us, you notice, for not keeping the place in repair! It wasn't our business to keep it in repair when we never get any rent for it."

"Yes, it does seem as if Mom might have kept it in repair when she was getting it rent free," said Jennie. "_I_ don't see why she has not been able to save something in all these years from what she's earnt from her vegetable garden."

"She certainly hasn't managed good," said Sadie.

"And to think of the cheek of those neighbours!" said Jennie wrathfully. "Saying we had ought to take her in here to live with us yet! As if she was our own flesh and blood!"

"What would _Hiram_ say to something like this coming!" Sadie speculated; "when _he_ thinks we did too much in not charging her rent."

"Well," Daniel suddenly announced with a magnanimous air that seemed to swell his chest, "I'll send her a check. I'll send her five dollars. Maybe I'll make it ten."

"Ten dollars yet, Danny!" said Sadie, regarding her brother with affectionate admiration.

"I'm not sure I'll send as much as ten. But anyhow five."

"She'll be sure to show the check around to prove to those neighbours how good you are to her."

"And there will be some among them," said Daniel indignantly, "that will be ready enough to call it stingy!"

"Oh, well, some folks would say it was stingy if you sent her twenty-five dollars yet!"

"If you and Sadie want to put a little to what I send," Daniel tentatively suggested, "we might make it ten or fifteen."

"Well," said Jennie reluctantly, "it _ain't_ fair for you to pay all, either. What do you say, Sadie?"

"Well," Sadie hesitatingly agreed; "for all, I did want to get a new fancy for my white hat. How much will you give, Jennie?"

"Well, if you and I each give two-fifty to Danny's five or ten, _that_ ought to stop her neighbours' talking out there."

"All right," Sadie pensively agreed.

"No use asking Hiram to contribute," Daniel growled, "when he thinks we ought to charge her rent for the place. He gets angry whenever he hears I gave her a little. I told him once, 'If I can better afford than you can to give her a little, and I don't ask you to help out, what are you kicking about?' 'It's the principle of it,' he said. 'If you give her money, it's admitting you owe it to her, or you wouldn't give it to her. Now I contend that we don't owe her anything.' 'Well, then,' I said, 'when I give her a little now and then, I'll put it down on my accounts under Christian Charities. Will that satisfy you?' But no, even that didn't satisfy him. He's all for putting her to a home. And it looks now as if that's what we'll have to do pretty soon," Daniel concluded, rising to go to his office.

Margaret looked on in silence as Jennie and Sadie each counted out carefully from their purses two dollars and a half and passed it over to their brother.

"I'll send a check, then, to mother for fifteen dollars," he said as he put the money into his own purse. "I'll make it fifteen," he nodded. "I'm willing to make it fifteen. That will certainly settle the gossips out there and keep her going for a while comfortably."

He came across the room to Margaret's chair by the window.

"Good-bye, my dear," he said, bending to kiss her; and it took all her self-control not to shrink in utter repugnance from his caress.

"Oh!" she inwardly moaned as she turned to gaze out of the window when he had gone, "what crime have I committed in marrying a man I----"

But even her innermost secret thought recoiled from the admission that she _despised_ her husband, the father of her child.

She went upstairs to her room to spend the time, while she waited for the hour of Catherine's arrival, in putting some last touches to the baby outfit she had made and in writing a note to Daniel's step-mother expressing her sympathy with her recent illness and reiterating her promise to come to see her as soon as possible after her confinement.

"I'll mail it _myself_," she decided as she sealed and stamped her letter, "or give it to Catherine to mail."