Part 7

As they all trooped into the dining-room for the crabs and salad Mrs. Callender told of as in the ice-box, the figure of Elizabeth in her pink kimono seemed to weave in and out among the others, but in another moment he was laughing and talking uproariously with the men, while the women, on Mrs. Callender’s assertion that the servants were in bed, tucked up their gowns and descended the cellar stairs for the provisions, refusing all masculine assistance.

“I think it’s an eternal shame,” said Mrs. Callender as the three held an excited conclave in cellared seclusion by the open refrigerator. “It’s just as Celeste says, he’s ill—anyone can see it. Why, he starts whenever he’s spoken to. He told Mr. Callender the other day that he’d been horribly worried about business. He’s a nervous kind of a fellow, and he takes everything too hard. He ought not to be left alone in this way.”

“I think somebody ought to write to _her_,” said Mrs. Waring solemnly, resting the dish of salad on the top of the ice-box. “I think it’s perfectly heartless of her to go on enjoying herself when he’s ill.”

“She doesn’t know it,” interrupted Mrs. Callender with rare justice.

“That’s what I say, somebody ought to _tell_ her. She never seems to think about anything but herself, though—or the children, or clothes. If I thought that Henry—but I’d never leave him this way, never; _I_ wouldn’t have a bit of comfort. He’s so devoted to his home, just like Mr. Rivers.”

“Do you know—I have a dreadful feeling that something is going to happen to him to-night?”

“If you had heard him talk—” said Mrs. Weir with tragic impressiveness.

The three women looked at each other silently.

“Are we to have anything to eat to-night, or are you girls going to talk until morning?” came the steady tones of Porter from the head of the stairs. “It’s after eleven now.”

“Goodness!” said Mrs. Callender, hastily completing her preparations. “Yes! we’re coming. You can send Ned down now to crack some more ice, and then we’ll be ready.”

But she turned to say, “I think someone _ought_ to go home with him.”

“This is what I call comfort,” said Porter as they sat hilariously around the Flemish oak table, eating the cool viands and drinking anew from the iced bowl, a lacy square of white linen and a glass vase of scarlet nasturtiums gracing the center of the board. “Clear, clear comfort!”

“I feel at peace with all mankind—even with Atwood, who believes in an imperial policy.”

“Hush,” said Mrs. Callender, “who is that on the piazza?”

The door opened, a head was thrust in, and a shout arose.

“Martindale! Martindale, by all that’s holy! Come in, we’re expecting you.”

“That’s mighty good of you,” said the intruder, who seemed to be all red hair and smiles. “All the same, you don’t seem to have left me much of anything to eat.” He drew up a chair to the table and sat down.

“Where’s your wife?” asked Mrs. Weir.

“Oh, she had a headache this evening. I went out for a ride, and when I came back I saw you were on deck over here, so I thought I’d look in and see what was up.” He stopped, oblivious of the renewed laughter, and stared at Rivers. “Why, when did _you_ get here? I saw a light in your house ten minutes ago. I nearly dropped in on you.”

“A light in _my_ house!” exclaimed Rivers. He rose, and the others instinctively rose also, with startled glances at each other.

“Perhaps your family has come home,” suggested Mrs. Waring.

Rivers shook his head. “No, I had a letter from Bess to-day saying she had taken the rooms for two weeks more. It might have been Parker, but I don’t think so. Are you sure you saw a light?”

“On the lower floor,” asseverated Martindale. “Was the door locked when you came out?”

“No.”

“All right,” said Atwood briskly. “Porter and I’ll go back with you, Rivers. No, we don’t need you, Nichols, you’re tired. Come upstairs and choose from Callender’s arsenal.”

“Each of those women begged me secretly not to let _him_ get shot,” whispered Porter to his companion as they set off at a jog trot down the street, Rivers a little ahead. “I suppose they could sing our requiems with pleasure.”

“I know. They pounded it into me, too. They’ve got some kind of an idea between ’em that he’s coming to harm. Anything for an excitement. We’ll get ahead of him when we’re a little nearer to the house.”

It looked very dark and still as they reached it. The moon had set, and the patch of straggling woods stretched out weird and formless. The piano, the infant, the yelping dog had given place to an oppressive silence save for the dismal chirping of insects and the shuddering of a train of coal cars as it backed far off down the track. “There is no light now,” said Porter.

The three were drawn up in a line outside the house, and even while he spoke the gas flared up bright in the second story. The edge of a shadow wavered toward the back of the room; then it came forward and disappeared. The next moment the shade of the front window was partly drawn up and pulled down again by a round white arm, half clad in the loose sleeve of a pink kimono.

* * * * *

RIVERS sat in the big wicker chair with his arms around his little wife. Her head, with its light curls, lay on his shoulder, and both of her hands held one of his large ones as she talked.

“You are sure you do not mind my coming in this way?”

“No. No, my Betsy, I do not mind.” He touched his lips to her forehead, and smoothed the folds of her pink gown with the strong, unnecessarily firm touch of a man. “But where are the boys?”

“I left them with Alice”—Alice was her sister—“for another week. I couldn’t bring them back in this hot weather.”

“Left them with Alice!”

“Yes, don’t talk about it.” She colored nervously and then went on. “I know they’re all right, but if I think about it too much I’ll get silly—as I did about you. But, of course, it’s really different with them, for they have someone to look after them, and Alice will telegraph every day.”

“How did you get silly about me?”

She clasped and unclasped his hand. “I don’t know. Yes, I do. It was worse than the time I thought of little Brook and the tiger. I kept imagining and imagining dreadful things. Last night I thought you were—dead. I saw you fallen on the floor.” Her voice dropped to a note of horror, and her eyes grew dark as they stared at him. “Where did you get that cut on your forehead? Were you ill last night? _Did_ you have a fall?”

He nodded, gazing steadily at her.

“I’m all right now.”

“Oh,” she said with a long, shivering breath, and hid her face on his shoulder. Presently she fell to kissing his hand, holding it tight when he strove to draw it away. Then she went on in a smothered tone, with a little pause between each sentence,

“I got here at ten o’clock. I thought you’d _never_ come home. Of course, I _knew_ you were at the Callenders’. I went to work and cleared up the butler’s pantry, or I couldn’t have _slept_ here! The house is in a dreadful condition.”

“Yes. Don’t you care.”

“I don’t. I’ll have an army here cleaning to-morrow. But oh, Brookton—” she broke off suddenly—“don’t send me away again!” There was a new, passionate ring in her voice. “_Never_ send me away again. I’ve been wild, wild, _wild_ for you! Promise never to send me away again. Let me stay with you always—whatever happens—like this—until we die!” A sob caught her by the throat.

The strong and tender clasp of his arms answered her—her trembling ceased. After a silence, he said gently,

“I’m going downstairs now to lock up.”

She rose, flushing under his smiling eyes as he held her off at arm’s length to say,

“It seems to me you’ve reached a high pitch of romance after seven years, Mrs. Rivers!”

“Ah, don’t, don’t,” she deprecated. She raised her drooping head and flashed a reckless glance at him, half mirthful, half tragic.

“Oh, it’s dreadful to care so much for _any_ man! Goodness knows what I’ll get to in seven years more!”

Mrs. Atwood’s Outer Raiment

Mrs. Atwood’s Outer Raiment

“HOW much will a new suit cost, Jo?” Mr. Atwood held his fingers reflectively on the rubber band of his pocketbook as he asked the question, and glanced as he did so at the round brunette face of his wife, which had suddenly become all flush and sparkle.

“Oh, Edward!”

“Well?”

“You oughtn’t to give me the money for it now—you really oughtn’t. There are so many calls on you at this season of the year, I don’t see how we can meet them as it is. The second quarter of Josephine’s music lessons begins next month, and the dancing school bill comes in too—besides the coal. Everything just piles in before Christmas. I meant to have saved the money, for a coat at any rate, this summer out of my allowance, but I was obliged to fit Josephine out from head to foot—she grows so fast, she takes as much for a dress as I do. But it doesn’t make any difference—I can do very well for a while with what I have—really!”

“How about the Washington trip with me next month? I thought you said you couldn’t go anywhere without a new suit?”

“Well, I _can’t_, but—”

“That settles it.”

Mr. Atwood pulled off the rubber band from the pocketbook and laid it on the table before him, as he extracted a roll of bills and began to count them. It was a shabby article, worn brown at the edges, but it had been made of handsome leather to begin with, and still held together in spite of many years of service. Mrs. Atwood would hardly have known her husband without that pocketbook. It represented in its way the heart of a kind and generous man, always ready to do his utmost in help of the family needs, without complaint or caviling.

His wife always experienced mingled feelings when that leather receptacle appeared—a quick and blessed relief and a sharp wince, as if it were really his heart’s blood that she was taking. Her fervent imagination was perennially ready to picture unknown depths of stress.

He paid no attention now to her inarticulate murmur of protest; but asked, in a business-like way,

“How much will it take?”

“I _could_ get the material for a dollar a yard—” Mrs. Atwood sat with her hands clasped and her eyes looking off into space, feeling the words wrung from her—“I could get it for a dollar a yard, but I suppose it ought to be heavier weight for the winter.”

“Have it warm enough, whatever else you do,” interrupted her husband.

“It would take seven yards, or I might get along with six and a half, it depends on the width. It’s the linings that make it mount up to so much, and the making. You _can_ get a suit made for ten dollars; Cynthia Callender did, and hers looks well, but Mrs. Nichols went to the same place, and—”

“Will thirty dollars be enough?” asked Mr. Atwood with masculine directness, seeking for some tangible fact.

“Oh, yes. I’m sure it will be, I—”

“Then here’s fifty,” said Mr. Atwood. He counted out five tens and pushed them over to her. “Get a good suit while you’re about it, Jo.”

“Oh, Edward. I don’t want—”

“Make her take it,” said a girl of sixteen, rising from the corner where she had been sitting with a book in her hand, a very tall and thin and pretty girl, brunette like her mother, with a long black braid that hung down her back. She came forward and threw her arm around her mother’s neck, bending protectingly over her. “Make her take it, papa. She buys everything for me and the boys, and goes without herself, so that I’m ashamed to walk out in the street with her; it makes me look so horrid to be all dressed up when she wears that old spring jacket. When it’s cold she puts a cape over it. I wish you’d see that cape! She’s had it since the year one. She doesn’t dare wear it when she goes out with you, she just shivers.”

“Hush, hush, Josephine,” said the mother embarrassed, yet laughing, as her husband lifted his shaggy eyebrows at her in mock severity. “You needn’t say any more, either of you. I’ll take the money.” She paused impressively, and then gently pushed the girl aside and went over and kissed her husband.

“If I were only as good a manager as some people! I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I try, and I try, but—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” said the husband. “All I ask now is that you spend this money on yourself; it’s not for other needs. Remember! You are to spend it all on yourself.”

“Yes, I will,” said Mrs. Atwood, with the guilty thrill of the perjured at the very moment of her promise. She knew very well that some of it would have to be spent for other needs. She had but fifty cents left of her allowance to last her until the end of the month, five long days away. No one but the mother of a family of moderate means realizes what the demand for pads, pencils, shoestrings, lunches, postage stamps, hair ribbons, medicines, mended shoes, and such like can amount to in that short time. She had meant to ask Edward to advance her a little more on the next month’s allowance—already largely anticipated—but she had not the face to after his generosity to her now. A couple of dollars out of the fifty would make very little difference, and she did not need it all, anyway. She almost wept as she thought of Josephine’s championship of her, and her husband’s thoughtfulness.

Mrs. Atwood adored her husband and her three children. She firmly believed them to be superior in every way to all other mortals; sacrificing service for them was her joy of joys, her keenest affliction the fear that she did not appreciate them half enough. It is certain that the children, truthful, loving, and obedient as they had been trained to be, would have been spoiled beyond tolerance if it were not that the very strength of her admiration made it innocuous. They were so used to being told that they were the loveliest and dearest things on earth that the words were not even heard. As they grew older the extravagance of her devotion was beginning to rouse the protective element in them, to her wonder and humility.

Mrs. Atwood, at twenty, the time of her marriage, had been a warm-hearted, fervent, loquacious, impulsive child. At thirty-eight she was still in many ways the girl her husband had married; even to her looks, while he appeared much older than his real age, in reality but a couple of years ahead of hers. She was always longing to be a silent, noble, and finely-balanced character, quite oblivious of the fact that she suited him, a humorous but self-contained man, exactly as she was, and that he would have been very lonesome with anything more perfect. Perhaps, after all, there are few things that are better to bring into a household than an uncalculating and abounding love, even if the manifestations of it are not always of the wisest.

The extra money cast a rich glow over Mrs. Atwood’s horizon. In the effulgence of it she received a bill for twelve dollars presented to her just after breakfast the next morning, by the waitress, with the word that the man waiting outside the door had already brought it once before, when they were out of town. Could Mrs. Atwood pay it now? He needed the money.

“Why, certainly,” said Mrs. Atwood with affluent promptness. The bill was for work on the lawn during the summer, something her husband always paid for, but it seemed a pity to have the man go away again when the money was there at hand. She would not in the least mind asking Edward to refund it to her. But she felt the well-known drop into her usual condition of calculating economy.

Her husband came home that night with a bad headache, and the night after she had another bill waiting for him for repairs on the furnace. It was unexpectedly and villainously large, and Mrs. Atwood was constitutionally incapable of adding another straw to his burden, while she stood by consenting sympathetically unto his righteous wrath. A day later, when she spoke of going to town to buy the material for her new costume with outward buoyancy, but inward panic at the rapid shrinkage of her funds, Sam, a boy of twelve, announced the fact that he must have a new suit of clothes at once. As it was Saturday, he could accompany her.

“What is the matter with those you have on? They are not in the least worn out,” said his mother.

“Mamma, they’re so thin that I’m freezing all the time I’m in school. You ought to have heard me coughing yesterday.”

“You have the old blue suit; I’m sure that’s thick enough.”

“The blue suit! Yes, and it hurts me, it’s so tight I can hardly walk in it. I can’t sit down in it at all. It makes ridges all around my legs.”

Mrs. Atwood looked at her son with rare exasperation. It was well known that when Sam took a dislike to his clothes for any reason, they always hurt him. His coats, his trousers, his caps, his shoes, even his neckties developed hitherto unsuspected attributes of torture. And there was always a haunting feeling with the outraged dispenser of these articles that it might be true. A penetrative and scornful remark from the passing Josephine at once emphasized this view of the case to the anxious mother, remorseful already at her own lack of sympathy.

“I’m astonished at you, Josephine. If the clothes hurt him—” but the girl had disappeared beyond hearing. Sam came from town that jubilant evening, in warm and roomy jacket and trousers, and, oh, weakness of woman! with a new football, besides. Mrs. Atwood carried with her a box of lead soldiers for Eddy, and a sweet little fluffy thing in neckwear for Josephine, such as she saw other girls displaying. After all, what was her own dress in comparison with the darling children’s happiness? She would get some cheap stuff and make it up herself. No one would know the difference.

“How about your suit, Jo?” asked her husband one evening as they sat around the fire. “Is it almost finished?”

“Not—exactly,” said Mrs. Atwood.

“The club goes to Washington on the fifteenth of the month, it was decided to-day. Nearly all the men are going to take their wives with them. I’m looking forward to showing off mine.”

“My mamma will look prettier than any of them,” said Eddy belligerently.

“And lots younger,” added Sam.

“Have you ordered the suit yet?” asked the voice of Josephine. Oh, how her mother dreaded it!

“No, I haven’t—yet,” she felt herself forced into saying.

“I don’t believe there is any money left for it,” pursued the pitiless one. “She spends it for other things, papa. She pays bills and doesn’t tell, because she hates to bother you. And she buys things for us. And she paid a subscription to the Orphan’s Home yesterday, and she got a new wash-boiler for Katy. And—”

“Hush, hush, Josephine,” said her father severely. “I found that receipted bill of Patrick’s lying around the other day, Jo. I should have paid you back at once. How much money have you left?”

“Oh, Edward—I’m _so_ foolish. I—”

“Have you thirty dollars?”

“I—I don’t think so.”

“Have you twenty?”

“I haven’t—_more_ than that.” She had, as she well knew, the sum of nine dollars and sixty-seven cents in the purse in her dressing table drawer.

“Will this help you out?” His tone had the business-like quality in it as natural as breathing to a man when he speaks of money matters, and which a woman feels almost as a personal condemnation in its chill removal from sentiment.

“Oh, Edward—please don’t! It makes me feel so—” She tried not to be too abject. “But nearly all of it has gone for necessary things.”

“That’s all _right_.” He added with a touch of severity. “Don’t let there be any mistake about it this time, Jo,” and she murmured contentedly,

“No. No, indeed.”

With her allowance money, too, how could there be?

Mrs. Atwood now set herself seriously to the work of getting appareled. She read advertisements, and went to town two days in succession, bringing home samples of cloth for family approval; she sought the advice of her young sister-in-law, Mrs. Callender, and of her friend, Mrs. Nichols, with the result that she finally sat down one morning immediately after breakfast, and wrote a letter to a New York firm ordering a jacket and skirt made like one in a catalogue issued by them, and setting down her measurements according to its directions. Just before she finished, a maid brought her up word that Mrs. Martindale was below.

“Mrs. Martindale—at this time in the morning!”

Mrs. Martindale was her cousin, and lived over the other side of the track, some distance away. Mrs. Atwood hurried down with a premonition of evil to find the visitor, a pretty woman, elegantly but hastily gowned, sitting on the edge of a chair, as if ready for instant flight. There was a wild expression in her eye.

She began at once, taking no notice of Mrs. Atwood’s greeting.

“I suppose you think I’m crazy to come here in this way. I didn’t sleep a wink last night. I didn’t know what to do. We’re in such a state!”

“Is it the business?”

“Oh, it’s the estate and the business and everything. Mr. Bellew’s death has just brought the whole thing to a standstill. All the money is tied up in some dreadful way—don’t ask _me_. Of course it will be all right in three or four weeks, Dick says, and we have credit everywhere. It’s just to tide over this time. But we haven’t a penny of ready money; not a _penny_. It would be ridiculous if it wasn’t horrible. Dick gave me all he could scrape together last week, and told me to try and make it last, but it’s all gone—_I_ couldn’t help it. And the washerwoman comes to-day. If you could let me have ten dollars, Jo; I couldn’t _bear_ to let Dick know.”

“Why, certainly,” said Mrs. Atwood with loving alacrity. “Don’t say another word.” If she felt a pang, she scorned it.

“You don’t know how many calls there are on one,” murmured the other, sinking back with relief.

Mrs. Atwood thought she did, but she only said, “You poor thing,” and rushed upstairs to get one of her crisp ten-dollar bills; she could not use the house money for this. She passed Josephine in the hall, afterwards, on her way to school, and held the bill behind her, but she felt sure the girl’s keen eyes had spied it.

“I’m so glad I had it! Are you sure this will be enough?” she asked as the other kissed her fervently. What were clothes for herself in comparison with poor Bertha’s need? She would look over the catalogue again to-morrow, when she had time, and order a cheaper suit, or buy one ready made.

After all, she did neither. Her money—but why chronicle further the diminution of her forces? Delay made it as inevitable as the thaw after snow. Her entire downfall was completed the day she had unexpected and honorable company to dinner, and sent Sam out to the nearest shops instead of those at which she usually dealt, to “break a bill”—heart-rending process—in the purchase of fruits and sweets for their consumption. No one has ever satisfactorily explained why the change from five dollars never amounts to more than two dollars and sixteen cents. Poor Mrs. Atwood could never get quite used to the fact that if she spent money it was gone. She cherished an underlying hope that she could get it back somehow.

As the time approached for the Washington trip she did not dare to meet her Edward’s eye, and replied but feebly to his unusually jolly anticipations of “this time next week.” She had hoped that she might have some excuse to remain at home, much as she had longed for this jaunt alone with her husband, but there seemed to be no loophole of escape.

She tried to freshen up her heaviest skirt, and took the spring jacket she was wearing and made a thick lining to it, planning to disguise it further with a piece of fur at the neck. She felt horribly guilty when Josephine came in and caught her at it. The tall girl with her red cheeks just out of the wintry air looked at her mother with an inscrutable expression, but she merely said,