Part 2

The sleeping ones awoke. In the scuffle and rush forward Mrs. Gibbons became separated from her friends. The new car was already jammed when she reached it, with fighting in the doorway. With one foot raised to step up she was thrust to one side by a man who leapt from it, followed by several others dashing back across the tracks and down a side street, amid cries of “Catch him! Get the pocketbook! Catch the thief!”

There was a face—could it be her husband’s? She turned wildly to peer after it into the blankness outside of the car lights. The next instant the bell had rung, and the car, with the crowd on the platform all looking one way, was vanishing swiftly down the roadway, while Mrs. Gibbons, unnoticed, stood alone upon the rails. She made a futile step after it, and then stopped, appalled. She was left behind.

Opposite was the long, cavernous opening of a car-house, filled with the stalled cars. Near her was a saloon, ending what seemed a scattered row of small, mean houses and shops, closed and dark. Ahead there was a stretch of empty lots, with a faint, stationary glimmer of light down the road. But the saloon, though by no means brilliant, was the lightest place. There was no sound from within. After some hesitation, Mrs. Gibbons wandered up on the low platform that topped the two steps, watched by a couple of men from the car-house. Her heart was in her mouth as one of them came forward; but he only glanced at her and went in the saloon, to come out again with a wooden chair.

“Better set,” he remarked, laconically, and disappeared across the street. A moment later there were other footsteps from the saloon, and looking up, she saw a policeman wiping his mouth.

“Got left by the car?” he said.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Gibbons, raising her blue and guileless eyes to his. “I didn’t know it was going so soon. I was looking for my husband.”

The policeman’s face changed from solicitude to the cheerful acceptance of a familiar situation.

“Give ye the slip, did he? A lady like you, too! Sure he’s the bad lot, and not wort’ your lookin’ for. Now don’t be frettin’ yourself, the Queen couldn’t be safer. I’m wid you till the car comes. ’Tis an hour away.”

“It’s very good of you,” said Mrs. Gibbons, gratefully.

Of all the chances and changes of this wild Walpurgis night, there could be nothing stranger than this, that she, Nita Gibbons, should be sitting alone amid the dark marshes, in front of a Jersey “gin-mill,” at half-past two o’clock in the morning. It was so entirely past all imagining that frenzy had left her. She would probably never get home again, but she had ceased to struggle against fate. She sat there instead, passive, her slight figure bent against the cold night wind, and her hair half falling down under her battered hat, looking dreamily at the late twinkling stars in the black sky, and the gloomy car-house opposite, and at the policeman who walked up and down through the shadows. He swayed a little unsteadily, but he represented the guardianship of the law. Once he came close to her and asked encouragingly, “Would ye like a doggy?”

“What kind?” said Mrs. Gibbons, with a hazy fear of too large a protective animal.

He pointed over his shoulder towards the stationary light down the road. “The kind they do be havin’ in the Owl Wagon, down there—frankfooties or doggies, ’tis the same. I could get ye wan, wid a roll; they’re cleaned out in the s’loon here.”

“Thank you, I’d rather not eat,” said Mrs. Gibbons in haste, and then started nervously as the noise of footsteps running broke upon the ear. The three men who had followed the thief came in sight from the direction in which they had fled from the car. One called out, “Good-night, I’m going to hoof it home!”

And another voice also called, “Glad you got your pocketbook back again—ought to have got the fellow, too.”

The third said nothing, as he came towards the platform. Mrs. Gibbons turned her head away. The next instant a voice of amazement said, “_Nita!_ You here!” and, looking up, she saw her husband.

“Oh, Arnold, Arnold!” She stopped short in view of his face. “Oh, Arnold, I don’t wonder you’re surprised to see me, dear, but I’ve been looking for you!”

“Looking for _me_! Nita! _Nita!_ NITA!”

The astonishment in his voice held something ominous in it. She clung to his arm with both hands, as she rose with him, and hardly realized, in her excited explaining and explaining, that she was being borne off down the road without waiting for the car, at a tremendous pace, and still spasmodically explaining to a portentous silence. When he spoke at last it was in a tone that sounded dangerous:

“So the Worthingtons went off and _left_ you?”

“No, no, they were _in_ the car, they——”

“I’ll—I’ll _see_ Worthington to-morrow!” He paused for control, and Mrs. Gibbons had a swift vision of Mr. Worthington’s head rolling off into a basket. “I never heard such a lot of crazy stuff—I never _heard_ of such a thing—I _never_ heard of such a thing! It all comes of your being out of the house when I came home. What on earth you want to go wild-goose chasing for at the very time you know I’m coming home——”

“But, Arnold, I _didn’t_ go wild-goose chasing. I went to the station to surprise you.”

His anger grew.

“To surprise me! Then let me know next time you want to surprise me. I’ve had enough surprise to last me all the rest of my life.”

He broke off with a shudder as if the thought were too much for him.

“Well, you just missed it, not being with us to-night. You’ll never have such another chance, never. The Atterburys won’t be back for five years.”

“And did you enjoy it without _me_!”

“Enjoy it! Of course I enjoyed it. I’d have been a fool not to. I had a glorious time, the best dinner I ever ate, and Atterbury?—What on earth you wanted to spoil it all for I can’t see. _Take_ care!”—his arm went around her closely. “You’ll turn your ankle.” His touch was ineffably gentle and sure, in spite of the masterful rage of his tone.

“Oh, Arnold, I’ve been so unhappy all the evening. I——”

He went on, remorseless. “I’m glad you were. I hope you _were_ unhappy. It will teach you never to do such a thing again. When you didn’t meet us at the ferry, I was confounded. I couldn’t think _what_ had happened to you. If everything hadn’t been ordered ahead, tickets and all, I’d have come straight home, but I couldn’t leave the Atterburys in the lurch when _you_ had, though I hated to go without you. It just spoiled the whole thing. I’ve been worrying ever since that infernal hold-up in the elevated, thinking of you at home alone, and then I find you gallivanting around at the junction at three o’clock in the morning, after coming out in that outrageous car. If I’d known you were there——! Well, you were just crazy to do such a thing”—he set his teeth—“it makes me _wild_ to think of it. You don’t know _what_ might have happened. I’ll be afraid to go off and leave you home alone. I don’t know what you’ll do. You ought to be looked after like a child. You oughtn’t to be left a _minute_. What’s the matter?”

He slowed up the pace that was rapidly nearing them to home. His storming voice deepened reluctantly into a distressful tenderness.

“What’s the matter? You mustn’t cry in the street, Nita! You mustn’t, dear.”

“Oh, I’ve had such a horrid, horrid, horrid time!” The tears were blinding her so that she leaned unseeing on the enfolding arm that guided her. “I don’t mind your scolding me. I’m not crying for _that_. I don’t mind anything you say. I don’t mind even your not having kissed me. Nothing makes any difference to me as long as it’s you. I’m crying because I’m so glad it’s you, and I can hear your voice again. When I was trying to find you it seemed as if it would never end; it seemed—it seemed——” She raised her wet eyes to his.

He took a swift look up and down the empty, lifeless street, laid out straight and stiff in the cold, faint glimmer of the dawn, and then his lips sought hers in deep, deep acknowledgment of the joy, and of the sorrow, to which all love is born—one of those moments stolen in its beautifulness from the life to come.

But his voice was tense again, as he set her down within her own doorway, and he looked at her with stern eyes of jealous care, from which she hid the woman’s smile of love at dear love’s unreason.

“You’re nearly _dead_! Don’t you stir out of this house to-morrow until I come home—do you hear? _Never_ surprise me again!”

At the Sign of the Rubber Plant

At the Sign of the Rubber Plant

“I wonder _what_ he meant!”

Mrs. Thatcher had risen from the breakfast table from which her husband had departed some time since, after throwing out a mysterious hint about some event in store for her. She had better look out for—what? He had gone before she could question him further.

She went to the front window now, gazing down the street after Bobby, her only child, on his way to the kindergarten. She was a very tall young woman, yet lost none of her femininity by her height; it seemed rather to emphasize it in a willowy droop that always suggested an appealing dependence, in connection with the upward glance of her dark eyes. Her hair was dark, like her eyes, and very thick; her lips were red and curved; her cheeks were usually pale, but there was a faint glow on them now. Nevin had made a terse but complimentary remark about her appearance in that blue cambric morning dress, which she had received with as much innocent surprise as if she had not planned for it. He had also said that he pitied that poor fellow next door whose wife was homely enough to take away his appetite.

Mr. Thatcher’s attitude towards his wife was the subject both of good-natured comment and raillery among her neighbours. His least action towards her was charged, though unobtrusively, with that subtle and intimate attention which one only expects from a lover. He even had a way of helping her up and down the steps that was “different” to the married eye. Patently unintellectual as Mildred Thatcher was, she yet indisputably retained her charm for the man who _was_ intellectual. She had, in fact, that sweet will to be beloved which instinctively foreruns occasion, and makes a place for it in all the little daily matters of life.

“I wonder what he meant! I feel exactly as if somebody would come out from town to-day—it’s such a lovely morning.” She spoke half aloud as she looked down the street through the green feathery foliage of the elms, just out in their spring dress. The sun shone caressingly through them upon the crocuses peeping out in the front grass-plot, and the air, delicately cool, was charged with perfume. There were all the usual adjuncts of spring in the suburbs. A department store wagon was already delivering parcels at a house further down, and several women, fresh and neatly gloved, were alertly stepping trainward to get an early start for the day’s shopping, impelled thither by that soft breeze which woos womankind to the pursuit of clothes. All down the block the palms and rubber plants were being sunned on piazza steps, the former, for the most part, conspicuously brown and withered, but the latter still chunkily green after a winter of furnace heat and dust and gas.

To feel the spring air and not want to spend money was impossible even to Mildred Thatcher, but even if she could have purchased the rug so badly needed for the little drawing-room she would not leave home to-day. She was sure some one would be out from town. She turned now to the maid and gave her orders for luncheon.

“You can make the cold meat into croquettes, Kitty, and we’ll have pop-overs. And I’d like you to wash out the violet centerpiece.”

“Very well, ma’am.”

The hint of a pending pleasure had set its seal on the day. It might be Madge Stanfield who would come, or the Laviers, or her Cousin Lou. She set things to rights, and dusted and arranged daintily, and put fresh violets in the glass vases, and by and by, late in the morning, when all was done, went out on the piazza to listen for the train, while deciding whether or no to send her dwindling palms to the florist. She scrutinized the rubber plant anxiously for some sign of growth. The rubber plant was, in a way, a proof of the demoralizing extremes of Mildred’s nature. For a season she had railed intemperately at rubber plants and their possessors, and then, after moving from a flat to the suburbs, had incontinently gone forth one morning on the spur of the moment and bought one. It somehow didn’t seem as if they were really householders without that green and visible emblem of a much-enduring domesticity. Mrs. Thatcher cherished an idea that her rubber plant would grow with tropical luxuriance, but as yet it had only remained stolidly green.

“Good-morning!”

It was a neighbour, who, deflecting from the pavement, came up, with a paper bag in one hand, to lean familiarly against the post at the foot of the low steps.

“Your plants need water,” she continued, casting an officially critical eye upon them.

“They were watered this morning,” said Mrs. Thatcher.

“It should be done at the same time every day,” said the neighbour, obliviously. “Dear me, it’s getting warm, isn’t it? _You_ look fresh and cool enough. I had to go to the village at the last moment for rolls for lunch. I’m dreadfully tired. Spring weather does make your feet hurt so, doesn’t it? Well—good-bye!”

Mrs. Thatcher still stood looking down the street—a train had come in while they were talking. Yes, there was some one coming—a lady in brown—it must be Madge. No, it was only Mrs. Brereton.

“Back from the city already?” she called, as the figure approached.

“Yes. I only went in to match a sample. Dear me! how warm it is! This weather makes your feet hurt dreadfully. I wanted to stay in town and do something about furnishing the new house, but it takes so long to look at rugs, and I’ve a dressmaker waiting for me at home this moment.” She stopped an instant, leaning against the post, as the other had done. “How dry your plants look! they need water! Mercy! is that Meyer’s wagon stopping before my house? Well, good-bye!”

“Good-bye,” said Mrs. Thatcher, coolly. Not only was Meyer’s wagon standing before Mrs. Brereton’s, but several other wagons from department stores were stopping further up the street, sending forth boys laden up to the chin with fat, brown parcels and long, narrow, brown parcels. Mrs. Thatcher turned around to see yet another friend, who, without her hat, had come out of the house adjoining, and now dropped down beside her on the steps.

“Isn’t it heavenly! I saw you out here and couldn’t resist coming over for a minute. I’ve been sewing so hard on the children’s spring clothes, I’ve hardly had a glimpse of you for a week.—Your plants need water, don’t they?”

“No, they don’t,” said Mrs. Thatcher, with unspeakable exasperation. She controlled herself with an effort as she rose. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go in the house. I’m rather expecting company.”

“The express wagon seems to be coming here,” said the friend detainingly.

“Why, so it is!” cried Mrs. Thatcher, her irritation subsiding before this new interest. The unexpected advent of the express wagon always suggested pleasing and mysterious possibilities to her, until recollection brought to mind the usual case of mineral water, or the box from the tailor’s with her husband’s discarded clothing. This time, however, it was a box of another kind, oblong and wooden. The man who deposited it in the little square hall evidently found it heavy. This, then, was what Nevin had meant.

What could it be? Mrs. Thatcher stubbed her finger with the screw-driver, and hit her own nail lustily with the hammer, in her efforts to open the box. When she finally succeeded, and caught sight of the contents, she pushed it from her with a sharp exclamation of disgust.

Inside were two rows of large, morocco-bound volumes. The gilt lettering on the back showed that they were “Selections from the Literature of All Nations, with Lives of the Authors.”

“Of all things!” said Mrs. Thatcher in a tone of deep disappointment. “What on _earth_ does he want to keep on getting these subscription things for? And he _knows_ we need the money for the rug. He’ll never read these—he’ll never even look at them. I cannot understand it! He never _sees_ a book without wanting to buy it—he says he just likes to _have_ books. Well, _he’ll_ have to find a place to put these, for I can’t.”

“Shall I take the books out of the box, ma’am?” asked Kitty, coming into the hall.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” replied Mrs. Thatcher wearily. “Yes, I suppose you’ll have to; we can’t leave the box here.” She looked over at the tiny drawing-room, with its little spindle-legged mahogany tea-table, the low well-filled bookcase, the rattan sofa with its bright pillows, and the small upright piano, and then at the solid pile of information at her feet. There were thirty volumes—for she had counted them—thirty volumes pressed down and running over with the Literature of All Nations.

“I suppose you’ll have to pile them up in the corner over there. I’m sure _I_ don’t know what to do with them.”

“And shall I put the lunch on now, ma’am?”

“Is it time? Oh, yes; Bobby is coming in. Yes, put it on.”

Croquettes and pop-overs and the violet centerpiece for this arrival by express, indeed! She felt unaccountably defrauded—a sensation that lingered with her throughout the whole afternoon, and tinged her with melancholy, even when she responded to the playful overtures or the needs of Bobby, who kept continually running in from the back yard to have his ball mended, or a string tied to something. He struggled away from her when she wanted to kiss him, and he smelled indescribably of earth. He was of the sex which grew up to have strange ways and alien tastes—he even had them now. Mrs. Thatcher had not wanted a boy, although she loved this one devotedly. She longed inexpressibly sometimes for a dear little gentle, clinging girl, who could be frivolously dressed in soft, white, ruffly things, and have her sweet hair curled.

Mildred Thatcher could never help a mysteriously hurt feeling when her Nevin spent his money for books, or indeed for anything apart from her, of his own volition; there were always so many things needed perennially by “the house,” not to speak of her own wardrobe. Her feminine mind was incapacitated by nature from seeing anything from a man’s point of view—it was from the sheer force of her love alone that she leapt the chasm between them. It was from the heart, not the mind, that she divined what she did of him, as the blind see through feeling finger-tips. And even when she could not perceive how he wanted his own way—nay, when she had protested against it with intensity—after she had once proved herself in the right, she was apt to be overtaken by a sweet, fiercely unreasoning desire that he should have everything he wanted, just because he wanted it, and because he would love her better if he did, and she would grovel, and cringe, and eat her words unblushingly, in her efforts to drive him back into his own path. If she used all her energy now to making him send that wealth of literature back where it came from, she would probably labour still harder the next day to make him get it again.

There was an aloofness in her greeting, when he came home a little earlier than usual, which he was unusually quick to detect. His eyes were agreeably expectant, with none of the deprecation in them which she had looked for. Mr. Thatcher himself was one of Mildred’s inconsistencies. She had sworn that she would never marry any but a very tall man, yet her Nevin, stalwart and broad-shouldered as he was, did not top the highest roll of her dark hair.

“What’s the matter?” His hand lingered on her shoulder. “Don’t you feel well?”

“Oh, yes—pretty well.”

“Did you get the package I sent by express?”

“Yes; what to do with all those volumes I do not know. It is so inconsiderate of you when——”

“Oh, I didn’t mean the books—and I stopped at the carpenter’s; he is going to make shelves for them. But I meant the other package.”

“There wasn’t any other package.”

“Yes, there was”—his arm was still half around her. “I sent you—why here’s the expressman now. Hi! This is the place; yes, bring it here.”

He came back again to his wife. “There was a little debt paid me yesterday. After I got the books, I thought I’d buy a present for you.” He pressed her shoulder gently.

“Oh!”

“Something you’ve been wanting a long time, something you’ll like. It’s the large rug for the parlour.”

“The rug—Nevin, you _didn’t_ get a rug without _me_?”

“You’ll find it’s all right when you see it. Stand off a moment”—he was disposing of the knotted cords with sharp clicks of his penknife. “I’ll spread it out for you. There—what do you think of that?”

“What did you pay for it?” asked Mrs. Thatcher in an odd voice.

“Not much, considering what it’s worth,” said her husband, still exuberant. “It’s genuine something or other, I forget what. I got it at a bargain at a place down-town where they are selling off. It took my eye the moment I saw it. What’s the matter, Mildred? Don’t you like it?”

“Why, it’s very nice,” said Mrs. Thatcher, trying to keep rein on her feelings. “Only _of course_, those reds and yellows don’t go with anything that we have; it would look perfectly dreadful with the old rose wallpaper.”

“Why, I don’t see that it would.”

Mr. Thatcher was still lovingly regarding the article in question, stretched out in the hall. “They put all kinds of colours together nowadays. Here, let me set it out where it belongs, and see if you don’t think it looks all right.”

He switched a chair or two out of the way, moved back the tea-table, and stretched the rug down on the open space on the floor. He stood off admiringly. “Now, don’t you think that’s fine? Why don’t you speak?”

“Oh, Nevin, it’s _too_ dreadful! Can’t you see? It’s a disgrace, a perfect disgrace. I wouldn’t have any one I cared for come into the house with that thing on the floor; I don’t know _what_ they’d think of me.” Her voice had gone beyond control, and rose more and more hysterical.

“Oh, how _could_ you be mean enough to go and buy a rug without me—something I’d set my _heart_ on. A rug, of all _things_, that you have to live with always! And I had been looking forward so to choosing it with you! Why didn’t you tell me about it? It’s so terrible, it’s so _common_——”

“‘Common!’ Now you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Mr. Thatcher’s confidence in the pleasing powers of his purchase died hard. “It’s genuine—I forget just what, but it _is_ genuine. I thought you’d know.”

“I _do_ know—it’s one of the cheapest kinds there are. Nevin, I can’t have it in here, you _must_ understand that. Why, I couldn’t eat my meals if I had to look in and see it. Can’t you take it back and change it?”

“Change it!”

Mildred had known, even as she spoke, that the suggestion was unforgivable. She could go to town merrily, day after day, exchanging goods, but her husband would have felt like a sneak thief if he had taken anything back to “change it.”

“No, I can _not_!” His anger was at last aroused, and thoroughly. “If you don’t like the thing you can chuck it out into the street, for all I care. I tried to give you a pleasure, and this is what I get for it. I’ll never buy you another thing as long as I live!”