Part 15

“Forget her.” Quite so! It was just and simple and sensible. Yet, while I agreed heartily, I had my private misgivings that it might not be so easy to forget a face with that particular quality of witchery about it, a witchery wholly distinct from mere beauty. I've known quite homely women to have it. Not that the brown-and-gold fairy was homely. But I cannot quite think that she was beautiful, either, by the standards of calm and balanced judgment. Only, the calmest judgment would be put to it to preserve its balance with those eyes turned upon it. She had an unbalancing personality, that brown-and-gold fairy, even to an old and rusty-fusty pedagogue like myself.

In fact, she was quite unreasonably vivid to my thoughts for weeks after my one brief meeting with her. I believe that I was actually thinking about her and the Little Red Doctor, seated on my favorite bench in Our Square, on the August morning when a small, soft voice quite close behind me said:--

“Mr. Dominie.”

I got up and turned around. There stood the brown-and-gold fairy. I frowned upon her severely. Not as severely as she doubtless deserved, considering how the Little Red Doctor had winced at the mention of her, but as severely as was practicable in the face of the way she was smiling at me.

“What do you mean by coming up behind me and startling me with your 'Mr. Dominie'?” I demanded.

“I heard the man with the funny hat call you that. Isn't it your name?”

“It will serve. What are you doing in Our Square?”

“I came down to see the place.”

“You came down to see the Little Red Doctor,” I charged.

“Oh, no,” she protested softly. “Just to see the place where he lives. I went near there, but he came out and I ran away.”

“You needn't have,” I said. “He has forgotten you.”

“I don't think it nice of you to say that, Mr. Dominie.”

There was a little break in her voice. I looked away hastily. Though, if I had made her cry, it served her right. I looked back and found that she was not crying. She was laughing. At me!

“He has forgotten you,” I repeated positively, “as he ought.”

“Yes; I suppose he ought,” she assented dolorously. “But he hasn't,” she added with a sudden change to an adorable impertinence. “You know he hasn't. Nobody ever forgets me. You didn't forget me, did you? And you'd only seen me once.”

“Why am I seeing you now?”

“Because you're old and wise and you look kind.”

“I am very old and extremely wise,” I answered, “but my kindly expression is mere senile deterioration of the facial muscles. I am really brutal.”

“But you'll be kind to me,” she averred trustfully.

I surrendered. “What about?”

“I want to see the--the Little Red Doctor, and yet I--I don't want to see him. Do you know what I mean?”

“No. Do you?”

“N-n-no. I suppose I don't exactly. Do you think he'd like to see me?”

“I'm sure he wouldn't.”

Her lip quivered. “And you said you'd be kind to me,” she murmured plaintively.

“Not at all! _You_ said I'd be kind to you. Are you in love with the Little Red Doctor?”

“Of course I'm not!” she asserted violently.

“Then why are you here in Our Square at all? Does the scenery entice you? Are you enthralled by our social advantages? Would you like to meet some of our leading local lights?”

“I would like to meet somebody who is really wise and kind, too wise and kind to make fun of poor little me.”

“That's the Bonnie Lassie,” said I with sudden, inspired conviction. “Come with me.

“Where?” asked the brown-and-gold fairy, hanging back doubtfully.

“To her studio where she sculps wonderful and beautiful things. If I'm any judge she'll sculp you as a butterfly that's lost its way in this wicked--”

“I'm not a butterfly,” interrupted my companion. “I'm a very serious person on a very serious errand.”

“--world,” I proceeded. “And she'll talk to you about the Little Red Doctor--”

“Will she?” murmured the brown-and-gold fairy, moving after me.

“--whom she loves devotedly--”

“Does she!” said the brown-and-gold fairy, stopping short.

“--as every one in Our Square does and ought to--”

“Oh!” remarked the fairy, catching up with me again.

“--for reasons which you should know as well as any one.”

“I don't,” retorted the fairy, mutinously. “Who is the Bonnie Lassie? You all have such queer names here, Mr. Dominie!”

“In private life she's Mrs. Cyrus Staten: otherwise Cecily Willard.”

The golden lights in the fairy's eyes deepened with astonishment. “Not the famous Miss Willard who does the figurines! Does she live way down here in this--this--”

“Slum,” I supplied. “Don't be afraid to say it. Our Square isn't sensitive to what outsiders think of us.”

“This nice, queer old park,” concluded the fairy with dignity. “And I suppose she is very old and wise and--is she kind?”

“She is very young and lovely to look at and as wise as she needs to be for her own happiness and--come along and see her.”

“But you mustn't tell her--'' was as far as she got when the Bonnie Lassie came out of the studio with a smudge of clay on the tip of her chin, and regarded my pink and captive fairy with undisguised amazement.

“This young discovery of mine,” I explained, “has come to Our Square for the purpose of _not_ seeing the Little Red Doctor. Dead-Men's-Shoes struck up a professional acquaintance with her in the country and told her about the Doctor--whom she doesn't want to see--being in Our Square. As she hasn't seen him for several years and as he has been trying hard and conscientiously to forget her, she has come, _incognita_, where he is, in order to keep on not seeing him and to discover whether he has forgotten. It's all just as simple as it sounds.”

My fairy suddenly became a person, and a very decided person. “I beg your pardon,” she said. “I am _not incognita_. My name is Ethel Bennington, and I think you are a very unkind old man.”

The Bonnie Lassie set a slender, strong hand on the visitor's wrist and drew her within. “Never mind him, my dear,” she said softly. “He isn't really unkind. He's just a tease.” She paused and studied her caller a moment. Then, with her irresistible smile, she said: “I know it's dreadful of me--but, _would_ you mind if I just sketched you hastily?”

Now, that may have been the artist of it breaking through, or it may have been just the way of her invincible tact and management; you never can tell, with the Bonnie Lassie. But it's a proven fact that nobody can sit to her without giving up his heart's secrets, and sometimes she puts them in the bronze. Most unfairly I was banished, for the brown-and-gold fairy with a flush of pleasure said she'd sit at once. And from that sitting grew another sitting and another and many to follow. Sometimes I was bidden in. It was a sheer delight to sit there and watch those two young creatures, the sculptress gay and sunny and splendid in the glad beauty of power and achievement; the model, wistful, sweet, and vivid by turns, a fairy from a brighter world bringing her fairy gold to our grim and dusty neighborhood. Out of a working silence the brown-and-gold fairy spoke one day.

“Is he poor?”

“Is who--” I began.

But the quicker apprehension of the artist cut in on me.

“It isn't exactly a fashionable practice, the Little Red Doctor's. Is it, dominie?”

“No. But poor--certainly not, by the standards of Our Square. He has a new black suit for professional service every year.”

“Um!” said the fairy doubtfully. Then, after a pause, “He could have been rich, you know.”

“Could he?” said the Bonnie Lassie, holding her iron poised over the shadow of a flying dimple.

“An invention. Something to do with his surgery,” explained the girl. “Father said there were big possibilities in it. He offered to finance it himself. But he--the Lit--Dr. Smith wouldn't even take out a patent on it.”

The Bonnie Lassie lowered her weapon. “Do you mean the pressure brace for atrophy?”

“Yes,” said the girl, surprised. “How do you know about it?”

“Cyrus's uncle--he's Dr. Hardaman, the great orthopedic surgeon--says that there are thousands of children walking to-day who owe their legs to that brace of the Little Red Doctor's.”

“You never told any of us about that!” I cried.

“No,” she answered composedly. “It seemed to make the Little Red Doctor uncomfortable when Cyrus spoke of it. So we kept it quiet.”

“You see, he might really have made a fortune by patenting it,” said the brown-and-gold fairy.

“That is what I asked Uncle Charles. He said that physicians, the best type, don't take out patents. You see, the patent would have made the brace cost more, and the more it cost the fewer people could buy it, and that would mean more children who ought to have walked and couldn't. And, oh, my dear! if you could see the poor, pitiful, wee things as we see them in Our Square, withered and hobbling like old, worn-out folk --”

“Don't! Don't!” cried the girl. “I--I never thought of it that way.”

“Why should you? But the Little Red Doctor would.”

“Yes, but he didn't explain it that way,” said the brown-and-gold fairy miserably. “He said something stupid about ethics, and I said something I didn't mean--and,”--her head drooped,--“and that was our last quarrel.”

“And you loved him all the time, and still do,” said the Bonnie Lassie gently.

“I didn't! I don't!” denied the brown-and-gold fairy vehemently.

“Then why have you come down here?” demanded the inexorable sculptress.

“Because,” said the fairy in a fairy's whisper, “I--I just wanted to see him again. All the other men are so _alike_.”

“Yes; yes, I know,” said the Bonnie Lassie and threw an arm over her shoulder, and gave me a swift and wordless command to go away and be quick about it.

For the subsequent developments of the affair I expressly disclaim all responsibility. True, I was made an agent. But that was coercion, such coercion as the Bonnie Lassie practices on all of us. The scheme was hers and hers alone. If there is a weakness in the Bonnie Lassie's character, it is overfondness for the romantic and the dramatic. She loves to set the stage and move the puppets, and be the goddess from the machine generally. Miss Ethel Bennington, cast for the leading part, accepted it all implicitly, for in the strange environment of Our Square she was uncertain and self-distrustful, and she readily fell in with the dramatist's principal theme; to wit, that she had treated the Little Red Doctor very ill, and said wounding things hard to be forgiven by a high-spirited, sensitive, and red-headed lover; that any basis of pardon and understanding would be difficult and painful to arrive at, but that if he found her in straits and needing him, then the truth would come out and she would know at once whether he still cared for her or not, a point upon which my brown-and-gold fairy had her dismal doubts, it seems. Therefore she would please buy herself a working outfit and take a job with--well--with Dead-Men's-Shoes. Just the thing! Dead-Men's-Shoes, knowing so much of the matter, would require little explanation. The labor, sorting over and classifying his residuary apparel, would be not too violent; and the Little Red Doctor passed by the door daily on his way to the top floor to visit little Fannie McKay who had the rickets. It was only a question of time when he would find the fairy there toiling in poverty. Such was the setting devised by the Bonnie Lassie to bring those two together. For the rest, let Fate take its course.

Fate did. For their own private reasons, or perhaps in sheer derision of the human dramatist's puny efforts, the High Gods of Drama took a hand in the affair. They smote the Little Red Doctor, if not exactly hip and thigh, at least, tooth and jaw; so that he was incapacitated for any sort of decent, peaceable human association. They gave him an abominable toothache. The Bonnie Lassie came across Our Square to apprise me of the fact, with dismay in her face.

“What's a toothache,” I said, “in such circumstances!”

The Bonnie Lassie looked at me scornfully. “Men have no sense,” she sighed. “Do you think I'm going to have their meeting spoiled by a wretched thing like that, after all these years? Besides, he's all swollen on one side.”

“I see. You don't wish his classic beauty impaired on this occasion.”

“Don't be disagreeable. And do be good. Go to the Little Red Doctor and tell him he must have it fixed.”

I went to the Little Red Doctor and told him that very thing. To this day I believe that my age alone saved me from a murderous assault. “Have it fixed?” howled the Little Red Doctor. “Don't you suppose I want to have it fixed? Don't be an imbecile, dominie.”

“Then come along now to Doc Selters and get it filled.”

“I don't want it filled. I want it pulled. I want to get it out and stamp on it!”

“Well, he will pull it.”

“He will _not_. He says it's got to be saved. He's killing the nerve--on the Spanish Inquisition principle. I'd go to the fifty cent yankers this minute if I didn't have a saw-off with Selters.”

“A what?”

“A saw-off. A professional exchange. He owes me two liver-attacks and a diffuse laryngitis; and the best he'll do,” cried the Little Red Doctor, dancing with rage and pain, “is to say that the worst of it is over. D----n his eyes!”

Plainly, the Bonnie Lassie was right. The Little Red Doctor was in no state to meet vital issues. I went over to Dead-Men's-Shoes' place, and there beheld the brown-and-gold fairy skillfully sewing trouser buttons on waistcoats. She looked tired and pathetic, and when she saw me she jumped up and ran to me.

“Oh, Mr. Dominie!” she cried. “Where is he?”

I shook my head. Somehow I hadn't the heart to obtrude as unpoetic a _motif_ as a toothache upon that prospective romance.

“I've worked and worked and worked,” she said, with a drooping mouth, “and he doesn't come. And Miss Willard won't tell me why. I'm sure something has happened to him. Has there?”

“Why, no,” I said. “That is--er--certainly not!”

“There has!” She set her hands on my shoulders and explored my face with her sweet, anxious eyes. “Tell me. You _must_ tell me! It was you who brought me here.” (Oh, the justice of womankind!) “Was it, indeed!”

“Well, it is your fault that--that I came. You encouraged me.” She let her hands drop and her eyes darkened with reproach. “Won't you tell me if he is ill?”

“He isn't ill. On honor.”

Despite her workaday garb, she was instantly metamorphosed into the brown-and-gold fairy again. “Then, when is he coming?”

“I don't know.”

“You do! But you won't tell. You're playing with me, you and Miss Willard.”

“Didn't you play with the Little Red Doctor? What about that clandestine message in the toe of the shoe?”

“Oh!” She had the grace to blush (and a brown-and-gold fairy's blush is something to cherish in memory). But at once curiosity overbore shame. “Did you give him the shoes yourself? What did he say when he put them on?” Recalling the impassioned monosyllable which signalized the Little Red Doctor's original discovery of the hairpin, I replied truthfully enough: “I don't think that would interest you.”

“Don't you? Then how did he look?”

“Severe.”

“I know! Oh, how well I know!” Her voice declined to a caressing murmur. “And all the time there's that twinkle of fun and sympathy underneath the frown. Oh, ever so deep underneath! It took me a long time to find it.”

“And longer to forget it?” I suggested with malice.

“I don't want to forget it,” retorted the fairy loftily. “I could if I chose. You're sure there isn't anything the matter with him?”

“I never said there wasn't anything the matter with him. I said he wasn't ill.”

“Oh, well, I think it's very mean of you. You may go and sit on that pile of coats--the unpressed ones--and watch me work my poor fingers to the bone sewing on buttons until your hard heart softens and you come to a properer frame of mind.”

Accordingly I sat down and contemplated, not without a certain grim satisfaction, the spectacle of a brown-and-gold fairy sentenced to honest labor. Shadows deepened in the room until she was almost in darkness. If the necessity of labor weighed upon her blithe spirit, she gave no evidence of it, for presently she began to hum to herself in a soft, crooning undertone, “speech half-asleep or song half-awake.” Clearer and clearer grew the melody, waxing to full awakeness, as the fresh and lovely young voice filled the room with the verse, one single line of which had dragged the Little Red Doctor's heart back across the unforgetting years:--

“The falling dew is cold and chill, And no bird sings in Arcady; The little fauns have left the hill; Even the tired daffodil Has closed its gilded doors, and still My lover comes not back to me.”

The girlish voice trembled and stopped. The singer's hands fell into her lap. Her eyes dreamed. I think she must have forgotten, in the spell of music that she wove, the presence of an old man in the darkening room. I heard a soft, weary little catch of the breath, and then a name pronounced low and beseechingly, “Chris.” Now, this drama, as laid out by that romantic manageress the Bonnie Lassie, did not include music. The fairy song, I strongly suspect, was the interposition of the Higher Gods of Destiny. For the spell of it evolved and made real the past, and out of the past stepped the Little Red Doctor and stood trembling in the doorway of the ol'-clo' repository.

“Who sang?” he gasped.

I sat motionless. Neither the Bonnie Lassie nor the Higher Fates had assigned me a speaking part in the crisis.

“Whose voice was that?” said the Little Red Doctor fearfully. “Am I hearing sounds that don't exist?”

Out of the deepest of the shadows came the voice, broken, and thrilling.

“Chris! Oh, Chris, is it really you?”

“Ethel!” said the Little Red Doctor in a breathless cry.

He stumbled halfway across the dim room, encountered a chair, and stopped. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. His voice had hardened suddenly to that of a cross-examiner.

All the appealing and dramatic fiction which the Bonnie Lassie had carefully instilled into her subject for this crisis--the once rich and careless butterfly girl now brought low in the world and working for her precarious living--went by the board. “I--I-d-d-d-don't know,” stammered the brown-and-gold fairy.

“You--don't--know,” he repeated. Then, vehemently; “You must know.” Silence from the dim corner.

“Have you come back here to make my life wretched with longing again?”

“No. Oh, no!”

“Well? Why, then?”

“Don't be cruel to me, Chris,” pleaded the voice, a very wee, piteous voice now. Brown-and-gold fairies should not be bullied by little, red, fierce men with the toothache. They are not accustomed to it and they don't know how to defend themselves. Up to this moment my one purpose had been to tiptoe unobtrusively to the door and escape. Now I wondered whether I ought not to stay and offer aid to the abused fairy. At the next word from the Little Red Doctor, however, I gave up that notion, and resumed my cautious retreat.

“I? Cruel--to you?” he said desolately. Then, after a long pause: “I can't see you. I'm glad I can't see you. If you could know how many times I've seen you since--since I went away.”

“Seen me? Where?”

“Nowhere. Everywhere. Night after weary night. For a year. Or perhaps it was two years. Only, then you weren't real. You didn't sing.”

“Ah!” The exclamation hardly stirred the air. But I knew, as well as if I had seen it, that the woman's eyes of the brown-and-gold fairy were yearning to him and that her hands were pressed over her woman's heart, which yearned to him, too.

“No. You never sang to me. You spoke. You said the same thing over and over again. You said, 'I don't love you and I never did love you and I never could love you.'”

There was a stifled cry from the darkness, and a rustle and the sound of swift, light feet. Two dim figures met and merged in one. The fairy voice, with a desperate effort to be still a voice and not quite a sob of mingled pity and joy, murmured brokenly: “I--I d-d-don't love you. But I c-c-can't live away from you.” And I passed out, on tiptoe, unnoted. The tiptoe feature was, I dare say, superfluous. I suppose I might have marched out to the blare of a brass band and with a salvo of artillery, and still have been as a formless, soundless wraith to the Little Red Doctor who stood holding all heaven and earth in his arms.

Quarter of an hour afterward I sat on the front steps of the house of Dead-Men's-Shoes musing. The Little Red Doctor and the brown-and-gold fairy came out together. They were conversing in demure tones and with a commonplace air about the prospects of rain. So wholly at ease and natural did they seem that I began to have misgivings. It didn't seem in human nature that they should be calmly discussing the weather. Could I have fallen asleep on my heap of mortuary clothing and dreamed all that happiness of theirs? I rose and intercepted them.

“How is the toothache?” I asked the Little Red Doctor.

The Little Red Doctor turned on me a face transfigured. “What toothache?” he said vaguely.

Then I knew that my dream was reality.

THE END