Part 3

Hardly had the hostess seated her guest in the most comfortable corner of the big divan when there was a stir at the door, and a rangy, big-boned figure, clad in the unmistakable garb of honest labor, appeared, blinking a little at the lights. Instantly the Undertaker, in his rôle of official announcer, dashed forward to greet him. “Gentlemen _and_ ladies,” he proclaimed, “introducing Mr. Casey Jones, late of the Salt Lake Line.”

“Sing it, you Son of Toil!” shouted somebody, and Cyrus the Gaunt promptly obliged, in a clear and robust baritone, leading the chorus which came in jubilantly.

The elderly “Mrs. Sparkles” was not interested in the harmony; but she was interested in the face of her hostess, which had flushed a startled pink. She asked a question under cover of the music.

“That is your model, is it not?”

“Yes.”

“What is he in real life?”

“As you see him.”

“In--deed? What is he doing it for?”

“Two and a half a day, I believe.”

“Quite enough. But why?”

“I never asked him.” And the Bonnie Lassie tripped over to her newest guest, leaving her next-to-newest quite busy with thought.

Owing to the demands upon a hostess,

Cyrus the Gaunt saw very little of her in the brief hour remaining to him. One dance he succeeded in claiming.

“You see,” he remarked, “I came to your party anyway, although uninvited.”

“I didn't give it. It was a surprise,” she explained. “But the job?”

“They've put me on an hour later.”

“You still like it?”

“It limits one socially more than being a model,” he replied solemnly.

“But you are sticking to it?” she persisted.

“Oh, yes, I'm sticking to it, all right.”

“Even if--No matter what happens?”

“What is going to happen?” he asked gravely.

“Nothing,” she said hurriedly. “But it's the job for the job's sake with you now, isn't it?”

“I like the feel of it, if that's what you mean. The feel of being competent to hold it down.”

She nodded with content in her eyes. But he was troubled.

“You had something in mind--” he began, when another partner claimed her, while he was dragged off to assist in an improvised glee-club.

His time was up all too soon, and without chance of a further word from her, other than a formal farewell. In the little rear hallway whither he had made his way through his protesting fellow-revelers, he reached up for his coat, and felt something lightly brush the top of his head. He looked up. It was a sprig of mistletoe. At the same moment two firm hands closed over his eyes, and light, swift lips just grazed his cheek.

Cyrus the Gaunt fell a-trembling. He turned slowly, and found himself confronting a total stranger. The stranger had gray hair and a tired face lighted by crinkly eyes. “Oh!” said Cyrus the Gaunt with an irrepressible bitterness of disappointment.

“Frankness,” observed his salutant, “may or may not be a compliment to the object of it.” Cyrus remained mute. “Who did you _hope_ it was?” Silence seemed still the best policy. “If you are offended”--the eyes twinkled with added keenness--“I will apologize honorably.”

“Let me do it for you,” said Cyrus the Gaunt politely, and kissed the unknown square upon the lips.

She drew back. “Well!” she began; then she laughed. “The _entente cordiale_ having been established, _what_ are you doing here, Cyrus Staten?”

He gasped and gaped. “Do I know you?”

“Having neither memory nor manners, you do not. But I spent weeks at your country place when you were a boy, painting your father. Permit me to introduce myself.” And she gave a name so great that even Cyrus's comprehensive carelessness of art was not ignorant of it.

“Great snakes!” he ejaculated. “I--I'm sorry I kissed you.”

“Oh, I'm human. I rather liked it,” she chuckled, “even though I am old and stately. But how have you contrived to preserve your incognito?”

“Easy enough. This is another world. Look out!” he added as the curtain behind them moved. “Somebody's coming.” The hanging swung aside and the Bonnie Lassie emerged. “Oh!” she said in surprise. “Do you know each other?”

“We were becoming acquainted when you interrupted,” replied the woman. She turned a disconcerting gaze upon her hostess. “Where did you get him?” she demanded, exactly as if Cyrus weren't there. “Oh, please!” cried the girl.

“Don't mind me,” said Cyrus politely, sensible that something was going on which he didn't grasp. “I'm used to it.” He turned to the mighty artist. “You see, in real life I'm a studio model.”

“Are you?” retorted the genius. “I thought you were an engineer. Now I begin to suspect you are a fraud. Well, I have something to say to Miss Prim, here. Run you away and play with your job.”

“So that's your young Lincoln,” she observed, as Cyrus moodily accepted his dismissal, and passed out.

“He doesn't know it.”

“You have missed even more than I thought, in him.”

“I've done my best,” said the girl dispiritedly. “He's too big for little me.”

“Hm! You haven't told me yet where you got him.”

“'The wild wind blew him to my close-barred door,'” quoted the girl.

“A good many wild winds have blown about Cyrus Staten from time to time.”

“Who?”

“Cyrus Staten; don't you _know_ him?”

“No, I picked him up from the bench in Our Square.”

“Which the Statens used to own, by the way. Well, the _facilis descensus_ of an idle waster from the world of white lights and black shadows to a park-bench is nothing new.”

“Does he look like an idle waster?”

“He does _not_. Therein lies a miracle. What is he doing now?”

“Running the steam-roller, outside.” The face of the girl melted into lovely and irrepressible mirth.

“Ah! That explains much. But not all. What is your part in this?”

“You have seen it.” She nodded backward toward the studio.

“Not that. As a woman? What have you been doing to that boy to make him what he is?”

The girl took her soft lip grievously between her teeth for a moment before answering. “I've been playing my child's tricks with a real man--and now I'm being sorry.”

“And paying for it?”

The Bonnie Lassie's head drooped.

“Is he paying for it, too?”

“No.”

“No? Well, when I played a little surprise on him and kissed him under the mistletoe, I thought that tall and massive youth was going to faint away like a school-miss in my supporting arms, until he saw who it was. What do you suppose his expectations--”

“You had no right to take such an advantage,” flashed the girl, turning crimson.

“So?” The great woman smiled. “But I think my own thoughts. When one pays, or the other pays, that is well. It is the chance of the play. But when both pay--oh, that is wrong, wrong, wrong as wrong can be!”

“I can't help it,” said the girl, very low. “There is a previous debt.” And she turned aside a face so woe-begone that her interrogator forbore further pressure.

“At least,” she said, “the artist must complete the work, at whatever cost to the woman. You will finish _that?_” She jerked her head toward the studio.

“I--I suppose so. If I can.”

On the way home the genius caught a glimpse of Cyrus the Gaunt upon his triumphal chariot, and halted her auto the better to laugh. As the lumbering, clamoring monster drew opposite, she signaled. Cyrus did something abstruse to the mechanism, which groaned and clanked itself into stillness.

“Young man,” she hailed, “I have a message for you.”

“From whom?” said Cyrus hopefully. “From myself. This is it: Be careful.”

“I am,” said Cyrus with conviction, “the carefulest captain that ever ploughed the stormy pave.”

“Be careful,” she repeated, disregarding his interpretation, “or she'll make a man of you yet. The process is sometimes painful--like most creative processes, Home, Joseph.”

Many of the Bonnie Lassie's outlander guests passed Cyrus the Gaunt that night, but none other identified or noticed him. The latest departures were two heavily swathed youths who paused to light cigarettes in the lee of Cyrus's iron steed.

“Some little farewell party, wasn't it?” the engineer overheard them say. “Why wasn't the happy Bascom there?”

“Not back from Europe yet. I understand Morris Cartwright fixed things up, and the engagement is to be formally announced on his return.”

“It's a shame,” growled the first speaker. “Bascom's all right, but he's old enough to be her father. Wasn't she a dream and a vision to-night!”

“It was one of those legacy engagements, I believe. Dead-father's-wish sort of thing. All right, I suppose, so long as there's no one else. Who was the engineer guy? He seemed to be a reg'lar feller.”

The twain passed on, leaving Cyrus the Gaunt stiff and stricken in his seat. How he got through the next hour he hardly knew. He remembered vaguely a protest from sundry citizens who resented being charged off the cross-walks by a zigzagging juggernaut, a query from Terry the Cop whether he was off his feed, and the startled face of old man Sittser, who paused to pass the time of night on his way home from the late shift on the linotype and was incontinently cursed for his pains. Full consciousness of the practical world was brought back to Cyrus by the purring of a sleek auto close at hand as he curved out at the corner for his straightaway course. He was just gathering momentum when he caught sight of the Bonnie Lassie's face, white and wistful, soft-eyed and miserable, confronting darkness and vacancy from within the luxurious limousine.

Well, nobody can catch a sixty-horsepower motor-car with a ten-ton steamroller.

Cyrus, to do him justice, tried his best. They stopped one dollar and forty cents out of his Saturday's envelope for what he and the roller did to the barriers and lanterns. By the time he had swung into the cross-street, trailing wreckage, the Bonnie Lassie was out of sight and out of his world.

IV

Winter comes, stern and sharp, like an unpaid landlord, to Our Square, with sleet and gale for its agents of eviction. No longer are the benches blithe with the voice of love or play or gossip. The wind has blown them all away. A few tenacious leaves still cling, withered, brown, and clattering, to the trees, “bare, ruin'd choirs where late' the sweet birds sang,” and a few hardy stragglers beat across the unprotected spaces, just to maintain, as it were, the human right of way against the gray rigor of the skies. But, for the most part, we of Our Square, going about our concerns, huddle as close as may be to the lee of walls, for--though we would not for the world have it known--many of us are none too warmly clad. Behind the blank opaqueness of the bordering windows one may surmise much want and penury and cold, which, also, we keep to ourselves. Our Square has its pride. We do not publish our trials.

Perhaps Cyrus the Gaunt knew as much of them as any. For, by imperceptible gradations, he had become the 'confidant, the judge, the arbiter of our difficulties, and the friend of the shyest, the hardest, and the proudest of us alike. His engine-seat was become a throne, from whence he dispensed every good thing but charity. That word and all that follows in its train he hated. Which shows that he had learned Our Square. After hours he would “drop in,” almost secretly, on some friend; and it was a curious coincidence that Cyrus's friends were chosen apparently on the basis of need and distress. He had that rare knack of helping out without involving the aided one in the coils of obligation. There is nothing Our Square wouldn't have done for Cyrus the Gaunt. I believe he could even have been elected alderman.

Winter drove Cyrus from his perch and put a brake on the thunder-wagon before the job was quite finished. There still remained some final repairs which must now wait for the spring, on the side where the Bonnie Lassie's little house stood, bleak and desolate. Not wholly deserted, however, for one brave and happy dancer still stuck to her post in the window, lifting a thrilled face to the sky. Other employment claimed Cyrus the Gaunt until his iron steed should come out of the stable; a day job on a stationary engine around in Pike Street. Our Square remarked with concern that the indoor employment didn't seem to suit Cyrus the Gaunt. He became gaunter and thinner and more melancholy-looking, and more than once he was seen on wild nights, when nobody was supposed to be out late, staring at the now quite unembarrassed house with the quaint little door and the broad vestibule. But though the light and cheer that Our Square had seen grow in Cyrus's face in the early days of his job, were graying over, there increased the new understanding and sympathy and determination, in lines that he had put there himself in the building of his new manhood. Thus, only, in this perplexing world, does a man lift himself by his own boot-straps.

Though Cyrus the Gaunt could boast a thousand friends, he had accepted but one intimate. That was MacLachan the tailor. Every day they lunched on frankfurters and kohlrabi at Schwartz's. Thither Cyrus was wont to have his scanty mail sent from the house where he lodged. One blustery December day the tailor arrived late, to find his friend fingering a pink slip of paper, of suggestive appearance.

“Ye'll have been aimin' a bit ootside!” commented MacLachan.

Cyrus flipped the paper over to him.

“Save us!” cried the awe-stricken Scot. “It's a thousan' dollars. All in the one piece!”

“Two months overdue. He didn't have my address, I suppose.”

“Ha'e ye been drawin' a lottery?”

“No. It's a bet. Also my release. I'd almost forgotten. My time's up.”

“Ye'll not be leavin' us?” said the tailor. Cyrus avoided his eyes. “I'm through, Mac,” he said dully. “It's no use. It's not worth while. Nothing's worth while.” There was a long pause. “Mon,” said MacLachan finally, “ha'e ye tho't what this'll mean to Our Square?”

Cyrus the Gaunt thought. Behind the curtain of his impenetrable face there passed a panorama of recent memories; events which had, for the first time in his career, made him one with the fabric of life. Faces appealed to him; hands were outstretched to him confidently for the friendly help that he could give so well; the voices of the children hailed him as a fellow; the baseball team which did most of its practice at noon on the asphalt claimed a corner of his memory; his ears rang with the everyday greetings of his own people, and another panorama, summoned up by the pink slip, faded away. Cyrus folded the check and put it carefully in the pocket of his overalls.

“Ye'll be stayin' here,” said MacLachan contentedly, having read his expression.

Cyrus nodded. Then the tailor's dour-ness fell from him for the moment. He laid a hand on his friend's shoulder. “Laddie,” he said, “the little bronze dancer is in the window yet.”

Cyrus turned a haggard face to him. “I know,” he said.

“Do ye make nothin' o' that?”

“Nothing. You know why--what she went away for.”

“I ha'e haird.”

“Well, I'm learning to forget.”

“The little bronze dancer is in the window yet,” repeated the obstinate Scot.

How Cyrus won through that long winter is his own affair. Our Square respects other people's troubles. It asked no questions. Finally winter broke and fled before a southeast wind full of fragrance, and the trees began to whisper important tidings to each other; and a pioneer butterfly of the deepest, most luminous purple-black, with buff edges to its wings, arrived and led the whole juvenile populace such a chase as surely never was since the Pied Piper fluted his seductions long ago; and the benches came out of their long retreat, fresh-painted, to stand sturdy and stiff in their old places; and so did Cyrus's thun-der-wagon, whereon he perched nightly once more, and was even more than before the taciturn, humorous, kindly, secret, friendly adviser to all and sundry.

Then, one crisp March evening he became aware of a strong, bent, feminine figure beckoning him from the curbstone. Clanging to a halt, he heard a voice, unforgettable through its tinge of foreign accent, say: --

“How do you do? I have been seeing your face all through my travels.” Cyrus took off his working-cap and shook hands. “So I have come back to look at it. It's thin. Would you like to be painted?”

“I don't think so, thank you. I've been sculped within an inch of my life.”

“So I have understood,” said the Very Great Woman with a smile not devoid of sympathy. “You are not done with it yet. She is coming.”

The face of Cyrus the Gaunt lighted marvelously.. “Coming back to Our Square?” he cried. Then the light faded. “But--”

“But me no buts. She is coming. I did it. I found that she had never finished you. So I told her that if she did not come back and finish, I would take you away from her and finish you myself. And, oh, I am as bad a sculptor as I am a good painter---almost!” Her laughter rang in the chill air. “So she comes. And I have traveled all the way to this impossible spot to play traitor. The question is: Are you a man? You look it, at last!”

“The question is--Will you answer me one?”

“No! No! No! No! No! Put your questions where they belong. Farewell, my Phaëthon of the Slums.”

The world was mad with the wine of the wind the night the Bonnie Lassie came back to Our Square. All our trees waved their lean arms in welcome and sent down little buds as messengers of joy over her return. Of living welcomers there was none, for the gale had swept all humans before it, except Terry the Cop, and he didn't recognize her, from the distance, in her other-worldly raiment. That must have cost her a pang. Unnoticed she crept into the little, old, quaint, friendly house, and its doors closed behind her like the reassurance of a friendly arm. She set herself in the dark window where the blithe dancer still tripped it, faithful and lonely, and waited for Cyrus the Gaunt. But when she saw his face, the Bonnie Lassie didn't sculp. She cried.

Cyrus mounted to his seat and pulled the lever over. The engine was running badly that night, and the wind almost blew him from his perch. Aside from the improbability that the little sculptor would brave such weather, the charioteer was presently so immersed in his own immediate concerns that he all but forgot the prospective visit. When he had brought his charge to its senses and reduced it to some control, he was interrupted by the plight of a belated push-cart woman, who was dragging anchor and drifting fast to leeward under the furious impulsion of the nor'easter. Cyrus had just dragged her almost from under his ponderous wheels, when a beam flashed in his eyes, and he looked up to see a truck close upon them. His yell split the darkness. The truck-driver, with a mighty wrench, swung his vehicle sharp to the left, and up on the sidewalk.

The uptilted lights shone full into the lower window of the little, old, friendly house. Pressed against that window Cyrus saw the apparition of a tear-softened, desolate visage. Reason, prudence, and propriety deserted their posts in his brain simultaneously. A dozen long-legged leaps carried him as far as the vestibule of the little house. There his knees basely weakened. Perhaps her heart divined his step and sent her forth to meet him; or perhaps it was his old ally, Chance, that brought her into the vestibule as he stood there shaking.

“Oh!” she cried, and shrank back into a corner, with a deprecatory movement, which to him was infinitely pathetic.

“I'm sorry,” said Cyrus. “I saw your face and thought you were in trouble. If--if you wanted me to sit for you again,” he said composedly, “I should be very glad to, until you've finished your sketch.”

“Oh, no. I couldn't ask you. I couldn't think of--after--what--what--” Her voice waned into silence.

“Don't feel that way at all,” he encouraged her with resolved cheerfulness. “I can be a model and nothing more, again, I assure you.”

Her upturned eyes implored him. “Don't be cruel,” she said.

“Cruel?” he repeated wonderingly.

“Not at all. I'll be polite. It isn't too late to offer my best wishes. Though I'm not sure I know the name.”

“What name?”

“Your--your married name.”

“Then you don't know?” she gasped. The brain of Cyrus the Gaunt suddenly went numb. “I know you went away from us to get married.”

“I did,” she quavered. “But I couldn't. I--I--I tried to make myself go through with it. I couldn't. No woman could when--when--” Her voice trembled into silence.

A boisterous back-draft of the tempest thrust its way through the door and puffed out the little vestibule light. With a sense of irreparable loss impending he felt, rather than heard, her moving from him into the blackness of the outer world. Yet his mind seemed clogged and chained as he strove to grasp the meaning of what she had said--or was it what she had left unsaid?

And in a moment she would be gone forever.

Suddenly--miracle of miracles!--he felt those soft, strong hands on his arm, and heard her sobbing appeal: “Oh, Cyrus! Aren't you ever going to smile at me inside again?”

His arms went out. The Bonnie Lassie's hands slipped up to his shoulder. The flower-face pressed, close and cold and sweet, against his.

“Love of my heart!” he cried, “I'll never do anything else all my life long.”

Summer is tyrant in Our Square now. The leaves droop, flaccid and dusty, on the trees, and the sun gives a shrewish welcome to the faithful who still cling to the benches. Gone is Cyrus's chariot of flame and thunder. The work is done. Gone, too, is Cyrus, and with him the Bonnie Lassie, after a wedding duly set forth with much pomp and splendor in the public prints. Among those present was Our Square.

So now the little, quaint, old, friendly house stands vacant, with eager sunbeams darting about it in search of entry. Vacant but not cheerless, for behind the panes, against which the Bonnie Lassie once pressed her sorrowful face, troop the elfin company of her dream-children, the dancing figurines. Cyrus the Gaunt would have it so. He deeded her the house as a wedding-gift, that the happy dancers might remain with us lonely and unforgetting folk. They are the promise that one day Our Bonnie Lassie will come back to Our Square.

THE CHAIR THAT WHISPERED

An Idyl of Our Square

SPRING was in Our Square when I first saw the two of them. They sat on a bench under the early lilacs. It must have been the beginning of it all for them, I think, for there was still a dim terror in her face, and he gestured like one arguing stormily. At the last she smiled and drew a cluster of the lilac bloom down to her cheek. It was not deeper-hued than her eyes, nor fresher than her youth. They rose and passed me, alone on my bench, and I, who am wise in courtships, having watched so many bud and blossom on the public seats of Our Square, saw that this was no wooing, but some other persuasion, though what I could not guess.

So those two drifted out of sight; out of mind, too, for life in our remote, unconsidered, and slum-circled little park is a complex and swiftly changing actuality, and it crowds in with many pressures upon a half-idle old pedagogue like myself. It was the Little Red Doctor who, weeks later, recalled the episode, one blistering evening of the summer's end. He captured me as I emerged from the “penny-circulator” with my thumb in a book.

“What are we ruining our eyes with to-night?” he demanded.

I held up the treasure.

“'Victory,'” he read. “Good! He'll like Conrad.”

Perceiving what was expected, I fulfilled the requirements by asking: “Who will like Conrad?”

“The Gnome.”

I remembered that I had not seen Leon Coventry since the day he passed me with the girl who had youth and spring and terror in her face.

“Am I to loan it to him?”

“You're to read it to him.”

“When?”

“To-night. It's your turn to sit up.”

“Is the Gnome ill?”

“Worse.”

“Mad?”

“Haunted.”

“Since when has your practice branched out into the supernatural, doctor?”

“Oh, as for that, his trouble is physical too.”

“Is it anything that a simple lay mind could grasp?”