Chapter 2

A crashing blow upon the door startled Mrs. Breckenridge so that she cried out under her breath. Brown went to the door. A furious gust of wind hurled it wide open beneath his hand, but there was no one upon the doorstep. No one? At his feet lay a bundle, from which sounded a wailing cry. He picked it up, looked up and down a vacant street, closed the door, and came back to Sue Breckenridge by the fire.

"I wonder if they chose the bachelor's doorstep by chance or by intention," he said.

V

BROWN'S UNBORROWED BABY

"Don! Don't take it in! They'll come back for it if you don't--they're watching somewhere. Put it back on the doorstone--don't look at it!"

"Why, Sue!" he answered, and for an instant his eyes flashed reproof into hers. "On such a night?"

"But what can you do with it?"

"Make it comfortable, first."

He was unwrapping the bundle. The child was swathed none too heavily in clean cotton comforters; it was crying frantically, and its hands, as Brown's encountered them in the unwinding, were cold and blue. There emerged from the wrappings an infant of possibly six weeks' existence in a world which had used it ill.

"Will you take him while I get some milk?" asked Brown, as naturally as if handing crying babies over to his sister were an everyday affair with them both.

She shook her head, backing away. "Oh, mercy, no! I shouldn't know what to do with it."

"Sue!" Her brother's tone was suddenly stern. "Don't be that sort of woman--don't let me think it of you!"

He continued to hold out the small wailing bundle. She bit her lip, reluctantly extended unaccustomed arms, and received the foundling into them.

"Sit down close by the fire, my dear, and get those frozen little hands warm. A bit of mothering won't hurt either of you." And Brown strode away into the kitchen with a frown between his brows. He was soon back with a small cupful of warm milk and water, a teaspoon, and a towel.

"Do you expect to feed a tiny baby with a teaspoon?" Sue asked with scorn.

"You don't know much about babies, do you, Sue? Well, I may have some trouble, but it's too late to get any other equipment from my neighbours, and I'll try my luck." She watched with amazement the proceedings which followed. Brown sat down with the baby cradled on his left arm, tucked the half-unfolded towel beneath its chin, and with the cup conveniently at hand upon the table began to convey the milk, drop by drop, to the little mouth.

"I don't see how you dare do it. You might choke the child to death."

"Not a bit. He'll swallow a lot of atmosphere and it may give him a pain, but that's better than starving. Isn't it, Baby?"

"You act as if you had half a dozen of your own. What in the world do you know about babies?"

"Enough to puff me up with pride. Mrs. Murdison, my right-hand neighbour, is the mother of five; Mrs. Kelcey, on my left, has six--and two of them are twins. One twin was desperately ill a while ago. I became well acquainted with it--and with the other five."

"Don!" Again his sister gazed at him as if she found him past comprehension. "You--_you!_ What would your friends--our friends--say, if they knew?"

Putting down the teaspoon and withdrawing the towel, Brown snuggled the baby in his left arm. Warmth and food had begun their work in soothing the little creature, and it was quiet, its eyelids drooping heavily.

He got up, carried the baby to the couch, with one hand arranged a steamer rug lying there so that it made a warm nest, and laid the small bundle in it.

Then he returned to his chair by the fire. He lifted his eyes for a long, keen look into his sister's face, until she stirred restlessly under the inspection.

"Well, what do you see?" she asked.

"I see," said Brown slowly, "a woman who is trying to live without remembering her immortality."

She shivered suddenly, there before the blazing fire. "I'm not sure that I believe in it," she said fiercely. "Now I've shocked you, Don, but I can't help it. I'm not sure of anything, these days. That's why--"

"Why you want to forget. But you can't forget. And the reason why you can't forget is because you do believe in it. Every day people are trying to forget one of the greatest facts in the universe. They may deny it with their lips, but with their hearts they know it is true."

She did not answer. Her brother drew his chair closer, leaned forward, and took one of the jewelled hands in his. He spoke very gently, and in his voice was a certain quality of persuasion which belongs not to all voices which would persuade.

"Sue, make room in your life for a little child. You need him."

Her glance evaded his, flashed past his to the small, still bundle on the couch. Then, suddenly, into her unhappy eyes leaped a suspicion. She straightened in her chair.

"You don't mean--you're not suggesting--"

He smiled, comprehending. "No, no--nothing like that. Your heart isn't big enough for that--yet. It's the mothers of children who make room for the waifs, or those who have long been mothers in heart and have been denied. You don't belong to either of those classes, do you?"

She drew a stifled breath. "You don't know what you are talking about, Don. How could you, a bachelor like you?"

"Couldn't I? Well, Sue, if fathers may be divided into the same two classes, I might be found in one of them."

She stared at him. "You? Oh, I can't believe it. You could have married long ago, if you had wanted to. You could have married anybody--simply anybody!"

"You do me too much honour--or discredit, I'm not just sure which."

"But it's true. With your position--and your money! Rich and brilliant clergymen aren't so common, Donald Brown. And your personality, your magnetism! Men care for you. Women have always hung on your words!"

He made a gesture of distaste; got up.

"Sterility of soul is a worse thing than sterility of body," said he. "But sometimes--God cures the one when He cures the other."

"But you never prescribed this strange thing before."

He smiled. "I've been learning some things out here, Sue, that I never learned before. One of them is how near God is to a little child."

"You've learned that--of your neighbours?" Her accent was indescribable.

"Of my neighbours--and friends."

It was time for her to go. He helped her into her great fur coat and himself fastened it in place. When she was ready she turned from the window from which she had tried in vain to see her surroundings, and threw at her brother a question which seemed to take him unawares.

"Don, do you know anything about Helena these days?"

Though his face did not change, something about him suggested the mental bracing of himself for a shock. He shook his head.

"She's dropped everything she used to care for. Nobody knows why. Her mother's in despair about her--you know what a society leader Mrs. Forrest has always been. She can't understand Helena--nor can anybody."

"She's not ill?"

"Apparently not; she's as wonderful to look at as ever, when one meets her--which one seldom does. The girls say she walks miles every day, so she must be well in body, though even that doesn't assure Mrs. Forrest. I thought, possibly, you might know. You and Helena used to be such friends."

"We are still, I hope."

His sister's eyes were not easily to be deceived, and they were positive they saw pain in the eyes which met her own.

"Don," she said softly, "may I ask you one question?"

"Please don't."

"When you were a little boy, and you got hurt in any way, you used to run away and hide. Are you--hiding now?"

His eyes grew dark with sudden anger, but he replied with self-control:

"You will have to think what you like about that, Sue. If that is the way the thing looks to you--so be it!"

The sound of the returning car made Mrs. Breckenridge speak hurriedly:

"I didn't mean to be unkind, Don boy. Nobody knows better than I that you are no coward. Only--only--you know an ascetic denies himself things that he needn't. And--you _are_ an ascetic!"

"Can I never convince you of your mistake about that?" he answered; and now his lips smiled again, a little stiffly.

She embraced him once more, stopped to say beseechingly, "You won't keep that baby here, will you, Don?" and, receiving his assurance that he would consult with his neighbours in the morning as to the welfare of the foundling, took her departure.

Left alone Brown went back into the quiet room. The baby was stirring among its wrappings. Bim, who had roused himself to see the visitor off, came and poked his nose into the bundle.

"We never know what's coming, Bim, do we?" asked Brown of his companion. "Sometimes it's what we want, and sometimes not. But--if we are to teach others we must be taught ourselves, Bim. And that's what's happening now."

VI

BROWN'S PERSISTENT MEMORY

"I wonder," he said to himself an hour later, "if it's any use to go to bed at all!" He was walking the floor with the baby in his arms. Bim, puzzled and anxious, walked by his side, looking up at the small bundle with a glance which seemed to say, "What in the world are we going to do with it?"

Whether the feeding from the teaspoon had disagreed with its digestion could not be discovered, but clearly the baby was unhappy. It was quiet when walked with but upon being put down immediately set up such an outcry that the bachelor, unaccustomed, could not listen to it with stoicism. Therefore, when he had endured the sound as long as he could, he had taken the little visitor up and was now walking with it, himself in bathgown and slippers.

"It may be a pin, Bim," said he suddenly.

He sat down before the fire, laid the baby upon its face on his knees and began cautiously to investigate. He loosened the tiny garments one by one, until he had reached the little body and could assure himself that no sharp point was responsible for the baby's discomfort. He gently rubbed the small back, wondering, as he did so, at the insignificant area his hand nearly covered. Under this treatment the wailing gradually quieted.

"Bim," said he resignedly, "we shall have to sit up with him--for a while, at least."

Bim walked over to the window.

"No," said his master, "we can't disturb our neighbours at this time of night. We must see it through. If we can manage to read, it will make the time go faster."

He reached for a book, opened it at a mark, and began to read, his hand, meanwhile, steadily maintaining the soothing motion up and down the baby's back. But his thoughts were not upon the page. Instead, they took hold upon one phrase his sister had used--one phrase, which had brought up to him a certain face as vividly as the sudden presentation of a portrait might have done.

"_She's as wonderful to look at as ever_."

Was she? Well, she had been wonderful to look at--there could be no question of that. He had looked at her, and looked, and looked again, until his eyes had blurred with the dazzle of the vision. And having looked, there could be no possible forgetting, no merciful blotting out of the recollection of that face. He had tried to forget it, to forget the whole absorbing personality, had tried with all his strength, but the thing could not be done. It seemed to him sometimes that the very effort to efface that image only cut its outlines deeper into his memory.

The baby began to cry afresh, with sudden, sharp insistence. Brown took it up and strode the floor with it again.

"Poor little chap!" he murmured. "You can't have what you want, and I can't have what I want. But it doesn't do a bit of good to cry about it--eh?"

The knocker sounded. Bim growled.

"At this hour!" thought Brown, with a glance at his watch lying on the table. It was nearly two in the morning.

Holding the baby in the crook of his arm he crossed the floor and opened the door gingerly, sheltering the baby behind it.

"Is it the toothache, Misther Brown?" inquired an eagerly pitiful voice. "Or warse?"

Mrs. Kelcey came in, her shawl covering her unbound hair--his next-door neighbour and little Norah's mother. Her face was full of astonishment at sight of Brown in his bathgown and the baby in his arms.

"I'm mighty glad to see you," Brown assured her. "I don't know what to do with him, poor little fellow. I think it must be a pain."

"The saints and ahl!" said Mrs. Kelcey. She took the baby from him with wonted, motherly arms. "The teeny thing!" she exclaimed. "Where--"

"Left on my doorstep."

"An' ye thried to get through the night with him! Why didn't ye bring him to me at wanst?"

"It was late--your lights were out. How did you know I was up?"

"Yer lights wasn't out. I was up with me man--Pat's a sore fut, an' I was bathin' it to quiet him. I seen yer lights. Ye sit up till ahl hours, I know, but I cud see the shadow movin' up and down. I says to Pat, 'He's the toothache, maybe, and me with plinty of rimidies nixt door.'"

She turned her attention to the tiny creature in her lap. She inquired into the case closely, and learned how the child had been fed with a teaspoon.

"To think of a single man so handy!" she exclaimed admiringly. "But maybe he shwallied a bit too much air with the feedin'."

"He swallowed all the air there was at hand," admitted Brown, "and precious little milk. But he seemed hungry, and I thought he was too little to go all night without being fed."

"Right ye were, an' 'tis feedin' he nades agin--only not with a shpoon. I'll take him home an' fix up a bit of a bottle for him, the poor thing. An' I'll take him at wanst, an' let ye get to bed, where ye belong, by the looks of ye."

"You're an angel, Mrs. Kelcey. I hate to let you take him, with all you have on your hands--"

"Shure, 'tis the hands that's full that can always hold a bit more. An' a single man can't be bothered with cast-off childher, no matter how big his heart is, as we well know."

And Mrs. Kelcey departed, with the baby under her shawl and a motherly look for the man who opened the door for her and stood smiling at her in the lamplight as she went away.

But when he had thrown himself, at last, on his bed, wearily longing for rest, he found he had still to wrestle a while with the persistent image of the face which was "wonderful to look at," before kindly slumber would efface it with the gray mists of oblivion.

VII

BROWN'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES

"There, Tom, how's that? Does it droop as much as the one on the other side?"

Tom Kelcey, aged fourteen, squinted critically at the long festoon of ground-pine between the centre of the chimney-breast and the angle of the dingy old oak-beamed ceiling.

"Drop her a couple of inches, Misther Brown," he suggested. "No, not so much. There, that's the shtuff. Now you've got her, foine and dandy."

Brown stepped down from the chair on which he had been standing, and stood off with Tom to view the effect.

"Yes, that's exactly right," said he, "thanks to your good eye. The room looks pretty well, eh? Quite like having a dinner party."

"It's ilegant, Misther Brown, that's what it is," said a voice in the doorway behind them. "Tom bhoy, be afther takin' the chair back to the kitchen for him."

Mrs. Kelcey, mother of Tom, and next-door neighbour to Brown, advanced into the room. She was laden with a big basket, which Brown, perceiving, immediately took from her.

"Set it down careful, man," said she. "The crust on thim pies is that delicate it won't bear joltin'. I had the saints' own luck with 'em this toime, praise be."

"That's great," said Brown. "But I haven't worried about that. You never have anything else, I'm sure."

Mrs. Kelcey shook her head in delighted protest.

"The table is jist the handsomest I iver laid eyes on," she asserted, modestly changing the subject.

"It is pretty nice, isn't it?" agreed Brown warmly, surveying the table with mixed emotions. When he stopped to think of what Mrs. Hugh Breckenridge would say at sight of that table, set for the Thanksgiving dinner her brother, Donald Brown, was giving that afternoon, he experienced a peculiar sensation in the region of his throat. He was possessed of a vivid sense of humour which at times embarrassed him sorely. If it had not been that his bigness of heart kept his love of fun in order he would have had great difficulty, now and then, in comporting himself with necessary gravity.

Mrs. Kelcey herself had arranged that table, spending almost the entire preceding day in dashing about the neighbourhood, borrowing from Brown's neighbours the requisite articles. Brown's own stock of blue-and-white ware proving entirely inadequate, besides being in Mrs. Kelcey's eyes by no means fine enough for the occasion, she had unhesitatingly requisitioned every piece of china she could lay hands on in the neighbourhood. She had had no difficulty whatever in borrowing more than enough, for every woman in the block who knew Brown was eager to lend her best. The result was such an array of brilliantly flowered plates and cups and dishes of every style and shape, that one's gaze, once riveted thereon, could with difficulty be removed.

When Brown had first conceived this festival it had been with the idea of sending to the nearest city for a full equipment, if an inexpensive one, of all the china and glass, linen and silver necessary for the serving of the meal. But upon thinking it over it occurred to him that such an outlay would not only arouse his new friends' suspicion of his financial resources, it would deprive them of one of the chief joys in such a neighbourhood as this in which he was abiding--that of the personal sharing in the details of the dinner's preparation and the proud lending of their best in friendly rivalry.

Therefore the table, as it now stood before him in all but complete readiness for the feast, bore such witness to the warmth of esteem in which the neighbourhood held him, not to mention its resourcefulness in fitting together adjuncts not originally intended for partnership, as must have touched the heart of a dinner-giver less comprehending than Donald Brown, late of St. Timothy's great and prosperous parish.

To begin with, the table itself had been set up in its place in the front room by Tim Lukens the carpenter, who when he was sober was one of the cleverest of artisans. Starting with two pairs of sawhorses and continuing with smooth pine boards, he had constructed a table of goodly proportions and of a solidity calculated to withstand successfully the demand likely to be made upon it. Over this table-top Mrs. Kelcey had laid--without thought, it must be admitted, of any intermediary padding such as certain mistaken hostesses consider essential--three freshly and painstakingly laundered tablecloths, her own, Mrs. Murdison's, and Mrs. Lukens's best, cunningly united by stitches hardly discoverable except by a too-searching eye.

The foundations thus laid, the setting of the table had been a delightful task for Mrs. Kelcey, assisted as she was by Mrs. Murdison, who frequently differed from her in points of arrangement but who yielded most of them upon hearing, as she frequently did, Mrs. Kelcey's verbal badge of office: "Misther Brown put me in charge, Missus Murdison. He says to me, he says, 'Missus Kelcey, do jist as ye think best.'" Together the two had achieved a triumph, and the table now stood forth glowingly ready for its sixteen guests, from the splendid bunch of scarlet geraniums in an immense pink and blue bowl with an Indian's head on one side, to the sixteen chairs, no two exactly alike, which had been obtained from half as many houses.

As for the dinner itself, there was no patchwork about that. Brown himself had supplied the essentials, trusting that the most of his guests could have no notion whatever of the excessively high cost of turkeys that season, or of the price of the especial quality of butter and eggs which he handed over to Mrs. Kelcey to be used in the preparation of the dishes which he and she had decided upon. That lady, however, had had some compunctions as she saw the unstinted array of materials an astonished grocer's boy had delivered upon her kitchen table two days before the dinner, and had expressed herself to Mrs. Murdison as concerned lest Mr. Brown had spent more than he could well afford.

"'Tis the big hearrt of him that leads his judgment asthray," she said, exulting none the less, as she spoke, over the prospect of handling all those rich materials and for once having the chance to display her skilled cookery. "I said as much as I dared, lest I hurrt his pride, but--'Tis but wanct a year, Missus Kelcey,' says he, an' I said no more."

The thrifty Scotswoman shook her head. "The mon kens nae mair aboot the cost o' things than a cheild," said she. "But 'twould be, as ye say, a peety to mak' him feel we dinna appreciate his thocht o' us."

So they had done their best for him, and the result was a wonderful thing. To his supplies they had surreptitiously added small delicacies of their own. Mrs. Kelcey contributed a dish of fat pickles, luscious to the eye and cooling to the palate. Mrs. Murdison brought a jar of marmalade of her own making--a rare delicacy; though the oranges were purchased of an Italian vender who had sold out an over-ripe stock at a pittance. Mrs. Lukens supplied a plate of fat doughnuts, and Mrs. Burke sent over a big platter of molasses candy. Thus the people of the neighbourhood had come to feel the affair one to which not only had they been bidden, but in which they were all in a way entertainers.

The boys of the district, also, had their share in the fun. Though not invited to the dinner proper, they had been given a hint that if they dropped in that evening after their fathers and mothers had departed there might be something left--and what boys would not rather "drop in" after that fashion, by the back door, than go decorously in at the front one? So they had been eager to furnish decorations for the party, according to Brown's suggestion, by going in a body to the woods three miles away and bringing back a lavish supply of ground-pine. They had spent two happy evenings helping Brown make this material into ropes, while he told them stories, and there was not a boy of them all who would not cheerfully have lent his shoulders to the support of the dinner-table throughout the coming meal, if it had suddenly been reported that Tim Lukens's sawhorses were untrustworthy.

"Now, Misther Brown, I'll be goin' home to see to the twins and get me man to dhress himsilf, an' thin I'll be back. Have no fear--av'rythin's doin' foine, an' the turrkey's an ilegant brown jist beginnin' to show. If I'm not back in tin minutes ye moight baste him wanct, but have no other care."

"I'll be delighted to baste him, thank you," Brown responded. "And I have no cares at all, with you in charge. I only hope you won't be too tired to enjoy the dinner. You've been busy every minute since dawn."

"Shure, 'tis the labour of love makes the worrk aisy," she responded, and then, attacked by a sudden and most unusual wave of shyness, disappeared out of the door.

Brown, standing with his back to the fire, smiled to himself. Well he knew that since the suffering three-year-old twin son of the Kelceys had spent the night in his pitiful arms and in the morning taken a turn for the better, the entire Kelcey family would have made martyrs of themselves for his sake. It was quite true that that sort of thing, as his sister, Mrs. Breckenridge, had intimated, was not precisely in accordance with the prescription of Dr. Bruce Brainard, distinguished specialist. But if that night had been his last, Donald Brown could not have spent it in a way more calculated to give him pleasure as he closed his eyes. Surely, since life was still his, the love of the Kelceys was not to be despised.