Part 3

"And what does that help, I'd like to know? The doll is broke, ain't it? And some one of us is going to catch it, however things go. You're a lucky girl, I say, if you don't lose your place. Some one of us is going to, I can easy foretell."

"I ain't going to lose my place," said Miss Catherine, firmly; and with a lifted chin was leaving to lay off her things, when the cook's nice copper-saucepan face was pushed a little inside the door.

"What's the matter?" she asked, cheerily, and stepped in. Her high-colored shawl was pinned on her breast with a big brooch; her bonnet-strings were nearly lost in her fat chin. "What's it all about? Whose nice little girl is this?"

Gradually she got the whole story, and going straight to Tibbie lifted her miserable little face, saying: "Don't you feel bad one bit, darlin'! It was all an accident, and it's no good crying over spilt milk. And if Mrs. Darling gets mad at you, she ain't the real lady I take her for. Why, I gave my Clary a new doll to-night, and it's ready for a new head this minute. And did I stop to rear and tear about it? Not a bit of it. Why, bless you, she didn't go for to do it! What child smashes a doll a purpose? You're a pretty set, the whole gang of you, to pitch into a mite like this!"

Tibbie by this time was freely weeping, and Sally and the cook together were trying to comfort and silence her.

"I've a great mind to stay here myself and stand up for her, yer pack of old maids, the lot of yer!" said the cook, looking hard at Mrs. Bonnet, who had reappeared without her hat and coat.

"You will oblige me, Mrs. MacGrath, by doing nothing of the sort," said Mrs. Bonnet. "We've no need to have a whole scene from the drama. You've no business on this floor anyhow, and I must insist on your keeping yourself in your own quarters."

"And I'll take my own time, yer born Britisher," said Mrs. MacGrath. Then putting her arm around Tibbie: "Well, Tibbie dear, you can be sure of this: however bad this seems, it'll soon be over. And if Mrs. Darling does scold, it'll soon be over too. It'll all be looking different to you in the morning. However things goes, you'll soon be forgetting all about it. And to-morrow is Christmas Day, that our own dear Lord was born on, and I'll bake you a little cake and send it to you by Sally."

"But Sally's going to be sent away," sobbed Tibbie.

"So she might be, but I feel it in my little toe that she ain't going to be."

"Well, and if I am, I am, and there an end," said Sally, bravely. "But I don't see why she can't take the price of the doll out of my wages and let me stay."

"I think you'll find," said Mrs. Bonnet, "that it ain't most particularly the cost of the doll gets you into trouble--There she comes this minute!"

The door-bell had rung. Profound silence reigned above, while all listened. Tibbie stopped crying.

"Good-night," came Mrs. Darling's sweet voice, presently, floating up from the foot of the stairs.

"Good-night," came the Rev. Dorel Goodhue's.

There was a rustle of silken skirts.

"Oh, Cousin Cynthia!"

"Yes?"

"At ten, did you say--or half past?"

"I said ten--_or_ half past. Good-night."

More rustling of skirts; then,

"Oh, Cousin Dorel--"

"Yes?" from the foot of the stairs.

"It doesn't matter--what we spoke about, you know, unless perfectly convenient."

"Oh, but it will be convenient, perfectly. Good-night. Sleep well."

"You too. Pleasant dreams. Good-night."

"Good-night."

The rustling drew nearer, and Mrs. Darling stood in the doorway, looking with a sort of absent-minded astonishment at the assemblage in her room.

The violets were quite dead on her white bosom; her hair was beginning to come loose, and stood out in golden wisps about her flushed face. She looked very sweet and soft and shiny-eyed and pleasant altogether.

"What is it?" she asked; and as Jetty was evoluting and clamoring about her feet she picked him up and kissed him like a mother. "Has anything happened? What is everybody doing up here? Whose little girl is this sitting up so late? They used to tell me I should never grow, my dear, if I sat up so late--"

"This is what it is, ma'am," began Mrs. Bonnet; and she told her arrangement of the story, uttering her words as a mowing-machine cuts weeds.

Mrs. Darling abstractedly took the rocking-chair; as she listened, the pleasant, happy look forsook her face.

"Oh, cut it short!" she interrupted, sharply. "What you have to tell is that the child there has broken one of the dolls, isn't it?"

There was an assenting mutter from Mrs. Bonnet.

"And you've kept her here, when she ought to have been in bed these hours, to bear the first beauty of my displeasure--"

Mrs. Darling had said so much in a hard voice, with an appearance of cold anger; here her voice suddenly died, and she burst out crying like a vexed, injured child. "I _declare_ it is too bad!" she sobbed, quite reckless of making a spectacle of herself, while all looked on and listened in consternation--"I declare it is too bad! It's no use! It doesn't matter _what_ I do--it is always the same! It is _always_ taken for granted I will conduct myself like a beast. Who can wonder, after that, if I do? Here I find them, pale as sheets, the five of them, shaking in their boots because a forlorn little child has broken a miserable doll. And _what_ is it supposed I shall do about it? Didn't I dress the hundred of them for children, and little poor children too? And I must have known they would get broken, of course. _Why_ did I dress them? _What_ did I spend months dressing them for? Solely for _show_, they think--not for any charity, any kindness, any love of children, or anything in the _world_ but to make an effect on an occasion, I suppose--to make myself a merit with the parson, perhaps!" Here her crying seemed to become less of anger and nervousness, and more of sorrow; one would have thought her heart-broken. "Oh, it is too bad! One would imagine I never said a decent thing, or did a kind act, to any one. And Heaven knows it is not for lack of trying to change. But no one sees the difference! I am treated like a vixen and a terror. All the people about me hate and fear and deceive me! A proof of it to-night! Oh, the _lesson_! Oh, I wasn't _meant_ for this! I wasn't meant for it! When I remember last Sunday's sermon, and how straight to my heart it went--oh, I am a fool to cry! Come here to me, dear child. What is your name? What? A little louder! What did you say? Tibbie! Oh, what a nice, funny name!" Mrs. Darling smiled through her tears, pathetically hiccoughing and sighing while she spoke. "_You_ didn't think I was going to scold you, did you, dear? Of _course_ not! It was an accident; I understand all about it. I used to break my dolls' heads frequently, I remember very well--"

Mrs. Darling had put her arm endearingly around Tibbie, and tried to make the child's head easy on her shoulder. But poor Tibbie's muscles could not relax; her stiff little face rested uncomfortably, without pressing, upon its warm alabaster prop. "Let us see, dear, now, what we can do to make us both feel happier. I dressed all those dolls for little children I am not acquainted with at all. Which of them should you like the very best? Which should you like for your very own?"

Tibbie could neither make herself move nor speak; but the tail of her eye travelled towards the dolls.

"The bride!" Sally took the liberty of saying, beaming as she came to Tibbie's aid.

"The bride? Which one is that? That one? Of course!" Mrs. Darling reached for the resplendent favorite and placed her in Tibbie's hands. "There, my dear."

Tibbie took the doll loosely, without breath of thanks; but while Mrs. Darling reviewed the dolls, her hand went out involuntarily towards the broken one. Mrs. Darling saw it. "Of course," she said--"of course, you would want that poor dollie to nurse back to health. Now, dear, isn't there _one more_ you would like?"

At this Tibbie's confusion seemed likely to overwhelm and swamp her. "I'll choose one for you," said Mrs. Darling, "and you shall call her Cynthia, after me. How would you like that? Suppose we say this one, with the forget-me-nots? She looks a little like me, doesn't she, with her hair parted in the middle? Her frock is made of a piece of one of my own, and that blue is my favorite color. There, Tibbie, now you have two whole dollies and part of another. You must run right home to bed. A Merry Christmas to you, dear child. I am very happy to have made your acquaintance."

The exuberant Sally talked like a clock gone mad all the way home through the clear wintry night; and since she felt inclined to conversation, it was well she could keep one up alone, for Tibbie, who trotted beside her, holding fast her dolls, did not utter a single word.

THE PASSING OF SPRING

In the crowded, unbeautiful part of the city were two streets forming as if the two long legs of the A we knew as children, the A with feet wide apart, that stood for Ape. A third street went from one to the other, as the little bar does across the A, but crooked, as a child's hand would draw it. This street was narrow, gloomy, and relatively quiet. The tide of traffic kept to the larger streets; the small street knew, beyond the occupants of its own houses and visitors to these, few but hurried foot-travellers who used it as a short cut, and people of inferior pretensions coming there to trade. The ground-story of almost every house was a shop; a person might have spent a life without real necessity for leaving the street. Here boots were made and mended; in the next door, clothes were sold (the dim show-windows were full of decent dresses, very good still for what you paid; you could be fitted even with a ball-dress, all beads and satin bows), yonder you could get money on deposit of your watch, or your flute, or your ear-drops; farther you could have yourself shaved. There was a window full of tarts and loaves; another window in which a roast fowl set its gold note, as some would say, between the pink note of half a ham and the coral note of a lobster.

Across a certain one of the windows in that street for a long time had hung from a line, as from the belt of a savage, tails of hair--black, brown, blond. Below these, two featureless wax faces presented their sallow blankness to the passer, one wreathed with yellow curls, the other capped with brown waves of a regular pattern. Ordered around the twin turned-ebony stands were hairpins, sticks of cosmetic wrapped in silver paper, slabs of chalk laid on pink cotton, china pots with pictures of flowers or beauties and pleasing inscriptions in French, fuzzy white balls of down, combs, gilt-brass ornaments, kid-capped phials containing amber and ruby liquids. On the inside of the heavy shutter, caught back against the street-wall by day, was pasted a large print. This told you in what a prodigious way Madame Finibald's Gold Elixir would make your hair grow, and showed you the picture of a lady who doubtless had used it--her hair was extraordinary, it nearly reached to her feet.

Perhaps it had been found that the neighborhood was become hardened to the sight of the luxuriant pictured hair; perhaps some who had provided themselves with the small copy of it, to be obtained inside on a bottle full of brown stuff, had grown inclined to treat of it lightly: "Ah, Madame Finibald!" perhaps one irritated customer had said to the old proprietress, coming to have made clear to her why after three bottles of Gold Elixir her locks were still not thick, still not glossy and splendid as the announcement promised they should be, "it's easy to cork up herb tea. It's easy to make hair long in a picture, and it's easy to make it thick. I don't believe there ever was any such person as that young woman on the label!" One morning saw a change in Madame Finibald's window. All the accustomed things were crowded to the sides to make room for a chair; on this sat a girl with brown-gold hair that reached in very truth to the floor.

On every morning and every afternoon, through a long winter, first one end and then the other of the little street was crossed by a youth who kept to the larger thoroughfares with the stream. He carried books; he went rapidly, granting small attention to the things he passed. It is not from that to be supposed that he was profoundly thinking. His face, agreeable in feature and color, was rather wanting in expression; no more interesting than it was interested. He passed at precisely the same hour every morning, and the time of his passing in the afternoon varied but little. This, from October unto April. But when April set its gold stamp on the weather, had there been any wise person observing this well--constructed blond machine, applauding its regularity, holding it up perhaps as an example to other young frequenters of schools and lecture-rooms--that wise person would have been troubled, he would have had misgivings, he would have been at last full of grief.

A change had come over the young man's mood. His eye was acquiring a roving habit. If his step had before been bent on duty, it was now less directly bent; if before he had been on time at his appointments, he must now have been always more or less late. He walked leisurely, swinging his books by a strap. He loitered before shop-windows, he turned to look after a face. The sky smiled down between the rows of buildings on the occasion of the first balmy day; little clouds floated in it, shimmering like dissolving pearls. He returned the soft sky's compliment; he looked up at it, the winter sternness melting from his eyes. At every street corner he was seen to stop, foolishly smiling upward; and, yes, positively, he was seen there, forgetful of all the people, to sigh and stretch! On that very day he lost three books out of his strap, and did not for some time notice it; when he did, he cared nothing! From a scrawl on the fly-leaf the finder of these books learned their rightful owner to be of the house of Fraisier.

He had come hundreds of miles from an obscure town to study in this great city; he had been a serious, mechanical plodder for months, feeling that he owed it to himself and to his distant family to fill his head full, full with precious notions. He had formed no friendships with his fellow-students, fearing that they would divert him, or perhaps, fearing the young fellows themselves, among whom he felt singularly green. He lived alone in one little room at the end of the world, took no holidays, had no fun, went to bed early so as to be fresh for his book in the morning. And now, suddenly, he had completely lost the point of view from which it had seemed necessary that he should get dizzily high marks, that he should conquer field after field in the realm of learning, and return to his home exuding glory. He could not persuade himself any more but that it befitted him perfectly to spend many hours strolling through the streets with his hands in his pockets, amusing his eyes with sights of every sort. He could find no argument that satisfied him why he should not lounge on a garden seat warm with sun, smoking cigarettes half the day, thinking nothing profitable. The wretched boy had lost all sober sense of the duty of man.

If he had limited himself to sitting idle in the garden, watching the year develop in that narrow, charming enclosure, one might have found an excuse for him, the same as for the scientist who studies a specimen under a glass; or, one might have said he had been overworking, his new circumstances on coming to the city had induced in him a false sort of fervor for work--a reaction was to be expected. But the mood whose first stage had been simple disinclination for study and a taste for pointless wanderings, by the time that in the march of the year the crocuses had gone, took on developments. It was not so often before a many-colored flower-bed he stopped, as before a window full of hats and bonnets.

If, again, he had limited himself to staring in at milliners' fronts! The wares there do somewhat resemble fantastic flowers, and might explain the interest of a botanist. But he halted in the same way before shops that offered no excuse for the same attention; windows in which were only idle feminine frocks displayed, flippant fans, frills of fluted lace, feathery things for the neck.

One might have imagined from his wonder and interest that all these things had just been invented, that they were a strange spring-crop; that new, too, was the race of smiling, chatting, shopping beings crowding the street on sunny days, new and in fashion only since this spring, such unaccustomed pleasure spoke in his eye that shyly followed them in their prettiest representatives. What exquisite sense shown, O ever-young Creator, in making the lip red, and the neck white, and the temperate cheek between white and red!

The boy had moments of being drunk in a glorified way even as is the innocent bee, with nothing but wandering among flowers. Owing to a confusion in the ideas attendant on that mysterious soft travailing among the atoms of the heart warmed through by spring, all sorts of things to him were as flowers! His imagination was so increased in power, that with nothing but a pair of little shoes in a show-case to start from he could build up the most astonishing, dreamy stories: he could set feet in the shoes and rear a palatial flesh-and-blood structure over them, as easy as sigh; fit the whole with graces, laces, circumstances and adventures--contrive even to tangle its fate pleasingly with his own.

Which may make supposed that he was a youth of some boldness. Far from it. He scarcely knew what a woman's eyes were like, except in profile or fugitive three-quarters; on the other hand, he was well acquainted with her back hair. Hair, in which he could pursue long studies unconfounded, seemed to him the most beautiful thing in all the world.

One day, with a view to lengthening the way by taking a road that though shorter must from novelty be richer in diversion than his daily track, he turned into the little street that cut off the triangle of the A. He paused before the window of the worn watches and sleeve-links; he took his time over the faded finery of the second-hand clothes shop; he examined certain yellowed wood-cuts and stained books he found in a narrow open stall. As he seemed coming to the end of the street's resources, he looked over the way and thoughtfully felt his cheek: he could not find there what would have justified a refreshing station at the barber's. He continued his way slowly, to make it last. Now, he stopped where several others were likewise stopping--he had come to Madame Finibald's.

The girl sat amid her hair, either unconscious or disdainful of the eyes watching her beyond the glass. She looked in a book open on her lap; now and then she turned over a leaf, sometimes revealing a picture on the page. Her chair was low, perhaps so that her hair should amply trail; its lowness made an excuse for the listlessness of her posture; her feet were outstretched and crossed, the passers might know that one of her shoes was laced with pink twine. If she moved her eyes from her book a moment, it was only to sweep them past the faces, unseeing, and lift them to the strip of sky between the houses--so blue this day, the little bit there was of it.

Her face one scarcely noticed for the first moment more than any rosy apple; for oh! her hair!--her hair claimed all the attention a man had to give, did her shining hair falling stately along her cheeks, all over her shoulders, below her waist, beyond her garment--richer, of course, than any possible queen's cloak. The light rippled over it, changing on it all the time, when nothing else in the window appeared to live.

Within the shadow of the shop was discerned a watchful, wrinkled old face, chiefly differing from a parrot's in the slyness of its eyes. Fraisier catching sight of it thought of a witch on guard over a princess enchanted and imprisoned in a glass-case.

The little group in front of Madame Finibald's dispersed, formed anew with other faces many times in the hour; Fraisier remained, his eyes climbing up, sliding down the golden ropes of hair.

At last, though the girl gave no sign, he was made uncomfortable by the sense that she must, even without looking, have seen how long he stood. He inquired timidly of her face. It was informed with a gentle brazenness, fortified to be stared at all the day. Yet there was a suggestion of childishness in its abstracted expression; she wore the sort of look one has seen on the face of a little girl playing at being somebody else far more splendid than herself. A close observer might have suspected that she really thought it rather grand to sit there in the gorgeousness of her hair, and was amused with pretending not to know that a soul looked on.

Fraisier, because her eyes were lowered, found hardihood to stare his fill at her face. He surrendered without struggle before the round cheeks, the short little nose, the good-natured mouth and chin, which, in truth, took more than their just space in the face. But most--oh, still most! delighted him the brown-gold hair that tumbled over her forehead and ears in little curls.

He was realizing from the mutterings of what was left him of a conscience how late it must be getting--he must be taking himself off; he was making long the one minute more he allowed himself, when her pupils slid between the lashes in his direction. He had lost all presence of mind, he could not withdraw his glance. After a second's pause upon his, her eyes slid back to her book and were hidden. Then, without another thought towards duty, he crossed the street to the barber's, from whose window he could see Madame Finibald's; and, coming forth with a smoother face than the rose, entered the little eating-shop next door, from which likewise he could command Madame Finibald's.

He went through the little street every day. He took many atrocious meals in the shop, on the table nearest the window.

On such days as brought perfect weather, the girl in Madame Finibald's would turn very often to the sky a look easily interpreted as longing. Then would Fraisier look up too and sigh. It seemed such a pity, this wasted blue weather.

It seemed such a pity, all this wasted sweetness, he thought in crossing a public garden on his occasional unwilling way to a lecture. The quince-tree blossomed in red; under the cherry were little drifts of scented snow; up out of the vigorous, rested earth were flowers springing in mad, gay multitudes. The air was silver made air in the morning; and in the afternoon it was gold made air. Birds, busily building, busily twittered. These things did nothing to him, but the more they were lovely and penetrated the heart, the more to make him lonesome.

He took himself away from their radiance without one regret for them, to spend his time in preference in an ugly little street where one could scarcely have known what season it was, where there was nothing to see that was beautiful but certain long, long hair. In thought, though, let it be said in vindication of spring's power of enthralling, having done up the hair in braids, and extinguished it with a hat, he was always, always guiding it to the contemned garden. When once it was in the garden, May there had become perfect.