Chapter 7

"I have often wondered how all her charity people take her; it must come tough on them, sometimes. Gee! Can't you see her raising those lorgnettes of hers and saying, 'My good boy, do you read your Bible?' or, 'My little girl, I hope you remember to be grateful for all you receive.' Say, wouldn't you hate to have charity stuffed down your throat that way?" and the oldest and favorite grandson groaned out his feelings.

"That isn't what I should mind the most." It was the youngest daughter speaking again. "I've been with mother when she has made remarks about the patients in the hospital, loud enough for them to hear, and I was so mortified I wanted to sink through the floor, And you simply can't shut mother up. Of course she doesn't realize how it sounds; she doesn't believe they hear her, but I know they do. I wonder how mother would like to have us stand around her--and we know her and love her--and have us say she was getting deaf, or her hair was coming out, or her memory was beginning to fail, or--"

The Oldest Trustee smiled grimly. "Oh, don't stop, my dear. If there is any other failing you can think of--" She opened her eyes with a start. "Goodness gracious!" she exclaimed. "My grandson is in college five hundred miles away, and my daughter is abroad. Have I been dreaming?"

The Meanest Trustee unlocked the drawer of his desk and took out a cigar. He did not intend that his sons or his servants should smoke at his expense; furthermore, it was well not to spread temptation before others. He took up the evening paper and examined the creases carefully. He wished to make sure it had not been unfolded before; being the one to pay for the news in his house, he preferred to be the first one to read it. The creases proved perfectly satisfactory; so he lighted his cigar, crossed his feet, and settled himself--content in his own comfort. The smoke spun into spirals about his head; and after he had skimmed the cream of the day's events he read more leisurely, stopping to watch the spirals with a certain lazy enjoyment. They seemed to grow increasingly larger. They spun themselves about into all kinds of shapes, wavering and illusive, that defied the somewhat atrophied imagination of the Meanest Trustee.

"Hallucinations," he barked to himself. "I believe I understand now what is implied when people are said to have them."

Suddenly the spirals commenced to lengthen downward instead of upward. To the amazement of the Meanest Trustee he discovered them shifting into human shapes: here was the form of a child, here a youth, here a lover and his lass, here a little old dame, and scores more; while into the corners of the room drifted others that turned into the drollest of droll pipers--with kilt and brata and cap. It made him feel as if he had been dropped into the center of a giant kaleidoscope, with thousands of pieces of gray smoke turning, at the twist of a hand, into form and color, motion and music. The pipers piped; the figures danced, whirling and whirling about him, and their laughter could be heard above the pipers' music.

"Stop!" barked the Meanest Trustee at last; but they only danced the faster. "Stop!" And he shook his fist at the pipers, who played louder and merrier. "Stop!" And he pounded the arms of his chair with both hands. "I hate music! I hate children! I hate noise and confusion! Stop! I say."

Still the pipers played and the figures danced on; and the Meanest Trustee was compelled to hear and see. To him it seemed an interminable time. He would have stopped his ears with his fingers and shut his eyes, only, strangely enough, he could not. But at last it all came to an end--the figures floated laughing away, and the pipers came and stood about him, their caps in their hands out-stretched before him.

He eyed them suspiciously. "What's that for?"

"It is time to pay the pipers," said one.

"Let those who dance pay; that's according to the adage," and he smiled caustically at his own wit.

"It's a false adage," said a second, "like many another that you follow in your world. It is not the ones who dance that should pay, but the ones who keep others from dancing--the ones who help to rob the world of some of its joy. And the ones who rob the most must pay the heaviest. Come!" And he shook his cap significantly.

A sudden feeling of helplessness overpowered the Meanest Trustee. Muttering something about "pickpockets" and "hold-ups," he ferreted around in his pocket and brought out a single coin, which he dropped ungraciously into the insistent cap.

"What's that?" asked the head piper, curiously.

"It looks to me like money--good money--and I'm throwing it away on a parcel of rascals."

"Come, come, my good man," and the piper tapped him gently on the shoulder, in the fashion of a professional philanthropist when he remonstrates with a professional vagrant; "don't you see you are not giving your soul any room to grow in? A great deal of joy might have reached the world across your open palm. Instead, you have crushed it in a hard, tight fist. You must pay now for all the souls you've kept from dancing. Come--fill all our caps."

"Fill!" There was something akin to actual terror in the voice of the Meanest Trustee. He could feel himself growing pale; his tongue seemed to drop back in his throat, choking him. "That would take a great deal of money," he managed to wheeze out at last; and then he braced himself, his hands clutched deep in his pockets. "I will never pay; never, never, never!"

"Oh yes, you will!" and the piper's smile was insultingly cheerful. "It was a great deal of joy, you know," he reminded him. "Come, lads"--to the other pipers--"hold out your caps, there."

The Meanest Trustee had the strange experience of feeling himself worked by a force outside of his own will; it was as if he had been a marionette with a master-hand pulling the wires. Quite mechanically he found himself taking something out of his pocket and dropping it into the caps thrust under his very nose, and at the same time his pockets began to fill with money--his money. In and out, in and out, his hands flew like wooden members, until there was not a coin left and the last piper turned away satisfied. He closed his eyes, for he was feeling very weak; then he became conscious of the touch of a warm, friendly hand on his wrist and he heard the voice of the old family doctor--the one who had set his leg when he was a little shaver and had fallen off the banisters, sliding downstairs.

"You will recover," it was saying. "A good rest is all you need. Sometimes there is nothing so beneficial and speedy as the old-fashioned treatment of bleeding a patient."

Some warm ashes dropped across the wrist of the Meanest Trustee and scattered on the floor; his cigar had gone out.

The Executive Trustee dozed at his study table. For months he had been working his brain overtime; he had still more to demand of it, and he was deliberately detaching it from immediate executive consciousness for a few minutes that he might set it to work again all the harder.

The Executive Trustee knew that he was dozing; but for all that it was unbearable--this feeling of being bound by coil after coil of rope until he could not stir a finger. A terrifying numbness began to creep over him--as if his body had died. The thought came to him like a shock that he had an active, commanding intelligence, still alive, and nothing for it to command. What did people do who had to live with dead, paralyzed bodies, dependent upon others to execute the dictates of their brains? Did not their brains go in the end, too, and leave just a breathing husk behind? The thought became a horror to him.

And yet people did live, just so. Yes, even children. Somewhere--somewhere--he knew of hundreds of them--or were there only a few? He tried to remember, but he could not. He did remember, however, that he had once heard them laughing; and he found himself wondering now at the strangeness of it. He hoped there was some one who would always keep them laughing--they deserved that much out of life, anyway; and some one who could understand and could administer to them lovingly--yes, that was the word--lovingly! As for himself, there was no one who could supply for him that strength and power for action that he had always worshiped; he must exist for the rest of his life simply as a thinking, ineffective intelligence. The Executive Trustee forgot that he was dozing. He wrestled with the ropes that bound him like a crazed man; he called for help again and again, until his lips could make no sound. For the first time in his remembrance he tasted the bitterness of despair. Then it was that the door opened noiselessly and Margaret MacLean entered, her finger to her lips. Coil after coil she unwound until he was free once more and could feel the marvelous response of muscle and nerve impulse. With a cry--half sob, half thankfulness--he flung his arms across the table and buried his face in them.

The Executive Trustee slept heavily, after the fashion of a man exhausted from hard labor.

In the house left by the Richest Trustee a little gray wisp of a woman sat huddled in a great carved chair close to the hearth, thinking and thinking and thinking. The fire was blazing high, trying its best to burn away the heart-cold and loneliness that clung about everything like a Dover fog. For years she had ceased to exist apart from her husband--her thoughts, her wishes, her interests were of his creating; she had drawn her very nourishment of life from his strong, dominant, genial personality. It was parasitic--oh yes, but it had been something rarely beautiful to them both--her great need of him. The need had grown all the greater because no children had come to fill her life; and the need of something to take care of had grown with him. Their love, and her dependence, had become the greatest factors in his life; in hers they were the only ones. Therefore, it was hardly strange, now that he had died, that she should find it hard to take up an individual existence again; to be truthful, she had found it impossible--she had not even existed.

The habit of individual, separate thinking had grown rusty, and as she sat before the hearth ideas came slowly. The room was dim--lighted only by the firelight; and in that dimness her mind began to stir and stretch and yawn itself awake, like a creature that had been hibernating through a long, dark winter. Suddenly the widow of the Richest Trustee broke out into a feeble little laugh--a convalescing laugh that acted as if it was just getting about for the first time.

"I haven't the least idea what is the matter with me," she said, addressing the fire, "but I think--I think--I'm becoming alive again."

The fire gave an appreciative chuckle--it even slapped one of the logs on the back; then it sputtered and blazed the harder, just as if it were ashamed of showing any emotion.

"It is funny," agreed the little gray wisp of a woman, "but I actually feel as I used to when I was a little girl and Christmas Eve had come, or Hallowe'en, and--and-- What other night in the year was it that I used to feel creepy and expectant--as if something wonderful was going to happen?"

The fire coughed twice, as if it would have liked to remind her that it was May Eve, but felt it might be an intrusion.

"I believe," she continued, speculatively--"I believe I am going to begin to think things and do them again; and what's more, I believe I am going to like doing them."

The fire chuckled again, and danced about for a minute in an absurd fashion; it was so absurd that one of the logs broke a sap-vessel. After that the fire settled down to its intended vocation, that of making dream-pictures out of red and gold flames, and black, charred embers.

The widow of the Richest Trustee watched them happily for a long time, until they became very definite and actual pictures. Then she got up, went to her desk, and wrote two letters.

The first was addressed to "The Board of Trustees of Saint Margaret's Free Hospital for Children"; the second was addressed to "Miss Margaret MacLean." They were both sealed and mailed that night.

What befell the other trustees does not matter, either from the standpoint of Fancy or of what happened afterward; moreover, it was nearly midnight, and what occurs after that on May Eve does not count.

IX

THE LOVE-TALKER

All through the evening Saint Margaret's had been frankly miserable. Nurses gathered in groups in the nurses' annex and talked about the closing of the incurable ward and the going of Margaret MacLean. The passing of the incurables mattered little to them, one way or another, but they knew what it mattered to the nurse in charge, and they were just beginning to realize what she had meant to them all. The Superintendent felt so much concerned that she dropped her official manner when she chanced upon Margaret MacLean on her way from supper.

"Oh, my dear--my dear"--and the Superintendent's voice had almost broken--"what shall we do without you? You have kept Saint Margaret's human--and wholesome for the rest of us."

The House Surgeon had been miserable unto the third degree. It had forced him into doing all those things he had left undone for months passed; and he bustled through the building--from pharmacy to laboratory and from operating-room to supply-closets--giving the impression of a very scientific man, while he was inwardly praying for a half-dozen minutes alone with Margaret MacLean. He had passed her more than once in the corridors, but she had eluded him each time, brushing by him with a tightening of the lips and a little shake of the head, half pleading, half commanding. At last, in grim despair, he gave up appearances and patrolled the second-floor hall until the night nurse fixed upon him such a greenly suspicious eye that he fled to his quarters--vowing unspeakable things.

Even old Cassie, the scrub-woman, shared in the general misery--Cassie, who had brewed the egg-shell charm against Trustee Days. She had stayed past her hours for a glimpse of "Miss Peggie," with the best intention in the world of cheering her up. When the glimpse came, however, she stood mute--tears channeling the old wrinkled face--while the nurse patted her hands and made her laugh through the tears. In fact, Margaret MacLean had been kept so busy doling out cheer and consolation to others that she had had no time to remember her own trouble--not until Saint Margaret's had gone to bed.

She was on her way for a final visit to her ward--the visit she had told Bridget she would make to see if the promise had been kept--when a line from Hauptman's faery play flashed through her mind: "At dawn we are kings; at night we are only beggars."

How true it was of her--this day. How beggared she felt! The fact that she was very nearly penniless troubled her very little; it was the homelessness--friendlessness--that frightened her. She had never had but two friends: the one who had gone so long ago was past helping her now; the other--

No; she had made up her mind some hours before that she should slip away in the morning without saying anything to the House Surgeon. It would make it so much easier for him. Otherwise--he might--because of his friendship--say or do something he would have to regret all his life. She had been very much in earnest when she had told the Senior Surgeon on the stairs that such as she laid no claim to the every-day happiness that felt to the lot of others. That was why she had kept persistently out of the House Surgeon's way all the evening.

She pushed back the door of Ward C. The night light in the hall outside was shaded; only a glimmer came through the windows from the street lamps below; consequently things could not be seen very clearly or distinguishably in the room. Across the threshold her foot slid over something soft and slippery; stooping, her hand closed upon a flower, while she brushed another. Puzzled, she felt her way over to the table in the center of the room, where she had put the green Devonshire bowl. It was empty.

"That's funny," she murmured, her mind attempting to ferret out an explanation. She dropped to her knees and scanned the floor closely. There they were, the primroses, a curving trail of them stretching from the head of Pancho's bed to the foot of Michael's. She choked back an exclamation just as a shadow cut off the light from the hall. It was a man's shadow, and the voice of the House Surgeon came over the threshold in a whisper:

"What are you doing--burying ghosts?"

"Come and see, and let the light in after you."

The House Surgeon came and stood behind her where she knelt. She looked so little and childlike there that he wanted to pick her up and tell her--oh, such a host of things! But he was a wise House Surgeon, and his experience on the stairs had not counted for nothing; moreover, he was a great believer in the psychological moment, so he peered over her shoulder and tried to make out what she was looking at.

"Faded flowers," he volunteered at last, somewhat doubtfully.

"A primrose ring," she contradicted. "But who ever heard of one in a hospital? Take care--" For the surgeon's shoe was carelessly knocking some of the blossoms out of place. "Don't you know that no one must disturb a primrose ring? It's sacred to Fancy; and there is no telling what is happening inside there to-night."

"What?" The House Surgeon asked it as breathlessly as any little boy might have. Science had goaded him hard along the road of established facts, thereby causing him to miss many pleasant things which he still looked back upon regretfully, and found himself eager for, at times. Of course, he had scoffed at them aloud and before Margaret MacLean, but inwardly he adored them.

She did not answer; she was too busy wondering about something to hear the House Surgeon's question. Her eyes looked very big and round in the darkness, and her face wore the little-girl scarey look as she reached up for his hand and clutched it tight, while her other hand pointed across the primrose ring to the row of beds.

"See, they look empty, quite---quite empty."

"Just nerves." And he patted the hand in his reassuringly; he tried his best to pat it in the old, big-brother way. "You've had an awfully trying day--most women would be in their rooms having hysteria or doldrums."

Still she did not hear. Her eyes were traveling from cot to crib and on to cot again, as they had once before that night. "Every single bed looks empty," she repeated. "The clothes tumbled as if the children had slipped quietly out from under them." She shivered ever so slightly. "Perhaps they have found out they are not wanted any longer and have run away."

"Come, come," the House Surgeon spoke in a gruff whisper. "I believe you're getting feverish." And mechanically his ringers closed over her pulse. Then he pulled her to her feet. "Go over to those beds this minute and see for yourself that every child is there, safe and sound asleep."

But she held back, laughing nervously. "No, no; we mustn't spoil the magic of the ring." Her voice trailed off into a dreamy, wistful monotone. "Who knows--Cinderella's godmother came to her when it was only a matter of ragged clothes and a party; the need here was far greater. Who knows?" She caught her breath with a sudden in-drawn cry. "Why, to-night is May Eve!"

"Why, of course it is!" agreed the House Surgeon, as if he had known it from the beginning.

"And who knows but the faeries may have come and stolen them all away?"

Now the House Surgeon was old in understanding, although he was young in years; and he knew it was wiser sometimes to give in to the whims of a tired, overwrought brain. He knew without being told--for Margaret MacLean would never have told--how tired and hopelessly heart-sick and mind-sick she was to-night. What he did not know, however, was how pitifully lonely and starved her life had always been; and that this was the hour for the full conscious reckoning of it.

She had often said, whimsically, "Those who are born with wooden instead of golden spoons in their mouths had better learn very young to keep them well scoured, or they'll find them getting so rough and splintered that they can't possibly eat with them." She had followed her own advice bravely, and kept happy; but now even the wooden spoon had been taken from her.

The House Surgeon lifted her up and put her gently into the rocker, while he sat down on the corner of the table, neighbor to the green Devonshire bowl.

Perhaps Margaret MacLean was not to find bitterness, after all; perhaps it would be his glad good fortune to keep it from her. It was surprising the way he felt his misery dwindling, and instantly he pulled up his courage--another hole.

"I think you said 'faeries,'" he suggested, seriously. "Why not faeries?"

She nodded in equal seriousness. "Why not? They always come May Eve to the lonely of heart; and even a hospital might have faeries once in a generation. Only--only why couldn't they have taken me with the children? It wasn't exactly fair to leave me behind, was it?"

Her lips managed to keep reasonably steady, but she was wishing all the time that the House Surgeon would go and leave her free to be foolishly childish and weak. She wanted to drop down beside Bridget's bed and sob out her trouble.

But the House Surgeon had a very permanent look as he went on soberly talking.

"Well, you see, they took the children first because they were all ready. Probably, very probably, they are sending for you later--special messenger. It's still some minutes before midnight; and that's the time things like that happen. Isn't it?"

"Perhaps." A little amused smile crept into the corners of her mouth while she rummaged about in some old memories for something she had almost forgotten. "Perhaps"--she began again--"they will send the Love-Talker."

"The what?"

"The Love-Talker. Old Cassie used to tell us about him, when I was an 'incurable.' He's a faery youth who comes on May Eve in the guise of some well-appearing young man and beguiles a maid back with him into faeryland. He's a very ardent wooer--so Cassie said--and there's no maid living who can resist him."

"Wish I'd had a course with him," muttered the House Surgeon under his breath. Then he gripped the table hard with both hands while the spirit of mischief leaped, flagrant, into his eyes. "Would you go with him--if he came?" he asked, intensely.

"If he came--if he came--" she repeated, dreamily. "How do I know what I would do? It would all depend upon the way he wooed."

Unexpectedly the House Surgeon jumped to his feet, making a considerable clatter.

"Hush! you'll waken the children."

"But they're not here," he reminded her.

"Yes, I know; but you might waken them, just the same."

Instead of answering, the House Surgeon stepped behind the rocker and lifted her out of it bodily; then his hands closed over hers and he lifted them to her eyes, thereby blind-folding them. "Now," he commanded, "take two steps forward."

She did it obediently; and then stood waiting for further orders.

"You are now inside this magical primrose ring; and you said yourself, a moment ago, there was no telling what might happen inside. Keep very still; don't move, don't speak. Remember you mustn't uncover your eyes, or the spell will be broken. Hark! Can you hear something--some one coming nearer and nearer and nearer?"