Part 5
"Was this a comic opera? A farce? A phantasy of not enough work and too much worry? Was every mention of Mrs. Tome Gallien's name to be a _scream_? As long as life lasted? As long as--?" Startled by a tiny gasp he turned to find his little visitor convulsed with tears but still struggling bravely to regain her self-possession. "Oh, please don't think I'm always as--as weak as this," she pleaded through her sobs. "But with pain and disappointment and everything happening so all at once. And with my big loss so recent----"
"How long ago did you lose your father?" asked the Young Doctor, very gently.
"My father?" stammered the girl. White now as the death she mourned she lifted her stricken face to his. "Why it wasn't father I was talking about," she gasped. "It was my husband."
"Your husband?" cried the Young Doctor. Two minutes ago was _this_ the situation that he had cursed out as a farce, a comic opera? This poor, stricken, exquisite, heartbroken little widow, tagged out by Mrs. Tome Gallien as an "Adventure" and foisted on his attention like some gay new kind of a practical joke? It was outrageous! he fumed. "Inexcusably brutal!"
"Colorado--is where it happened," he had to bend his head to hear. "Almost a year and a half ago," strangled the poor little voice, "and we hadn't been married a year. Lung trouble it was, something dreadfully acute. Mrs. Tome Gallien did everything. She's always done everything. It's something about my father I think. Oh, ages and ages ago they were lovers it seems. But--but she chose to make a worldier marriage. And later, my father--why she bought my whole trousseau for me!" suffered the sweet voice afresh. "Went to Paris herself for it, I mean!"
Across the Young Doctor's memory a single chance sentence came flashing back "The daughter of a man who once meant something to me in my youth." So this was the girl? The little "Stingy Receiver"? Among all Mrs. Tome Gallien's so-called "stingy receivers" the one unquenchable pang in an otherwise reasonably callous side? Precious undoubtedly, poignant, eternally significant, yet always and forever the flesh that was not of her flesh nor the spirit quite of her spirit. Familiar eyes--perhaps? An alien mouth? A dimple that had no right, possibly, haunting a lean, loved cheek line? Fire, flame, ice, ashes? A torch to memory, a scorch to hope! But whose smile was it, anyway? That maddeningly casual and inconsequent little "Thank You" smile searing its way apparently with equal impartiality across chiffon or crape,--a proffered chair, or eagerest promise of relief from pain? Had Mrs. Tome Gallien's life, by chance, gone a-wreck on just that smile? And why in Heaven's name, if people loved each other, did they let anything wreck them? And back of that--what did people want to love each other for anyway? What good was it? All this old loving-and-parting-and-marrying-some-one-else fretting its new path now all over again into chiffon-and-crape! "Bony-Ankylosis-of-the-Temporomandibular-Joint!" At the very taste of the phrase his mind jumped out of its reverie and back to the one real question at hand. "If you please, now!" he implored his visitor. "Just a little of the coffee! Just a crunch or two of the rusk!" Urgently as he spoke he began proffering first one and then the other. "And this crying?" he persisted. "Does this also hurt you?"
From the doorway beyond him he sensed suddenly the low sound of footsteps and looked up into Solvei Kjelland's laughing face. Blue as a larkspur in a summer hail-storm, crisp, shimmery, sparkling with frost, even her blonde hair tucked into a larkspur-blue storm hat, she stood there shaking a reproachful finger at both the Young Doctor and his patient.
"Oh, Ho! For what a pity!" she laughed. "If you had but told me that Mrs. Tome Gallien's adventure was to be a picnic then I also could have brought the food!"
"Picnic?" frowned the Young Doctor. Before the plaintive bewilderment in the dark eyes that lifted at just that instant to his an unwonted severity crisped into his voice. "Excuse me, Miss Kjelland," he said; "but this is not a picnic--it is a clinic."
"So? Who is a clinic?" cried Solvei Kjelland perfectly undaunted, and swished bluely forward to join them. "It is not of course of a propriety, Doctor Kendrue," she laughed, "that I should come thus without the sick aunt! But in a storm so unwholesome for aunt is it not best that I buy some good medicine?" In a shimmer of melting snowflakes she perched herself on the arm of the first chair she could reach, and extracting the familiar little purse from her big blue pocket handed the Young Doctor a one-dollar bill. "Medicine for the sick aunt!" she commandeered gaily. Then with only the most casual glance at the piano she whirled around to scrutinize the desolate little figure before her. If she noticed the tears she certainly gave no sign of it.
"Ah! It is as I thought!" she triumphed. "Most surely in my mind did I say that you would be a girl!" In one sweeping blue-eyed glance she seemed to be appraising suddenly every individual tone and feature of the dark, exquisite little face that lifted so bewilderedly to hers. Then quite unexpectedly a most twinkling smile flickered across her own sharply contrasted blondeness and like a fine friendly child she held out her hand in greeting. "Most certainly," she conceded, "you are more cute than I! But also in some ways," she beamed, "I am of course more cute than you!"
While the Young Doctor waited for the skies to fall, he saw instead, to his infinite amazement, that the little brunette though still bewildered was returning the handshake with unquestionable cordiality. "Awfully well-bred women were like that," he reasoned quickly. "No matter how totally disorganized they might be by silly things like mice or toads you simply couldn't faze them when it came to a purely social emergency." And in a situation which had thus precipitously reached a point so hopelessly non-professional there seemed after all but one thing left for him to do.
"Miss Kjelland!" he essayed with a really terrifying formality, "This is Mrs. Kendrue!" The instant the phrase had left his lips his very ears were crimsoning with the one possible implication which Miss Solvei Kjelland would draw from such an announcement, and more panic-stricken than any woman would have been with a mouse he turned and fled for his medicine cabinet in the very farthest corner of the room.
"Your wife?" faltered Solvei Kjelland in frank astonishment. "S-o?" she laughed. "And I have only just come! Mix me a quarter's worth more of the good medicine, Mr. Doctor!" she called back over her shoulder, and dropped down on the low stool at the other girl's feet. "Now about this piano!" she began precipitously.
"I am not Doctor Kendrue's wife!" protested the little black figure bewilderedly. "Why--why I thought you were his wife," she confided with increasing confusion.
From the direction of the medicine cabinet the sound of some one choking was distinctly audible. Both girls rose instinctively to meet--only the Young Doctor's perfectly inscrutable face.
"Who now is eating a Miss--mis-apprehension?" beamed Solvei.
"Mrs. Kendrue is a patient of mine," affirmed the Young Doctor with some coldness.
"O-h," conceded the Norse girl with equal coldness. "A patient? That is most nice. But--" As though suddenly muddled all over again by this latest biographical announcement she threw out her hands with a frank gesture of despair. "If this should be a patient," she implored, "who then is the 'Other Adventure'?"
Behind the little black figure's back the Young Doctor lifted a quick warning finger to his lips.
"S-s-h!" he signaled beseechingly to her.
On Solvei Kjelland's forehead the incongruous frown deepened from perplexity into something very like impatience.
"Well certainly," she attested. "You are of a great sobriety in your office, but most wild on the doorstep. As for me," she confided, "it is of the piano and the piano only that I care!"
"That's just it," said the Young Doctor, "it is of the piano and the piano only that Mrs. Kendrue cares!"
With her finger-tips already touching the ivory keys the Norse girl swung sharply around.
"What is that?" she demanded.
With a sudden impish conviction that Mrs. Tome Gallien, being already responsible for so many awkward situations in the world, might just as well now be responsible for everything, the Young Doctor gathered breath for his latest announcement.
"Mrs. Kendrue," he smiled with studied calm, "is the niece,--as it were, of the lady who gave me the piano."
"What," stammered both girls in a single breath.
But it was the little widow's turn this time to be the most dumfounded. "What," she repeated with a vague new sort of pain. "What? You mean that Mrs. Tome Gallien gave _you_ the piano--when--when she knew how I had been longing for it all these months? Been haunting the warerooms day after day!" she explained plaintively over her black shoulder to the other girl. "Why--why do _you_ love music so?" she demanded with sudden vehement passion of the Young Doctor. "Are you a real musician, I mean?"
"On the contrary," bowed the Young Doctor, "I am as tender-hearted about pianos as you are about ducks. Nothing under Heaven would induce me to lay my rough, desecrating hand upon a piano." In an impulse of common humanity he turned to allay the new bewilderment in Solvei Kjelland's face. "This allusion about ducks," he explained, "concerns another little idiosyncrasy of Mrs. Tome Gallien's."
"Yes!" quickened the little widow. "When she sent Doctor Kendrue this wonderful piano she sent me a--a dreadful duck blind--way down somewhere in South Carolina!"
"What is that?" puzzled Solvei Kjelland.
"Why a place to shoot!" snapped the Young Doctor. "Wild ducks, you know! 'Quack-Quack!' A--a sporting camp!" His whole face was suddenly alight.
"O-h! And this little Mrs. Kendrue does not sport," reflected Solvei. In another instant her own face was all alight too. "Oh, of what a nonsense!" she laughed. "Of what a silliness! It is of course a mistake, most funny, most conflictable! In some way it is that the gifts should get mixed in the mails!"
"Oh, no!" wagged the Young Doctor's head. "Oh, no!" he reiterated with some emphasis. "Careless as I assure you many of the post-offices are there is very little likelihood of a grand piano and a duck blind getting mixed in the mails."
"O-h," subsided the Norse girl, but only for an instant. "What my idea should be," she resumed cheerfully, "and what the idea of my aunt should be, is that if you would let us take the piano--one month, two months, three, we would in return give you some lessons in this music, either in the piano or of the vocal."
"U-m-m," said the Young Doctor, "Yes--yes, of course that would undoubtedly be very humanizing and all that, but with so much unexpected competition, as it were, one must move very,--er--slowly in the matter. Just what--just what would be your idea, Mrs. Kendrue?" he turned and asked quite abruptly.
"My idea?" flushed the little widow. "Why--why, of course I didn't have any idea because I didn't even know that you possessed the piano until just now. But if you are still willing to part with it after--after the estate is settled," she hurried with evident emotion, "why, then--perhaps--I--" Yearningly as she spoke she stepped forward to the piano and fingered out one chord after another, soft, vibrant, experimental, achingly minor, a timid, delicate nature's whole unconscious appeal to life for help, love, tenderness.
"Dear me!" mused the Young Doctor.
"Oh! Do you play?" cried Solvei Kjelland ecstatically.
"Oh, no," deprecated the little widow. "I just sing. Do _you_ sing?" she in turn demanded as though her very heart jumped with the question.
"Oh, no," said Solvei Kjelland, "I just play." Yearningly she in turn stepped forward and struck a single chord. But there was nothing soft or minor about this one chord. Sharp, clear, stirring as a clarion call it rang out through the dingy room.
"Oh, dear!" thought the Young Doctor.
And as though flaming then and there with the musical fervor so long suppressed the Norse girl swung impetuously round upon her companion. "You do not play! And I do not sing! So let us!" she cried excitedly and dropping down on the piano stool seemed literally melting her fluent finger-tips into ivory-key and melody.
Indefinitely for a brilliant, chaotic moment or two, chord heaped upon chord and harmony upon harmony, and then suddenly to the Young Doctor's musically untutored mind it seemed as though the crashing waves of sound were literally parting on either side to let a little tune come through. And such a "pleasant familiar tune" he rated it delightedly. He didn't remember that Verdi wrote it. He didn't stop to consider that it was from Trovatore. All he cared was that it was a tune, and a tune that said things, and a tune that always said the same things whether you heard it chopped through a hurdy-gurdy on an asphalt pavement or roared stentoriously by a band at the beach. "Home to our Mountains!" was what it said, and oh, other things too, undoubtedly, but that was all that really mattered, "Home to our Mountains!"
It was perfectly evident, though, that the little widow cared who wrote it, and what it was from, and where it was going to! With thrilling sweetness, astonishing technique, and most amazing volume, her rich contralto voice rang suddenly through the room. And in the precipitous jump of his heart was it any wonder that the poor Young Doctor couldn't have told for the life of him whether the mischief was all in one girl's voice or another girl's finger-tips, or partly in the voice and partly in the finger-tips--or--? "Home to our Mountains," soared the lovely voice, then quivered suddenly, like some wounded thing, and with her hands pressed tightly to her cheek, the little singer sank weakly down in the first chair she could reach.
"Why, what is it!" jumped the Young Doctor.
Through a haze of tears the dark eyes lifted to his. "Oh, nothing special," faltered the little singer. "Just everything!"
With an irrelevant crash of chords Solvei Kjelland swung sharply round from the piano.
"Who is this Mrs. Tome Gallien, anyways?" she demanded fiercely. "And where is her habit? And what good is she? To hold back from people thus the things they want and stuff them all choke-up with what they don't want,--it is a scandal I say! It is a monstrosity!" With a quick, jerky sort of defiance she rose to her feet and commenced straightening her blue hat and tightening up her blue collar. "I am a failure as One Adventure," she laughed. "And I also get nothing! Neither the piano, nor the medicine for the sick aunt. Give me the address of this woman," she demanded. "And I will write to her in my leisure and tell her what my thoughts of her should be!"
"Do!" urged the Young Doctor. "Nothing would please her more! When a woman has the ego that Mrs. Tome Gallien has there's nothing in the world that tickles her vanity so as to hear just what people think of her, be it good, bad, or indifferent." With deliberate malice he tore a leaf from his notebook, scribbled the desired address on it and handed it to the Norse girl. "If it doesn't do anything else," he commended her with mock gravity, "it may at least draw the fire!"
"'Draw the fire'?" repeated the Norse girl a bit perplexedly. Then as though to shrug all perplexity aside she turned suddenly to the young widow. "As for you--" she beamed. "You are a cunning little thing! And I loves you!" With unmistakable tenderness she stooped and kissed the astonished little singer on the forehead. "And I hope you will soon be of a perfect wellness," she coaxed. "And sing the perfectly whole songs to whatever piano it is that you should love the best! As for me?" she called briskly to the Young Doctor. "It is that you understand I am perfectly resigned?"
"Resigned to what?" frowned the Young Doctor.
"Oh, this language!" laughed Solvei. "Do you know your own words? To? Of? It is the _from_ that I would say! Complete _from_ the Adventure I am resigned!"
"S-s-h! S-sh!" warned the Young Doctor's frowning face once more. Almost anxiously he accompanied her to the door. "S-sh--s-s-h!" he implored her. "The poor little girl must never know of Mrs. Tome Gallien's audacity in sending her here as an 'Adventure.' With all the sorrow she's in just now, and the pain--"
"Yes, quite so," acquiesced Solvei Kjelland with perfect docility. Then all of a blue-blonde flutter in the open doorway she turned to call back her blithe "Good-by."
"Good-by, Doctor and Mrs. Kendrue!" she called. "What? _No_?" she flushed at the very evident consternation in both uplifted faces. "Good-by then, Mrs. and Doctor Kendrue!" she revised her adieus hastily. "_What_? _N-o_?" she flared with her first real sign of impatience. "Well then, good-by, Mrs. and _not_ Doctor Kendrue!" she finished triumphantly, and vanished into the snowstorm. Turning back to his somber office and his sad little patient it seemed suddenly to the Young Doctor as though the first blue bird had fled, leaving only a single black iris bud to presage spring for the garden. "Blue birds were darlings!" quickened the Young Doctor. "And yet?" Poignantly to his memory revived a misty May time years and years ago when he had sat cross-legged in the grass a whole day through--to watch the unfolding miracle of a black iris bud!
In consideration of the particular speed and energy which Solvei Kjelland applied that afternoon to her homeward plunge through jostling traffic and resonant subways it is of interest to note that the first thing she did on reaching her room was to sit right down in her Larkspur-Blue coat and hat and investigate the word "leisure" in her English Dictionary. Out of all the various definitions given, "vacancy of mind" seemed to suit her fancy best. "In the vacancy of my mind is it that I have promised for this writing?" she questioned. "Of a very good wellness then! When else should my mind or my heart be more vacated than now?"
True to this impulse she sat down that very evening to tell Mrs. Tome Gallien just exactly what she thought of her. On some very pale, pale yellow note paper, with the blue ink which she adored, and in the spirited handwriting so characteristic of her nationality, the very page was a blonde flare of personality.
MRS. TOME GALLIEN,
DEAREST MADAM (she wrote):
How do you do's, And I know all! Do not do it, I say. Do not do it. They do not like it and if you so persist in thus teasing of them you will most certainly defeat the one object which I am of an inclination to suspect that you have tucked away in one side of the mind. Is it not so?
You are of course very clever and of much wealthiness and some pain. And, it is of course very diverting and most droll lying thus to plan how one may yet motivate the destinies, is it, that you say?
And it is doubtless as you well think--the little widow lady has mourned too long, and is too delicate of the indoors, and moons too much over the singing-voice. And this Young Doctor in his own turn he also is a mistake, so sarcasms, so severe, and hates all womans and all pianos both, except for minutes. And you have thought that if thus across the little pain in the lady's bone these two could be brought to scold about the pianos and the blind ducks much good might yet come and of a most loving adjustingment?
But no, Madam it is a great mistake! These people are not at all as bright as you think. And also in their hearts is there none of that most happy greed which makes all comical things as they come one joke! No! It is only that they see in your gifts one great make-them-mad which if you persist in so doing with other comics will make them cold with hate and humiliation for each other. And when you tag the poor little lady as an Adventure you have yet outraged complete the chivalries of the Young Doctor so that he cannot even see in his sense that even so little a widow may yet be a very great Adventure.
Do not do it, I say! Do not do it! It is cruel. And there is no law but your own honor that can stop it.
If the malice is so formed that you cannot stop it but must persist in this most foolish custom of giving people the things what they do not want I would respectfully suggest that you send them to me.
I am young. I am strong. And very laughing. If you can find anything in the world at just this time that I do not want _I dare you to send it to me!_
Yours very truly,
SOLVEI KJELLAND.
Being satiate then with justice and the English language Solvei reverted once more to the pursuit of juvenile pedagogics and the general discussion of human events with her own aunt and in her own tongue.
Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, nothing except pedagogics and the aunt even remotely threatened her horizon. And by Thursday every gesture of her fine young body, every changing expression of her fine young face, seemed frankly indicative of some seething inner triumph that as yet remained unspoken. By Friday night, however, even this self-control slipped its leash, and she closed her eyes for sleep with a very distinct and definite expression of emotion. "Ah!" she laughed, "that Gallien lady down yonder is good and fixed! Yes!"
It was not until Saturday night, late, by special delivery, that Mrs. Tome Gallien's answer came.
Stumbling sleepily down the stairs just be fore midnight to answer the doorbell that no one else seemed awake to answer, Solvei Kjelland received the insignificant looking envelope into her own hands. Small as it was, heavily overshadowed by special delivery postage, and almost quaveringly directed in a pale, fine writing it might well have suggested to anybody a suppliant for mercy, or at least for pity.
With a first faint twinge of remorse Solvei tore it open to discover no contents whatever--except a railroad ticket to the little mainland town in South Carolina where Mrs. Tome Gallien had established her official address.
Scowlingly for a moment and in dumb perplexity the girl stood shifting from one slippered foot to another in a really desperate effort to decipher each word, phrase, comma, asterisk, in the momentous little document be fore her. Then quite suddenly a smile that was by no means mirthful flashed brilliantly across her blue eyes and her gleaming teeth.
"_Stinged_!" said Solvei Kjelland, and gathering her big gray blanket wrapper a little bit closer around her fled back precipitously to her bed.
With the first faint ray of morning light perhaps she might have waked to an instant's reassuring conviction that the whole ticket episode was a dream if only her subconscious deductions from that episode had not waked first on her lips like a wry taste. "The one things in the world that I did not want--at just this time? That lady is a witchess!" was the phrase that waked on her lips.
It was not until early the following week, however, that she called up the Young Doctor to tell him the news.
"How do you do?" she telephoned. "This is Solvei Kjelland. And I am to say good-by."
"Good-by? Why, what do you mean?" questioned the Young Doctor's frankly surprised voice.
"It is that I am going away," said Solvei, "on a little--what it is you would call a trip."
"Oh," said the Young Doctor. "Where?"
If the statement could ever be made that a Person "shrugged" his voice Solvei certainly "shrugged" hers.
"Oh, through the tunnel!" she said. "And then off!"
"Yes, but where?" persisted the Young Doctor.
"Oh, to the Southern Carolines to visit this Mrs. Tome Gallien," sing-songed the girl as one who had rehearsed the line even to the point of monotony.
"What?" cried the Young Doctor. "Why--why, what do you mean?"