Part 6

"Mean?" bridled Solvei instantly. "For why should it be a meanness? Is not this Mrs. Tome Gallien as fine a lady as I? Am I not as fine a lady as Mrs. Tome Gallien? For why if two ladies like to visit it should not be so? Have I not explain it all to the sick aunt?"

"Yes, but do you really mean that you wrote to Mrs. Tome Gallien?" stammered the Young Doctor. "What did you say? For Heaven's sake what did you say?"

"What I did say should be sealed in my own heart," affirmed Solvei with some coldness.

"Yes, but my dear child!" protested the Young Doctor. "You don't seem to have any idea of just what you're going to! It's not at all a cheerful sort of place you understand. Why even its name you know is 'Gloom of the Sea.'"

"Even so," said Solvei, "there is no special pain in that. In my time have I not already seen several Glooms of the Land? Why then should I not, for sheer geography, start out to investigate a 'Gloom of the Sea'?"

"Yes, but it's a--it's a Desert Island, you know!" persisted the Young Doctor.

"So-o?" brightened Solvei. "And will there then be camels? N-o?" With a soft sigh of regret her whole personality seemed to fade for a moment into the indeterminate blur and buzz of crossed telephone wires. Then clear as a bell her voice rang out again. "And have you seen the little sad lady once more?" she asked.

"Why she's here in my office now," said the Young Doctor. "She has to come almost every day."

"So?" mused the Norse girl. "And will it take the long time perhaps to mend the little pain in the bone?"

"I certainly hope so!" laughed the Young Doctor. And for the first time since she had heard it there was no irony in the laugh but sheer boyish happiness.

"You do not seem quite to get the ideas of this little trip that I should make," she reproached him briskly. "It is not just that I go! But that I stay! It is not just for the once it would seem but for the all time that this lady so desires me! The ticket that she so kindly sends is but one-sided. It does not return."

"Ticket?" exclaimed the Young Doctor. "Why, this is preposterous! You don't really mean it, surely? There's nothing that can make you go, you know!"

"So?" said Solvei. "Did I not make the dare to her? Should I not pay? Is it not then as you say? I have drawn the fire!" Across the astonishing gravity of her tone a most joyous laugh broke suddenly. "Your words are of such a mixedness," she laughed. "Drawn? Drawn? Is it not rather as the strong banks would say, Miss Solvei Kjelland by one lady from the South has been withdrawn from the circulations? But I adore this America!" she confided blithely. "Always around every corner there is something that you did not first expect when you curled that corner."

"Yes, I know," admitted the Young Doctor. "But what about all this Montessori study and everything? Are you going to chuck it? And the little brother? The little lad who isn't?" he asked with real regret.

"It will all keep," said Solvei. "It is only what is, it would seem, that should pass."

"Oh, but Miss Kjelland," insisted the Young Doctor, "this whole thing is absurd! I--I believe you're making it all up, just for a joke! If you're going to be home next Sunday afternoon couldn't I come around and--and laugh the thing out with you?"

"Next Sunday afternoon?" mused Solvei, with the manner of one who pauses for an instant to count the days on the fingers. "And this now, this minute, is a Tuesday?" she questioned, still speculatively.

"Yes," agreed the Young Doctor.

"No! It will not be possible!" said Solvei. "I leave!"

"Yes, but when?" asked the Young Doctor.

"Now," said Solvei. "Already it is that I can hear the taxicab adding at the door."

"What?" cried the Young Doctor.

"Under the river!" waved Solvei's clear young voice. "Under the river, Dr. Sam Kendrue!"

Like a gigantic gray-brown wonder bulb the northern winter is dumped down thus at will into the sunny, plushy forcing frame of a New York Pullman to bloom in perfect scent and glory only one day, two days, three days later in some welcoming Southland.

If Solvei Kjelland was astonished, however, at the first bland sights that met her blizzard-habituated eyes it is only fair to say that Mrs. Tome Gallien in all her years of experience in every kind of a Southland had never seen any thing that astonished her as much as the sight of Solvei Kjelland.

Fuming helplessly in her great mahogany bed with its weird-carven bed-posts of pirate and sailor and siren, the sick woman lay staring blankly from the ceiling to the piazza railing and from the piazza railing to the dull gray sea when the vision first burst upon her.

"Why--why--Martha!" she screamed to her deaf woman. "There is a bright blue girl in the wrangle boat! And nobody is wrangling! They are coming right along, I mean! Scudding! And the girl is running the engine!"

From her own quick glance at the scene the deaf woman's answering voice came back as calm, as remote, as de-magnetized as the voice of an old letter.

"You sent for a girl to come, I believe," said the deaf woman.

"Yes, I know," fumed Mrs. Tome Gallien. "But I hardly dreamed for a moment that she really would!"

"What?" said the deaf woman.

"Never--dreamed--that--she--would!" repeated Mrs. Tome Gallien as economically as she could.

"Most things that you send for--seem to come," monotoned the deaf woman by no means unamiably. "There's no room left in the storeroom now for the last box of Japanese bric-a-brac, or the French wedding gown or the new-fangled fireless cooker. Where shall we put the girl?"

"In the fireless cooker!" snapped Mrs. Tome Gallien.

From the vague acquiescent smile on Martha's face it was evident that she sensed the spirit if not the words of the suggestion.

The next direction however was startlingly clear. With a quite unmistakable gesture Mrs. Tome Gallien pointed toward the stairs.

"Martha! Go to it!" she screamed.

To a person lying in bed voices travel so much quicker than do the owners of the voices. Through what seemed an eternity then of time and noise, boat-keels grounding, men grumbling, boys shouting, women chattering, the sick woman waited in the lonely hush of her immediate surroundings with a very perceptible shiver of nervousness flashing from moment to moment across her spine.

Then all a-glow and a-blow and theatrically incongruous like some splendid young Viking of Old rigged out in a girl's blue and ultramodern rain-coat, the stranger loomed up suddenly at the foot of the bed with Martha's portly white figure backgrounding every radiant flutter and line of the blue and gold silhouette.

"I am come!" said Solvei Kjelland.

As coolly as if she had been appraising a new dog or pussy Mrs. Tome Gallien narrowed her eyes to both the vision and the announcement.

"Certainly you are a very good-looking young person!" she conceded at last. "But of such an ungodly name! Is there no way to overcome it?"

"Over--come it?" puzzled Solvei for a single shadowed instant. "Oh, that is most easy," she brightened, almost at once. "Solway it is as though it was. And Ch-Chelland."

"You may call me 'Elizabeth,'" said Mrs. Tome Gallien without the flicker of an eyelash.

"E-lee-sa-buth?" repeated the girl painstakingly.

"Oh, I suppose that will do," sighed Mrs. Tome Gallien, struggling up a little bit higher on her pillows. "But whatever in the world made you come?" she demanded tartly.

But if the question was like a dash of cold water, Solvei's reaction to it was at least the reaction of a duck's back.

"You mean you did not really want me?" she preened and fluttered. Her voice was ecstasy, her eyes like stars.

"I certainly did not," sliced Mrs. Tome Gallien's clear incisive voice.

"Oh, of what a joyousness and retribution!" beamed Solvei. "Of what a gloriosity! As the shooting camping is to the sad little lady, and the piano to the Young Doctor,--so thus am I to you! What then shall happen to everyone of us is yet on the lap of the gods! Let us kiss!" she suggested as one prize fighter might proffer his hand to another.

"I am not a kisser, thank you," said Mrs. Tome Gallien with some coldness.

"So-o?" acquiesced the girl softly. If her spirit faltered for an instant, her blue eyes fortunately faltered no lower than the great clutter of boxes that flanked Mrs. Gallien's bed in every direction. "For why are there so many boxes?" she looked up suddenly to ask with a smile that would have disarmed a Tartar.

"Why--why those are just some things I've been buying lately," relaxed Mrs. Tome Gallien ever so slightly. "There isn't so very much to do here, some days, except just to read the advertisements in the back of the magazines--and send for things. Martha hates it!" she added with a sudden wry glance at Martha's impassive face.

"O-h!" said Solvei. And the word was divided absolutely evenly between praise of the boxes and disparagement of Martha.

The boxes seemed to have heard their part of it anyway. The string on a huge brown paper package burst suddenly as though for sheer excitement.

"Martha will show you to your room," said Mrs. Tome Gallien quite imperviously. "And whatever else you try to jar, pray don't waste your energies trying to jar Martha. By a most merciful dispensation of Providence her sensibilities have been wrapped in a cotton batting silence for the past twenty years. You may in time learn to understand me," she smiled faintly with her first kindness. "But you will never understand Martha. Come back to me after supper, if you wish. And wear something blue if you have it. I like you in blue."

It was long after supper when Solvei returned. But at least she was in blue, and a very neat and trim blue it was and essentially boyish with its soft collar rolling back sailor-wise from her slender throat. Like one fairly consumed with the winter novelty of boats and beaches, too full of a hundred new excitements to speak, she dropped down on the low footstool by Mrs. Tome Gallien's pungent, smoky, lightwood fire, and with her blue elbows on her blue knees and her white chin cupped in her white hands, sat staring wide-eyed at her hostess. The whole breathless significance of youth was in her face. Youth struggled eternally for its own best self-expression. But when she spoke, a single sentence only burst from her lips.

"What was in that big brown bundle-box that should burst so?" she asked with a sudden elfish impudence.

But instead of being annoyed by the question, Mrs. Tome Gallien seemed on the contrary to be rather amused with it.

"You like boxes?" she asked with a faintly quizzical lift of her eyebrows.

"Boxes?" flamed Solvei. "It is like the new day! When the string breaks--it is the dawn! 'What should there then be in it?' jumps the heart. What is there yet that will come?"

"Oh, dear me," smiled Mrs. Tome Gallien. "If you feel like that about it by all means come and open it. I forget myself what is in it, there are so many. Nuts maybe," she laughed, "or a new carpet sweeper. Or a sable muff even!"

With all the frank eagerness of a child Solvei Kjelland jumped up to investigate the mystery, and like a kitten snarling itself into worsteds disappeared for the moment into interminable pale-colored tissue papers, only to emerge at last brandishing on high the plumpest, gaudiest, altogether most hideous hand-embroidered sofa pillow that human eyes were ever forced to contemplate.

"It is not nuts," said Solvei Kjelland. In another moment she had clasped the pillow to her breast. "Oh, of what a horror!" she laughed. "And how beloved! Is it the work then," she demanded, "of a blind one? Or of one crazy? Or of one both blind and crazy?" Back of the laughter and the question was a sincere and unmistakable concern.

"A clergyman's widow makes them," confided Mrs. Tome Gallien. "Somebody over in Alabama,--I saw the advertisement in a country newspaper. I take a whole lot of country newspapers for just that sort of amusement," she added a bit drily. "There seems to be such an everlasting number of bunglers in the world who are trying so desperately hard to make a little money. This woman I believe is trying to send her boy to college."

With the pillow extended precipitously to full arm's length Solvei sat for a moment staring from the chaotic embroidery to Mrs. Tome Gallien's perfectly composed face.

"Could a boy come to any of the good that should go to college on a pillow like that?" she demanded uproariously, while all the laughing curves of her mouth seemed reaching suddenly up to fend off the threat of tears in her eyes. Once again she clasped the pillow to her breast. "Oh, the bridge that it does make into the other's life!" she cried. "Can you not see all at once, the house, the desolation, the no store anywhere with fine goods to compare with! The boy so thin, so white, so eager perhaps, so watching of every stitch! That most dreadful magenta? Will there be by the grace of the good God a chance perhaps for the Latin? That screaming oranges? Should it be humanly possible that so much joys as histories and boots might yet be in the same world with the Latin. And the mother? So pricked with needles? So consumed with hopings----"

"You--you see it, do you?" drawled Mrs. Tome Gallien.

"See it?" flamed Solvei. "I _am_ it!" With the gesture of one who sought suddenly to hide her emotion she swung around abruptly toward the other side of the room. "What else is there then?" she asked, all laughter and mischief again. "That box so wooden, so busted at the top? Is that also a bridge to some other livings?"

"If you choose to call it so," nodded Mrs. Tome Gallien. A frankly quizzical invitation to explore was in the nod.

Solvei certainly needed no urging. In another instant down on her knees before the great wooden box, she was slowly extracting from wads of excelsior, piece after piece of the most exquisitely delicate and transparent turquoise blue china beaded in gold and airily overwrought with soaring sea gulls. There was a big breakfast cup, and a middle-sized breakfast cup, and a big plate, and a middle-sized plate, and a cereal saucer and another cereal saucer, and a most stately little coffee pot and all the other attendants and attendants to attendants which Fashion assigns to just that sort of a service.

"Oh, it is for the fairies then?" gasped Solvei. "Or a Princess?" Deftly as she spoke she pulled a great white sheet of paper to her and spread it on the floor as a cloth. "No!" she quickened. "It is for lovers! See? The first breakfast of the new home?" As cautiously as though she had been handling butterfly wings she began to dramatize the scene, the big plate there, the middle-sized plate here, a man's elbow-room, thus, a woman's daintiness, so! In the ingenuousness of her own visualization she lifted the bride's cup to her lips and sipped an ecstatic draught from it.

"Mocha or Java?" mocked Mrs. Tome Gallien.

"Joy!" said Solvei Kjelland.

In a sudden fit of abstraction then the girl struggled slowly to her knees and knelt thus staring very thoughtfully all around her.

"So is it then with all these boxes?" she asked. "That from this desert island lying so you would make constantly such little bridges across to other people's livings? In time, it is, I mean, as soon as you should bear to part with them you would build even these most Heavenish dishes across to some young happiness? But will such a young happiness ever take the troubles to cross back to you?" she demanded with sudden fierceness. "That is it, I say! That is it! A prattling note perhaps? A praise-you for being so rich? But do they ever yet write more late to tell that the gift is still well, that it has made new joy that very morning perhaps, that even yet after one month, six months, twenty, it is still so dear?"

"They never have," admitted Mrs. Tome Gallien.

In utter irrelevance the girl sank back on her heels and crossing her arms on her breast began to rock herself joyously to and fro.

"Oh, I do love this place so!" she confided. "I do love it so! And if you should then keep me," she beamed. "And I should be quite pleasant,--there is a lawn mower I read in yesterday's paper! Most wonderful it is, and runs by the gasolene, so that all one needs to do is to follow singing gaily. Could you send for such?"

"A lawn mower?" sniffed Mrs. Tome Gallien. "You noticed, I trust, that there was no nice grass whatsoever on this island?"

"Yes, that is most so," admitted Solvei. "Neither equally is there any young happinesses or bare-toed boys making for Latin. But if we were possessed of such a lawn mower and its wonderfulness we could at least make the fine green lawns in the mind."

"Solvei!" snapped Mrs. Tome Gallien, "I am dreadfully afraid that I am going to like you! But before I actually commit myself," she frowned, "I want to ask you one question. Are you in the habit of letting strange young men kiss you?"

"What?" jumped Solvei.

Very significantly Mrs. Tome Gallien repeated the question. "Strange young men?" she revised it. "Are you in the habit of letting strange young men kiss you?"

"Oh!" flushed Solvei. "It is then the Young Doctor that you mean? Was it so that he thus confessed it to you?" she questioned a bit bewilderedly. "So shamed he was, so worried, I had not just thought that he should tell. Yes, it is as you say he is one most strange young man."

"Yes, but you?" persisted Mrs. Tome Gallien. "How did you feel about it? That's what I want to know!"

"How should I feel?" laughed Solvei. "Why it was so mad I was, so strong, I could have crushed him on the steps! And then suddenly I see his face! Bah!" shrugged Solvei. "I have one father and nine brothers and all the world is most full of men! It is not from such a face as the Young Doctor's that any evil should come. It is just as I have said, one very sad accident!"

"It does not seem to be just the sadness of the accident that lingers longest in your mind," drawled Mrs. Tome Gallien.

With her chin tip-tilted and her eyes like stars the girl met the sarcasm without a flicker of resentment.

"No!" she laughed. "It is not the sadness of the accident that remains longest in the mind!"

"U-m-mmmm," mused Mrs. Tome Gallien. "All the same," she resumed with sharpness, "I certainly think it was most cruel, most brutal of him, not to make the trip down here with me! It would have done him good," she insisted. "Just the mere balmy change of it! He is so grim!"

"Oh, but he cannot help the being grim," flared Solvei. "He is so poor and so wanting things! How should he yet achieve them except by sticking close to that most saddest of all truths that the only ways to get ahead is to stay behind and attend to one's business?"

"Solvei!" asked Mrs. Tome Gallien quite abruptly. "Have you gotten the impression in any way that the Young Doctor was--was attracted at all to my little widow friend?"

"Oh, of a surety!" attested Solvei. "He is I think what one would say 'crazy' of her."

"Oh, I hardly dare to hope that," mused Mrs. Tome Gallien. "But of course--" In some far-away speculation the sentence faded suddenly off into silence. "She will of course be very rich some day, I suppose," she resumed a bit haughtily. "I shall, I suppose, make her my heir."

"S-o?" said Solvei Kjelland.

"Solvei!" snapped Mrs. Tome Gallien with another spurt of abruptness. "Speaking of 'attending to one's business,' if _you_ should decide to stay here and make _me_ your business, what do you think you could do for me?"

"Oh, I could do the reading aloud," brightened Solvei instantly. "And I could thus open the boxes! And I could run the wrangle boat!" she quickened and glowed. "And also if it should so seem best I could scrub the blue flannel crockings from the Wrangle Boy's neck!"

"On the whole--as a really steady employment," conceded Mrs. Tome Gallien, "suppose we begin on the reading aloud. I adore being read to."

"Oh, I am very fine on this reading aloud!" preened Solvei. "So dramatic is it that you say? So intensed?" With absolute self-assurance she picked up the only book in reach, it happened to be the "Golden Treasury," and just out of sheer temperamental eagerness selected the biggest-looking poem she could find. "It should be an 'Ode,' is it that you call it?" she confided. "And it is about--about--? I do not know such words," she faltered for a single second only and passed the page to Mrs. Tome Gallien.

"Oh," said Mrs. Tome Gallien, "Wordsworth, you mean. 'Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.'"

"S-o?" conceded Solvei. "All that? It is not certainly of a poetry sound but more--later perhaps it will tell. All the rest is most easy looking.

"There was--some time" (she began) "when--when meadows, groves, also streams, "The earth and all things perfectly--ordinary "To me did--did seems "Ap-pareled--"

I do not know that word and here is another--

"in ce--les--tial lightings, "The----"

"Yes--anybody could see at once that you are a remarkable reader!" slashed Mrs. Tome Gallien's coolest, thinnest voice. "The picture it suggests of our long spring evenings together is----"

With a startled glance upward Solvei detected for the first time the actual glinting mockery in the older woman's eyes. "What is it?" she stammered. "What?" Still like some one more bewildered than hurt she struggled to her feet. "Even as from the first," she questioned, "is it that you are making the sport of me when I wish so hard to do the things that would please you? Through and through, is your heart then so cruel?" she demanded, "that it must make mockerings of the confused and the far-from-homes?"

"Oh, Solvei!" cried the older woman suddenly. "Smile again! Laugh again! I can't bear it! It's as though the sun had died! It's as though the moon had gone! If you are angry and leave me, I shall be left all alone again with just the fog and the sea! I am a brute, and I know it! But oh, if you will only just smile again! Even just once, I mean! Oh, my poor dear little girl," she implored her. "Oh, my poor dear touchy little blonde girl!"

"I am not a 'poor--poor little blonde girl,'" asserted Solvei with some spirit. "I am indeed as I said, very young, very strong. And very laughing," she insisted without even the remotest flicker of a smile.

"Are you young enough and strong enough and laughing enough to come over here and sit on my bed?" rallied Mrs. Tome Gallien.

"I am young enough and strong enough and laughing enough to do anything!" said Solvei Kjelland.

Stiff and stern as a ramrod she went over and sat on the side of the Sick Woman's bed.

Without an atom of self-consciousness or embarrassment both women began all over again to study each other's faces.

"Could I put my hand on your yellow hair?" asked Mrs. Gallien at last quite surprisingly.

"You could put your hand on my yellow hair," said Solvei.

"If I should apologize fairly decently for existing at all," experimented Mrs. Tome Gallien a little further, "would you be willing to kiss now?

"I should never be willing," sighed Solvei, "to kiss any lips that tasted of mockerings."

"What would you be willing to do?" ventured Mrs. Tome Gallien.

"What would you want me to do?" relaxed Solvei ever so slightly.

Through Mrs. Tome Gallien's busy brain a dozen possible answers tested themselves one against the other.

"Well, would you be willing to--to tell me a little story?" she chose as the most promising one.

"Tell you a little story?" queried Solvei. Once again her whole face darkened with suspicion.

"Yes, about my little island," hurried Mrs. Tome Gallien. "It was dark when I came and they put me right into this bed. I do not leave my bed, you know."