Part 8

He spoke with the insolence of tone peculiar to well-bred young men, and he walked to the open door and stood waiting for the carriage and frowning out at the passers-by. There was a red glare from the furnaces on the other side of the river, shifting and fading on the coils of black smoke which lay motionless in the still, hot air. The street was the narrow unlovely street of the small manufacturing town of the West.

“It’s a beastly place,” Dick said to himself with an irritation which had its root in some formless apprehension; and he got into the lumbering, rattling hack and slammed the door with vicious emphasis. “What on earth does her father live here for, anyhow?” he said to himself.

The carriage drew up first at a small market, where piles of faded vegetables, flanked by glass cases of meats, jutted out upon the pavement; a man in a dirty white butcher’s frock leaned against the door-post, and two jets of gas flared and flickered from long iron stand-pipes.

The driver leaned down from his box and called out in friendly tones to know if this was the place.

“Idiot!” said Dick under his breath. “Of course not. Try the next address.”

This was a forlorn, untidy-looking house on a side street. Lodgers’ heads were thrust out of the windows as Dick climbed the steps and inquired whether Miss Annie Graham lived there? He was conscious of a distinct relief when he went back again to the carriage. They went to two other houses, but there was no Miss Annie Graham.

“I guess,” said the hackman, “we’ll have to cross over to the other side of the river. There’s a Graham over there, at Jack’s Corners. Jack’s Corners is a fine suburb, sir.”

Dick’s heart rose.

“All right; go on,” he said. “Can’t you hurry those beasts of yours up?”

And so it was that, about seven o’clock, the cabman drew up before a small, detached frame house on the Mill Road. It was so hot that the kitchen windows were wide open, and one could see the table drawn up between them, and a little man in his shirt-sleeves eating his supper. Opposite him, by the other window, was a girl with a fan in her hand, and between them were two other persons, for Johnny was entertaining that night. Dave Duggan, uncomfortable, he knew not why (although it certainly was not the weather, for he had, with great good sense, removed his coat), sat on Annie’s left; and next to him, beside Johnny, was an enormously fat woman, in a sort of loose white sack. This was Mrs. Pugsley, who was one of those neighboring ladies of thwarted stepmother potentialities. “But you never know what’ll happen,” Mrs. Pugsley often remarked, and dropped in this hot July night in a friendly way to see if Annie was making her father comfortable. It was Mrs. Pugsley’s opinion that all this learning wasn’t no good. “Better know how to dish a meal’s victuals,” said Mrs. Pugsley, “than be readin’ story papers all the time. That’s what them high-school girls does mostly.”

The room was faintly lighted by a kerosene lamp on the mantelpiece; but the real radiance was in Johnny’s face, as he looked across a bunch of roses in the middle of the narrow table at his Annie.

“Annie walked out two miles to get them flowers,” he said.

“Must ’a’ wanted something to do,” said Mrs. Pugsley.

“I’d ’a’ got ’em for you, Annie,” Dave said bashfully, “if I’d a-known you wanted ’em.” And it was just then that the carriage drew up at the door.

Dick, hot and disappointed and disgusted at the coachman’s stupidity in bringing him into this obviously mechanic’s suburb, leaned out to say, “Drive on!” And then he saw her.

There was a flutter in the tenement at seeing a hack draw up. Johnny Graham rose, seeing in a burst of fancy an important and hasty job, and a carriage sent to convey him to a wilderness of leaks or broken tips. Mrs. Pugsley conceived the hack to be a summons from a lady friend who had expected to need her services on a felicitous occasion, and was instantly agitated, and got up panting, and saying:--

“Goodness! they’ve sent!”

But Annie knew.

One wonders if she flinched, there in the twilight. She rose at once and went to the front door, her hand outstretched in pleased welcome.

“Why, Mr. Temple! This is very pleasant,” she said. “Father, dear, this is Mr. Temple.”

Dick’s face was white. He took Johnny Graham’s hand and bowed, with some murmured reference to pleasure.

“This is my friend, Mr. Duggan, Mr. Temple,” Annie went on placidly, “and Mrs. Pugsley.”

Dick bowed twice. He saw dimly, in the dusky kitchen interior, two other figures, one of which, assisted by the other, was struggling into a coat.

“Why, now set down, sir,” Johnny said joyously; “take a seat and set down. Annie, now, can’t you make room there by Dave? We was just setting out to eat our tea, sir; it’s so hot, we was late,--but it’s the style to be late, I hear! I guess we ain’t eat up everything, have we, Annie? I guess there’s something left for your gentleman friend.”

“You’re very kind,” Dick protested feebly; but he sat down, too bewildered to find any excuse.

Annie put a plate before him, and told him he must have some iced tea.

“It’s the only thing that makes life possible in this weather,” she said; “but I can’t make father believe it; he takes his boiling.”

“Well, sir,” said Johnny, “you had quite a jaunt to get out here, hadn’t you? But I don’t mind the walk myself, back and forth from my work, for it’s fresher out here.”

“I didn’t know your address,” Dick said, not looking at Annie; “I’ve been driving round”--

“When I saw that carriage drive up,” Mrs. Pugsley said, still panting, “I thought a lady friend of mine had sent for me; it give me such a start!”

“Tell me how you left Mrs. Paul,” Annie asked.

“Oh, thanks, very well,” Dick assured her; and there was a moment’s pause. Mrs. Pugsley and Dave were blankly silent. Annie talked against time.

“It was so nice to get home. Just think, I had been away five years,” she said; “that’s a pretty long time not to see one’s father; father didn’t know me when he met me at the station;--now, I would have known you anywhere!” she reproached Johnny, with a loving look.

“Well, but now, you’d growed, Annie; that’s what I said when I saw her. I says, ‘Why, Annie, you’ve growed!’ Dave, here, don’t see no change in her. But I do,” Johnny ended proudly.

“You must have missed your daughter very much,” Mr. Temple murmured.

“Well, indeed, an’ he did,” Mrs. Pugsley said resentfully; “but she would be studyin’. She’s that set on it.”

“Miss Graham is devoted to mathematics,” Dick began miserably, “and--and that sort of thing”--

He stopped so abruptly that Mrs. Pugsley’s hoarse whisper to Dave Duggan was audible to all,--

“Say, is he Annie’s feller?”

“Hush!” said Dave Duggan.

Dick drank his tumbler of iced tea with violent haste, and even Johnny looked disconcerted. Annie said something about the roses.

“The thing I miss most in South Bend are the gardens,” she said. “You know we are all working people on this side of the river, and there are no old houses, so there are no beautiful big gardens. I had to walk far out into the country for those.”

“Won’t you have anything more?” Johnny inquired hospitably. “Take another helping of something? You won’t? Oh, now, take a taste of this! No? Well, let’s go into the parlor, Annie.”

If Annie held back, no one saw it. They went into the best room, where Johnny set all the gas burners flaring, that the full glories of the decorations might strike the visitor, who, indeed, saw nothing but Annie’s set face.

“Miss Graham,” he said, “you are coming East again in September, aren’t you?”

“I think not; I think I must never leave father again. He is not very strong, and I want to be with him.”

“Oh, yes, quite so,” Dick answered, “but”--

“But what, Mr. Temple?”

“Oh, nothing; I only thought--I thought you were to teach in the college, and”--

He did not know how to end his sentence; he caught Dave Duggan’s eyes glowering at him, and Johnny’s rather obsequious smile. Johnny had the true American veneration for wealth, and he felt that this gentleman who kept a hack waiting for an hour was a rich man.

“I shall never leave my father,” Annie said, in a low voice.

Now Richard Temple was not a mean or unworthy man; he was a well-born, well-bred, well-educated young American gentleman; but he had been placed suddenly at a cruel disadvantage; his presence of mind deserted him--he was bewildered and confounded. His plans and hopes were all adrift. He could not meet Annie Graham’s eyes again; he said good-night, at first effusively, and then haughtily; and sneaked out to his carriage, anxious only to escape from an intolerable situation.

“Hope you’ll come again and talk over old times with Annie, sir,” Johnny said, shaking Dick’s hand all the time that he was speaking; “you’ll call again, sir?”

“Oh, certainly, yes, of course,” Dick answered wretchedly.

But Annie knew better.

* * * * *

Dave Duggan had watched Annie’s visitor with burning eyes. He followed the conversation with painful intentness, and a sense of speed which made him breathless. He wished to join in it,--and kept moistening his lips and clearing his throat, but he never found the courage to speak. His shyness probably prevented him from being rude; for his feeling about Dick was rage, pure and simple.

“He’s a blamed dude,” he thought to himself again and again; but he could think of nothing to say which would convey this opinion, and yet fit into the conversation. But when Dick had slunk back to his carriage Dave’s feelings burst forth. For a few moments, indeed, the little group (except Annie) talked, in their excitement, all together.

“Ain’t he handsome!” Johnny said proudly; he was proud of anything connected with Annie.

“He’s real rich, Annie, ain’t he? Ridin’ in hacks?” Mrs. Pugsley demanded.

“He’s a blamed dude; that’s what he is,” Dave said fiercely.

“I thought he was your feller, Annie,” Mrs. Pugsley declared, panting and fanning herself.

“Well, now, he’s none too good to be,” Johnny announced, chuckling.

“Father, dear, wouldn’t it be nicer to sit out on the steps, where it’s cooler? I’ll put the tea things away, and then I’ll come, too. Please--_go!_” she ended. Johnny looked at her in surprise, sensitive to every change in her voice.

“Why, now--Annie?” he faltered.

“I’ll be through with the dishes in a few minutes, father, dear,” she said; and so Johnny led the way to the front door and placed a chair on the hard, black earth at the foot of the steps for Mrs. Pugsley, and told Dave to take off his coat again.

“It’s that hot,” Johnny said, “there’s no good wearin’ coats.”

“Now that dude’s gone, I suppose there’s no harm being comfortable,” Dave agreed angrily.

They sat there in the dusk, Johnny and Mrs. Pugsley talking the visit over. They could hear Annie moving about in the kitchen, washing the dishes. After a while Dave Duggan got up and with painstaking and elaborate efforts not to attract attention went, with creaking, clumsy steps, into the kitchen. Annie stood by the sink, with her back to him. He heard her draw in her breath in a broken sob; and then he saw--he saw that tears were running down her face.

“Annie!” he said; “oh, now, Annie, don’t, don’t mind, Annie, dear!” He put out his hands beseechingly, his face red and wincing with feeling. Annie turned her shoulder toward him, and set her teeth. She drew her wrist across her eyes.

“It’s that dude’s hurt your feelin’s, Annie--darn him! but never you mind, he ain’t worth”--

“Oh, please go away, Dave,” Annie said; “you don’t know what you are talking about! Please go back to father.”

“Annie,” he burst out, “look here: he ain’t worth it. I say, Annie, will you take up with me?”

“I really don’t know what you are talking about. Mr. Temple--if you are referring to him--has not hurt my feelings in the least. I--I had something on my mind, and”--

“Oh, Annie,” poor Dave said, “what I’m wanting to know”--He stood there in his shirt-sleeves beside the sink, his voice trembling, one big red hand opening and shutting the hot-water spigot. “I’m just wanting to know if you’ll marry me, Annie. Say, now, will you?”

She shrank from him, a sort of horror in her face.

“_You?_”

“You ain’t mad?” he entreated.

“It is quite impossible,” she answered hoarsely; “quite, quite! Never speak to me of such a thing”--Her face was stinging, her voice was broken, as a woman’s might be to whom some insulting thing had been said. “You will go, if you please,” she ended, her head high, and with a certain gesture that confounded him.

“But look a-here,” he insisted, following her as she moved away from him; “Annie, look a-here; that fellow ain’t a-goin’ to marry anybody but a rich lady; his kind ain’t goin’ to marry you.”

“Well, I shan’t marry my kind, then! You can just understand that,” she cried, with a sudden almost coarse fury. “There’s no use for you to think of such a thing. Don’t ever dare to spake to me that way again!”

* * * * *

This is as far as Annie Graham has lived her story. She and Dave practically summed the matter up between them: “His kind will not marry you;” and “I will not marry my kind.”

The story is unfinished; one waits to see what will happen.

There are three things open to Annie: She may live out her life in South Bend; teaching, perhaps, in the public school, gradually refining the terrible little house, rejoicing Johnny’s heart, and never interfering, merely for her own æsthetic necessities, with the unlovely habits of Johnny’s fifty years of unlovely living; she may learn to accept his intimates as her acquaintances, his Mrs. Pugsleys and Dave Duggans as household friends, starving all the while for the companionship of her equals. Or--

She may shake off these intolerable surroundings which make her shrink as instinctively as an open eye shrinks from dust; she may turn her back on South Bend, and the tenement house, and the painted snow-shovel, and her father’s shirt-sleeves, and her father’s tender heart, and go out into the world to live her own strong, refined, intellectual life, perhaps as a teacher in her old college; marrying, after a while, some one who has never seen her father, and coming into the soul-destroying possession of that skeleton in the American closet--the vulgarity of the preceding generation. Or--

She may, because of sheer misery in the struggle between the new and the old, and for the dreadful suffocating comfort of it, fall back into the pit whence she was digged and try to forget the upper air.

What is the child’s duty? To live her own life, or to live some one else’s life? Is she to accept success or failure, fulfillment or renunciation?

People differ as to what constitutes success; some go so far as to say that the highest fulfillment lies in renunciation; and certainly there was once a life that might have been called a failure because it ended upon a cross on Calvary.

I suppose it all depends on how you look at it.

THE LAW, OR THE GOSPEL

I

EVERYBODY in Mercer knew Sara Wharton; in the first place, she was Edward Wharton’s daughter; the Edward Wharton of the Wharton & Blair Company, whose great Rolling and Smelting Mills darken Mercer’s sky with vast folds of black smoke, and give employment to two thirds of Mercer’s population. In the second place, she was a very charming young lady, who was too pretty to pass unnoticed when her victoria went rolling along the river road on fine afternoons. And in the third place, she was the president of two girls’ clubs, and the organizer of the Boys’ Alliance, and the Young Men’s Literary Association, and the founder of the Y. W. C. T. U., and the kindly autocrat of all Mercer’s rough, grimy, under-fed young people. She was a sweet-hearted, wholesome-minded, impulsive, dear child; the kind of girl who loved a party just as much, and planned her pretty dresses just as anxiously, and adored her father and mother just as unreasonably, as though she had never heard of a committee, and was indifferent to the Cause of Humanity. All Mercer knew her, and believed in her; and so when, one gray November afternoon, she was seen to go quietly up the steps of a certain house on Baker Street--a house which decent folk affected to ignore when they passed it by at midday, but at which they glanced curiously after nightfall--when Sara Wharton went into this house, those who chanced to see her said only, “Well! what won’t that girl do next?”

The woman who answered her ring opened the door scarcely more than a crack, and peered out at her sourly.

“I want to see Nellie Sherman,” said Miss Wharton.

“There’s no person by that name here,” the woman answered.

“Let me in, please,” Sara Wharton said. She put her hand against the door, which yielded a little and then stopped; the woman inside had braced her foot against it.

“She ain’t in.”

“I will wait until she comes, then,” returned the young lady pleasantly.

“I don’t know why you’re comin’ here lookin’ for a girl,” the woman cried out, in sudden, shrewish rage; “this is a respectable house; there’s no Sherman girl here!”

“Let me in at once,” said Sara Wharton, “or I shall get a policeman, and have a warrant served. I know Nellie Sherman lives here, and I want to see her. You had better let me in without further talk. I am Miss Wharton.”

“I don’t care if you are Queen Victoria,” the keeper of the house declared angrily; “well, you can come in, though there ain’t no Nellie Sherman here; there’s a Nettie Sherman,--if she’s the girl you’re looking for.”

“Tell her I want to see her, please.”

“She’s up in her room. You can go up.” Miss Wharton’s instant’s hesitation made her add, “There ain’t nobody there.”

The halls and stairs were nearly dark; one or two frowzy heads peered over the banisters, and drew back quickly; there was a loud guffaw of laughter from behind a closed door, and all the air was heavy with the reek of stale tobacco.

“Her room’s the third floor back,” the woman called up after the visitor, who went swiftly over the stairs, intent upon her errand, yet with a faint shudder, a sort of physical shrinking, that made her gather her cloak close about her, lest it might touch the wall or banisters.

“I’m glad I told Thomas to wait,” she said to herself, thinking of the brougham at the door, with the respectable, long-suffering Thomas on the box. At the third floor back she knocked, and waited for a reply; then she knocked again.

“What is it?” a muffled voice asked; “is that you, Mamie? Go ’way! I’m busy.”

“It is I; Miss Wharton; a friend of your aunt’s. Let me in, Nellie.” There was a breathless pause, and then a quick step, and a bolt was snapped back. A slight, startled-looking girl stood in the doorway. Sara entered with a certain fine, regal step that she had, that gave at once a sense of the uselessness of opposing her.

“Shut the door,” she commanded cheerfully, “and let me see you. Come, we will sit down and have a little talk. Oh, open that window first; there is some dreadful perfumery in the room. Ah, that’s nice; fresh air is the nicest sort of perfumery; don’t you think so?”

The girl stared at her without an answer. She was a delicate-looking creature, rather pretty, except that just now her face was stained with tears, and there was a sullen look about her little pale lips. But she had fair hair in a sort of aureole around her low forehead, and shading her really beautiful eyes; and she wore a crimson silk waist,--spotted, to be sure, and ripped on the shoulder, but bringing out the fairness of her skin, and the blue veins on her delicate temples.

“I’m sure I haven’t the pleasure of your acquaintance,” she said airily; but she was trembling.

“I know your aunt, Mrs. Sherman,” her visitor said; then there was a moment’s silence. Sara Wharton looked about the untidy room,--with its banjo hung with ribbons, its looking-glass rimmed with cards and tintypes stuck edgewise within the frame; its litter of cigarette ends, and its half-empty, uncorked bottle of beer on the marble-topped centre-table.

“Your aunt told me about you, my child,” she said, with a deep, kind look full into the girl’s face.

The color rushed into Nellie’s pale cheeks; but she only said, with vast indifference, “Is that so? Well, she’s very kind, I’m sure.”

“I don’t know that she has always been very kind,” Sara Wharton answered thoughtfully. “Now shut that window behind you; I don’t want you to sit in a draft; and the fresh air has driven out the perfumery. Why do you use perfumery, Nellie? Nice girls don’t.”

The girl looked at her blankly.

“Yes; your aunt told me about you. She told me how she had taken care of you ever since your mother died; and how she had sent you to school, and bought pretty dresses for you, and done the housework herself so that you shouldn’t spoil your hands; and how she took in washing so that you might go to dancing-school. She loved you very much, Nellie; but I am not sure that she was kind. Perhaps if you had had to work you wouldn’t have come to this dreadful house, and brought shame and disgrace to Mrs. Sherman. You’ve broken her heart, Nellie.”

The girl’s face paled and flushed; and then quivered suddenly into a storm of tears.

“_I_ don’t like it here. But I can’t help it. I lost my place in the shop. I was late, and they discharged me. And I was afraid to go home and tell my aunt, she jaws at me so. That was four weeks ago. It was the third place I’d lost. So I--came here. I don’t like it. I was just crying when you came in!” She squeezed her handkerchief into a damp ball and pressed it against her eyes, sobbing. “The woman is so cross. And--and I owe her for board.”

Sara was silent.

“But there ain’t anything I can do; I’d die rather than go back to my aunt’s. She’d never forgive me. I don’t blame her. But _I_ don’t like it here.”

“Perhaps your aunt will forgive you?” Sara said gently. Nellie rocked back and forth, sobbing.

“I’m too wicked,” she recited; her eyes roved over Sara’s dark dress, and inspected her pretty little bonnet, and dwelt on the glitter of an amethyst pin at her throat. “Oh, dear, I wish I hadn’t; I wish I was dead,” she said helplessly.

Sara Wharton’s face lit with a quick tenderness. She put her arm over the child’s bent shoulders, and drew the wet cheek down against her breast. “My dear, if you are sorry, if you know that it is wicked and dreadful, then the worst is over. Don’t wish to die--wish to live, so that you may be good. I know you _can_ be good!” she ended, with a burst of courage in her voice, that struck some answering chord in the poor, half-developed little soul at her side. Nellie looked up.

“Oh, I will be good--if I can; just get out of here! I’m just about sick, anyway; I’ve got such a pain under my left shoulder; and I’m just tired of it--and Mrs. Smith is so cross. But I can’t go home. My aunt’ll jaw at me. Oh, I can’t ever go home!” She whimpered a little, and looked at her pretty finger nails critically.

“I’m _sure_ your aunt will forgive you!” Sara said, impetuous and tender. “Let’s go and ask her to, now.”

“Mrs. Smith won’t let me go, I guess,” Nellie sighed; “I owe her two weeks board.”

“I will pay her.”

“I’ll come to-morrow,” the child demurred.

“Nellie, dear, I want you to come now! Oh, Nellie, won’t you begin this minute to be good?”

“I’m not so very bad,” Nellie protested, “and I can’t come now, truly. I haven’t any sack. I--sold it.” The tears welled up in her soft eyes at the remembrance of her poverty.

“You don’t need a sack. You’ll come in my carriage, and I’ll wrap a rug around you.”

“My!” said Nellie, “is your carriage here? One of the club girls told me it had satin cushions. Is that so, Miss Wharton?”

Sara bit her lip. “Never mind about the cushions. Oh, Nellie, dear, don’t think of things like that! Only just try with all your might to be good. Will you, Nellie?”

“Why, certainly,” said Nellie.

* * * * *