IXAnother
For the first time in her life, Mrs. Carr fully comprehended the sensations of a wild animal caught in a trap. In her present painful predicament, she was absolutely helpless, and she realised it. It was Harlan’s house, as he had said, but so powerful and penetrating was the personality of the dead man that she felt as though it was still largely the property of Uncle Ebeneezer.
The portrait in the parlour gave her no light upon the subject, though she studied it earnestly. The face was that of an old man, soured and embittered by what Life had brought him, who seemed now to have a peculiarly malignant aspect. Dorothy fancied, in certain morbid moments, that Uncle Ebeneezer, from some safe place, was keenly relishing the whole situation.
Upon her soul, too, lay heavily that ancient Law of the House, which demands unfailingcourtesy to the stranger within our gates. Just why the eating of our bread and salt by some undesired guest should exert any particular charm of immunity, has long been an open question, but the Law remains.
She felt, dimly, that the end was not yet—that still other strangers were coming to the Jack-o’-Lantern for indefinite periods. She saw, now, why wing after wing had been added to the house, but could not understand the odd arrangement of the front windows. Through some inner sense of loyalty to Uncle Ebeneezer, she forebore to question either Mrs. Smithers or Dick—two people who could probably have given her some light on the subject. She had gathered, however, from hints dropped here and there, as well as from the overpowering evidence of recent events, that a horde of relatives swarmed each Summer at the queer house on the hilltop and remained until late Autumn.
Harlan said nothing, and nowadays Dorothy saw very little of him. Most of the time he was at work in the library, or else taking long, solitary rambles through the surrounding country. At meals he was moody and taciturn, his book obliterating all else from his mind.
He doubtless knew, subconsciously, that his house was disturbed by alien elements, but he dwelt too securely in the upper regions to be troubled by the obvious fact. Once in the library, with every door securely bolted, he could afford to laugh at the tumult outside, if, indeed, he should ever become aware of its existence. The children might make the very air vocal with their howls, Elaine might have hysterics, Mrs. Smithers render hymns in a cracked, squeaky voice, and Dick whistle eternally, but Harlan was in a strange new country, with a beautiful lady, a company of gallant knights, and a jester.
The rest was all unreal. He seemed to see people through a veil, to hear what they said without fully comprehending it, and to walk through his daily life blindly, without any sort of emotion. Worst of all, Dorothy herself seemed detached and dream-like. He saw that her face was white and her eyes sad, but it affected him not at all. He had yet to learn that in this, as in everything else, a price must inevitably be paid, and that the sudden change of all his loved realities to hazy visions was the terrible penalty of his craft.
Yet there was compensation, which is alsoinevitable. To him, the book was vital, reaching down into the very heart of the world. Fancy took his work, and, to the eyes of its creator, made it passing fair. At times he would sit for an hour or more, nibbling at the end of his pencil, only negatively conscious, like one who stares fixedly at a blank wall. Presently, Elaine and her company would come back again, and he would go on with them, writing down only what he saw and felt.
Chapter after chapter was written and tossed feverishly aside. The words beat in his pulses like music, each one with its own particular significance. In return for his personal effacement came moments of supremest joy, when his whole world was aflame with light, and colour, and sound, and his physical body fairly shook with ecstasy.
Little did he know that the Cup was in his hands, and that he was draining it to the very dregs of bitterness. For this temporary intoxication, he must pay in every hour of his life to come. Henceforward he was set apart from his fellows, painfully isolated, eternally alone. He should have friends, but only for the hour. The stranger in the street shouldbe the same to him as one he had known for many years, and he should be equally ready, at any moment, to cast either aside. With a quick, merciless insight, like the knife of a surgeon used without an anæsthetic, he should explore the inmost recesses of every personality with which he came in contact, involuntarily, and find himself interested only as some new trait or capacity was revealed. Calm and emotionless, urged by some hidden power, he should try each individual to see of what he was made; observing the man under all possible circumstances, and at times enmeshing new circumstances about him. He should sacrifice himself continually if by so doing he could find the deep roots of the other man’s selfishness, and, conversely, be utterly selfish if necessary to discover the other’s power of self-sacrifice.
Unknowingly, he had ceased to be a man and had become a ferret. It was no light payment exacted in return for the pleasure of writing about Elaine. He had the ability to live in any place or century he pleased, but he had paid for it by putting his present reality upon precisely the same footing. Detachment was his continually. Henceforth he was a spectatormerely, without any particular concern in what passed before his eyes. Some people he should know at a glance, others in a week, a month, or a year. Across the emptiness between them, some one should clasp his hand, yet share no more his inner life than one who lies beside a dreamer and thinks thus to know where the other wanders on the strange trails of sleep.
In the dregs of the Cup lay the potential power to cast off his present life as a mollusk leaves his shell, and as completely forget it. For Love, and Death, and Pain are only symbols to him who is enslaved by the pen. Moreover, he suffers always the pangs of an unsatisfied hunger, the exquisite torture of an unappeased and unappeasable thirst, for something which, like a will-o’-the-wisp, hovers ever above and beyond him, past the power of words to interpret or express.
It is often reproachfully said that one “makes copy” of himself and his friends—that nothing is too intimately sacred to be seized upon and dissected in print. Not so long ago, it was said that a certain man was “botanising on his mother’s grave,” a pardonable confusion, perhaps, of facts andrealities. The bitter truth is that the writer lives his books—and not much else. From title to colophon, he escapes no pang, misses no joy. The life of the book is his from beginning to end. At the close of it, he has lived what his dream people have lived and borne the sorrows of half a dozen entire lifetimes, mercilessly concentrated into the few short months of writing.
One by one, his former pleasures vanish. Even the divine consolation of books is partly if not wholly gone. Behind the printed page, he sees ever the machinery of composition, the preparation for climax, the repetition in its proper place, the introduction and interweaving of major and minor, of theme and contrast. For the fine, glowing fancy of the other man has not appeared in his book, and to the eye of the fellow-craftsman only the mechanism is there. Mask-like, the author stands behind his Punch-and-Judy box, twitching the strings that move his marionettes, heedless of the fact that in his audience there must be a few who know him surely for what he is.
If only the transfiguring might of the Vision could be put into print, there would be littlein the world save books. Happily heedless of the mockery of it all, Harlan laboured on, destined fully to sense his entire payment much later, suffer vicariously for a few hours on account of it, then to forget.
Dorothy, meanwhile, was learning a hard lesson. Harlan’s changeless preoccupation hurt her cruelly, but, woman-like, she considered it a manifestation of genius and endeavoured to be proud accordingly. It had not occurred to her that there could ever be anything in Harlan’s thought into which she was not privileged to go. She had thought of marriage as a sort of miraculous welding of two individualities into one, and was perceiving that it changed nothing very much; that souls went on their way unaltered. She saw, too, that there was no one in the wide world who could share her every mood and tense, that ultimately each one of us lives and dies alone, within the sanctuary of his own inner self, cheered only by some passing mood of friend or stranger, which chances to chime with his.
It was Dick who, blindly enough, helped her over many a hard place, and quickened her sense of humour into something uponwhich she might securely lean. He was too young and too much occupied with the obvious to look further, but he felt that Dorothy was troubled, and that it was his duty, as a man and a gentleman, to cheer her up.
Privately, he considered Harlan an amiable kind of a fool, who shut himself up needlessly in a musty library when he might be outdoors, or talking with a charming woman, or both. When he discovered that Harlan had hitherto earned his living by writing and hoped to continue doing it, he looked upon his host with profound pity. Books, to Dick, were among the things which kept life from being wholly pleasant and agreeable. He had gone through college because otherwise he would have been separated from his friends, and because a small legacy from a distant relative, who had considerately died at an opportune moment, enabled him to pay for his tuition and his despised books.
“I was never a pig, though,” he explained to Dorothy, in a confidential moment. “There was one chump in our class who wanted to know all there was in the book, and made himself sick trying to cram it in. All of a sudden, he graduated. He left collegefeet first, three on a side, with the class walking slow behind him. I never was like that. I was sort of an epicure when it came to knowledge, tasting delicately here and there, and never greedy. Why, as far back as when I was studying algebra, I nobly refused to learn the binomial theorem. I just read it through once, hastily, like taking one sniff at a violet, and then let it alone. The other fellows fairly gorged themselves with it, but I didn’t—I had too much sense.”
When Mr. Chester had been there a week, he gave Dorothy two worn and crumpled two-dollar bills.
“What’s this?” she asked, curiously. “Where did you find it?”
“‘Find it’ is good,” laughed Dick. “I earned it, my dear lady, in hard and uncongenial toil. It’s my week’s board.”
“You’re not going to pay any board here. You’re a guest.”
“Not on your life. You don’t suppose I’m going to sponge my keep off anybody, do you? I paid Uncle Ebeneezer board right straight along and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t pay you. You can put that away in your sock, or wherever it is that womenkeep money, or else I take the next train. If you don’t want to lose me, you have to accept four plunks every Monday. I’ve got lots of four plunks,” he added, with a winning smile.
“Very well,” said Dorothy, quite certain that she could not spare Dick. “If it will make you feel any better about staying, I’ll take it.”
He had quickly made friends with Elaine, and the three made a more harmonious group than might have been expected under the circumstances. With returning strength and health, Miss St. Clair began to take more of an interest in her surroundings. She gathered the white clover blossoms in which Dorothy tied up her pats of sweet butter, picked berries in the garden, skimmed the milk, helped churn, and fed the chickens.
Dick took entire charge of the cow, thus relieving Mrs. Smithers of an uncongenial task and winning her heartfelt gratitude. She repaid him with unnumbered biscuits of his favourite kind and with many a savoury “snack” between meals. He also helped Dorothy in many other ways. It was Dick who collected the eggs every morning andtook them to the sanitarium, along with such other produce as might be ready for the market. He secured astonishing prices for the things he sold, and set it down to man’s superior business ability when questioned by his hostess. Dorothy never guessed that most of the money came out of his own pocket, and was charged up, in the ragged memorandum book which he carried, to “Elaine’s board.”
Miss St. Clair had never thought of offering compensation, and no one suggested it to her, but Dick privately determined to make good the deficiency, sure that a woman married to “a writing chump” would soon be in need of ready money if not actually starving at the time. That people should pay for what Harlan wrote seemed well-nigh incredible. Besides, though Dick had never read that “love is an insane desire on the part of a man to pay a woman’s board bill for life,” he took a definite satisfaction out of this secret expenditure, which he did not stop to analyse.
He brought back full price for everything he took to the “repair-shop,” as he had irreverently christened the sanitarium, though he seldom sold much. On the other side of thehill he had a small but select graveyard where he buried such unsalable articles as he could not eat. His appetite was capricious, and Dorothy had frequently observed that when he came back from the long walk to the sanitarium, he ate nothing at all.
He established a furniture factory under a spreading apple tree at a respectable distance from the house, and began to remodel the black-walnut relics which were evidence of his kinsman’s poor taste. He took many a bed apart, scraped off the disfiguring varnish, sandpapered and oiled the wood, and put it together in new and beautiful forms. He made several tables, a cabinet, a bench, half a dozen chairs, a set of hanging shelves, and even aspired to a desk, which, owing to the limitations of the material, was not wholly successful.
Dorothy and Elaine sat in rocking-chairs under the tree and encouraged him while he worked. One of them embroidered a simple design upon a burlap curtain while the other read aloud, and together they planned a shapely remodelling of the Jack-o’-Lantern. Fortunately, the woodwork was plain, and the ceilings not too high.
“I think,” said Elaine, “that the big living room with the casement windows will be perfectly beautiful. You couldn’t have anything lovelier than this dull walnut with the yellow walls.”
Whatever Mrs. Carr’s thoughts might be, this simple sentence was usually sufficient to turn the current into more pleasant channels. She had planned to have needless partitions taken out, and make the whole lower floor into one room, with only a dining-room, kitchen, and pantry back of it. She would take up the unsightly carpets, over which impossible plants wandered persistently, and have them woven into rag rugs, with green and brown and yellow borders. The floor was to be stained brown and the pine woodwork a soft, old green. Yellow walls and white net curtains, with the beautiful furniture Dick was making, completed a very charming picture in the eyes of a woman who loved her home.
Outspeeding it in her fancy was the finer, truer living which she believed lay beyond. Some day she and Harlan, alone once more, with the cobwebs of estrangement swept away, should begin a new and happierhoneymoon in the transformed house. When the book was done—ah, when the book was done! But he was not reading any part of it to her now and would not let her begin copying it on the typewriter.
“I’ll do it myself, when I’m ready,” he said, coldly. “I can use a typewriter just as well as you can.”
Dorothy sighed, unconsciously, for the woman’s part is always to wait patiently while men achieve, and she who has learned to wait patiently, and be happy meanwhile, has learned the finest art of all—the art of life.
“Now,” said Dick, “that’s a peach of a table, if I do say it as shouldn’t.”
They readily agreed with him, for it was low and massive, built on simple, dignified lines, and beautifully finished. The headboards of three ponderous walnut beds and the supporting columns of a hideous sideboard had gone into its composition, thus illustrating, as Dorothy said, that ugliness may be changed to beauty by one who knows how and is willing to work for it.
The noon train whistled shrilly in the distance, and Dorothy started out of her chair.“She’s afraid,” laughed Dick, instantly comprehending. “She’s afraid somebody is coming on it.”
“More twins?” queried Elaine, from the depths of her rocker. “Surely there can’t be any more twins?”
“I don’t know,” answered Dorothy, vaguely troubled. “Someway, I feel as though something terrible were going to happen.”
Nothing happened, however, until after luncheon, just as she had begun to breathe peacefully again. Willie saw the procession first and ran back with gleeful shouts to make the announcement. So it was that the entire household, including Harlan, formed a reception committee on the front porch.
Up the hill, drawn by two straining horses, came what appeared at first to be a pyramid of furniture, but later resolved itself into the component parts of a more ponderous bed than the ingenuity of man had yet contrived. It was made of black walnut, and was at least three times as heavy as any of those in the Jack-o’-Lantern. On the top of the mass was perched a little old man in a skull cap, a slippered foot in a scarlet sock airily waving at one side. A bright green coil closely clutchedin his withered hands was the bed cord appertaining to the bed—a sainted possession from which its owner sternly refused to part.
“By Jove!” shouted Dick; “it’s Uncle Israel and his crib!”
Paying no heed to the assembled group, Uncle Israel dismounted nimbly enough, and directed the men to take his bed upstairs, which they did, while Harlan and Dorothy stood by helplessly. Here, under his profane and involved direction, the structure was finally set in place, even to the patchwork quilt, fearfully and wonderfully made, which surmounted it all.
Financial settlement was waved aside by Uncle Israel as a matter in which he was not interested, and it was Dick who counted out two dimes and a nickel to secure peace. A supplementary procession appeared with a small, weather-beaten trunk, a folding bath-cabinet, and a huge case which, from Uncle Israel’s perturbation, evidently contained numerous fragile articles of great value.
“Tell Ebeneezer,” wheezed the newcomer, “that I have arrived.”
“Ebeneezer,” replied Dick, in wicked imitationof the old man’s asthmatic speech, “has been dead for some time.”
“Then,” creaked Uncle Israel, waving a tremulous, bony hand suggestively toward the door, “kindly leave me alone with my grief.”
XStill More
Uncle Israel, whose other name was Skiles, adjusted himself to his grief in short order. The sounds which issued from his room were not those commonly associated with mourning. Dick, fully accustomed to various noises, explained them for the edification of the Carrs, who at present were sorely in need of edification.
“That’s the bath cabinet,” remarked Mr. Chester, with the air of a connoisseur. “He’s setting it up near enough to the door so that if anybody should come in unexpectedly while it’s working, the whole thing will be tipped over and the house set on fire. Uncle Israel won’t have any lock or bolt on his door for fear he should die in the night. He relies wholly on the bath cabinet and moral suasion. Nobody knocks on doors here, anyway—just goes in.
“That’s his trunk. He keeps it under the window. The bed is set up first, then the bath cabinet, then the trunk, and last, but not least, the medicine chest. He keeps his entire pharmacopœia on a table at the head of his bed, with a candle and matches, so that if he feels badly in the night, the proper remedy is instantly at hand. He prepares some of his medicines himself, but he isn’t bigoted about it. He buys the rest at wholesale, and I’ll eat my hat if he hasn’t got a full-sized bottle of every patent medicine that’s on sale anywhere in the United States.”
“How old,” asked Harlan, speaking for the first time, “is Uncle Israel?”
“Something over ninety, I believe,” returned Dick. “I’ve lost my book of vital statistics, so I don’t know, exactly.”
“How long,” inquired Dorothy, with a forced smile, “does Uncle Israel stay?”
“Lord bless you, my dear lady, Uncle Israel stays all Summer. Hello—there are some more!”
A private conveyance of uncertain age and purposes drew up before the door. From it dismounted a very slender young man of medium height, whose long auburn hair hungover his coat-collar and at times partially obscured his soulful grey eyes. It resembled the mane of a lion, except in colour. He carried a small black valise, and a roll of manuscript tied with a badly soiled ribbon.
An old lady followed, stepping cautiously, but still finding opportunity to scrutinise the group in the doorway, peering sharply over her gold-bowed spectacles. It was she who paid the driver, and even before the two reached the house, it was evident that they were not on speaking terms.
The young man offered Mr. Chester a thin, tremulous hand which lay on Dick’s broad palm in a nerveless, clammy fashion. “Pray,” he said, in a high, squeaky voice, “convey my greetings to dear Uncle Ebeneezer, and inform him that I have arrived.”
“I am at present holding no communication with Uncle Ebeneezer,” explained Dick. “The wires are down.”
“Where is Ebeneezer?” demanded the old lady.
“Dead,” answered Dorothy, wearily; “dead, dead. He’s been dead a long time. This is our house—he left it to my husband and me.”
“Don’t let that disturb you a mite,” saidthe old lady, cheerfully. “I like your looks a whole lot, an’ I’d just as soon stay with you as with Ebeneezer. I dunno but I’d ruther.”
She must have been well past sixty, but her scanty hair was as yet untouched with grey. She wore it parted in the middle, after an ancient fashion, and twisted at the back into a tight little knob, from which the ends of a wire hairpin protruded threateningly. Dorothy reflected, unhappily, that the whole thing was done up almost tight enough to play a tune on.
For the rest, her attire was neat, though careless. One had always the delusion that part or all of it was on the point of coming off.
The young man was wiping his weak eyes upon a voluminous silk handkerchief which had evidently seen long service since its last washing. “Dear Uncle Ebeneezer,” he breathed, running his long, bony fingers through his hair. “I cannot tell you how heavily this blow falls upon me. Dear Uncle Ebeneezer was a distinguished patron of the arts. Our country needs more men like him, men with fine appreciation, vowed to the service of the Ideal. If you will pardon me, I will now retire to myapartment and remain there a short time in seclusion.”
So saying, he ran lightly upstairs, as one who was thoroughly at home.
“Who in—” began Harlan.
“Mr. Harold Vernon Perkins, poet,” said Dick. “He’s got his rhyming dictionary and all his odes with him.”
“Without knowing,” said Dorothy, “I should have thought his name was Harold or Arthur or Paul. He looks it.”
“It wa’n’t my fault,” interjected the old lady, “that he come. I didn’t even sense that he was on the same train as me till I hired the carriage at the junction an’ he clim’ in. He said he might as well come along as we was both goin’ to the same place, an’ it would save him walkin’, an’ not cost me no more than ’t would anyway.”
While she was speaking, she had taken off her outer layer of drapery and her bonnet. “I’ll just put these things in my room, my dear,” she said to Dorothy, “an’ then I’ll come back an’ talk to you. I like your looks first-rate.”
“Who in—,” said Harlan, again, as the old lady vanished into one of the lower wings.
“Mrs. Belinda something,” answered Dick. “I don’t know who she’s married to now. She’s had bad luck with her husbands.”
Mrs. Carr, deeply troubled, was leaning against the wall in the hall, and Dick patted her hand soothingly. “Don’t you fret,” he said, cheerily; “I’m here to see you through.”
“That being the case,” remarked Harlan, with a certain acidity in his tone, “I’ll go back to my work.”
The old lady appeared again as Harlan slammed the library door, and suggested that Dick should go away.
“Polite hint,” commented Mr. Chester, not at all disturbed. “See you later.” He went out, whistling, with his cap on the back of his head and his hands in his pockets.
“I reckon you’re a new relative, be n’t you?” asked the lady guest, eyeing Dorothy closely. “I disremember seein’ you before.”
“I am Mrs. Carr,” repeated Dorothy, mechanically. “My husband, Harlan Carr, is Uncle Ebeneezer’s nephew, and the house was left to him.”
“Do tell!” ejaculated the other. “I wouldn’t have thought it of Ebeneezer. I’m Belinda Dodd, relict of Benjamin Dodd, deceased.How many are there here, my dear?”
“Miss St. Clair, Mr. Chester, Mrs. Holmes and her three children, Uncle Israel Skiles, and you two, besides Mr. Carr, Mrs. Smithers, and myself.”
“Is that all?” asked the visitor, in evident surprise.
“All!” repeated Dorothy. “Isn’t that enough?”
“Lord love you, my dear, it’s plain to be seen that you ain’t never been here before. Only them few an’ so late in the season, too. Why, there’s Cousin Si Martin, an’ his wife, an’ their eight children, some of the children bein’ married an’ havin’ other children, an’ Sister-in-law Fanny Wood with her invalid husband, her second husband, that is, an’ Rebecca’s Uncle James’s third wife with her two daughters, an’ Rebecca’s sister’s second husband with his new wife an’ their little boy, an’ Uncle Jason an’ his stepson, the one that has fits, an’ Cousin Sally Simmons an’ her daughter, an’ the four little Riley children an’ their Aunt Lucretia, an’ Step-cousin Betsey Skiles with her two nieces, though I misdoubt their comin’ this year. The youngest niecehad typhoid fever here last Summer for eight weeks, an’ Betsey thinks the location ain’t healthy, in spite of it’s bein’ so near the sanitarium. She was threatenin’ to get the health department or somethin’ after Ebeneezer an’ have the drinkin’ water looked into, so’s they didn’t part on the pleasantest terms, but in the main we’ve all got along well together.
“If Betsey knowed Ebeneezer was dead, she wouldn’t hesitate none about comin’, typhoid or no typhoid. Mebbe it was her fault some, for Ebeneezer wa’n’t to blame for his drinkin’ water no more ’n I’d be. Our minister used to say that there was no discipline for the soul like livin’ with folks, year in an’ year out hand-runnin’, an’ Betsey is naturally that kind. Ebeneezer always lived plain, but we’re all simple folks, not carin’ much for style, so we never minded it. The air’s good up here an’ I dunno any better place to spend the Summer. My gracious! You be n’t sick, be you?”
“I don’t know what to do,” murmured Dorothy, her white lips scarcely moving; “I don’t know what to do.”
“Well, now,” responded Mrs. Dodd, “I can see that I’ve upset you some. Perhapsyou’re one of them people that don’t like to have other folks around you. I’ve heard of such, comin’ from the city. Why, I knew a woman that lived in the city, an’ she said she didn’t know the name of the woman next door to her after livin’ there over eight months,—an’ their windows lookin’ right into each other, too.”
“I hate people!” cried Dorothy, in a passion of anger. “I don’t want anybody here but my husband and Mrs. Smithers!”
“Set quiet, my dear, an’ make your mind easy. I’m sure Ebeneezer never intended his death to make any difference in my spendin’ the Summer here, especially when I’m fresh from another bereavement, but if you’re in earnest about closin’ your doors on your poor dead aunt’s relations, why I’ll see what I can do.”
“Oh, if you could!” Dorothy almost screamed the words. “If you can keep any more people from coming here, I’ll bless you for ever.”
“Poor child, I can see that you’re considerable upset. Just get me the pen an’ ink an’ some paper an’ envelopes an’ I’ll set down right now an’ write to the connection an’ tell’em that Ebeneezer’s dead an’ bein’ of unsound mind at the last has willed the house to strangers who refuse to open their doors to the blood relations of poor dead Rebecca. That’s all I can do an’ I can’t promise that it’ll work. Ebeneezer writ several times to us all that he didn’t feel like havin’ no more company, but Rebecca’s relatives was all of a forgivin’ disposition an’ never laid it up against him. We all kep’ on a-comin’ just the same.”
“Tell them,” cried Dorothy her eyes unusually bright and her cheeks burning, “that we’ve got smallpox here, or diphtheria, or a lunatic asylum, or anything you like. Tell them there’s a big dog in the yard that won’t let anybody open the gate. Tell them anything!”
“Just you leave it all to me, my dear,” said Mrs. Dodd, soothingly. “On account of the connection bein’ so differently constituted, I’ll have to tell ’em all different. Disease would keep away some an’ fetch others. Betsey Skiles, now, she feels to turn her hand to nursin’ an’ I’ve knowed her to go miles in the dead of Winter to set up with a stranger that had some disease she wa’n’tfamiliar with. Dogs would bring others an’ only scare a few. Just you leave it all to me. There ain’t never no use in borrerin’ trouble an’ givin’ up your peace of mind as security, ’cause you don’t never get the security back. I’ve been married enough to know that there’s plenty of trouble in life besides what’s looked for, an’ it’ll get in, without your holdin’ open the door an’ spreadin’ a mat out with ‘Welcome’ on it. Did Ebeneezer leave any property?”
“Only the house and furniture,” answered Dorothy, feeling that the whole burden of the world had been suddenly shifted to her young shoulders.
“Rebecca had a big diamond pin,” said Mrs. Dodd, after a brief silence, “that she allers said was to be mine when she got through with it. Ebeneezer give it to her for a weddin’ present. You ain’t seen it layin’ around, have you?”
“No, I haven’t seen it ‘laying around,’” retorted Dorothy, conscious that she was juggling with the truth.
“Well,” continued Mrs. Dodd, easily, nibbling her pen holder, “when it comes to light, just remember that it’s mine. I don’tdoubt it’ll turn up sometime. An’ now, my dear, I’ll just begin on them letters. Cousin Si Martin’s folks are a-packin’ an’ expectin’ to get here next week. I suppose you’re willin’ to furnish the stamps?”
“Willing!” cried Dorothy, “I should say yes!”
Mrs. Dodd toiled long at her self-imposed task, and, having finished it, went out into the kitchen, where for an hour or more she exchanged mortuary gossip with Mrs. Smithers, every detail of the conversation being keenly relished by both ladies.
At dinner-time, eleven people sat down to partake of the excellent repast furnished by Mrs. Smithers under the stimulus of pleasant talk. Harlan was at the head, with Miss St. Clair on his right and Mrs. Dodd on his left. Next to Miss St. Clair was the poet, whose deep sorrow did not interfere with his appetite. The twins were next to him, then Mrs. Holmes, then Willie, then Dorothy, at the foot of the table. On her right was Dick, the space between Dick and Mrs. Dodd being occupied by Uncle Israel.
To a careless observer, it might have seemed that Uncle Israel had more than his share ofthe table, but such in reality was not the case. His plate was flanked by a goodly array of medicine bottles, and cups and bowls of predigested and patent food. Uncle Israel, as Dick concisely expressed it, was “pie for the cranks.”
“My third husband,” remarked Mrs. Dodd, pleasantly, well aware that she was touching her neighbour’s sorest spot, “was terribly afflicted with stomach trouble.”
“The only stomach trouble I’ve ever had,” commented Mr. Chester, airily spearing another biscuit with his fork, “was in getting enough to put into it.”
“Have a care, young man,” wheezed Uncle Israel, warningly. “There ain’t nothin’ so bad for the system as hot bread.”
“It would be bad for my system,” resumed Dick, “not to be able to get it.”
“My third husband,” continued Mrs. Dodd, disregarding the interruption, “wouldn’t have no bread in the house at all. He et these little straw mattresses, same as you’ve got, so constant that he finally died from the tic doleroo. Will you please pass me them biscuits, Mis’ Carr?”
Mrs. Dodd was obliged to rise and reachpast Uncle Israel, who declined to be contaminated by passing the plate, before she attained her desired biscuit.
“Next time, Aunt Belinda,” said Dick, “I’ll throw you one. Suffering Moses, what new dope is that?”
A powerful and peculiarly penetrating odour filled the room. Presently it became evident that Uncle Israel had uncorked a fresh bottle of medicine. Miss St. Clair coughed and hastily excused herself.
“It’s time for me to take my pain-killer,” murmured Uncle Israel, pouring out a tablespoonful of a thick, brown mixture. “This here cured a Congressman in less ’n half a bottle of a gnawin’ pain in his vitals. I ain’t never took none of it yet, but I aim to now.”
The vapour of it had already made the twins cry and brought tears to Mrs. Dodd’s eyes, but Uncle Israel took it clear and smacked his lips over it enjoyably. “It seems to be a searchin’ medicine,” he commented, after an interval of silence. “I don’t misdoubt that it’ll locate that pain that was movin’ up and down my back all night last night.”
Uncle Israel’s wizened old face, with itsfringe of white whisker, beamed with the joy of a scientist who has made a new and important discovery. He had a long, hooked nose, and was painfully near-sighted, but refused to wear glasses. Just now he sniffed inquiringly at the open bottle of medicine. “Yes,” he said, nodding his bald head sagely, “I don’t misdoubt this here can locate it.”
“I don’t, either,” said Harlan, grimly, putting his handkerchief to his nose. “Will you excuse me, Dorothy?”
“Certainly.”
Mrs. Holmes took the weeping twins away from the table, and Willie, his mentor gone, began to eat happily with his fingers. The poet rose and drew a roll of manuscript from his coat pocket.
“This afternoon,” he said, clearing his throat, “I employed my spare moments in composing an ode to the memory of our sainted relative, under whose hospitable roof we are all now so pleasantly gathered. I will read it to you.”
Mrs. Dodd hastily left the table, muttering indistinctly, and Dick followed her. Willie slipped from his chair, crawled under the table, and by stealthily sticking a pin intoUncle Israel’s ankle, produced a violent disturbance, during which the pain-killer was badly spilled. When the air finally cleared, there was no one in the room but the poet, who sadly rolled up his manuscript.
“I will read it at breakfast,” he thought. “I will give them all the pleasure of hearing it. Art is for the many, not for the few. I must use it to elevate humanity to the Ideal.”
He went back to his own room to add some final reverent touches to the masterpiece, and to meditate upon the delicate blonde beauty of Miss St. Clair.
From Mrs. Dodd, meanwhile, Dick had gathered the pleasing purport of her voluminous correspondence, and insisted on posting all the letters that very night, though morning would have done just as well. When he had gone downhill on his errand of mercy, whistling cheerily as was his wont, Mrs. Dodd went into her own room and locked the door, immediately beginning a careful search of the entire apartment.
She scrutinised the walls closely, and rapped softly here and there, listening intently for a hollow sound. Standing on a chair, she felt all along the mouldings and window-casings,taking unto herself much dust in the process. She spent half an hour in the stuffy closet, investigating the shelves and recesses, then she got down on her rheumatic old knees and crept laboriously over the carpet, systematically taking it breadth by breadth, and paying special attention to that section of it which was under the bed.
“When you’ve found where anythin’ ain’t,” she said to herself, “you’ve gone a long way toward findin’ where ’t is. It’s just like Ebeneezer to have hid it.”
She took down the pictures, which were mainly family portraits, life-size, presented to the master of the house by devoted relatives, and rapidly unframed them. In one of them she found a sealed envelope, which she eagerly tore open. Inside was a personal communication which, though brief, was very much to the point.
“Dear Cousin Belinda,” it read, “I hope you’re taking pleasure in your hunt. I have kept my word to you and in this very room, somewhere, is a sum of money which represents my estimate of your worth, as nearly as sordid coin can hope to do. It is all in cash,for greater convenience in handling. I trust you will not spend it all in one store, and that you will, out of your abundance, be generous to the poor. It might be well to use a part of it in making a visit to New York. When you find this, I shall be out in the cemetery all by myself, and very comfortable.
“Yours,Ebeneezer Judson.”
“Yours,Ebeneezer Judson.”
“I knowed it,” she said to herself, excitedly. “Ebeneezer was a hard man, but he always kep’ his word. Dear me! What makes me so trembly!”
She removed all the bedclothes and pounded the pillows and mattress in vain, then turned her attention to the furniture. It was almost one o’clock when Mrs. Dodd finally retired, worn in body and jaded in spirit, but still far from discouraged.
“Ebeneezer must have mistook the room,” she said to herself, “but how could he unless his mind was failin’? I’ve had this now, goin’ on ten year.”
In the night she dreamed of finding money in the bureau, and got up to see if by chance she had not received mysterious guidance from an unknown source. There was moneyin the bureau, sure enough, but it was only two worn copper cents wrapped in many thicknesses of old newspaper, and she went unsuspiciously back to bed.
“He’s mistook the room,” she breathed, drowsily, as she sank into troubled slumber, “an’ to-morrer I’ll have it changed. It’s just as well I’ve scared them others off, if so be I have.”
XIMrs. Dodd’s Third Husband
Insidiously, a single idea took possession of the entire household. Mrs. Smithers kept a spade near at hand and systematically dug, as opportunity offered. Dorothy became accustomed to an odorous lantern which stood near the back door in the daytime and bobbed about among the shrubbery at night.
There was definite method in the madness of Mrs. Smithers, however, for she had once seen the departed Mr. Judson going out to the orchard with a tin box under his arm and her own spade but partially concealed under his long overcoat. When he came back, he was smiling, which was so unusual that she forgot all about the box, and did not observe whether or not he had brought it back with him. Long afterward, however, the incident assumed greater significance.
“If I’d ’ave ’ad the sense to ’ave gone outthere the next day,” she muttered, “and ’ave seen where ’e ’ad dug, I might be a rich woman now, that’s wot I might. ’E was a clever one, ’e was, and ’e’s ’id it. The old skinflint wasn’t doin’ no work, ’e wasn’t, and ’e lived on ’ere from year to year, a-payin’ ’is bills like a Christian gent, and it stands to reason there’s money ’id somewheres. Findin’ is keepin’, and it’s for me to keep my ’ead shut and a sharp lookout. Them Carrs don’t suspect nothink.”
She was only half right, however. Harlan, lost in his book, was heedless of everything that went on around him, but Mrs. Dodd’s reference to the diamond pin, and her own recollection of the money she had found in the bureau drawer, began to work stealthily upon Dorothy’s mind, surrounded, as she was, by people who were continually thinking of the same thing.
Then, too, their funds were getting low. There was little to send to the sanitarium now, for eleven people, as students of domestic economics have often observed, eat more than one or two. Dick was also affected by the current financial depression, and at length conceived the idea that Uncle Ebeneezer’sworldly goods were somewhere on the premises.
Mrs. Holmes spent a great deal of time in the attic, while the care-free children, utterly beyond control, rioted madly through the house. Dorothy discovered Mr. Perkins, the poet, half-way up the parlour chimney, and sat down to see what he would do when he came out and found her there. He had seemed somewhat embarrassed when he wiped the soot from his face, but had quickly explained that he was writing a poem on chimney-swallows and had come to a point where original research was essential.
Even Elaine, not knowing what she sought, began to investigate, idly enough, the furniture and hangings in her room, and Mrs. Dodd, eagerly seizing opportunities, was forever keen on the scent. Uncle Israel, owing to the poor state of his health, was one of the last to be affected by the surrounding atmosphere, but when he caught the idea, he made up for lost time.
He was up with the chickens, and invariably took a long afternoon nap, so that, during the night, there was bound to be a wakeful interval. Ordinarily, he took a sleeping potionto tide him over till morning, but soon decided that a little mild exercise with some pleasant purpose animating it, would be far better for his nerves.
Mrs. Dodd was awakened one night by the feeling that some one was in her room. A vague, mysterious Presence gradually made itself known. At first she was frightened, then the Presence wheezed, and reassured her. Across the path of moonlight that lay on her floor, Uncle Israel moved cautiously.
He was clad in a piebald dressing-gown which had been so patched with various materials that the original fabric was uncertain. An old-fashioned nightcap was on his head, the tassel bobbing freakishly in the back, and he wore carpet slippers.
Mrs. Dodd sat up in bed, keenly relishing the situation. When he opened a bureau drawer, she screamed out: “What are you looking for?”
Uncle Israel started violently. “Money,” he answered, in a shrill whisper, taken altogether by surprise.
“Then,” said Mrs. Dodd, kindly, “I’ll get right up and help you!”
“Don’t, Belinda,” pleaded the old man.“You’ll wake up everybody. I am a-walkin’ in my sleep, I guess. I was a-dreamin’ of money that I was to find and give to you, and I suppose that’s why I’ve come to your room. You lay still, Belinda, and don’t tell nobody. I am a-goin’ right away.”
Before she could answer in a way that seemed suitable, he was gone, and the next day he renewed his explanations. “I dunno, Belinda, how I ever come to be a-walkin’ in my sleep. I ain’t never done such a thing since I was a child, and then only wunst. How dretful it would have been if I had gone into any other room and mebbe have been shot or have scared some young and unprotected female into fits. To think of me, with my untarnished reputation, and at my age, a-doin’ such a thing! You don’t reckon it was my new pain-killer, do you?”
“I don’t misdoubt it had sunthin’ to do with payin’,” returned Mrs. Dodd, greatly pleased with her own poor joke, “an’, as you say, it might have been dretful. But I am a friend to you, Israel, an’ I don’t ’low to make your misfortune public, but, by workin’ private, help you overcome it.”
“What air you a-layin’ out to do?” demanded Uncle Israel, fearfully.
“I ain’t rightly made up my mind as yet, Israel,” she answered, pleasantly enough, “but I don’t intend to have it happen to you again. Sunthin’ can surely be done that’ll cure you of it.”
“Don’t, Belinda,” wheezed her victim; “I don’t think I’ll ever have it again.”
“Don’t you fret about it, Israel, ’cause you ain’t goin’ to have it no more. I’ll attend to it. It ’s a most distressin’ disease an’ must be took early, but I think I know how to fix it.”
During her various investigations, she had found a huge bunch of keys beneath a pile of rubbish on the floor of a closet in an unoccupied room. It was altogether possible, as she told herself, that one of these keys should fit the somnambulist’s door.
While Uncle Israel was brewing a fresh supply of medicine on the kitchen stove, she found, as she had suspected that one of them did fit, and thereafter, every night, when Uncle Israel had retired, she locked him in, letting him out shortly after seven each morning. When he remonstrated with her, shereplied, triumphantly, that it was necessary—otherwise he would never have known that the door was locked.
On her first visit to “town” she made it her business to call upon Lawyer Bradford and inquire as to Mr. Judson’s last will and testament. She learned that it did not concern her at all, and was to be probated, in accordance with the dead man’s instructions, at the Fall term of court.
“Then, as yet,” she said, with a gleam of satisfaction in her small, beady eyes, “they ain’t holdin’ the house legal. Any of us has the same right to stay as them Carrs.”
“That’s as you look at it,” returned Mr. Bradford, squirming uneasily in his chair.
Try as she might, she could extract no further information, but she at least had a bit of knowledge to work on. She went back, earnestly desiring quiet, that she might study the problem without hindrance, but, unfortunately for her purpose, the interior of the Jack-o’-Lantern resembled pandemonium let loose.
Willie was sliding down the railing part of the time, and at frequent intervals coasting downstairs on Mrs. Smithers’s tea tray,vocally expressing his pleasure with each trip. The twins, seated in front of the library door, were pounding furiously on a milk-pan, which had not been empty when they dragged it into the hall, but was now. Mrs. Smithers was singing: “We have our trials here below, Oh, Glory, Hallelujah,” and a sickening odour from a fresh concoction of Uncle Israel’s permeated the premises. Having irreverently detached the false front from the keys of the melodeon, Mr. Perkins was playing a sad, funereal composition of his own, with all the power of the instrument turned loose on it. Upstairs, Dick was whistling, with shrill and maddening persistence, and Dorothy, quite helpless, sat miserably on the porch with her fingers in her ears.
Harlan burst out of the library, just as Mrs. Dodd came up the walk, his temper not improved by stumbling over the twins and the milk-pan, and above their united wails loudly censured Dorothy for the noise and confusion. “How in the devil do you expect me to work?” he demanded, irritably. “If you can’t keep the house quiet, I’ll go back to New York!”
Too crushed in spirit to reply, Dorothy saidnothing, and Harlan whisked back into the library again, barely escaping Mrs. Dodd.
“Poor child,” she said to Dorothy; “you look plum beat out.”
“I am,” confessed Mrs. Carr, the quick tears coming to her eyes.
“There, there, my dear, rest easy. I reckon this is the first time you’ve been married, ain’t it?”
“Yes,” returned Dorothy, forcing a pitiful little smile.
“I thought so. Now, when you’re as used to it as I be, you won’t take it so hard. You may think men folks is all different, but there’s a dretful sameness to ’em after they’ve been through a marriage ceremony. Marriage is just like findin’ a new penny on the walk. When you first see it, it’s all shiny an’ a’most like gold, an’ it tickles you a’most to pieces to think you’re gettin’ it, but after you’ve picked it up you see that what you’ve got is half wild Indian, or mebbe more—I ain’t never been in no mint. You may depend upon it, my dear, there’s two sides to all of us, an’ before marriage, you see the wreath—afterwards a savage.
“I’ve had seven of ’em,” she continued,“an’ I know. My father give me a cemetery lot for a weddin’ present, with a noble grey marble monumint in it shaped like a octagon—leastways that’s what a school-teacher what boarded with us said it was, but I call it a eight-sided piece. I’m speakin’ of my first marriage now, my dear. My father never give me no weddin’ present but the once. An’ I can’t never marry again, ’cause there’s a husband lyin’ now on seven sides of the monumint an’ only one place left for me. I was told once that I could have further husbands cremationed an’ set around the lot in vases, but I don’t take to no such heathenish custom as that.
“So I’ve got to go through my declinin’ years without no suitable companion an’ I call it hard, when one’s so used to marryin’ as what I be.”
“If they’re all savages,” suggested Dorothy, “why did you keep on marrying?”
“Because I hadn’t no other way to get my livin’ an’ I was kinder in the habit of it. There’s some little variety, even in savages, an’ it’s human natur’ to keep on a-hopin.’ I’ve had ’em stingy an’ generous, drunk an’ sober, peaceful an’ disturbin’. After the firstfew times, I learned to take real pleasure out’n their queer notions. When you’ve learned to enjoy seein’ your husband make a fool of himself an’ have got enough self-control not to tell him he’s doin’ it, nor to let him see where your pleasure lies, you’ve got marryin’ down to a fine point.
“The third time, it was, I got a food crank, an’ let me tell you right now, my dear, them’s the worst kind. A man what’s queer about his food is goin’ to be queerer about a’most everything else. Give me any man that can eat three square meals a day an’ enjoy ’em, an’ I’ll undertake to live with him peaceful, but I don’t go to the altar again with no food crank, if I know it.
“It was partly my own fault, too, as I see later. I’d seen him a-carryin’ a passel of health food around in his pocket an’ a-nibblin’ at it, but I supposed it was because the poor creeter had never had no one to cook proper for him, an’ I took a lot of pleasure out of thinkin’ how tickled he’d be when I made him one of my chicken pies.
“After we was married, we took a honeymoon to his folks, an’ I’ll tell you right now, my dear, that if there was more honeymoonstook beforehand to each other’s folks, there’d be less marryin’ done than what there is. They was all a-eatin’ hay an’ straw an’ oats just like the dumb creeters they disdained, an’ a-carryin’ wheat an’ corn around in their pockets to piece out with between greens.
“So the day we got home, never knowin’ what I was a-stirrin’ up for myself, I turned in an’ made a chicken an’ oyster pie, an’ it couldn’t be beat, not if I do say it as shouldn’t. The crust was as soft an’ flaky an’ brown an’ crisp at the edges as any I ever turned out, an’ the inside was all chicken an’ oysters well-nigh smothered in a thick, creamy yellow gravy.
“Well, sir, I brung in that pie, an’ I set it on the table, an’ I chirped out that dinner was ready, an’ he come, an’—my dear! You never saw such goins’-on in all your born days! Considerin’ that not eatin’ animals makes people’s dispositions mild an’ pleasant, it was sunthin’ terrible, an’ me all the time as innercent as a lamb!
“I can’t begin to tell you the things my new-made husband said to me. If chickens an’ oysters was human, I’ll bet they’d have sued him for slander. He said that oysterswas ‘the scavengers of the sea’—yes’m, them’s his very words, an’ that chickens was even worse. He went on to tell me how they et worms an’ potato bugs an’ beetles an’ goodness knows what else, an’ that he wa’n’t goin’ to turn the temple of his body into no slaughter-house. He asked me if I desired to eat dead animals, an’ when he insisted on an answer, I told him I certainly shouldn’t care to eat ’em less’n theywasdead, and from then on it was worse ’n ever.
“He said that no dead animal was goin’ to be interred in the insides of him or his lawful wife, an’ he was goin’ to see to it. It come out then that he’d never tasted meat an’ hadn’t rightly sensed what he was missin’.
“Well, my dear, some women would have took the wrong tack an’ would have argyfied with him. There’s never no use in argyfyin’ with a husband, an’ never no need to, ’cause if you’re set on it, there’s all the rest of the world to choose from. When he’d talked himself hoarse an’ was beginnin’ to calm down again, I took the floor.
“‘Say no more,’ says I, calm an’ collected-like. ‘This here is your house an’ the things you’re accustomed to eatin’ can be cooked init, no matter what they be. If I don’t know how to put the slops together, I reckon I can learn, not being a plum idjit. If you want baked chicken feed and boiled hay, I’m here to bake ’em and boil ’em for you. All you have to do is to speak once in a polite manner and it’ll be done. I must insist on the politeness, howsumever,’ says I. ‘I don’t propose to live with any man what gets the notion a woman ceases to be a lady when she marries him. A creeter that thinks so poor of himself as that ain’t fit to be my husband,’ says I, ‘nor no other decent woman’s.’
“At that he apologised some, an’ when a husband apologises, my dear, it’s the same as if he’d et dirt at your feet. ‘The least said the soonest mended,’ says I, an’ after that, he never had nothin’ to complain of.
“But I knowed what his poor, cranky system needed, an’ I knowed how to get it into him, especially as he’d never tasted meat in all his life. From that time on, he never saw no meat on our table, nor no chickens, nor sea scavengers, nor nothin’, but all day, while he was gone, I was busy with my soup pot, a-makin’ condensed extracts of meat for flavourin’ vegetables an’ sauces an’ so on.
“He took mightily to my cookin’ an’ frequently said he’d never et such exquisite victuals. I’d make cream soups for him, an’ in every one, there’d be over a cupful of solid meat jelly, as rich as the juice you find in the pan when you cook a first-class roast of beef. I’d stew potatoes in veal stock, and cook rice slow in water that had had a chicken boiled to rags in it. Once I put a cupful of raw beef juice in a can of tomatoes I was cookin’ and he et a’most all of ’em.
“As he kep’ on havin’ more confidence in me, I kep’ on usin’ more an’ more, an’ a-usin’ oyster liquor for flavourin’ in most everything durin’ the R months. Once he found nearly a bushel of clam-shells out behind the house an’ wanted to know what they was an’ what they was doin’ there. I told him the fish man had give ’em to me for a border for my flower beds, which was true. I’d only paid for the clams—there wa’n’t nothin’ said about the shells—an’ the juice from them clams livened up his soup an’ vegetables for over a week. There wa’n’t no day that he didn’t have the vital elements of from one to four pounds of meat put in his food, an’ all the time, he was gettin’ happier an’ healthier an’more peaceful to live with. When he died, he was as mild as a spring lamb with mint sauce on it.
“Now, my dear, some women would have told him what they was doin’, either after he got to likin’ the cookin’ or when he was on his death-bed an’ couldn’t help himself, but I never did. I own that it took self-control not to do it, but I’d learned my lesson from havin’ been married twicet before an’ never havin’ fit any to speak of. I had to take my pleasure from seein’ him eat a bowl of rice that had a whole chicken in it, exceptin’ only the bones and fibres of its mortal frame, an’ a-lappin’ up mebbe a pint of tomato soup that was founded on eight nice pork chops. I’m a-tellin’ you all this merely to show you my point. Every day, Henry was makin’ a blame fool of himself without knowin’ it. He’d prattle by the hour of slaughter-houses an’ human cemeteries an’ all the time he’d be honin’ for his next meal.
“He used to say as how it was dretful wicked to kill the dumb animals for food, an’ I allers said that there was nothin’ to hinder his buyin’ as many as he could afford to an’ savin’ their lives by pennin’ ’em up in the back yard,an’ a-feedin’ ’em the things they liked best to eat till they died of old age or sunthin’. I told him they was all vegetarians, the same as he was, an’ they could live together peaceful an’ happy. I even pointed out that it was his duty to do it, an’ that if all believers would do the same, the dread slaughter-houses would soon be a thing of the past, but I ain’t never seen no food crank yet that’s advanced that far in his humanity.
“I never told him a single word about it, nor even hinted it to him, nor told nobody else, though I often felt wicked to think I was keepin’ so much pleasure to myself, but my time is comin’.
“When I’m dead an’ have gone to heaven, the first thing I’m goin’ to do is to hunt up Henry. They say there ain’t no marriage nor givin’ in marriage up there, but I reckon there’s seven men there that’ll at least recognise their wife when they see her a-comin’ in. I’m goin’ to pick up my skirts an’ take off my glasses, so’s I’ll be all ready to skedaddle, for I expect to leave my rheumatiz behind me, my dear, when I go to heaven—leastways, no place will be heaven for me that’s got rheumatiz in it—an’ then I’m goin’ to say: ‘Henry, in allthe four years you was livin’ with me, you was eatin’ meat, an’ you never knowed it. You’re nothin’ but a human cemetery.’ Oh, my dear, it’s worth while dyin’ when you know you’re goin’ to have pleasure like that at the other end!”