CHAPTER XIIRAFAEL PROPOSES
Madelineworked on her play with the furious industry of the “digs” she had always ridiculed. The floor of her room was littered with dusty sheets of manuscript, which she mysteriously informed her landlady must not be touched, or “the world and all would be lost.” She took long, solitary walks, sat for hours at her desk or the Tally-ho’s, alternately staring hopelessly into space, or frantically covering reams of papers with her pretty illegible writing. Occasionally she emerged from her closely-guarded solitude and gave a tea-drinking for the B. C. A.’s, at which she adroitly turned the conversation to the strangest topics; or she bundled some long-suffering friend off with her on an endless shopping tour or trolley ride, during which she listened in complete absorption to chance bits of dialogue, coming home with a delicious new monologue for which she insisted on an immediateaudience, “to test the note of reality,” she explained vaguely.
One day just before Christmas she was caught by Mary Brooks in a mellow mood and dragged off to dinner, to give Dr. Hinsdale a practical demonstration of some of the idiosyncrasies of genius. And after Dr. Hinsdale had gone to his study, over the second round of coffee by the open fire, she explained her newest literary device to the bewildered Mary.
“When I do stunty pageants for my friends to act and footless little playlets that don’t matter,” she began, “I just dash them off without thinking and they turn out beautifully. But somehow the idea of writing seriously for publication stiffens me all up inside and muddles my ideas. Heroine always turns into a freak or a prig on my hands. Hero gets hysterical when I try to make him earnest. But now when things begin to go wrong, I calmly tear up what I’ve written, and go out and make my little pals talk off the next scene to me, or at least recall to my mind how real conversation sounds. The awfully romantic, lover-y parts I either have to overhear or extractfrom people who don’t know me. The girl at Cannon’s who is the model for my heartless coquette little guesses her proud mission in life.”
“I should call that just cold-blooded cribbing,” declared Mary indignantly.
“Cold-blooded cribbing from life is the very top notch of art,” Madeline assured her. “My play is a slice from life. I suppose it’s because I’m young and inexperienced that I have to keep stopping to refer to life so often as I go along.”
“Am I in it anywhere?” demanded Mary eagerly.
“You and the girl at Cannon’s and Fluffy Dutton and Betty are the principal ingredients in the heroine,” explained Madeline. “But I defy you to have discovered it for yourself, and I swear you to eternal secrecy, because people would misunderstand. Life with a big ‘L’ is the kind I’m cribbing; I should scorn, of course, to put my friends and their petty affairs into a play.”
Mary drew her smooth brows into a puzzled frown. “I suppose I shall understand all that when I see the play,” she said with asigh. “George Garrison Hinsdale would better be saving up for a trip to New York before long, including a box party to the first night of your slice from life.”
“You’ll have to wait till the second night if you want a box,” Madeline told her calmly. “All the boxes are spoken for on the first night, and there will be several parties in the seats, besides.”
This calm assumption of success made Mary gasp and engage her husband, later in the evening, in an intricate discussion of the distinction between the serene self-assurance of genius and the ordinary man’s unjustified conceit.
Eleanor Watson wanted to join Jim in New York. He was sure of being there for several months, he wrote her, and equally sure of being sent off to “some miserable hole” in the early spring.
“Beating the firm’s time-limit on Morton Hall,” he wrote, “is about the unluckiest thing I ever did. They’ve written me down for a hustler, and slated me for all the forlorn hopes. Remind Betty that she owes me a good long letter for that.”
The thing that kept Eleanor at Harding was of course the devotion of the Terrible Ten to her and to education under her auspices. In vain she had introduced other story-tellers; the evenings that she stayed away to give Mr. Thayer’s most promising candidates a trial were tumultuous revolts, or, after she had patiently explained to the class how unhappy their disorderly conduct made her, spiritless sessions, endured because the smouldering fire in Rafael’s eyes commanded outward submission from the Ten.
“But if you really leave I’m afraid they’ll all backslide again,” said Mr. Thayer, “and you see they’re on probation now to the very end of their course. Did Rafael tell you that he’d had another raise? That boy does the work of two men, in spite of his bad hand—runs the most difficult machine in the factory, and makes repairs that we used to have to get a man up from Boston to attend to.”
“How old is he?” asked Eleanor idly.
“Eighteen, he thinks. They’re all older than they look or act.”
Eleanor sighed. “They won’t be able to meet the reading requirements of the factorylaw for six weeks yet, and they ought to be induced to keep on all winter—certainly the ones who are bright enough at their work to have any future before them. But it does seem absurd for me to stay on here just because ten young Italians listen to my stories and eat my peanuts.”
“And appreciate the tact and understanding that you bestow so generously, mixed with the peanuts and the stories,” added Mr. Thayer soberly.
That night Eleanor went to Mr. Thayer’s office after the class to have one more consultation with him about its future. When she came back for her coat and hat a stealthy figure slipped past her in the hall.
“Did you forget something, Rafael?” she asked, recognizing her favorite pupil.
Rafael muttered something unintelligible and hurried off, but his return was explained when Eleanor found a neatly folded note tucked in the sleeve of her coat.
“Der Mis”—it began, “I luv yu. i haf nuther raz. I keep you good lik lada. Wil yu haf me to mary, if not I die“YurRafael.“I tak 1 hor a day for wik to make thiz note rite.”
“Der Mis”—it began, “I luv yu. i haf nuther raz. I keep you good lik lada. Wil yu haf me to mary, if not I die
“YurRafael.
“I tak 1 hor a day for wik to make thiz note rite.”
Eleanor read the pathetic little missive through with growing dismay. He had misunderstood her kindness—the pictures she had given him to brighten the dark little hovel where he and his family lived, the Thanksgiving dinner she had sent them, the special smile she always had ready when he appeared at the club. She started to show her note to Mr. Thayer, then changed her mind.
After all, Rafael was in earnest, and she would treat his proposal like any other. It should be a secret between them. She would think out for herself some kindly way of explaining that she could not “haf” him “to mary,” and that he must not die of a broken heart.
The next evening when the class met she smiled at him just as usual, and catching his eye early in the evening slipped a note, folded as his had been, under his cap.
In it she had printed, in short easy words that Rafael could read, how sorry she was todisappoint him, how she liked him for a friend, how he must forget what he had written and work hard to make the Italian girl whom he would love some day proud and happy and comfortable.
“I can’t treat it as absurd,” she had decided, “and I can’t be cross to him. He means it all, and he doesn’t dream how comical it is. I only hope he won’t be too excited to read what I’ve written.”
Evidently he was not, for just as Eleanor, having said good-night to the Harding girls who had walked up the hill with her from their classes, was turning in at her own door, Rafael glided out from the shadow of the house and stood in her path.
“Der is no hope?” he demanded tragically, standing bareheaded before her.
“Oh, Rafael,” Eleanor remonstrated, “I always speak the truth to you, don’t I? I wrote you a note because you wrote me one; and now you ask me if I mean it. Why, dear boy, I’m almost old enough to be your mother.”
“I love you,” Rafael told her stoutly.
“Then please me by acting sensible. You’remuch too young to think about marrying and I——”
“You luf anodder,” broke in Rafael accusingly.
Eleanor flushed pink under cover of the darkness. Hardly to herself even did she admit the part that Richard Blake played in her thoughts. Indeed so skilfully had she concealed it that Dick Blake, working day and night to push “The Quiver” to the top of the magazine world, was wont to smile scornfully to himself when he thought how little he and his valiant efforts meant to the girl who, in all his hopes and plans and dreams, was to share his future.
But in a swift moment’s consideration Eleanor decided that the best way to cure this sentimental little Italian boy of his infatuation was to let him know that he had indeed a successful rival. Telling Rafael was different from admitting it to anyone else—because Rafael was foolishly in love too.
She stretched out her hand impulsively and patted his shoulder. “Yes, Rafael,” she whispered softly, “I’m in love with somebody else. But he doesn’t know it yet, andI’m not sure that he cares for me. Nobody knows it but you, and I’m telling you because I——”
“Good-bye, lovely lada, good-bye.” Rafael caught the hand that lay on his shoulder, kissed it in his passionate, foreign fashion, and glided away into the darkness.
Eleanor stood looking after him with the curious sensation of being the heroine of a pretty old-time romance that belonged in a fairy world of magic and moonlight, and ought to be set to the tinkling music of guitars. And just as she had put out her light and gone to bed, still smiling at the whimsicality of the whole affair, and particularly of her having confided to Rafael her carefully-secreted feeling for Dick—who would do beautifully for the brave young prince of the fairy-tale the music came. The Terrible Ten were grouped under the window singing soft, crooning Italian songs to their Lovely Lada. Giuseppi had traveled with his father one summer in a troupe of street musicians; it was his fingers that picked a bit uncertainly at the guitar’s strings, and little Nicolo’s wonderful voice, rising sweet and true above theothers, that led the chorus. But Rafael stood in the centre of the half circle, his angelic face touched with light from a down-stairs window, and the sob and the thrill in the music, that brought a lump to Eleanor’s throat and a mist over her eyes, was all in Rafael’s voice, singing out his love and longing to the cruel lady who would not “haf” him “to mary.”
Eleanor had a bunch of red roses on her table that the adoring Eugenia Ford had sent her, and she tossed them down to the singers, who laughed and cheered in most unromantic boy fashion, and finally departed, leaving Eleanor to wonder how Rafael had explained the serenade to his followers, and how he would treat her at the next club meeting. She little guessed what would happen before then.
For the next morning before she was dressed an apologetic parlor-maid escorted a weeping Italian girl to Eleanor’s door. It was Pietro’s flashing-eyed sister, her beauty tear-stained and her proud confidence quite vanished.
“Rafael’s hurt,” she sobbed. “Black Hand maybe, we think. He don’t know nothing,but he moan your name with his eyes shut. Would you come?”
Of course she would come. She hurried the maid off after the best doctor in Harding, and she and the beautiful Maria went at once to Rafael, who lay tossing in delirium on his blood-stained bed, a terrible gash across his throat, which had been roughly bandaged by an old Italian herb doctor. Nobody, it seemed, guessed what had really happened, though when some one found a tiny dagger under the bed Pietro and Nicolo interchanged curious glances. They had recognized it as the one with which Rafael had struck terror to the hearts of the Ten and compelled their rigid obedience.
Eleanor installed a trained nurse, made the doctor promise to give the case his best attention, and went off to find her unfailing stand-by in troublous times, Betty Wales. For Rafael was beyond knowing anybody, perhaps for all time, and she felt like a criminal when his mother kissed her sleeve in gratitude for all she had done and Maria clung to her, sobbing out her love for Rafael who never had “eyes for any girl” and declaringthat if he died she would enter a convent. She couldn’t bring herself to tell them the dreadful truth.
But, “If he dies I shall be a murderer,” she told Betty bitterly. “I’ve always been so vain and frivolous. Now when I want to take life seriously and do things for other people, as you do, I only make a mess of it, and bring dreadful trouble where I wanted most to help. I shall never, never try to do anything more. I wish I were——”
“No, you don’t,” Betty assured her hastily. “Just because you did the best you could for those boys and this silly one had his head full of sentimental nonsense doesn’t make you responsible. It’s a dreadful thing, of course, but I’m sure he’ll get well. Didn’t the doctor think so?”
The doctor hadn’t said.
“Then I’ll leave word for him to telephone you here of any change either way,” Betty decreed. “Mrs. Post is going to make German Christmas cakes this morning for the girls. She wanted me to help her, but I’ve got to go to the Tally-ho before chapel and then to the office, so you simply must helpinstead. I suppose you haven’t had any breakfast, have you now?”
Eleanor didn’t want any.
“Of course you do. I’ll send some up by a maid, and Mrs. Post will tell you when she’s ready to begin on the cakes. Remember, the telephone messages will come here, so you must stay till I get back.”
Six times that morning Betty left an accommodating friend in charge of her office, and in the short intervals between clients rushed over to inquire for the cakes, Eleanor, and Rafael. At noon she snatched a moment before luncheon to tell Mr. Thayer all about it—Eleanor had declared she never could do that—so that he could explain what was necessary to the authorities and avoid a futile search for non-existent Black Hand plots and family feuds. Mr. Thayer had seen Rafael and the doctor, and the doctor had been very encouraging. Betty flew back to assure Eleanor that he had not been deceiving her—that he had said the very same things to Mr. Thayer—and to beg her assistance that afternoon at the Tally-ho workshop. For Madeline had come out of her dramatic eclipselong enough to design some Christmas dinner-cards, and there was a small fortune in them if only they could be put on sale in time. Secretly Eleanor thought that Betty had grown just a little bit selfish and very commercial since they had left college; but she could not well refuse, after the dainty breakfast on a tray and all the calls and the arranging with Mr. Thayer, to help with the Christmas dinner-cards.
Next day Rafael was worse. The doctor looked serious and suggested a night-nurse and a consultation. At noon Eleanor declared that the air of the little workshop stifled her, and Betty gave up office-hours—an unheard-of proceeding—to go for a long tramp, during which she planned all sorts of delightful things that Eleanor should do for Rafael when he got well.
The next day the boy was better, the day after that worse. But at the end of a nerve-racking week of alternating hopes and fears the doctor pronounced him out of danger. That very afternoon Jim telegraphed that he was sick with a cold and needed Eleanor. Jim had always hated coddling, Eleanor commentedwonderingly, and failed to notice Betty’s dimple flashing out in a tiny smile that was at once sternly suppressed. For Jim had written her that he only hoped he could preserve “the faded shadow of a suspicion of a snuffle” until Eleanor’s arrival. “After that,” he concluded, “I count on my new bull pup, suitors galore, and the diversions of little old New York to blow away any remaining relics of melancholy. When the poor little chap is well enough dad and I will see him through the best trade-school we can find and give him every chance that’s coming to him. Adoring some girls is a thing no fellow can or ought to help.”