The Good Man,When-he-falleth-in-LoveAnd-getteth-Snubbed,Breaketh Forth In-to Tears:But-the-Ungawdly Careth Notta Damn!For Woman,She-is-but-VanityAy, Verily, and False-Curls.And-the-Wooing Thereof Is Bitterness.For-he-Wasteth-his-Substance-Upon-Her,Taking-her-Pic-nics and Balls.And she Danceth with someOther Feller.Oh-hh SLUSH!!!
A window-shade floated sideways, revealing to the peerer's gaze a gnome with blue ears beating out the tempo with the fire-tongs for a quartette, consisting of an aeroplane, a Salvation Army captain, a white rabbit, and an Apache, while a motley crowd circulated around them. In the intensity of his relief, Cyrus the Gaunt took a great resolve: “Invited or not invited, I'm going to that party.”
MacLachan's “Home of Fashion” on the corner was long since dark, but Cyrus's pedal fantasia on the panels brought forth the indignant proprietor.
“What have you got for me to go to a fancy party in, Mac?” demanded his disturber.
“Turnverein or Pansy Social Circle?” inquired the practical tailor.
“Neither. A dead swell party.”
“Go as ye are-rr, ye fule!” said the Scot, and slammed the door.
“Perfectly simple,” said Cyrus the Gaunt. “I'll do it.”
He hastened around to Schwartz's to wash his hands and smut his face artistically.
Upon the reiterated testimony of the Oldest Inhabitant, Our Square had never before witnessed such scenes or heard such sounds of revelry by night as the Bonnie Lassie's surprise party, given for her by her friends of the far-away world. None of us was bidden in at first, as the Bonnie Lassie had not the inviting in her hands. But to her—little loyalist that she is!—a celebration without her own neighbors was unthinkable; so she sent her messengers forth and gathered us in from our beds, from Schwartz's, from Lavansky's Pinochle Parlors, from the late shift of the “Socialist Weekly Battlecry,” and even from the Semi-Annual Soirée and Ball of the Sons of Gentlemen of Goerck Street, far out on our boundaries of influence; and though we wore no fancier garb than our best, we made a respectable showing, indeed.
Along with the early comers, and while Cyrus the Gaunt was still putting the final touches to his preparation, there appeared at the hospitable door an unexpected guest, a woman of sixty with a strong, bent figure, and a square face lighted by gleaming eyes with fixed lines about them. The black-hued Undertaker who had constituted himself master of ceremonies met her at the door, and immediately hustled her within.
“While I have not the privilege of this lady's personal acquaintance,” he announced, “I have the honor of presenting, ladies and gentlemen, the eminent and professional chaperon, Mrs. Sparkles.”
The newcomer paused, blinking and irresolute. “But I did not know—” she began, in a faintly foreignized accent From a far corner the Bonnie Lassie spied her, and flew across the floor, flushed, radiant, and confused. “You!” she cried—and there was something in her voice that drew upon the pair curious looks from the other guests. “Oh, Madame! Why didn't you let me know?”
The newcomer set her finger to her lips. “I am incognita. What is it the somber person called me? Mrs. Sparkles? Yes.” The Bonnie Lassie nodded her comprehension. “If I had known that you were making fête this evening—I cannot see your work now.”
“Indeed, you can. I'll shut just us two into the studio. They won't miss me.” She gently pushed the new guest through a side door, which she closed after them. Confronted with the little sculptor's work, the visitor moved about with a swift certainty of judgment, praising this bit with a brief word, shrugging her shoulders over that, indicating by a single touch of the finger the salient defect of another, while her hostess followed her with anxious eyes.
“Not bad,” murmured the critic. “You have learned much. What is under that sheet?”
“Experiments,” answered the girl reluctantly.
The woman swept the covering aside. Beneath were huddled a number of studies, some finished, others in the rough, ungrouped.
“All the same subject,n'est-ce-pas?”
“Yes.”
The visitor examined them carefully. “Very interesting. Any more of this?”
“Some notes in pencil.”
“Let me see them.”
The Bonnie Lassie drew out and submitted a sheaf of papers.
“You have done very badly with this,” was the verdict, after concentrated study. “Or else—you have worked hard and honestly upon it?”
“Harder than on anything I've done.”
“There are signs of that, too. What is it you are aiming at? What is the subject? Inside, I mean?” She tapped her forehead and regarded with her luminous stare the eager girl-face before her.
“Why, I hardly know. At first it was one thing, then it changed. I had thought of doing him as 'The Pioneer.' 'Something lost beyond the ranges,' you know.” The woman nodded. “Then later, I wanted to do 'The Last American,' and I modeled him for that.”
“Good!” The older woman's endorsement was emphatic. “How Lincoln-like the formation of the face is, here.” She touched one of the unfinished bits. “That's the American of it. Orisit? Albrecht Dürer did the same thing in his ideal Knight four centuries ago. You know it? It's like a portrait of Lincoln. Did you consciously mould that line in?”
“Ah!” The girl contemplated her own work with glowing eyes. “That's the haunting resemblance I felt but couldn't catch when I first saw my model.”
“It isn't in most of these.”
“My fault. It must have been there, underneath, all the time.”
“Hm! You consider those pretty faithful studies?”
“As faithful as I could make them. But I haven't been able to catch and fix the face. It's most provoking,” she added fretfully, “but I'm constantly having to remodel.” Before she had finished, the elderly woman's swift hands were busy with the figures, manipulating them here and there, until they were presently set out in a single row with the sketches interspersed. “Read from left to right,” she said curtly. “Is not that the order of time in which the work was done?”
Read from Left to Right 082
“Pure magic!” breathed the girl. “How could you know?”
“How could I help but know? Child, child! Can't you see you have the biggest subject ready to your hand that any artist could pray for?” The girl looked her question mutely. “The man is making himself. How? God knows—the God that helps all real work. Look! See how the lines of grossnessthere”—she touched the first figure in her marshaled line —“have planed outhere.” The swift finger found a later study. “How could you miss it! The upbuilding of character, resolve, manhood, and with it all something gentler and finer softening it. You have half-done it, but only half, because you have not understood.Whyhave you not understood?”
“Because I'm not a genius.”
“Who knows? To have half-done it is much. The master-genius, Life, has been carving that face out before your eyes. You need but follow.”
“Tell me what to do.”
“Leave it alone for six months. Come back and take the face as it will be then.”
“Then will be too late,” said the girl in a low voice.
“What!” cried the critic, startled. “Your model isn't dying, is he?”
“Oh, no. I—I had something else in mind.”
“Dismiss it. Have nothing else in mind but to finish this.” She paused. “I have seen all I need to. Let us return to your friends.”
Hardly had the hostess seated her guest in the most comfortable corner of the big divan when there was a stir at the door, and a rangy, big-boned figure, clad in the unmistakable garb of honest labor, appeared, blinking a little at the lights. Instantly the Undertaker, in his rôle of official announcer, dashed forward to greet him. “Gentlemenandladies,” he proclaimed, “introducing Mr. Casey Jones, late of the Salt Lake Line.”
“Sing it, you Son of Toil!” shouted somebody, and Cyrus the Gaunt promptly obliged, in a clear and robust baritone, leading the chorus which came in jubilantly.
The elderly “Mrs. Sparkles” was not interested in the harmony; but she was interested in the face of her hostess, which had flushed a startled pink. She asked a question under cover of the music.
“That is your model, is it not?”
“Yes.”
“What is he in real life?”
“As you see him.”
“In—deed? What is he doing it for?”
“Two and a half a day, I believe.”
“Quite enough. But why?”
“I never asked him.” And the Bonnie Lassie tripped over to her newest guest, leaving her next-to-newest quite busy with thought.
Owing to the demands upon a hostess,
Cyrus the Gaunt saw very little of her in the brief hour remaining to him. One dance he succeeded in claiming.
“You see,” he remarked, “I came to your party anyway, although uninvited.”
“I didn't give it. It was a surprise,” she explained. “But the job?”
“They've put me on an hour later.”
“You still like it?”
“It limits one socially more than being a model,” he replied solemnly.
“But you are sticking to it?” she persisted.
“Oh, yes, I'm sticking to it, all right.”
“Even if—No matter what happens?”
“What is going to happen?” he asked gravely.
“Nothing,” she said hurriedly. “But it's the job for the job's sake with you now, isn't it?”
“I like the feel of it, if that's what you mean. The feel of being competent to hold it down.”
She nodded with content in her eyes. But he was troubled.
“You had something in mind—” he began, when another partner claimed her, while he was dragged off to assist in an improvised glee-club.
His time was up all too soon, and without chance of a further word from her, other than a formal farewell. In the little rear hallway whither he had made his way through his protesting fellow-revelers, he reached up for his coat, and felt something lightly brush the top of his head. He looked up. It was a sprig of mistletoe. At the same moment two firm hands closed over his eyes, and light, swift lips just grazed his cheek.
Cyrus the Gaunt fell a-trembling. He turned slowly, and found himself confronting a total stranger. The stranger had gray hair and a tired face lighted by crinkly eyes. “Oh!” said Cyrus the Gaunt with an irrepressible bitterness of disappointment.
“Frankness,” observed his salutant, “may or may not be a compliment to the object of it.” Cyrus remained mute. “Who did youhopeit was?” Silence seemed still the best policy. “If you are offended”—the eyes twinkled with added keenness—“I will apologize honorably.”
“Let me do it for you,” said Cyrus the Gaunt politely, and kissed the unknown square upon the lips.
She drew back. “Well!” she began; then she laughed. “Theentente cordialehaving been established,whatare you doing here, Cyrus Staten?”
He gasped and gaped. “Do I know you?”
“Having neither memory nor manners, you do not. But I spent weeks at your country place when you were a boy, painting your father. Permit me to introduce myself.” And she gave a name so great that even Cyrus's comprehensive carelessness of art was not ignorant of it.
“Great snakes!” he ejaculated. “I—I'm sorry I kissed you.”
“Oh, I'm human. I rather liked it,” she chuckled, “even though I am old and stately. But how have you contrived to preserve your incognito?”
“Easy enough. This is another world. Look out!” he added as the curtain behind them moved. “Somebody's coming.” The hanging swung aside and the Bonnie Lassie emerged. “Oh!” she said in surprise. “Do you know each other?”
“We were becoming acquainted when you interrupted,” replied the woman. She turned a disconcerting gaze upon her hostess. “Where did you get him?” she demanded, exactly as if Cyrus weren't there. “Oh, please!” cried the girl.
“Don't mind me,” said Cyrus politely, sensible that something was going on which he didn't grasp. “I'm used to it.” He turned to the mighty artist. “You see, in real life I'm a studio model.”
“Are you?” retorted the genius. “I thought you were an engineer. Now I begin to suspect you are a fraud. Well, I have something to say to Miss Prim, here. Run you away and play with your job.”
“So that's your young Lincoln,” she observed, as Cyrus moodily accepted his dismissal, and passed out.
“He doesn't know it.”
“You have missed even more than I thought, in him.”
“I've done my best,” said the girl dispiritedly. “He's too big for little me.”
“Hm! You haven't told me yet where you got him.”
“'The wild wind blew him to my close-barred door,'” quoted the girl.
“A good many wild winds have blown about Cyrus Staten from time to time.”
“Who?”
“Cyrus Staten; don't youknowhim?”
“No, I picked him up from the bench in Our Square.”
“Which the Statens used to own, by the way. Well, thefacilis descensusof an idle waster from the world of white lights and black shadows to a park-bench is nothing new.”
“Does he look like an idle waster?”
“He doesnot. Therein lies a miracle. What is he doing now?”
“Running the steam-roller, outside.” The face of the girl melted into lovely and irrepressible mirth.
“Ah! That explains much. But not all. What is your part in this?”
“You have seen it.” She nodded backward toward the studio.
“Not that. As a woman? What have you been doing to that boy to make him what he is?”
The girl took her soft lip grievously between her teeth for a moment before answering. “I've been playing my child's tricks with a real man—and now I'm being sorry.”
“And paying for it?”
The Bonnie Lassie's head drooped.
“Is he paying for it, too?”
“No.”
“No? Well, when I played a little surprise on him and kissed him under the mistletoe, I thought that tall and massive youth was going to faint away like a school-miss in my supporting arms, until he saw who it was. What do you suppose his expectations—”
“You had no right to take such an advantage,” flashed the girl, turning crimson.
“So?” The great woman smiled. “But I think my own thoughts. When one pays, or the other pays, that is well. It is the chance of the play. But when both pay—oh, that is wrong, wrong, wrong as wrong can be!”
“I can't help it,” said the girl, very low. “There is a previous debt.” And she turned aside a face so woe-begone that her interrogator forbore further pressure.
“At least,” she said, “the artist must complete the work, at whatever cost to the woman. You will finishthat?” She jerked her head toward the studio.
“I—I suppose so. If I can.”
On the way home the genius caught a glimpse of Cyrus the Gaunt upon his triumphal chariot, and halted her auto the better to laugh. As the lumbering, clamoring monster drew opposite, she signaled. Cyrus did something abstruse to the mechanism, which groaned and clanked itself into stillness.
“Young man,” she hailed, “I have a message for you.”
“From whom?” said Cyrus hopefully. “From myself. This is it: Be careful.”
“I am,” said Cyrus with conviction, “the carefulest captain that ever ploughed the stormy pave.”
“Be careful,” she repeated, disregarding his interpretation, “or she'll make a man of you yet. The process is sometimes painful—like most creative processes, Home, Joseph.”
Many of the Bonnie Lassie's outlander guests passed Cyrus the Gaunt that night, but none other identified or noticed him. The latest departures were two heavily swathed youths who paused to light cigarettes in the lee of Cyrus's iron steed.
“Some little farewell party, wasn't it?” the engineer overheard them say. “Why wasn't the happy Bascom there?”
“Not back from Europe yet. I understand Morris Cartwright fixed things up, and the engagement is to be formally announced on his return.”
“It's a shame,” growled the first speaker. “Bascom's all right, but he's old enough to be her father. Wasn't she a dream and a vision to-night!”
“It was one of those legacy engagements, I believe. Dead-father's-wish sort of thing. All right, I suppose, so long as there's no one else. Who was the engineer guy? He seemed to be a reg'lar feller.”
The twain passed on, leaving Cyrus the Gaunt stiff and stricken in his seat. How he got through the next hour he hardly knew. He remembered vaguely a protest from sundry citizens who resented being charged off the cross-walks by a zigzagging juggernaut, a query from Terry the Cop whether he was off his feed, and the startled face of old man Sittser, who paused to pass the time of night on his way home from the late shift on the linotype and was incontinently cursed for his pains. Full consciousness of the practical world was brought back to Cyrus by the purring of a sleek auto close at hand as he curved out at the corner for his straightaway course. He was just gathering momentum when he caught sight of the Bonnie Lassie's face, white and wistful, soft-eyed and miserable, confronting darkness and vacancy from within the luxurious limousine.
Well, nobody can catch a sixty-horsepower motor-car with a ten-ton steamroller.
Cyrus, to do him justice, tried his best. They stopped one dollar and forty cents out of his Saturday's envelope for what he and the roller did to the barriers and lanterns. By the time he had swung into the cross-street, trailing wreckage, the Bonnie Lassie was out of sight and out of his world.
Winter comes, stern and sharp, like an unpaid landlord, to Our Square, with sleet and gale for its agents of eviction. No longer are the benches blithe with the voice of love or play or gossip. The wind has blown them all away. A few tenacious leaves still cling, withered, brown, and clattering, to the trees, “bare, ruin'd choirs where late' the sweet birds sang,” and a few hardy stragglers beat across the unprotected spaces, just to maintain, as it were, the human right of way against the gray rigor of the skies. But, for the most part, we of Our Square, going about our concerns, huddle as close as may be to the lee of walls, for—though we would not for the world have it known—many of us are none too warmly clad. Behind the blank opaqueness of the bordering windows one may surmise much want and penury and cold, which, also, we keep to ourselves. Our Square has its pride. We do not publish our trials.
Perhaps Cyrus the Gaunt knew as much of them as any. For, by imperceptible gradations, he had become the 'confidant, the judge, the arbiter of our difficulties, and the friend of the shyest, the hardest, and the proudest of us alike. His engine-seat was become a throne, from whence he dispensed every good thing but charity. That word and all that follows in its train he hated. Which shows that he had learned Our Square. After hours he would “drop in,” almost secretly, on some friend; and it was a curious coincidence that Cyrus's friends were chosen apparently on the basis of need and distress. He had that rare knack of helping out without involving the aided one in the coils of obligation. There is nothing Our Square wouldn't have done for Cyrus the Gaunt. I believe he could even have been elected alderman.
Winter drove Cyrus from his perch and put a brake on the thunder-wagon before the job was quite finished. There still remained some final repairs which must now wait for the spring, on the side where the Bonnie Lassie's little house stood, bleak and desolate. Not wholly deserted, however, for one brave and happy dancer still stuck to her post in the window, lifting a thrilled face to the sky. Other employment claimed Cyrus the Gaunt until his iron steed should come out of the stable; a day job on a stationary engine around in Pike Street. Our Square remarked with concern that the indoor employment didn't seem to suit Cyrus the Gaunt. He became gaunter and thinner and more melancholy-looking, and more than once he was seen on wild nights, when nobody was supposed to be out late, staring at the now quite unembarrassed house with the quaint little door and the broad vestibule. But though the light and cheer that Our Square had seen grow in Cyrus's face in the early days of his job, were graying over, there increased the new understanding and sympathy and determination, in lines that he had put there himself in the building of his new manhood. Thus, only, in this perplexing world, does a man lift himself by his own boot-straps.
Though Cyrus the Gaunt could boast a thousand friends, he had accepted but one intimate. That was MacLachan the tailor. Every day they lunched on frankfurters and kohlrabi at Schwartz's. Thither Cyrus was wont to have his scanty mail sent from the house where he lodged. One blustery December day the tailor arrived late, to find his friend fingering a pink slip of paper, of suggestive appearance.
“Ye'll have been aimin' a bit ootside!” commented MacLachan.
Cyrus flipped the paper over to him.
“Save us!” cried the awe-stricken Scot. “It's a thousan' dollars. All in the one piece!”
“Two months overdue. He didn't have my address, I suppose.”
“Ha'e ye been drawin' a lottery?”
“No. It's a bet. Also my release. I'd almost forgotten. My time's up.”
“Ye'll not be leavin' us?” said the tailor. Cyrus avoided his eyes. “I'm through, Mac,” he said dully. “It's no use. It's not worth while. Nothing's worth while.” There was a long pause. “Mon,” said MacLachan finally, “ha'e ye tho't what this'll mean to Our Square?”
Cyrus the Gaunt thought. Behind the curtain of his impenetrable face there passed a panorama of recent memories; events which had, for the first time in his career, made him one with the fabric of life. Faces appealed to him; hands were outstretched to him confidently for the friendly help that he could give so well; the voices of the children hailed him as a fellow; the baseball team which did most of its practice at noon on the asphalt claimed a corner of his memory; his ears rang with the everyday greetings of his own people, and another panorama, summoned up by the pink slip, faded away. Cyrus folded the check and put it carefully in the pocket of his overalls.
“Ye'll be stayin' here,” said MacLachan contentedly, having read his expression.
Cyrus nodded. Then the tailor's dour-ness fell from him for the moment. He laid a hand on his friend's shoulder. “Laddie,” he said, “the little bronze dancer is in the window yet.”
Cyrus turned a haggard face to him. “I know,” he said.
“Do ye make nothin' o' that?”
“Nothing. You know why—what she went away for.”
“I ha'e haird.”
“Well, I'm learning to forget.”
“The little bronze dancer is in the window yet,” repeated the obstinate Scot.
How Cyrus won through that long winter is his own affair. Our Square respects other people's troubles. It asked no questions. Finally winter broke and fled before a southeast wind full of fragrance, and the trees began to whisper important tidings to each other; and a pioneer butterfly of the deepest, most luminous purple-black, with buff edges to its wings, arrived and led the whole juvenile populace such a chase as surely never was since the Pied Piper fluted his seductions long ago; and the benches came out of their long retreat, fresh-painted, to stand sturdy and stiff in their old places; and so did Cyrus's thun-der-wagon, whereon he perched nightly once more, and was even more than before the taciturn, humorous, kindly, secret, friendly adviser to all and sundry.
Then, one crisp March evening he became aware of a strong, bent, feminine figure beckoning him from the curbstone. Clanging to a halt, he heard a voice, unforgettable through its tinge of foreign accent, say: —
“How do you do? I have been seeing your face all through my travels.” Cyrus took off his working-cap and shook hands. “So I have come back to look at it. It's thin. Would you like to be painted?”
“I don't think so, thank you. I've been sculped within an inch of my life.”
“So I have understood,” said the Very Great Woman with a smile not devoid of sympathy. “You are not done with it yet. She is coming.”
The face of Cyrus the Gaunt lighted marvelously.. “Coming back to Our Square?” he cried. Then the light faded. “But—”
“But me no buts. She is coming. I did it. I found that she had never finished you. So I told her that if she did not come back and finish, I would take you away from her and finish you myself. And, oh, I am as bad a sculptor as I am a good painter—-almost!” Her laughter rang in the chill air. “So she comes. And I have traveled all the way to this impossible spot to play traitor. The question is: Are you a man? You look it, at last!”
“The question is—Will you answer me one?”
“No! No! No! No! No! Put your questions where they belong. Farewell, my Phaëthon of the Slums.”
The world was mad with the wine of the wind the night the Bonnie Lassie came back to Our Square. All our trees waved their lean arms in welcome and sent down little buds as messengers of joy over her return. Of living welcomers there was none, for the gale had swept all humans before it, except Terry the Cop, and he didn't recognize her, from the distance, in her other-worldly raiment. That must have cost her a pang. Unnoticed she crept into the little, old, quaint, friendly house, and its doors closed behind her like the reassurance of a friendly arm. She set herself in the dark window where the blithe dancer still tripped it, faithful and lonely, and waited for Cyrus the Gaunt. But when she saw his face, the Bonnie Lassie didn't sculp. She cried.
Cyrus mounted to his seat and pulled the lever over. The engine was running badly that night, and the wind almost blew him from his perch. Aside from the improbability that the little sculptor would brave such weather, the charioteer was presently so immersed in his own immediate concerns that he all but forgot the prospective visit. When he had brought his charge to its senses and reduced it to some control, he was interrupted by the plight of a belated push-cart woman, who was dragging anchor and drifting fast to leeward under the furious impulsion of the nor'easter. Cyrus had just dragged her almost from under his ponderous wheels, when a beam flashed in his eyes, and he looked up to see a truck close upon them. His yell split the darkness. The truck-driver, with a mighty wrench, swung his vehicle sharp to the left, and up on the sidewalk.
The uptilted lights shone full into the lower window of the little, old, friendly house. Pressed against that window Cyrus saw the apparition of a tear-softened, desolate visage. Reason, prudence, and propriety deserted their posts in his brain simultaneously. A dozen long-legged leaps carried him as far as the vestibule of the little house. There his knees basely weakened. Perhaps her heart divined his step and sent her forth to meet him; or perhaps it was his old ally, Chance, that brought her into the vestibule as he stood there shaking.
“Oh!” she cried, and shrank back into a corner, with a deprecatory movement, which to him was infinitely pathetic.
“I'm sorry,” said Cyrus. “I saw your face and thought you were in trouble. If—if you wanted me to sit for you again,” he said composedly, “I should be very glad to, until you've finished your sketch.”
“Oh, no. I couldn't ask you. I couldn't think of—after—what—what—” Her voice waned into silence.
“Don't feel that way at all,” he encouraged her with resolved cheerfulness. “I can be a model and nothing more, again, I assure you.”
Her upturned eyes implored him. “Don't be cruel,” she said.
“Cruel?” he repeated wonderingly.
“Not at all. I'll be polite. It isn't too late to offer my best wishes. Though I'm not sure I know the name.”
“What name?”
“Your—your married name.”
“Then you don't know?” she gasped. The brain of Cyrus the Gaunt suddenly went numb. “I know you went away from us to get married.”
“I did,” she quavered. “But I couldn't. I—I—I tried to make myself go through with it. I couldn't. No woman could when—when—” Her voice trembled into silence.
A boisterous back-draft of the tempest thrust its way through the door and puffed out the little vestibule light. With a sense of irreparable loss impending he felt, rather than heard, her moving from him into the blackness of the outer world. Yet his mind seemed clogged and chained as he strove to grasp the meaning of what she had said—or was it what she had left unsaid?
And in a moment she would be gone forever.
Suddenly—miracle of miracles!—he felt those soft, strong hands on his arm, and heard her sobbing appeal: “Oh, Cyrus! Aren't you ever going to smile at me inside again?”
His arms went out. The Bonnie Lassie's hands slipped up to his shoulder. The flower-face pressed, close and cold and sweet, against his.
Her Hands Slipped to his Shoulder 110
“Love of my heart!” he cried, “I'll never do anything else all my life long.”
Summer is tyrant in Our Square now. The leaves droop, flaccid and dusty, on the trees, and the sun gives a shrewish welcome to the faithful who still cling to the benches. Gone is Cyrus's chariot of flame and thunder. The work is done. Gone, too, is Cyrus, and with him the Bonnie Lassie, after a wedding duly set forth with much pomp and splendor in the public prints. Among those present was Our Square.
So now the little, quaint, old, friendly house stands vacant, with eager sunbeams darting about it in search of entry. Vacant but not cheerless, for behind the panes, against which the Bonnie Lassie once pressed her sorrowful face, troop the elfin company of her dream-children, the dancing figurines. Cyrus the Gaunt would have it so. He deeded her the house as a wedding-gift, that the happy dancers might remain with us lonely and unforgetting folk. They are the promise that one day Our Bonnie Lassie will come back to Our Square.
SPRING was in Our Square when I first saw the two of them. They sat on a bench under the early lilacs. It must have been the beginning of it all for them, I think, for there was still a dim terror in her face, and he gestured like one arguing stormily. At the last she smiled and drew a cluster of the lilac bloom down to her cheek. It was not deeper-hued than her eyes, nor fresher than her youth. They rose and passed me, alone on my bench, and I, who am wise in courtships, having watched so many bud and blossom on the public seats of Our Square, saw that this was no wooing, but some other persuasion, though what I could not guess.
So those two drifted out of sight; out of mind, too, for life in our remote, unconsidered, and slum-circled little park is a complex and swiftly changing actuality, and it crowds in with many pressures upon a half-idle old pedagogue like myself. It was the Little Red Doctor who, weeks later, recalled the episode, one blistering evening of the summer's end. He captured me as I emerged from the “penny-circulator” with my thumb in a book.
“What are we ruining our eyes with to-night?” he demanded.
I held up the treasure.
“'Victory,'” he read. “Good! He'll like Conrad.”
Perceiving what was expected, I fulfilled the requirements by asking: “Who will like Conrad?”
“The Gnome.”
I remembered that I had not seen Leon Coventry since the day he passed me with the girl who had youth and spring and terror in her face.
“Am I to loan it to him?”
“You're to read it to him.”
“When?”
“To-night. It's your turn to sit up.”
“Is the Gnome ill?”
“Worse.”
“Mad?”
“Haunted.”
“Since when has your practice branched out into the supernatural, doctor?”
“Oh, as for that, his trouble is physical too.”
“Is it anything that a simple lay mind could grasp?”
The Little Red Doctor grunted. “His legs have turned to lamp-wicking. I don't vouch for the diagnosis. It's his own.”
“Paralysis?” I hazarded.
“Grip,” was the Little Red Doctor's curt rejoinder.
“Don't tell me that grip turns a young Hercules's legs to lamp-wicks?” I objected.
“Grip does if the young Hercules's legs are fools enough to carry him out and around the city with a temperature of one-naught-four-point-two,” retorted the Little Red Doctor with bitter exactitude. “Under such conditions grip turns to pneumonia. And pneumonia is the favorite ally of my old friend, Death.”
“You don't mean that the Gnome is going to die?”
“Not of pneumonia: that fight was fought out some weeks ago. But what pneumonia doesn't do to a young Hercules worry may. Another aid of my old friend, Death, worry is. That's a bothersome Gnome, tossing about in the heat with his sick brain full of plots to get away and no legs to carry'em out. His next try will be his last.”
“Then he got away once?”
“On all fours. As far as the sidewalk. There Cyrus the Gaunt and the Bonnie Lassie found him and brought him back. Cyrus was on duty again last night.”
“I began to see. I'm to be watchdog. It's No. 7, isn't it? At what hour?”
“No. 7. Top floor. Nine o'clock.”
“I'll be there.”
Thanks for neighborly services, which are a taken-for-granted part of our close-pressed life, are not deemed good form in Our Square. The Little Red Doctor nodded and prepared to pass on to the rounds of his unending bout with his old friend and antagonist, Death. I detained him.
“Just a moment. What is the object of the Gnome's excursions? To get work?”
“No. To search.”
“For what?”
The Little Red Doctor moved toward an approaching horse car, almost the last of that perishing genus in New York City. “Heaven knows!” he called back. “And Mac, the tailor, at least suspects. That's as far as I can get.”
He leaped upon the bobtailed vehicle, was immediately held up by a forehanded conductor, and too tardily bethought himself of a forgotten point. “The chair! The chair!” he bellowed. “Look out for the chair!”
“What chair?” I shouted back.
He made as if he would jump off and return. But he had already paid his nickel, so he only waved despairingly. Nickels count in Our Square.
No. 7 opened to me with a musty smell of stale heat. Built in the magnificent days of the neighborhood, by a senator of the United States, it had fallen to the base uses of machine workers on the lower and furnished lodgings on the upper floors. The very walls seemed to sweat as I made my way up to the dim light at the top, where the Gnome's door stood open, hopelessly inviting a draft. Upon my entrance a huge and fumbling creature from the lithographic plant where the Gnome was an assistant rose and made gloomy and bashful adieus.
Leon Coventry reached a great, thin hand across the littered bed to make me welcome. Even in his illness he preserved that suggestion of bowed and gnarled power, strangely alien to his youthfulness, which had given him his nickname in Our Square. Some would have called him ugly of face. But his mouth had the austere sweetness of a saint or a sufferer, and in his eyes glowed a living fire which might tame beasts or subdue hearts.
“How are you feeling to-night?” I asked perfunctorily.
“Wild,” he answered. “When are they going to let me out? When? When?” The little Red Doctor had given me no hint upon this point. So I said non-committally: “Soon, I think,” and moved around the bed to where an easy-chair invited. It was a wicker chair, broad-seated, wide-armed, and welcoming, a chair made conformable and gracious by long usage, a chair for lovers, for high hopes and for dreams, a chair to solace troubles and soothe weariness. Into it I would have dropped gratefully, when the sick man's fingers closed on my wrist like the jaws of an animal, and I was all but jerked from my feet.
“Not there!” he snarled insanely. “Not there!”
“I beg your pardon,” I said, much discomposed.
“I didn't mean to hurt you,” he returned with a return to that habitual gentleness of address which, by its contrast with his formidable physique, gave him the aspect of a kindly and companionable bear. “But if you don't mind sitting here on the bed? Or yonder on the sofa? Or anywhere except—”
“Not in the least,” I assured him. “The fact is, I detest wicker chairs anyway. I had to get rid of mine.”
“Did you? Why?”
“It was no companion for an old, lonely man.”
The Gnome clutched me again. His fingers quivered as they bit into my arm.
“I know! It whispered. Didn't it?”
I nodded.
“So does mine. Strange things. Echoes of what you can't forget.”
“Yes, yes. I know.”
“Do you, now? I wonder. Perhaps you do.” He studied my face with his luminous eyes, and then closed them and fell back, speaking slowly and dreamily. “In the darkness when I can see the chair just enough to know that it's empty as—as an empty heart—I hear it stirring, stirring softly, adjusting itself to—to what is not there. And I hold my breath and pray. But—nothing more.” He opened his eyes that seemed to gaze out across barriers of pain and incomprehension. “Dominie, does yours—did yours keep its secrets?”
That way, obviously, ran the boy's malady toward madness. Regretting that I had chanced upon so unfortunate a topic, I said nothing. But he took my assent for granted.
“So does mine,” he sighed. “It has not been moved nor touched since it was left vacant.”
“Shall I read to you?” I asked, to turn his mind aside.
“No. Talk to me. Tell me what they are doing in the Square.”
So I gave him the news of Tailor Mac-Lachan's latest drunk, and Pushcart Tonio's luck in the lottery, and Grandma Souchet'sfaux pasat the movies (her first experience) when she rose and yelled for the police to stop the pickpocket in the flagrant act of abstracting the heroine's aged father's watch, thereby disgracing her (grandma's) progeny and making them a derision and a byword even unto the third and fourth generation; and the Morrissey mumps, the whole kit and b'ilin' of juvenile Morrisseys having been sent to school looking like five little red balloons, whereby holiday for the rest of the scholars and great rejoicing, and the unavailing wrath of the authorities upon Mrs. Morrissey's head; and Terry the Cop's extra stripe; and the passing of the skat championship into the unworthy but preposterously lucky hands of the Avenue B Evening Dress Suit Club; and the battle over Orpheus the Piper (which was a jest of the Lords of High Derision, touching the boundaries of uttermost tragedy); and the exotic third stage of the affair, not yet ended, between Mary Moore and the Weeping Scion of Wealth; and the newspaper discovery of a barroom poet at Schmidt's free-lunch counter; and the joke which his fashionable uptown club put up on Cyrus the Gaunt; and politics and social doings, and the whisper of scandal; exactly as it might be in any other little world than Our Square; and, finally, for I was leading up to a delicate and difficult point, my own little smile of fortune, in the form of a small textbook finally accepted and advance royalty duly paid thereon. For the difficult and dangerous point was how to help the Gnome in case he needed it. Offer of charity, even when glossed over with the euphemism of a “loan,” is not accepted in ease of spirit by the people of Our Square. In fact, it isn't accepted at all, as a rule. The likelihood of ability to pay back is too dubious and remote. So it was in my most offhand manner that I inquired:—
“By the way, how are you off for ready cash?”
Leon fluttered his hand among the papers on the bed. They were opened envelopes.
“Look inside them,” he directed.
Within were checks. They were on various mercantile and commercial firms. Mostly the amounts were small; two dollars, two-and-a-half, three, and four, and the largest for ten dollars. Totaled up they amounted to affluence as Our Square understands the term.
“Something new?” I asked.
“Yes. Advertising sketches. They've caught on.”
“I didn't know that you could draw, Leon.”
“Neither did I, beyond scratchy, sketchy blobs, until the Bonnie Lassie told me.
“If the Bonnie Lassie has been giving you lessons, you're in a good school,” I said, for the local sculptress, nymph, and goddess of Our Square had already begun to make us and herself famous with her tiny bronzes.
“Not lessons exactly. But pointers.”
“You're in luck to be making money while you 're laid up.”
“The doc says I oughtn't to work at it. But I had to do something or go crazy. A man can't live by just waiting; can he? So when I can't sleep I sketch. And the checks come in. It's like a miracle. Only—it isn't the miracle that I want. When do you think I'll be strong enough to get out? Can't you tell me? Can't you find out from doc? I'd get better if I only had something to go on!”
Always that was the beginning and end of our talks; talks which often skirted the borders of the secret that was wearing his life down, but never revealed it. When I sought to shift the burden of the query upon the Little Red Doctor, he looked glum and shook his head.
“But go there when you can, dominie. He likes to have you. You rest him. Sometimes he sleeps after you've gone.” Though the Gnome never spoke of it again, I knew why he liked me with him. The bond of sympathy was that in my life, too, had been an empty chair that whispered. So the harsh summer elongated itself like the stretching of a white-hot metal bar, and through the swelter and hush of long nights I watched the rugged Gnome slowly dwindle.
My first weekly watch night in September came with one of the savagest onslaughts of belated heat in the memory of Our Square. For the sake of what little air there was I had drawn the couch out between the two windows. Discouraged by the handicap of a forearm which stuck clammily to his drawing board, the Gnome had turned off his overhead light, and now lay rigid. But I knew that he did not sleep. From some merciful cleft in the brazen sky came a waft of coolness. It fanned me into a doze.
I awoke with a start, to hear the Gnome's voice, in a hard-breathed whisper: “My heart! Oh, my heart!”
“This,” I thought, “is the end.” I tried to rise, but a paralysis of the will held me, though my senses seemed preternaturally acute.
From the bedside I heard the stir of the wicker chair. The withes moved softly upon themselves with delicate, smooth rustlings. The chair, whispering, sagged and yielded as if to the pressure of some light, sweet burden. Then the voice of the Gnome came, out of the darkness, again, and I knew that my fear was without cause, for he was leaning toward the chair and speaking to that which whispered.
“My Heart! Oh, my Heart! Will you never come back? Don't you know that I can't come to find you? I've tried. God of pity, how I've tried! Can't you hear me, can't you feel me calling for you? If I could see you once again! Only once. It isn't so much to ask. And the time is short. Come back to me, my Heart!”
I heard the chair whispering, whispering messages beyond the little reach of human understanding. Then the beggar of ghosts fell back, and the bed creaked and shook. I knew what made it creak and shake. Chairs that whisper have no balm for that misery.
Two of us lay still and wakeful through the rest of that night. In the morning we faced each other pallidly.
“Did you hear me in the night?” asked my host.
“Yes.”
“Then I'm going to tell you the rest, for I think I haven't much longer time to tell anything.”
“Oh, nonsense!” I protested; but it was lip speech only, and he smiled at the pretense.
“Of course, nonsense, if you like. But I'll go, shriven ofthatsecret. The wicker chair is where She used to sit.”
“That much I gathered.”
“How can I describe Her to you? How can I make you understand as you would if you'd seen Her?”
“Perhaps I have.”
“When? Where?”
“Sitting with you on a bench in the Square the week the lilacs bloomed. She looked afraid.”
“She was. A brute of a foreman had insulted her. So she lost her job as a feather finisher—did you see her beautiful hands?—and she could find no other, and there was nobody in the world for her to turn to. Down below her last dollar, and twenty years old, and lovely. There's terror enough in that, isn't there?”
My mind went back to certain black-and-scarlet tragedies which Our Square makes brave pretense of having forgotten; tragedies of its unforgotten daughters. Terror enough, indeed!
“Was she some one you knew?”
No; she was not some one whom the Gnome knew. How to get to know her and help her (for help was his one, all-effacing, loyal purpose from the first moment he looked into her face); there was the heart of the problem. At any moment she might pass on, out of reach of his aid.
Yet to speak to her was too much risk. She sat poised as ready for startled flight as a bird. Into which deadlock of fateful chances intruded Susan Gluck's Orphan, aged six, and with a passion for scientific pursuits. The immediate object of his research was to discover what treasure so strongly interested a honeybee in a lilac bell, and if need be assist in the operation, his honorable purpose also being to help. Unfortunately the Busy One misunderstood and resented, whereupon Susan Gluck's Orphan lifted up his voice and smote the far heavens with his lamentations. To him, running in agonized circles with his finger in his mouth, the girl extended arms and invitation to come and be comforted. The voice, with its clear, soft, mothering appeal, tugged at the Gnome's heart-strings; to Susan Gluck's Orphan it was, however, but the voice of a stranger, and therefore to be feared. There, however, sat Leon the Gnome, unnoted before, but now an appreciated refuge. For to the young of the species in Our Square the Gnome is a delight, because of his athletic habit of using a child—and sometimes two—in evening dumb-bell exercises, for the upkeep of his mighty muscles. To his knees fled the wailful orphan. Gently though clumsily the Gnome extracted the stinger, in astonished contemplation of which the sufferer temporarily forgot his woes; presently, however, as the poison took hold of the nerves, lapsing again into woe.
All this the girl had been watching from the corner of her eye, making, one may guess, a private estimate of the singular-looking youth who had been covertly spying upon her fear and despair. Wise in a lore of which the Gnome was as ignorant as the Orphan, she now offered wet mud. It was applied, and the adoptive pride of the Glucks raced off to vaunt his wounds to his fellows, leaving two people with quick-beating hearts gazing at each other. The Gnome took a quick resolve.
“I have been frightened, too, in my time.”
“He is well over it,” answered the girl, following the now boasting Orphan with her gaze.
“I don't mean that. I have been hungry too.”
Now she understood, and drew back, flushing. But she, too, was one to go straight to a point. Perhaps two more direct spirits than those twain seldom meet. “You mean me?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I'm not hungry, and I'm not afraid,” she lied.
“Could you believe,” he said slowly, “that I mean as well to you as I did to that child—and the same?”
She did not answer at once, but the defensive look wavered in her eyes.
“Do you ever gamble?” was his next question.
“Gamble?” she repeated in amazement.
“Like matching pennies. I'll match you for the dinners.”
“I—I've only got a dollar,” she said.
“Plenty.”
“It isn't really a dollar,” she murmured. “I've only got—forty-three cents—in the world.”
It was her first confidence, and he thrilled to it. But he accepted it quite as a matter of course.
“Even on that it can be done. Come; where are you any worse off, even if you lose? And, at dinner, we might figure out some way for you to be better off.”
She got out a penny and looked at it a long time and then said: “Do I toss it up?” And of course the Gnome said no; because a tossed penny shows for itself. So they matched, and he looked at his coin (which showed the winning side up) and said:—
“I lose; I didn't match you.”
And then her lost misgiving surged over her and they sat and argued it. That is when I first noticed them. The Gnome won. Of course.
“So I took her to Marot's,” said the young giant, sitting up against his pillows and letting his gaze fare out into the humming heat of the day; “because I knew that, on a pinch, Mme. Marot would look after her. And I had an awful time keeping the bill of fare away from her and making her believe that she was getting only forty-three cents' worth. Courage came back to her with the food. She told me a little of her story; not much, then or afterward. I think she didn't want to claim anything of me, ever, not even sympathy. You see?”
I did see, if only vaguely. Leon the Gnome was building up a character to match the curious beauty of the face I had seen that once.
“That foreman brute wasn't her first experience. She had had to fight before; to leave good employment. To her the world was a jungle full of men who were only a horrible sort of pursuing ape. That came out later when I knew her better. My business there at that first dinner at Marot's was to get her to believe in me. Well,” he sighed, as over the memory of a formidable task accomplished, “I did it!”
He did it! Think of the gulf between those two; full, for her, of shameful memories and bristling fears; a gulf to be crossed with a shrinking heart before she could trust him; and across it he had led her by the mere power of words. Well, no; not words alone. Something shining and clear and trust-compelling back of the words; the nature of the man. Have I said that our Gnome was rather a wonderful person? He was.
“But how did you do it, miracle worker?” I demanded.
“No miracle at all. I don't understand you. I just told her about myself.”
“Quite so. What, for example?”
“Oh, everything,” he said, with a gesture of his big hands, indicating a broad generality. “Just a sort of outline of my life. I wanted her to know me as I was.” I wondered how many youths of my acquaintance in Our Square, or out, could afford to tell “everything” as a method of winning a young girl's confidence. But the Gnome, as I have indicated, was something of a phenomenon.
“So I lent her money and courage to go on with. And that evening, when we had walked and talked I said to her: 'Where will you go to-night?' and she said: 'Tell me.' So I brought her here to live.”
“Here?” I exclaimed.
“What are you thinking?” he growled. “Don't think it. Open that door.”
He pointed to the far corner of the room. I did as directed. “Look on the other side of it. What do you see?”
What I saw on the further side of the door was an oak bar set in iron clamps. Beyond was a tiny room and a tiny white bed and a flower in a pot on the window sill, dead and withered in the heat. Opposite the window an exit led to the hallway.
“There she lived and sang and was happy for fifty-five days. Each day was more glorious than the last for me. She stopped being afraid almost at once. It was just an even week after she came that she tapped on the door, when I had settled down to read my evening away.
“'May I come in?' she asked.
“'Yes,' I said.
“'For quite a time she made no move. Then: 'Are you sure?' she said.
“I understood. That was her way—to make you understand more than she said.” The sick man leaned out from his pillow toward the little door. “I can see her now, as she came into the room. She was all in fresh white, with a touch of some color at her waist. I had bought that dress for her. Do you know the delight of buying the realities of life for the woman you love? Oh, yes! I loved her then. I had loved her from the first sight, when I spoke to her on the bench because she seemed so desolate and scared.
“She came straight to me, and I stood up and put down my book. She looked me in the eyes, hard. Then she held out her hand. 'Shake hands,' she said. I shook. 'I'll keep the bargain,' I said. 'I know you will,' said she. She sat down in the wicker chair. No one has sat in it since; not even the Bonnie Lassie when she came. Yes; she sat down in the chair as if she were adopting it for her own. And we talked.”
“What did you talk about?” I asked. A foolish question, for what do youth and youth always talk about, when they encounter? But his reply surprised me.
“Money, mostly, that first evening. We went over accounts. She was keeping strict record of every cent I spent on her, to pay back when she got a job. Room rent, too. Oh, it was all very businesslike throughout. Afterward we talked about life and books and things. I lent her my books. I read a good deal, you know; all of us in the printing trades are great readers,” he added with a touch of guild pride. “She was better educated than I, though. Where did she get it? I never found out. Of course I didn't ask any questions. That was part of the bargain, as I understood it. She asked me a million. She turned me inside out and sometimes she laughed at me. But her laughter never hurt. It wasn't that kind.”
“Mightn't she have thought that your not asking questions of your own showed a lack of interest in her?” I suggested.
“How could she? I hadn't the right to ask questions. I hadn't the right to do anything but watch over her and guard her and keep to my bargain. Every evening she knocked and came in and sat in the wicker chair, and we talked. It was the sweetest thing in life to me, that absolute confidence. But the greater her confidence grew the more I was bound not to let her see what I felt for her. Isn't it so? You see, I know nothing about women.”
Having my grave doubts upon the point, I offered no advice.
“She got a job. I don't know where. Next week she began to pay me up.”
“Did you make any protests?” I asked, sounding him.
“Protests? Certainly not. I couldn't, could I? It was a question of her self-respect.”
“Of course. I beg your pardon for asking.”
“There was one night—we had been to a concert, Dutch treat, of course—and she came into my room to sit and talk it over for a few minutes. Passing me on her way back to her own room, she stopped behind my chair, and I felt something just brush my temple; and then the door shut behind her and the bar fell, and I heard her voice: 'Good-night, Gala-had.' For the next three days I never set eyes on her.”
“Did that tell you nothing?”
“What should it tell me?” retorted that pathetic young idiot. “It was just part of her mystery, of the mystery of woman, I suppose. The next Saturday night that drunken sot, MacLachan, came and ruined everything.”
“Soft words, Leon,” I protested, for the dour-faced, harsh-spoken, sore-hearted tailor of Our Square has his own reasons for drink and forgetfulness, and, drunk or sober, he is my friend.
“I wish he had broken his neck on the stairs,” said the Gnome savagely. “He sat over there, bleating to me some gibberish about Scotch philosophy, when Vera came into her room, and knocked as she always did. It was he that called 'Come in.' She came and stopped, looking at him with surprise. 'Oh,' she said, 'I didn't know.' 'No more did I,' said MacLachan, standing up with solemn, drunken politeness. 'I was not aweer there was a Mrs. Leon Coventry here.' She turned color, but looked him in the eye. 'There isn't,' said she. 'Then take shame to yerself,' he said. 'Ye should make at least the pretex'.'
“If she hadn't jumped between us, I would have pitched him out of the window. But she checked me long enough for him to get away and run down the stairs. It was the first time I had felt her arms and it turned me sick with longing. She backed away from me and said: 'I'm sorry, Leon. I didn't know there was any one here.' 'Wait,' I said. 'We'vegotto be married now.' If you could have seen her face, you'd have thought I'd struck her.” He stopped and swept the beads of sweat from his temples.
“Is that all you said?” I asked.
He stared at me. “That's almost what she asked me?” he replied. “She said: 'Is that all you have to say to me, Leon?' I didn't get her meaning. I was intent on the one thing—the bargain: that I mustn't make love to her; that I mustn't catch her in my arms and hold her against my heart that was bursting with love of her. The fever was on me, then, too, and I suppose that kept me to the one idea that was burning in my brain.
“'We can go to the Greek church, on the other side of the square,' I said. 'When can you be ready?'
“She walked back into her room, and I never saw her again.”
“God forgive you for a fool!” I said.
“Why didn't you tell her what every woman wants to hear, that you loved her?”
“Why, she must have known it; she must have realized it a thousand times, by a thousand signs. Yet she left me—that way.”
“You've had nothing from her since?”
“Yes. A money order for the balance of what she owed me.” An involuntary, jealous clutch at his pillow told me that the money order had not been and would not be cashed.
“No word with it?”
“Just gratitude.” The Gnome's sensitive lips quivered. “What do I want with gratitude? I wanther!I want to find her. Suppose she were in trouble again. She's so young and helpless!”
“MacLachan never meant—”
“I went out to kill MacLachan next day. I was having pretty good luck at it too, when Terry the Cop came in. They brought me back here and called the doctor, and MacLachan cried out of one eye, for the other was closed.”
I recalled the tailor's black eye. Further I recalled that when some other-world business had taken me to Fifth Avenue I had there encountered Mac (of all persons) in (of all places) a millinery store. The fragments of his conversation which I caught related to ostriches. To my inquiry he replied that he was pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp, and that it was a lawful occupation. The suspicion now lodged in my mind that Mac had been searching for a lost trail. Of this I said nothing to Leon.
“Sometimes at night,” the sick man went on, “when I am not longing to smash up all the world because I can't get out and find her, she comes and sits in the wicker chair, and I hear the pressure of her dear body against the withes, and I feel her breath in the silence, but she never speaks. Is she dead, do you think?”
I most emphatically declined to entertain any such hypothesis. As for the Gnome, it seemed that he soon might be. The Little Red Doctor's visits grew more frequent, and his brow more corrugated, and his eyes more perplexed. Once he went so far as to observe in my hearing that nature could go just about so far without sleep and then it cracked.
“Through that crack,” he remarked, “enters sometimes my old friend, Death, sometimes madness. Let's pray that it won't be madness in the Gnome's case.”
Indications seemed to point in that direction, however. Leon's association with the spirit of the chair became closer and more constant. Night after night I heard him murmuring in the darkness, and the soft creak and rustle and whisper of the chair in reply, until the hairs of my neck quivered.
There came a night when the heat broke under a pressure of wild wind and rain from the northwest that swept Our Square like an aerial charge. It whirled me, breathless, into No. 7, and pursued me up the stairs, puffing out the light at the top. The Gnome was working. Beside him on a stand rustled a little pile of checks, weighted down.
“I'm going to leave a legacy,” he said gayly. “Will you be my executor? You'll have to find Her, you know.”
“Ask me ten years from now, if I'm alive,” I answered. “What's to-night? Reading?”
“Sleep, for you. You look done up. Take the couch and a blanket.”
I took them and, with them, what I had originally planned to be a brief nap, for there was medicine to be given now. When I woke up the room was dark. It seemed to me that a cold draft had passed over and roused me. Above the rush and whistle of the wind I could hear the chair whispering.
“My Heart! Oh, my Heart! Have you come back?” pleaded the Gnome's voice in the silence.
Then all the blood in my body made one great leap and stopped. The chair had sobbed.
“It has seemed so often that I could stretch out my hand and touch you,” went on the piteous, quiet voice from the bed. “But you were never there. And my soul is tired with waiting and longing.”
The chair rustled again with the sound of release from weight. There was a broken cry of love and fear and gladness that was of this and not the other world, and I knew without seeing that it was a woman of flesh and blood who lay on the Gnome's breast, covering his face with her kisses.
“Darling fool! Darling fool! Why didn't you tell me?” she sobbed. “Why didn't you tell me that you loved me?”
“I thought that I did,” said the Gnome, and I started at the changed voice, for it had suddenly taken on life and vigor. “I thought I told you in every word and look that you were all my world.” There was a pause, then: “Whodidtell you?”
“Mr. MacLachan. He found me at last. He took me by the arm and said: 'Lassie, the love o' you is the life o' him. An' it's going if you don't come back an' save him!' Is it true, dearest one?” she cried passionately. “Tell me I'm not too late.”
Then I judged it best to tiptoe quite circumspectly out of the room. On the landing below I met the Little Red Doctor.
“Who went up the stairs just now?” he cried.
“Love,” said I. “Did you fear it was Death?”