CHAPTER VIOne morning, as she was making ready to go to the store, and taking ready to go to the store, and taking much time at the process, she observed at her forehead a white hair. It startled her, frightened her for a moment; then she laughed."Why, I'm growing old!"What use had she for youth? It had never been kind to her. All the loss of it meant was that it might harm her a little at the store. She plucked out the white thread and forgot it–nearly.Another day there was another white hair. She removed that, too. Then came another, and others, swiftly, till she was afraid to take any more away.At last there was a whole gray lock. She tucked it in and pinned it beneath the nondescript mass of her coiffure. It would have terrified her more if she had not been so busy. She chattered and proffered her wares all day long. Hunger became one of her most sincere emotions. Fatigue wore her out but strengthened her, sweetened her sleep, kept dreams away. When she woke she must hurry, hurry to the store. The old stupidity of her life had given way to an eternal hurry.And now the white hairs were hurrying, too, like the snowflakes that suddenly fill the air. But with this snow came the quickening of pulse and glistening of eyes, the reddening of cheeks that the snow brings.The white fell about her hair as if she stood bareheaded in a snow-storm. There was a kind of benediction in it. She felt that it softened something about her face, as the snow softens old rubbish-heaps and dreary yards and bleak patches.People began to say, "How well you look, Debby!" They began to dignify her as "Deborah" or "Miss Larrabee." Her old contemners came to her counter with a new meekness. Age was making it harder and harder for them to keep the pace. Bright colors did not become them any longer. Their petals were falling from them, the velvet was turning to plush, and the plush losing its nap, rusting, sagging, wearing through. The years, like moths, were gnawing, gnawing.Debby felt so sorry for the women who had been beautiful. She could imagine how the decay of rosehood must hurt. It is not necessary to have been Napoleon to understand Elba.One day a sad, heavy figure dragged along Deborah's aisle and sank upon the mushroom stool in front of her. Deborah could hardly believe that it was Josie Shillaber. She could hardly force back the shock that leaped to her expression. From thin, white lips crumpled with pain came a voice like a rustling of dead leaves in a November gust. And the voice said, with a kind of envy in it:"Why, Deborah, how well you look!""Oh, I am well!" Deborah chanted, then repressed her cheer unconsciously. It was not tactful to be too well. "That is, I'm tol'able. And how are you this awful weather?""Not well, Debby. I'm not a bit well; no, I'm never well any more. Why, your hair is getting right white, isn't it, dear? But it's real becoming to you. Mine is all gray, too, you see, but it's awful!""Indeed it's not! It's fine! Your children must love it. Don't they?""Oh, the children!" Josie wailed. "What do they think of me? The grown ones are away, all flirting and getting married. They say they'll come back, but they never do. But I don't care. I don't want them to see me like this. And the young ones are so selfish and inconsiderate. It's awful, getting old, isn't it, Debby? It don't seem to worry you, though. I suppose it's because you haven't had sorrow in your life as I have. I'm looking for something to wear, Debby. The styles aren't what they used to be. There's not a thing fit to wear to a dog-fight in these new colors. What are people coming to? I can't find a thing to wear. What would you suggest? Do help me!"Deborah emptied the shelves upon the counter, sent to the stock-room for new shipments that had not been listed yet, ransacked the place; but there was nothing there for the woman whose husband owned it all. The physician's wife was sick with time, and even he could not cure her of that. The draper's wife was turning old; he could not swaddle her from the chill of that winter. Josie was trying to dress up a rose whose petals had fallen, whose sepals were curled back; the husk could not endure colors that the blossom had honored.Josie, however, would not acknowledge the inevitable autumn; she would not grow old with the grace of resignation. She limped from the store, shaking her unlovely head. Could this be Josie Shillaber, who had romped through life with beauty in and about everything she was and wore and did?Deborah could have moralized over her as Hamlet over Yorick's skull: Where be your petal cheeks, your full, red lips, your concise chin, and that long, lithe throat, and those pearly shoulders, and all that high-breasted, spindle-hipped, lean-limbed girlishness of yours? And where your velocity, your tireless laughter, your amorous enterprise?Could they have ever been a part of this cumberer of the ground, creeping almost as slowly and heavily as a vine along a cold, gray wall.Deborah's hand went to her heart, where there was an ache of pity for one who had never pitied her. It was Deborah now that was almost girlish of form; she was only now filling out, taking flesh upon her bones and rhythm into her members. And that scrawny chicken-chest of hers was becoming worthy of that so beautiful name for so dear a place; she was gaining a bosom. She did not know how the whimsical sultan Time had shifted his favor to her from his other slaves.She knew only that Josie was in disgrace with beauty and stared after her in wet-eyed pity. Who can feel so sorry for a fallen tyrant as the risen victim of tyranny?A few weeks later Deborah went again to the Shillaber house, sat again on the sofa in the dining-room. The children had all come home. Josie was in the parlor, almost hidden in flowers. She did not rise to receive her guests. They all filed by and looked at her and shook their heads. She did not answer with a nod. Birdaline wept over her, looking older and terrified. But Pamela was wonderfully pretty in black. She sang Josie's favorite hymn, "Jesus, lover of my soul," with a quartet accompanying her. Then the preacher said a few words and prayed.Mr. Crankshaw was there, and so were his camp-stools. One of them had collapsed, and the bass of the choir had been unable to open his. Some of the young people giggled, as always. But even for them the laughter was but the automatic whir of a released spring, and there was no mirth in the air.Deborah was filled with a cowering awe, as one who sees a storm rush past and is unhurt save by the vision of its wreckage. The girl Pamela had sung here a year or so ago that song to the rose, and had shredded the flower and ruined it and tossed it aside. So time had sung away the rose that had been Josie. Deborah had heard the rose cry out in its agony of dissolution, and now it was fallen from the bush, scentless and dead. But it had left at least other buds to replace it. That was more than Deborah had ever done.The store was closed the day of the funeral, and Deborah went home with her mother. All that her mother could talk about was:"Poor Josie! But did you see Birdaline? My, how poorly she looks! And so kind of scared. And she used to be such a nice-looking girl! My, how she has aged! Poor Josie! But Birdaline! What was she so scared about?"It was the very old triumphing over the old for meeting the same fate. In her own summer Mrs. Larrabee had been a rose and had shriveled on the stem.That night Deborah thanked God that He had not lent her beauty. Its repayment was such ruin.CHAPTER VIIThe next morning the Bazar was open at the regular hour. Shoppers open at the regular hour. Shoppers came as numerously as before. People were as eager as ever to enhance their charms or disguise their flaws. In a few days Asaph Shillaber was again in his office. He wore black always, and a black tie, and he moved about with mourning in his manner.A month later his cravat was brown, not black, and the next week it was red. He was taking more care of his costume. He talked more with the women customers, especially the young women, and he did not keep his eye anxiously on the front door. He rubbed his hands once more, recommending his goods.In a few months younger girls were behind many of the counters. Deborah felt that youth was invading and replacing. She wondered how soon her turn would come. It would be a sad day, for she loved the work.But she took some reassurance from the praises of Asaph. He paused now and then to compliment her on a sale or her progress. He led up to her some of his most particular customers and introduced her with a flourish. Sometimes he paused as he went down the aisle, and turned back to stare at her. She knew that she had blushed, because her face was hot, and once Mrs. Crankshaw, who was trying to match a sample, whispered to her:"Say, Deborah, what kind of rouge do you use? It gives you the nicest color, and it looks like real."When Deborah denied that she painted, the undertaker's wife was angry. She thought Deborah was trying to copyright her complexion. Deborah's cheeks tactfully turned pale again, now that Asaph had taken his strange eyes from her, and now the woman said:"You're right; it's your own. It comes and goes! Look, now it's coming back again."And so was Asaph. When Mrs. Crankshaw had moved off Asaph hung about awkwardly. Finally he put the backs of his knuckles on the counter and leaned across to murmur:"Say, Debby, I was telling Jim Crawford yesterday that you made more sales than any other clerk in the shop this last month.""Oh, really, did I?" Deborah gasped, her eyes snapping like electric sparks. They seemed to jolt Asaph; he fell back a little. Then he leaned closer."Crawford said he'd like to have you in his store. I told him you were a fixture here. Don't you leave me, Debby. You won't, will you?""Why, Asaph!" she cried."Leastways, you'll let me know any offer you get before you take it. You can promise me that, can't you?""Of course I will, but– Well, I never!"This last was true. She never had known till now that superlative rapture of a woman, to have one man trying to take her away from another. Debby had not known it even as a little girl, for if two boys claimed the same dance–which had happened rarely enough–they did not wrangle and fight, but each yielded to the other with a courtesy that was odious.On her way home Deborah began to doubt the possibility of it all. Asaph had been talking about somebody else, or he had been joking–he was such a terrible fellow to cook up things and fool people! Or else Jim Crawford was just making fun of Asaph. She would not tell her mother this news.That night, as she was washing the dishes after her late supper, the door-bell burred."You go, mother, will you? My hands are all suds."Mrs. Larrabee hobbled slowly to the hall door, but came back with a burst of unsuspected speed. She was pale with fright."It's a man!" she whispered."A man! Who could it be?" Debby gasped."One of those daylight burglars, prob'ly. What 'll we do?""We could run out the back door while he's at the front.""He might have a confederut waiting to grab us there.""That's so!"What possible motive a burglar could have for grabbing these two women, what possible value they would have for him, they did not inquire. But Debby, in the new executive habit of her mind, grew bold enough to take at least a peek at the stranger.The bell continued to ring while she tiptoed into the parlor and lifted the shade slightly aside. She speedily recognized a familiar suit."It's old Jim Crawford," she said.There was a panic of another sort now, getting Debby's hands dry, her sleeves down, her apron off, her hair puffed, the lamp in the parlor lighted. Old Jim Crawford was some minutes older before he was admitted.It was the first male caller Deborah had had since her mother could remember. The old lady received him with a flourish that would have befitted a king. That he was a widower and, for Carthage, wealthy may have had something to do with it. A fantastic hope that at last somebody had come to propose to Deborah excited her mother so that she took herself out of the way as soon as the weather had been decently discussed.Mr. Crawford made a long and ponderous effort at small talk and came round to his errand with the subtlety of an ocean liner warping into its slip. At length he mumbled that if Miss Debby ever got tired of Shillaber's there was a chance he might make a place for her in his own store. O' course, times was dull, and he had more help 'n he'd any call for, but he was a man who believed in bein' neighborly to old friends, and, knowin' her father and all–It was such a luxury to Deborah to be sought after, even with this hippopotamine stealth, that she rather prolonged the suspense and teased Crawford to an offer, and to an increase in that before she told him that she would have to "think it over."He lingered on the porch steps to offer Deborah "anything within reason," but she still told him she would think it over. When she thought it over she felt that it would be base ingratitude to desert Asaph Shillaber, who had saved her from starvation by taking her into his beautiful shop. No bribe should decoy her thence so long as he wanted her.She did not even tell Asaph about it the next day. A week later he asked her if Crawford had spoken to her. She said that he had mentioned the subject, but that, of course, she had refused to consider leaving the man who had done everything in the world for her.This shy announcement seemed to exert an immense effect on Asaph. He thanked her as if she had saved his life. And he stared at her more than ever.A few evenings later there was another ring at the Larrabee bell. This time Mrs. Larrabee showed no alarm except that she might be late to the door. It was Asaph! He was as sheepish as a boy. He said that it was kind of lonesome over to his house and, seeing their light, he kind of thought he'd drop round and be a little neighborly. Everybody was growing more neighborly nowadays.Once more Mrs. Larrabee vanished. As she sat in the dining-room, pretending to knit, she thought how good it was to have a man in the house. The rumble of a deep voice was so comfortable that she fell asleep long before Asaph could bring himself to going home.He had previously sought diversion in the society of some of the very young and very pretty salesgirls in his store, but he found that, for all their graces, their prattle bored him. They talked all about themselves or their friends. Debby talked to Asaph about Asaph. He and she had been children together–they were of the same generation; she was a sensible woman, and she had learned much at the counter-school. He got to dropping round right often.That long-silent door bell became a thing to listen for of evenings. Jim Crawford dropped round now and then; the elderly floor-walker at Shillaber's dropped round one night and talked styles and fabrics and gossip in a cackling voice. When he had left, the matchmaker's instinct led Mrs. Larrabee to warn Debby not to waste her time on him. "Two old maids talkin' at once is more'n I can stand."Three times that year Newt Meldrum was in town and called on Deborah. She asked him to supper once, and he simply raved over the salt-rising biscuits and the peach-pusserves. After supper he asked if he might smoke. That was the last word in masculine possession. If frankincense and myrrh had been shaken about the room Debby and Mrs. Larrabee could not have cherished them as they did the odor of tobacco in the curtains next day. Mrs. Larrabee cried a little. Her husband had smoked.Deborah was only now passing through the stages the average woman travels in her teens and early twenties, Deborah was having callers. Sometimes two men came at once and tried to freeze each other out. And finally she had a proposal!–from Asaph!–from Josie's and Birdaline's Asaph! They had left him alone with Debby once too often.CHAPTER VIIIIt was not a romantic wooing, and Asaph was not offering the first love Asaph was not offering the first love of a bachelor heart. He was a trade-broken widower with a series of assorted orphans on his hands. And his declaration was dragged out of him by jealousy and fear.Jim Crawford, after numerous failures to decoy Deborah, had at last offered her the position of head saleswoman; this included not only authority and increase of pay, but two trips a year to New York as buyer!Deborah's soul hungered to make that journey before she died, but she put even this temptation from her as an ingratitude to Asaph. Still, when Asaph called the next evening it amused her to tell him that she was going to transfer herself to Crawford's–just to see what he would say and to amuse him. Her trifling joke brought a drama down on her head.Asaph turned pale, gulped: "You're going to leave me, Deborah! Why, I–I couldn't get along without you. I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't talk to you all the time. Jim Crawford's in love with you, the old scoundrel! But I won't let you marry him. I got a nicer house than what he has for you to live in, too. There's the childern, of course, but you like childern. They'd love you. They need mothering something awful. I been meaning to ask you to marry me, but I was afraid to. But I couldn't let you go. You won't, will you? I want you should marry me–right off. You will, won't you?"Deborah stared at him agape. Then she cried: "Asaph Shillaber, are you proposing to me or quarreling with me–which?""I'm proposin' to you, darn it, and I won't take 'No' for an answer."Deborah had often wondered what she would say if the impossible should happen and a man should ask for her hand. And now it had come in the unlikeliest way, and what she said was:"Sakes alive! Ase, one of us must be crazy!"Asaph was in a panic; and he besieged and besought till she told him she would think it over. The sensation was too delicious to be finished with an immediate monosyllable. He went away blustering. Her mother had slept through the cataclysm. Deborah postponed telling her, and went to her room in a state of ecstatic distress.Her room was prettier than it had been, and the bureau was more bravely equipped. It was a place of interesting mystery; there were curling-irons and skin-foods and nail-powders, and what not?Now she was asked to give up this loneliness, this lifelong privacy, with its blessing and its bane, to move over into a man's house and share his room and her life with him.Only, now she was asked this at the period when many women were returning to a second spinstership and one of her friends, who had married young and whose daughter had married young, was a grandmother. Deborah was experiencing the terror that assails young brides, the dread of the profoundest revolution in woman's life. Only in her case the terror was the greater from the double duration of her maidenhood. She was still a girl, and yet gray was in her hair.The thought of marriage was almost intolerably fearful, and yet it was almost intolerably beautiful.How wonderful that she should be asked to marry the ideal of her youth–she, the laughing-stock of the other girls; and now she could have a husband, a home, and children of various ages, from the little tot to the grown-ups. She would never have babies of her own, she supposed, but she could acquire them ready-made. All her stifled domestic instincts flamed at the new empire offered her.And then she remembered Josie and Josie's sneer: "Poor old Debby. She never was a rose."And now Josie was dead a year and more, and Josie's children and Josie's lover were submitted to her to take or leave. What a revenge it would be! What a squaring of old accounts! How she would turn the laugh back on them! How well she could laugh who waited to the last!Then she shook her head. What had she to do with revenge? What meaner advantage could anybody take than to flaunt a dead enemy's colors? We can all deal sharply with our friends, but we must be magnanimous with our foes.No, it was impossible. Josie had suffered enough in the ebb of her beauty. Debby could not strike at her in her grave.CHAPTER IXShe waited to announce her decision till Asaph should call again. Then till Asaph should call again. Then she told him what she had decided, but not why. He suspected every other reason except the truth. He was always a quick, hard fighter, and now Deborah had to endure what Josie had endured all her life. He denounced her, threatened her, cajoled her, pleaded with her, but Josie's ghost chaperoned the two, forbade the banns, seemed to whisper, "His bad temper was what ruined my beauty."The next day in the store Asaph looked wretched. Deborah grew the more desirable for her denial. He had thought that he had but to ask her; and now she refused his beseeching. He paused before her counter and begged her to reconsider.He called at her home every evening. He went to her mother and implored her aid. The poor old soul could hardly believe her ears when she heard that Deborah was not only desired, but difficult. She promised Asaph that Deborah would yield, and he went away happy.There was a weird conflict in the forsaken house that night. The old pictures nearly fell off the walls at the sight of the stupefied mother trying to compel that lifelong virgin to the altar. Mrs. Larrabee pointed out that there would never be another chance. The A.G.&St.P.Ry. was in the receiver's hands. They would starve if Deborah lost her job.Deborah's only answer was that she would go to Crawford's. Her mother could not shake her decision, and hobbled off to bed in senile dismay. She had always been asking what the world was coming to, and now it was there. Deborah's heart was a whirlpool of indecision. Asaph's gloom appalled her, his evident need of her was his one unanswerable argument. He had given her her start in life. How could she desert his store, how could she refuse him his prayer? But how could she take Josie's place, kidnap Josie's children? Why was such a puzzle forced upon her, where every decision was cruel to some one, treacherous to something?The turmoil made such a din in her soul that she could hardly transact the business at her counter. As she stood one morning asking a startled shopper if a bolt of maroon taffeta matched a clipping of magenta satin, she saw Newton Meldrum enter the store. As he went by to the office he saw her, lifted his hat, held it in air while he gazed, then went on.It occurred to Deborah that he could help her. She could lay the case before him, and he would give her an impartial decision. She waited for him, and when he left the office she beckoned to him and asked him shyly if he would take supper with her and her mother."You bet I will!" he said, and stared at her so curiously that she flashed red.Through the supper, too, he stared at her so hard that she buttered her thumb instead of her salt-rising biscuit. Afterward she led him to the parlor and closed the door on her mother. This was in itself an epoch-making deed. Then she said to Newt: "Better light the longest cigar you have, for I have a long story to tell you. Got a match?"He had, but he said he hadn't. She fetched one, and was so confused that she lighted it for him. Her hand trembled till he had to steady it with his own big fingers, and he stared at her instead of at the match, whose flickering rays lighted her face eerily.When she had him settled in a chair–the best patent rocker it was–she told him her story. There is no surer test of character than the problem a mind extracts from a difficulty. As Meldrum watched this simple, starved soul stating its bewilderment he saw that her one concern was what she should do to be truest to other souls. There was no question of her own advantage.He studied her earnestly, and his eyes were veiled with a kind of smoke of their own behind the scarf of tobacco-fumes. When she had finished she raised her eyes to his in meek appeal and murmured, "And now what ought I to do?"He gazed at her a long while before he answered, "Do you want to go to Crawford's?""Well, I'd get more money and I'd get to see New York, but I don't like to leave Asaph. He says he needs me.""Do you–do you want to marry Asaph?""Oh no! I–I like him awfully much, but I–I'm kind of afraid of him, too. But he says he needs me; and Josie's children need me, he says.""But do you–l-love Asaph?""Oh no! not the kind of love, that is, that you read about. No, I'm kind of afraid of him. But I'm not expecting the kind of love you read about. I'm wondering what I ought to do?""And you want me to decide?""If you only would.""Why do you leave it to me, of all people?""Because you're such a fine man; you know so much. I have more–more respect for you than for anybody else I know.""You have!""Oh yes! Oh yes, indeed!""And you'll do what I tell you to?""Ye-yes, I will.""Promise?""I promise.""Give me your hand on it."He rose and stood before her and put forth that great palm of his, and she set her slim white fingers in it. And then there must have been an earthquake or something, for suddenly she was swept to her feet and she was enveloped in his big arms and crushed against him, and his big mouth was pressed so fiercely to hers that she could not breathe.She was so frightened that her heart seemed to break. And then she knew nothing till she found herself in the patent rocker, with him kneeling at her side, pleading with her to forgive him for the brute he was.She was very weak and very much afraid of him and entirely bewildered. She wanted to run away, but he would not let her rise. The only thing that eased her was his saying over and over again, "You are the most beautiful thing in this world."She had to laugh at that, and she heard herself saying, "Why, Newt Meldrum, one of us must be crazy!""I am–crazy with love of you.""But to call me beautiful–poor old Debby!""You are beautiful; you're the handsomest woman I know.""Me–with my white hair!""White roses. I don't know what's happened to you. You're not the woman I talked to at Asaph's, at all. You're like a girl–with silver hair–only you've got a woman's big heart, and you haven't the selfishness of the young, but that kind of wonderful sadness that sweetens a soul more than anything else."Meldrum was as much amazed as Deborah was at hearing such rhapsodies from his matter-of-fact soul.Her comment was prosaic enough. She fell back and sighed. "Well, I guess both of us must be crazy.""I guess we are." He laughed boyishly. "We'd better get married and keep the insanity in one family.""Get married!" she echoed, still befuddled. "And after you telling me what you did!""Yes, but I didn't know the Lord was at work on a masterpiece like you–girl, woman, grandmother, child, beauty, brains–all in one."Deborah was as exhausted by the shock as if she had been stunned by lightning. She was tired out with the first kiss an impassioned man had ever pressed upon her lips, the first bone-threatening hug an ursine lover had ever inflicted upon her wicker ribs.She was more afraid of Newt Meldrum than she had been of Asaph. But when she told him she would think it over he declined to wait. He laughed at her pleas. She had promised to abide by his decision, and he had decided that she should go neither to Asaph's nor to Crawford's, but to New York–not as any old buyer, either, except of things for her own beautiful body and some hats for that fleecy white hair of hers. And she should live in New York, take her mother there if she wanted, and close up this house after they had been married in it.She had been shaking her head to all these things and dismissing them gently as the ravings of a delirious boy. But now she said: "Oh, I could never be married in this town.""And why not?""Oh, I don't know. I just couldn't."She was still afraid that people would laugh at her, but more afraid that they would think she was trying to flaunt her triumph over them–the triumph of marrying the great Newton Meldrum. She could bear the laughter; she was used to the town's ridicule. But she could not endure to be triumphing over anybody.Meldrum did not fret over her motives; he simply nodded."All right; then we'll be married in New York. How soon can you start?"She stared at him, this amazing man. "How soon? Why, I haven't said I'd marry you yet! I'll have to think it over."He laughed and crushed her in his arms and would not let her breathe till she breathed "Yes." He was the most amazing man. But, then, men were all so amazing when you got to know them. They must have all gone crazy at once, though.THE END*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOKTHE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER***
CHAPTER VI
One morning, as she was making ready to go to the store, and taking ready to go to the store, and taking much time at the process, she observed at her forehead a white hair. It startled her, frightened her for a moment; then she laughed.
"Why, I'm growing old!"
What use had she for youth? It had never been kind to her. All the loss of it meant was that it might harm her a little at the store. She plucked out the white thread and forgot it–nearly.
Another day there was another white hair. She removed that, too. Then came another, and others, swiftly, till she was afraid to take any more away.
At last there was a whole gray lock. She tucked it in and pinned it beneath the nondescript mass of her coiffure. It would have terrified her more if she had not been so busy. She chattered and proffered her wares all day long. Hunger became one of her most sincere emotions. Fatigue wore her out but strengthened her, sweetened her sleep, kept dreams away. When she woke she must hurry, hurry to the store. The old stupidity of her life had given way to an eternal hurry.
And now the white hairs were hurrying, too, like the snowflakes that suddenly fill the air. But with this snow came the quickening of pulse and glistening of eyes, the reddening of cheeks that the snow brings.
The white fell about her hair as if she stood bareheaded in a snow-storm. There was a kind of benediction in it. She felt that it softened something about her face, as the snow softens old rubbish-heaps and dreary yards and bleak patches.
People began to say, "How well you look, Debby!" They began to dignify her as "Deborah" or "Miss Larrabee." Her old contemners came to her counter with a new meekness. Age was making it harder and harder for them to keep the pace. Bright colors did not become them any longer. Their petals were falling from them, the velvet was turning to plush, and the plush losing its nap, rusting, sagging, wearing through. The years, like moths, were gnawing, gnawing.
Debby felt so sorry for the women who had been beautiful. She could imagine how the decay of rosehood must hurt. It is not necessary to have been Napoleon to understand Elba.
One day a sad, heavy figure dragged along Deborah's aisle and sank upon the mushroom stool in front of her. Deborah could hardly believe that it was Josie Shillaber. She could hardly force back the shock that leaped to her expression. From thin, white lips crumpled with pain came a voice like a rustling of dead leaves in a November gust. And the voice said, with a kind of envy in it:
"Why, Deborah, how well you look!"
"Oh, I am well!" Deborah chanted, then repressed her cheer unconsciously. It was not tactful to be too well. "That is, I'm tol'able. And how are you this awful weather?"
"Not well, Debby. I'm not a bit well; no, I'm never well any more. Why, your hair is getting right white, isn't it, dear? But it's real becoming to you. Mine is all gray, too, you see, but it's awful!"
"Indeed it's not! It's fine! Your children must love it. Don't they?"
"Oh, the children!" Josie wailed. "What do they think of me? The grown ones are away, all flirting and getting married. They say they'll come back, but they never do. But I don't care. I don't want them to see me like this. And the young ones are so selfish and inconsiderate. It's awful, getting old, isn't it, Debby? It don't seem to worry you, though. I suppose it's because you haven't had sorrow in your life as I have. I'm looking for something to wear, Debby. The styles aren't what they used to be. There's not a thing fit to wear to a dog-fight in these new colors. What are people coming to? I can't find a thing to wear. What would you suggest? Do help me!"
Deborah emptied the shelves upon the counter, sent to the stock-room for new shipments that had not been listed yet, ransacked the place; but there was nothing there for the woman whose husband owned it all. The physician's wife was sick with time, and even he could not cure her of that. The draper's wife was turning old; he could not swaddle her from the chill of that winter. Josie was trying to dress up a rose whose petals had fallen, whose sepals were curled back; the husk could not endure colors that the blossom had honored.
Josie, however, would not acknowledge the inevitable autumn; she would not grow old with the grace of resignation. She limped from the store, shaking her unlovely head. Could this be Josie Shillaber, who had romped through life with beauty in and about everything she was and wore and did?
Deborah could have moralized over her as Hamlet over Yorick's skull: Where be your petal cheeks, your full, red lips, your concise chin, and that long, lithe throat, and those pearly shoulders, and all that high-breasted, spindle-hipped, lean-limbed girlishness of yours? And where your velocity, your tireless laughter, your amorous enterprise?
Could they have ever been a part of this cumberer of the ground, creeping almost as slowly and heavily as a vine along a cold, gray wall.
Deborah's hand went to her heart, where there was an ache of pity for one who had never pitied her. It was Deborah now that was almost girlish of form; she was only now filling out, taking flesh upon her bones and rhythm into her members. And that scrawny chicken-chest of hers was becoming worthy of that so beautiful name for so dear a place; she was gaining a bosom. She did not know how the whimsical sultan Time had shifted his favor to her from his other slaves.
She knew only that Josie was in disgrace with beauty and stared after her in wet-eyed pity. Who can feel so sorry for a fallen tyrant as the risen victim of tyranny?
A few weeks later Deborah went again to the Shillaber house, sat again on the sofa in the dining-room. The children had all come home. Josie was in the parlor, almost hidden in flowers. She did not rise to receive her guests. They all filed by and looked at her and shook their heads. She did not answer with a nod. Birdaline wept over her, looking older and terrified. But Pamela was wonderfully pretty in black. She sang Josie's favorite hymn, "Jesus, lover of my soul," with a quartet accompanying her. Then the preacher said a few words and prayed.
Mr. Crankshaw was there, and so were his camp-stools. One of them had collapsed, and the bass of the choir had been unable to open his. Some of the young people giggled, as always. But even for them the laughter was but the automatic whir of a released spring, and there was no mirth in the air.
Deborah was filled with a cowering awe, as one who sees a storm rush past and is unhurt save by the vision of its wreckage. The girl Pamela had sung here a year or so ago that song to the rose, and had shredded the flower and ruined it and tossed it aside. So time had sung away the rose that had been Josie. Deborah had heard the rose cry out in its agony of dissolution, and now it was fallen from the bush, scentless and dead. But it had left at least other buds to replace it. That was more than Deborah had ever done.
The store was closed the day of the funeral, and Deborah went home with her mother. All that her mother could talk about was:
"Poor Josie! But did you see Birdaline? My, how poorly she looks! And so kind of scared. And she used to be such a nice-looking girl! My, how she has aged! Poor Josie! But Birdaline! What was she so scared about?"
It was the very old triumphing over the old for meeting the same fate. In her own summer Mrs. Larrabee had been a rose and had shriveled on the stem.
That night Deborah thanked God that He had not lent her beauty. Its repayment was such ruin.
CHAPTER VII
The next morning the Bazar was open at the regular hour. Shoppers open at the regular hour. Shoppers came as numerously as before. People were as eager as ever to enhance their charms or disguise their flaws. In a few days Asaph Shillaber was again in his office. He wore black always, and a black tie, and he moved about with mourning in his manner.
A month later his cravat was brown, not black, and the next week it was red. He was taking more care of his costume. He talked more with the women customers, especially the young women, and he did not keep his eye anxiously on the front door. He rubbed his hands once more, recommending his goods.
In a few months younger girls were behind many of the counters. Deborah felt that youth was invading and replacing. She wondered how soon her turn would come. It would be a sad day, for she loved the work.
But she took some reassurance from the praises of Asaph. He paused now and then to compliment her on a sale or her progress. He led up to her some of his most particular customers and introduced her with a flourish. Sometimes he paused as he went down the aisle, and turned back to stare at her. She knew that she had blushed, because her face was hot, and once Mrs. Crankshaw, who was trying to match a sample, whispered to her:
"Say, Deborah, what kind of rouge do you use? It gives you the nicest color, and it looks like real."
When Deborah denied that she painted, the undertaker's wife was angry. She thought Deborah was trying to copyright her complexion. Deborah's cheeks tactfully turned pale again, now that Asaph had taken his strange eyes from her, and now the woman said:
"You're right; it's your own. It comes and goes! Look, now it's coming back again."
And so was Asaph. When Mrs. Crankshaw had moved off Asaph hung about awkwardly. Finally he put the backs of his knuckles on the counter and leaned across to murmur:
"Say, Debby, I was telling Jim Crawford yesterday that you made more sales than any other clerk in the shop this last month."
"Oh, really, did I?" Deborah gasped, her eyes snapping like electric sparks. They seemed to jolt Asaph; he fell back a little. Then he leaned closer.
"Crawford said he'd like to have you in his store. I told him you were a fixture here. Don't you leave me, Debby. You won't, will you?"
"Why, Asaph!" she cried.
"Leastways, you'll let me know any offer you get before you take it. You can promise me that, can't you?"
"Of course I will, but– Well, I never!"
This last was true. She never had known till now that superlative rapture of a woman, to have one man trying to take her away from another. Debby had not known it even as a little girl, for if two boys claimed the same dance–which had happened rarely enough–they did not wrangle and fight, but each yielded to the other with a courtesy that was odious.
On her way home Deborah began to doubt the possibility of it all. Asaph had been talking about somebody else, or he had been joking–he was such a terrible fellow to cook up things and fool people! Or else Jim Crawford was just making fun of Asaph. She would not tell her mother this news.
That night, as she was washing the dishes after her late supper, the door-bell burred.
"You go, mother, will you? My hands are all suds."
Mrs. Larrabee hobbled slowly to the hall door, but came back with a burst of unsuspected speed. She was pale with fright.
"It's a man!" she whispered.
"A man! Who could it be?" Debby gasped.
"One of those daylight burglars, prob'ly. What 'll we do?"
"We could run out the back door while he's at the front."
"He might have a confederut waiting to grab us there."
"That's so!"
What possible motive a burglar could have for grabbing these two women, what possible value they would have for him, they did not inquire. But Debby, in the new executive habit of her mind, grew bold enough to take at least a peek at the stranger.
The bell continued to ring while she tiptoed into the parlor and lifted the shade slightly aside. She speedily recognized a familiar suit.
"It's old Jim Crawford," she said.
There was a panic of another sort now, getting Debby's hands dry, her sleeves down, her apron off, her hair puffed, the lamp in the parlor lighted. Old Jim Crawford was some minutes older before he was admitted.
It was the first male caller Deborah had had since her mother could remember. The old lady received him with a flourish that would have befitted a king. That he was a widower and, for Carthage, wealthy may have had something to do with it. A fantastic hope that at last somebody had come to propose to Deborah excited her mother so that she took herself out of the way as soon as the weather had been decently discussed.
Mr. Crawford made a long and ponderous effort at small talk and came round to his errand with the subtlety of an ocean liner warping into its slip. At length he mumbled that if Miss Debby ever got tired of Shillaber's there was a chance he might make a place for her in his own store. O' course, times was dull, and he had more help 'n he'd any call for, but he was a man who believed in bein' neighborly to old friends, and, knowin' her father and all–
It was such a luxury to Deborah to be sought after, even with this hippopotamine stealth, that she rather prolonged the suspense and teased Crawford to an offer, and to an increase in that before she told him that she would have to "think it over."
He lingered on the porch steps to offer Deborah "anything within reason," but she still told him she would think it over. When she thought it over she felt that it would be base ingratitude to desert Asaph Shillaber, who had saved her from starvation by taking her into his beautiful shop. No bribe should decoy her thence so long as he wanted her.
She did not even tell Asaph about it the next day. A week later he asked her if Crawford had spoken to her. She said that he had mentioned the subject, but that, of course, she had refused to consider leaving the man who had done everything in the world for her.
This shy announcement seemed to exert an immense effect on Asaph. He thanked her as if she had saved his life. And he stared at her more than ever.
A few evenings later there was another ring at the Larrabee bell. This time Mrs. Larrabee showed no alarm except that she might be late to the door. It was Asaph! He was as sheepish as a boy. He said that it was kind of lonesome over to his house and, seeing their light, he kind of thought he'd drop round and be a little neighborly. Everybody was growing more neighborly nowadays.
Once more Mrs. Larrabee vanished. As she sat in the dining-room, pretending to knit, she thought how good it was to have a man in the house. The rumble of a deep voice was so comfortable that she fell asleep long before Asaph could bring himself to going home.
He had previously sought diversion in the society of some of the very young and very pretty salesgirls in his store, but he found that, for all their graces, their prattle bored him. They talked all about themselves or their friends. Debby talked to Asaph about Asaph. He and she had been children together–they were of the same generation; she was a sensible woman, and she had learned much at the counter-school. He got to dropping round right often.
That long-silent door bell became a thing to listen for of evenings. Jim Crawford dropped round now and then; the elderly floor-walker at Shillaber's dropped round one night and talked styles and fabrics and gossip in a cackling voice. When he had left, the matchmaker's instinct led Mrs. Larrabee to warn Debby not to waste her time on him. "Two old maids talkin' at once is more'n I can stand."
Three times that year Newt Meldrum was in town and called on Deborah. She asked him to supper once, and he simply raved over the salt-rising biscuits and the peach-pusserves. After supper he asked if he might smoke. That was the last word in masculine possession. If frankincense and myrrh had been shaken about the room Debby and Mrs. Larrabee could not have cherished them as they did the odor of tobacco in the curtains next day. Mrs. Larrabee cried a little. Her husband had smoked.
Deborah was only now passing through the stages the average woman travels in her teens and early twenties, Deborah was having callers. Sometimes two men came at once and tried to freeze each other out. And finally she had a proposal!–from Asaph!–from Josie's and Birdaline's Asaph! They had left him alone with Debby once too often.
CHAPTER VIII
It was not a romantic wooing, and Asaph was not offering the first love Asaph was not offering the first love of a bachelor heart. He was a trade-broken widower with a series of assorted orphans on his hands. And his declaration was dragged out of him by jealousy and fear.
Jim Crawford, after numerous failures to decoy Deborah, had at last offered her the position of head saleswoman; this included not only authority and increase of pay, but two trips a year to New York as buyer!
Deborah's soul hungered to make that journey before she died, but she put even this temptation from her as an ingratitude to Asaph. Still, when Asaph called the next evening it amused her to tell him that she was going to transfer herself to Crawford's–just to see what he would say and to amuse him. Her trifling joke brought a drama down on her head.
Asaph turned pale, gulped: "You're going to leave me, Deborah! Why, I–I couldn't get along without you. I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't talk to you all the time. Jim Crawford's in love with you, the old scoundrel! But I won't let you marry him. I got a nicer house than what he has for you to live in, too. There's the childern, of course, but you like childern. They'd love you. They need mothering something awful. I been meaning to ask you to marry me, but I was afraid to. But I couldn't let you go. You won't, will you? I want you should marry me–right off. You will, won't you?"
Deborah stared at him agape. Then she cried: "Asaph Shillaber, are you proposing to me or quarreling with me–which?"
"I'm proposin' to you, darn it, and I won't take 'No' for an answer."
Deborah had often wondered what she would say if the impossible should happen and a man should ask for her hand. And now it had come in the unlikeliest way, and what she said was:
"Sakes alive! Ase, one of us must be crazy!"
Asaph was in a panic; and he besieged and besought till she told him she would think it over. The sensation was too delicious to be finished with an immediate monosyllable. He went away blustering. Her mother had slept through the cataclysm. Deborah postponed telling her, and went to her room in a state of ecstatic distress.
Her room was prettier than it had been, and the bureau was more bravely equipped. It was a place of interesting mystery; there were curling-irons and skin-foods and nail-powders, and what not?
Now she was asked to give up this loneliness, this lifelong privacy, with its blessing and its bane, to move over into a man's house and share his room and her life with him.
Only, now she was asked this at the period when many women were returning to a second spinstership and one of her friends, who had married young and whose daughter had married young, was a grandmother. Deborah was experiencing the terror that assails young brides, the dread of the profoundest revolution in woman's life. Only in her case the terror was the greater from the double duration of her maidenhood. She was still a girl, and yet gray was in her hair.
The thought of marriage was almost intolerably fearful, and yet it was almost intolerably beautiful.
How wonderful that she should be asked to marry the ideal of her youth–she, the laughing-stock of the other girls; and now she could have a husband, a home, and children of various ages, from the little tot to the grown-ups. She would never have babies of her own, she supposed, but she could acquire them ready-made. All her stifled domestic instincts flamed at the new empire offered her.
And then she remembered Josie and Josie's sneer: "Poor old Debby. She never was a rose."
And now Josie was dead a year and more, and Josie's children and Josie's lover were submitted to her to take or leave. What a revenge it would be! What a squaring of old accounts! How she would turn the laugh back on them! How well she could laugh who waited to the last!
Then she shook her head. What had she to do with revenge? What meaner advantage could anybody take than to flaunt a dead enemy's colors? We can all deal sharply with our friends, but we must be magnanimous with our foes.
No, it was impossible. Josie had suffered enough in the ebb of her beauty. Debby could not strike at her in her grave.
CHAPTER IX
She waited to announce her decision till Asaph should call again. Then till Asaph should call again. Then she told him what she had decided, but not why. He suspected every other reason except the truth. He was always a quick, hard fighter, and now Deborah had to endure what Josie had endured all her life. He denounced her, threatened her, cajoled her, pleaded with her, but Josie's ghost chaperoned the two, forbade the banns, seemed to whisper, "His bad temper was what ruined my beauty."
The next day in the store Asaph looked wretched. Deborah grew the more desirable for her denial. He had thought that he had but to ask her; and now she refused his beseeching. He paused before her counter and begged her to reconsider.
He called at her home every evening. He went to her mother and implored her aid. The poor old soul could hardly believe her ears when she heard that Deborah was not only desired, but difficult. She promised Asaph that Deborah would yield, and he went away happy.
There was a weird conflict in the forsaken house that night. The old pictures nearly fell off the walls at the sight of the stupefied mother trying to compel that lifelong virgin to the altar. Mrs. Larrabee pointed out that there would never be another chance. The A.G.&St.P.Ry. was in the receiver's hands. They would starve if Deborah lost her job.
Deborah's only answer was that she would go to Crawford's. Her mother could not shake her decision, and hobbled off to bed in senile dismay. She had always been asking what the world was coming to, and now it was there. Deborah's heart was a whirlpool of indecision. Asaph's gloom appalled her, his evident need of her was his one unanswerable argument. He had given her her start in life. How could she desert his store, how could she refuse him his prayer? But how could she take Josie's place, kidnap Josie's children? Why was such a puzzle forced upon her, where every decision was cruel to some one, treacherous to something?
The turmoil made such a din in her soul that she could hardly transact the business at her counter. As she stood one morning asking a startled shopper if a bolt of maroon taffeta matched a clipping of magenta satin, she saw Newton Meldrum enter the store. As he went by to the office he saw her, lifted his hat, held it in air while he gazed, then went on.
It occurred to Deborah that he could help her. She could lay the case before him, and he would give her an impartial decision. She waited for him, and when he left the office she beckoned to him and asked him shyly if he would take supper with her and her mother.
"You bet I will!" he said, and stared at her so curiously that she flashed red.
Through the supper, too, he stared at her so hard that she buttered her thumb instead of her salt-rising biscuit. Afterward she led him to the parlor and closed the door on her mother. This was in itself an epoch-making deed. Then she said to Newt: "Better light the longest cigar you have, for I have a long story to tell you. Got a match?"
He had, but he said he hadn't. She fetched one, and was so confused that she lighted it for him. Her hand trembled till he had to steady it with his own big fingers, and he stared at her instead of at the match, whose flickering rays lighted her face eerily.
When she had him settled in a chair–the best patent rocker it was–she told him her story. There is no surer test of character than the problem a mind extracts from a difficulty. As Meldrum watched this simple, starved soul stating its bewilderment he saw that her one concern was what she should do to be truest to other souls. There was no question of her own advantage.
He studied her earnestly, and his eyes were veiled with a kind of smoke of their own behind the scarf of tobacco-fumes. When she had finished she raised her eyes to his in meek appeal and murmured, "And now what ought I to do?"
He gazed at her a long while before he answered, "Do you want to go to Crawford's?"
"Well, I'd get more money and I'd get to see New York, but I don't like to leave Asaph. He says he needs me."
"Do you–do you want to marry Asaph?"
"Oh no! I–I like him awfully much, but I–I'm kind of afraid of him, too. But he says he needs me; and Josie's children need me, he says."
"But do you–l-love Asaph?"
"Oh no! not the kind of love, that is, that you read about. No, I'm kind of afraid of him. But I'm not expecting the kind of love you read about. I'm wondering what I ought to do?"
"And you want me to decide?"
"If you only would."
"Why do you leave it to me, of all people?"
"Because you're such a fine man; you know so much. I have more–more respect for you than for anybody else I know."
"You have!"
"Oh yes! Oh yes, indeed!"
"And you'll do what I tell you to?"
"Ye-yes, I will."
"Promise?"
"I promise."
"Give me your hand on it."
He rose and stood before her and put forth that great palm of his, and she set her slim white fingers in it. And then there must have been an earthquake or something, for suddenly she was swept to her feet and she was enveloped in his big arms and crushed against him, and his big mouth was pressed so fiercely to hers that she could not breathe.
She was so frightened that her heart seemed to break. And then she knew nothing till she found herself in the patent rocker, with him kneeling at her side, pleading with her to forgive him for the brute he was.
She was very weak and very much afraid of him and entirely bewildered. She wanted to run away, but he would not let her rise. The only thing that eased her was his saying over and over again, "You are the most beautiful thing in this world."
She had to laugh at that, and she heard herself saying, "Why, Newt Meldrum, one of us must be crazy!"
"I am–crazy with love of you."
"But to call me beautiful–poor old Debby!"
"You are beautiful; you're the handsomest woman I know."
"Me–with my white hair!"
"White roses. I don't know what's happened to you. You're not the woman I talked to at Asaph's, at all. You're like a girl–with silver hair–only you've got a woman's big heart, and you haven't the selfishness of the young, but that kind of wonderful sadness that sweetens a soul more than anything else."
Meldrum was as much amazed as Deborah was at hearing such rhapsodies from his matter-of-fact soul.
Her comment was prosaic enough. She fell back and sighed. "Well, I guess both of us must be crazy."
"I guess we are." He laughed boyishly. "We'd better get married and keep the insanity in one family."
"Get married!" she echoed, still befuddled. "And after you telling me what you did!"
"Yes, but I didn't know the Lord was at work on a masterpiece like you–girl, woman, grandmother, child, beauty, brains–all in one."
Deborah was as exhausted by the shock as if she had been stunned by lightning. She was tired out with the first kiss an impassioned man had ever pressed upon her lips, the first bone-threatening hug an ursine lover had ever inflicted upon her wicker ribs.
She was more afraid of Newt Meldrum than she had been of Asaph. But when she told him she would think it over he declined to wait. He laughed at her pleas. She had promised to abide by his decision, and he had decided that she should go neither to Asaph's nor to Crawford's, but to New York–not as any old buyer, either, except of things for her own beautiful body and some hats for that fleecy white hair of hers. And she should live in New York, take her mother there if she wanted, and close up this house after they had been married in it.
She had been shaking her head to all these things and dismissing them gently as the ravings of a delirious boy. But now she said: "Oh, I could never be married in this town."
"And why not?"
"Oh, I don't know. I just couldn't."
She was still afraid that people would laugh at her, but more afraid that they would think she was trying to flaunt her triumph over them–the triumph of marrying the great Newton Meldrum. She could bear the laughter; she was used to the town's ridicule. But she could not endure to be triumphing over anybody.
Meldrum did not fret over her motives; he simply nodded.
"All right; then we'll be married in New York. How soon can you start?"
She stared at him, this amazing man. "How soon? Why, I haven't said I'd marry you yet! I'll have to think it over."
He laughed and crushed her in his arms and would not let her breathe till she breathed "Yes." He was the most amazing man. But, then, men were all so amazing when you got to know them. They must have all gone crazy at once, though.
THE END
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOKTHE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER***