THE PERCEPTIONS OF MINGA
The"explosive dust" of the Trout County court-room had not yet subsided. Two young heads had not yet bowed before the final judgments of the law. After a week of mysterious communings, sudden hidings of and exchanges of letters, a series of hidden glances and specially planned conferences, Dunstan and Minga announced at the breakfast table one morning that they would take the green car and be gone all day. They carefully did not state where they were going and no one dreamed the dramatic character of their plans.
The rest of the family received the news without comment, the Judge merely remarking:
"Wash the car before you use it, and pay for your own gas."
Dunstan received these orders with benevolent understanding. "Well said," he approved his father impudently; with lifted eyebrows he grimaced at Sard.
"We miss our good friend Colter," he murmured. "There was a fine literary washer of cars. I mind me of the splendid hexameters that rolled from the amnesian lips while he applied himself to the mud-guards." The dancing eyes questioned his sister'sface. The Judge's watchful look went also to this face, but there was no book for the world to read.
At whatever cost to her own hunger for sympathy the girl, sitting at the coffee urn, in Miss Aurelia's temporary absence, had the absorbed air of the knight who prays beside armor. For Sard was devising pathetic, youthful armors of self-control and wisdom. Her world could not share her belief nor be with her in her ardent things, therefore she would keep these ardent things bright and enshrined in her own lonely heart.
Colter had said, "I will come back." Sard, her being thrilling at the words, had dared to whisper, "Promise—promise!" She was so ashamed, so thankful for that daring now! Want him? The silent girl there dared not tell herself how she wanted him, could not put even into secret words the tremulous ecstasy of this wanting. Outside of her, curious faces like Dunstan's and Minga's and Miss Aurelia's and the Judge's looked at her own absorbed face and disapproved or were tolerant. It was nothing. Sard saw them as a person standing in a soft firelit, flower-bright room sees faces passing in profile on a cold street.
Dunstan's comment was madesotto voce, from the Arabian nights:
"'Fish, Fish, art thou in thy duty?' The fishes raised their heads and said, 'If you reckon, we reckon—'" The youth looked around the breakfast table amiably as if he expected to be answered in kind. Receiving no like sallies he pushed his chairand sauntered forth, followed in a few discreet seconds by Minga. As the two fussed over the car-washing, low voices discussed beside their own plan the whole problem of the Man on the Place.
"It's the real thing for Con Sordino, I guess," Dunstan sighed. "Gosh, suppose the duffer is a confidence man or a bigamist? The papers have such every day; their kind always gets amnesia when convenient," the boy sighed; "sort of rotten to have your own sister go nuts on a Wandering Willy. I wonder." The lad turning on the hose, softly whistled. Minga giggled.
"It's so funny," she declared, "as if Sard sort of thought Colter would turn to a prince if you only waved the right wand."
"No, it's not that; she really saw a prince or something like that in him," the brother declared. "Sard's like that when she looks at anybody, Minga; she doesn't see an ordinary flapper, like you; she sees a future stateswoman, a fearless fighter for the good, the true, the pure, the thing that might be." Dunstan was only half flippant.
"My goodness!" Minga was awed. "But say, about Colter. I went up to that room after he left, the room over the garage, and will you believe it, I found Sard there. She was sitting queer and still and in her hand she had a book she'd lent him. Well, my word," said Minga violently, "it was the awfulest old scientific flubdub, first causes, amœbas and protoplasms, all those out-of-date things."
"Yep, all the hogwash; they still print it," saidDunstan. "That was the old fellow's line, always chewing at those bones the old guy was; self-made-man-stuff, y' know."
The girl groaned. "Don't I hate it! We had it at college, so of course I'm through it all. You going to cram your two last years with that sawdust?" inquired Minga.
The washer of automobiles ceased his sponging of the long green body. Dunstan stood, brown-shirted sleeves rolled up, young head hot and tumbled, eye bright and discriminating.
"No, Grandma," he turned promptly, "I am not. I cram on facts. See? I cut out all the frills and monkey and snail lore, and I root around just enough Latin and mathematics to look good to the old-timers. All I want is a diploma. See, so's I can walk into any chap's office and call him Bill and look him in his Pie Rooky Beta Kipper eye and say, 'Now then, my young Arabian Nights Oil Pasha, I may look like the One-eyed Calendar, but I've got the same world-series, all-American learning you've got, and I don't propose to be kicked out of this office till I get what I came for, see?' That," said Dunstan mopping his brow, "is my idea of education."
Minga nodded. "You sure do need an education in business," the girl agreed thoughtfully. "I know the Mede keeps saying that if he had his choice he'd give up his income and keep his brains, but not me," said serious Minga. "What use would my brains be to me if I hadn't an income?"
"You gotter have brains all right," said Dunstan;"and then you've gotter forget you got 'em or that anybody else has 'em. Look at the after-dinner speeches, you know that rot, and the political ones, all done by famous men; don't they prove that brains are only a side-show? You just have 'em, but when you get there you don't use 'em. That's the idea."
The bobbed head leaning seriously by the side of the cropped one to swab the runners considered seriously these things.
Finally Minga announced, "Say, while I'm speaking of deep things and all, I'm going home next week. After we snitch Terry from jail I'm done!"
Dunstan looked at her sagely. He stood up, stretched, and eyed his friend with increasing disapproval. "Pshaw, that's a new kind of slush; what have you got, indigestion? Go home, nothing. Why, after the Terry rescue——"
Minga rubbed solemnly on the running-board; her friend looked alarmed.
"You have not got to go home! What do the Mede and Persian care as long as you're where they can send you day-letters and telephones. No, ma'am, you've got to stay here in this house of the seven sleepers and nobody-to-wash-cars, you've got to stay here and sass the governor and shock Aunt Reely and keep Sard from eloping with the iceman and once in a while, for deviltry, hold my hand. That's what you've got to do."
The boyish faun-like face smiled belligerently, but Dunstan's eyes had subtle anxiety. "You haven't really to go?" he inquired. "Aw come on, can't youstart a new sweater and say you can't go home till you've finished it? I've seen many a girl work that dodge," remarked Dunstan. "On account of this being the only place you can match the wool," he nodded acutely.
Minga stood pulling down her belt. She gave the bobbed head a resolute shake. "I'm going," she said. She stood there, a curious little picture of untried resolution. "I don't know exactly what's come over me," the girl confessed. "I've nothing against you, Dunce; you've been a real sweet idiot, and I'm going to see us through the Terry rescue, but after the Terry rescue," said Minga in a solemn tone, "home I've got to go." She hesitated a moment adding, "Anyway, after that, you see, Judgie will hate me and turn me out and Aunt Reely will be nervous and Sard will be queer and gloomy and you——"
"Anyway I'll be annoying," said Dunstan obstinately, "the way I've been right along."
There was a long silence for this talkative pair. At last:
"Anyway," said Minga, "I sort of see things different. I can't seem to want to visit around as much as I used. I'm going home to be a daughter, that sort of thing."
"Oh, deliver us!" groaned Dunstan. "Oh my soul! Say, what's the matter, girl, didn't your last allowance come? Nobody's a daughter nowadays; it isn't done. Say, Minga, this is awful! Anyway—don't go!"
Minga stood first on one foot, then on the other. Inher mind, a little dazed and haunted by recent events, still rang Shipman's summing up of her after their various encounters, and the final night at the dance. The lawyer had held the two tantalizing hands very tightly and murmured, "You are a very dear little thing, a very dear little thing." He had said it with a sort of tortured groan. Minga was beginning to realize with a good deal of slow pain how a man might resolutely hold a girl like her away from himself and herself, from something to which, the girl was clever enough to know, she had half unconsciously tried to lure him. The sentence with its tender repudiation of her had penetrated to something honest in her heart. Then had come the morning outside the court-house when Shipman had defined life to them. The older man's power, his penetrating analysis, had somehow reached to the soul that lay dormant, the little butterfly character had sleepily stirred, the little blue egg had broken, and Minga, a scared soul, looked forth upon a universe that had a spiritual endlessness. Some new dim sense of men came to her, not as strong creatures that must be made silly slaves to women or played upon by light motives, but as loyal brothers who had enormous power of strength or suffering through women. Watts Shipman's world of standards and honor stood out to her like a strange austere country of mountains and looming towers as to which she was supremely curious, but into which her feet hardly knew how to tread.
Minga looked earnestly at Dunstan's back. "You see," she worked this out as she had once worked itout with Sard, "you see, Dunce, whether we like it or not, we've got to get busy, us young ones. It's queer," said little Minga with an omniscience not to be despised, "but though the grown-ups try all they can to discourage us when we do take hold, they know as well as we do that we've got to take hold. We," said Minga, with awed prophecy, "our kind, the Bunches, don't you know, all over the world. The French Bunch, like us, the Italian Bunch, the English Bunch, the flappers of the world. Our Bunches have got to run the world; it's awful, it's queer, but," the little bobbed head nodding violently, "it's true; so we ought to be preparing. The fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles and things hate to have us take hold before they tell us what to do. Though you can see," said Minga solemnly, "that they don't half of them know what to do themselves. So we havegotto take hold." The bobbed maiden was sober to a terrifying degree. Dunstan stared at the little mouth that summed up, "And I suppose for this reason we ought to sort of brace up and begin to take notice. Now, for instance," said Minga with a sudden virtuous decision, "I've made up my mind that love is divine; I'm not going to fool any more. Love is divine," announced Minga.
"Wow!" said Dunstan, "don't hit me there again, as the lady said."
"Yes, it is," returned his car-washing companion determinedly. "I—I—I've grown sick of these petting parties and all this silly stuff. When you really don't care you—you just don't do it, so I'm going to cutout these fake engagements just to wear different kinds of rings—I—I—if love is really divine," said Minga, she looked half timidly off to the mountain where the organ builder's house stood, "why, those petting parties are kind of common; do you get me?"
"Do I get you?" ejaculated Dunstan. "Say," he straightened up, "if you knew what I knew. Say, I could tell you things, Minga."
Minga, her resolutions almost overcoming her, sat down on an upturned box. "I really feel different," she said solemnly. "After that night Tawny Troop bawled me out, and—and something else happened, well, I got a sort of different feeling. Now, for instance," said Minga, "old people; I don't want to make fun of them any more. Isn't that queer? I want to sort of study 'em and see what they mean. Imagine! I really want," went on Minga in an awed voice, "to hang around and talk seriously to Judgie, and—and queer unnatural things like that. I'm going to be a daughter and sort of get interested; isn't it awful?"
Dunstan walked lovingly around his car, trying all its functions, and cast an appreciative eye on his comrade. "Good stuff," he commended. "The old birds must have some sense packed away somewhere. The old-timers like to beat the air and say things, but they ain't so low in the grave but what they see a few facts too.
"Well," the youth stood up straight, hands in pockets, whistling softly, "the 'Green Bottle' is herself again, cleaned, curried and coddled. Got that letter? I'll go in and change my duds, and then I guess we're ready. What? You got Terry's letter all right?"
Minga produced the letter; with one eye on the distant house, the two rereading it together, enjoying the sense of secrecy, half giggling at the queer spelling and altogether excited over their plan. The black round script ran thus:
"The gang stops work at five. The guards goes first to git the truck ready to take us bak to the pen! If you come threw about that time, I will beat it to your car and take the chance. Go slow till I jump; if I catch on, go like hell; go like hell anyways. There is a curve ahead to the right, but that is what you want, as the guards got motorcycles. So no more at present. Give the duck that brings this fifty cents and oblige"You Know Who."
"The gang stops work at five. The guards goes first to git the truck ready to take us bak to the pen! If you come threw about that time, I will beat it to your car and take the chance. Go slow till I jump; if I catch on, go like hell; go like hell anyways. There is a curve ahead to the right, but that is what you want, as the guards got motorcycles. So no more at present. Give the duck that brings this fifty cents and oblige
"You Know Who."
As Minga read, the two young faces suffused with a thrilled fire; weeks ago at the trial Minga and Dunce had decided to abduct Terry. The legal aspects of the thing hardly occurred to them. This sort of thing was done in the movies successfully, why not in actual life? Their plan was to snatch the boy from the road-building gang sent out by the state's prison to the stone crusher on the Western Shore where road-making was in progress. Terry was then to be conveyed in their automobile to the deserted Stone Oven of Revolutionary fame near Bear Mountain. Here, where a little stream wandered through the bracken, he could be driven to every day and supplied withfood until it should be safe to convey him to a night train and ship him to the West. Minga and Dunce had worked out the thing with dime novel detail, with dramatic appreciation of its flavor and dash, until the project ceased to have its original motive of saving Terry and gradually became their own twentieth century private automobile adventure. They had a charmed sense of thrill and a pleasant feeling of outwitting such staid and sober folk as Watts Shipman. It was not at all uncharacteristic of young persons, not at all uncharacteristic of the time, not at all uncharacteristic of the laughable enigma of human nature that at the very moment that the two were starting out to do something entirely discreditable, inevitably wrong, that they should be resolving with all the power and imagination of their young souls to adjust themselves better to the world they lived in. If it occurred to Minga and Dunce that as a first step in their new resolutions the Terry abduction was hardly judicious, they put the idea aside; each felt committed to the thing; neither knew how to withdraw.
It was the early July that is still reminiscently June. Orioles and tanagers were still flashing through the Hudson River green, rose-breasted grosbeaks and indigo birds had only just moved on to other mysterious leafage. The fields and hills were dusted with silver daisies and amid slopes of feathery grass coreopsis began to toss golden crowns. Out on the country roads the deep woods began to show, through their mystical vistas, tall towered carillons of speckled lily bells, and mountain laurel tossed pink shells on clumpsof foam-lit dark. The car whirled along rocky bits of road where tall plantains, and milkweed and fireweed, things of orange and rose and scarlet plume burned along the ditches of water-worn gravel, or by the lichened gray of ranging stone walls. It all spelled myriad fecundities, ripe gay plant life, a thousand dusts and washes of seed, a thousand marchers of hidden atoms, a thousand caravans and progression of strange mysterious pollen. The rich Chord of Summer was resolving throughout the countryside, played by a hand that goes lovingly back each year to the old hymn of begetting, and birth, and death! The old, old hymn of creation that sings us all in and out of being.
A gypsy camp on a rocky hillside back of the road showed dingy tents, and the tethered horses and empty hooded wagons stood in a sea of wild roses and buttercups. The gypsies, rather modern, with a decided tendency to fireless cookers and hair-nets and graphophones, were brown and smiling in indolent gypsy leisure. Minga stared upon them with awe; she dimly got their Pagan raison d'être, their rising to sunrise, their sleeping in cold stars and dew; the girl looked delightedly upon the strong bodies of little, half-naked children, and though daintily clad herself, she got a sense of the primal poetry and rags of the vagabond women who looked not too respectfully out to the showy car.
"Pretty lady, have your fortune told," called out one old hag. The gleaming lawless faces said impertinent lawless things, the teeth glittered, and the eyes were saucy. Minga was for halting the car and climbing down for this experience, but her companion restrained her.
"Ah, don't!" begged Dunstan disgustedly. "Say, they're fresh. Don't monkey with 'em, they have diseases, they're always horribly dirty. Don't go near them," shuddered the boy; "they make me crawl, somehow."
The old crone sitting by a steaming kettle swung on a pole looked out to them leeringly. That she could have heard their comments seemed incredible to the two in the automobile, but the black gaze seemed to read their very souls.
"Ah—Mates," the old woman called out teasingly, meaningly, with a curious warning.
"Mates," then as the impudent curious eyes surveyed them, this woman made a strange gesture, pagan, clairvoyant and authoritative. "Mates," she screamed after them, "there's a dead body between ye; it joins ye, Mates, Mates."
This was too much for Miss Gerould. She of the pampered and sheltered life. "Oh, my goodness," the girl gasped. The face under the pretty hat paled. Minga, who had never before come up against the raw things of life, grew suddenly faint. The face of his friend peered up into Dunstan's. "Say, would you call that a curse?" inquired Minga. "It—it sounded awful, Dunce; I believe it was a curse. It sort of scares me."
The boy laughed. He changed gears. "These people are awful queer," he admitted; "they do know things; they're good to keep away from, I think."
Minga shivered. "But could she make up such wild things? 'a dead body between ye, joining ye,' how do they know? They can't know, can they?"
Dunstan shook his head solemnly and the two young heads for a time cast nervous glances behind them, for it was a strange happening for a summer day; it would seem to cast a curious shadow on their adventure. The boy driver of the "Green Bottle" was thoughtful for a long time before he said ruminatingly, slowly, to his companion, "Just the same, they do know things. Minga, if we slept outdoors always and found our roads by the stars and noticed the way bushes grew, and tides, and the moon, and stayed with just animals and just took life as it is, you know, without the elevators and cosmetics and electric lights and hotels and the things that keep us away from life, just took it straight like a big drink of something powerful, why, wouldn't we be like that? Wouldn't we look directly at big things and see them straight, not wrapped up in tissue paper?"
Dunstan swept his free hand to the fields flowing by them. "Colter, well, Colter told me an awful lot of funny things about life and the great laws under it. Just being good, for instance, you have no idea, Minga, the great natural laws that lie under just being good." Dunstan paused. "There were a lot of old guys, priests and mystics and things that knew these laws, but we get lost from them, getting rich and all. The old kind of science got ahead of them and didn't believe them, but science, nowadays, Colter says——"
Dunstan after a few moments' reflection lookedaround at his companion. "Did you hear the old tent-toad call us 'Mates'?" he asked soberly, "just 'Mates'—I think she saw something."
Minga was silent.
"Maybe we are mates," said the boy soberly; "maybe we are, Minga."
The girl at his side bit her lip and her foot tapped impatiently on the floor. "Now," said Minga, "now I am not going to be bothered with that stuff." Then, the vivid color flying into her face, "Dunce, oh, I will not have it; such nonsense, from a wrinkled old gypsy." Minga was silent a moment before she added, "I should think you'd want to forget what she said, 'a dead body between us, uniting us,' all that."
But Dunstan was looking far ahead along the vista of the leafy road. He said no more, only as Minga, sitting back, tried to start up some of their old rallying songs and sallies the boy kept repeating dreamily, "She called us mates and it seems queer, for somehow I've always thought—you heard? She called us 'Mates,' Minga."
Perhaps it was the gypsy's prophecy making them conscious, perhaps it was the green world surrounding them like a round egg surrounding primal man and woman. But they grew silent and awed as though they walked toward a large surcharged destiny, so as they halted the car and took out their lunch basket they felt constrained; the rescue of Terence O'Brien would not take place until nearly five o'clock; they must pass the time alone together in this cathedral solemnity of summer. They tried not to look at eachother for fear they should see in each other's eyes things that would snatch away their control. They stood a little away from each other, troubled, questioning, half afraid, yet curious.
"TERRY!"
Eveningcame heavily, the river, flattened to an unearthly yellow calm, had thrown back all day field-heaviness, the prolific scent of grasses. The house was hot, the trees held lax droop of layered leaves. Languidly in the tepid air moved hundreds of unseen little ships of pollen, bringing to human breathing a thickness as of a new element. The fire-flies carrying their lanterns slowly up from dark grass, clotted beneath a shrub, or hung in tiny constellations by a tree; while out on the roadways the black automobiles rolled pompously like haughty monsters whose eyes, scornful and contemptuous, looked far ahead past all poetry of tree and water toward future summer nights when all the world should be a shattering brilliance of moving engines.
The house seemed to ache with loneliness and the desolation of souls at variance. There was no noisy gathering of the Bunch on the porch of the Judge's home. Miss Aurelia worried over the absence of Minga and Dunstan. She had retired early to "collect her thoughts," she told herself, supporting this enterprise by taking with her a novel by which her friend, Mrs. Spoyd, set great store and which, so its owner told Miss Aurelia, contained "not one unpleasant thing."Miss Aurelia who read a chapter out of "Something" every night, now read a blissful chapter out of this novel. Here there were such minute descriptions of crockery and curtains as delighted her soul; here married people all "got on" well; in this book the children arrayed in fresh pinks and blues played happily with clean spools or pretty blocks against backgrounds of hollyhocks. The little brooks ran without roiling, mad dogs kept away from villages and arranged their lives to be killed when convenient by intrepid lads educated for the purpose. The minister was handsome, good and healthy, and said what was expected, the doctor cured all fractures whether of skull or mind, the tax collector sent in his bills only when people had the money, and the young people sprang up together in couples like Noah's ark and married and started on a wonderful advertisement-perfected housekeeping.
"Why?" asked Miss Aurelia, yawning and settling down for the night. "Why don't more people write pleasant books and plays like this? I think all writers who write disagreeable things should be snubbed and made to feel uncomfortable, they should not be asked to dinner nor treated politely in any way until they stop writing about slums and dirty people and of unpleasant married problems. That," said Miss Aurelia, putting out the light, "would soon discourage them from writing horrid books, and then life would become normal and we should forget the things we don't want to think about. I should think," soliloquized Miss Aurelia, putting her handkerchief under her pillow,"that writers should realize that unless they write only about normal things that they will never be popular."
It was after ten, but Sard had not gone up-stairs, yet the figure of the Judge, sitting aloof in one corner of the piazza, smoking and staring at the river, magnetized while it antagonized her. Her father had not spoken to her since the day Colter went away. The girl believed that he knew in some way that she had met Colter after his forbidding it. She could explain the seeming disobedience of this final interview. She wanted to explain it. With all the misery of her young heart she wanted to explain.
Sard, moving wistfully under the great trees, looked up into the branches spread over her. "What are your laws?" she asked as of old. The girl, hot with surging new things, with new blind impulses and passions, asked but one thing, to be true to a law, to the highest laws of all, yet the great law that called men and women fiercely, insistently to each other seemed to be set forever at variance with other laws, laws that those same men and women themselves had made and sustained. What should one be faithful to, what repudiate?
"What shall be my laws?" whispered the girl. She felt trembling that fierce law of blood and ardent spirit that bade her follow Colter now, get to him if she could, this night! Sard looked up, her eyes wide, her body swept on the tidal streams of summer night, her tremulous being still vibrated to the remembered clasp of a man's hand, of the sense of mystery surroundingthat man, his unuttered call to her.... His truth for her truth.
The isolation of youth, such as Sard's, is very great. No human hand can help it. It walks a way of loneliness that glimmers and is drenched with strange lights that bewilder and if it comes to any help at all it is the knowledge of the glory of loneliness, the glory of the fighter, who at last prefers the sense of ambush and the hazard of the wrong trail. Who prefers to pierce the jungle and fight his way out into a clearing—alone.
Yet to those who question the night, that time when the earth is abandoned by its one angel, the sun, there comes inevitably out of the dreaming quiet the one word, Patience.
"Our law is Patience," said the trees to Sard. The girl, a swift hand passed over her eyes, went in by way of the terrace; she passed the dark form sitting there; half pushing herself, half afraid she tiptoed toward it, to make peace, to ask forgiveness. Then, as softly, she tiptoed back; for deep in her heart Sard knew that there would be only one condition of forgiveness, that she repudiate the best and dearest thing that had come into her life, she must give up Colter.
Now passion swept over against any calm she could win, the girl saw vehemently that one man's face with the look of gentleness and dumb pain. "I can't give him up," she said fiercely. Sard drew a long breath; she began climbing slowly up-stairs to bed.
As she stood at the foot of the tower room stairs the hall clock struck eleven; there was a sudden whir ofwheels and lights on the drive outside; she heard indistinctly lowered voices of men, some long thing, covered, was taken to the kitchen, sudden stir and commotion ran like wild fire through the house.
Like a spell the summer night was breathless and Sard was aware of heat and suffocation in her own throat; the telephone began ringing, a man's voice speaking with the Judge. Her father's questions and commands were issued curt, annoyed, angry and then finally hushed and with a knife-like anxiety the girl flew to the head of the lower stair; there were slow footsteps coming up into the upper hall. The light fell upon a stretcher,—Dunstan—his boyish head bloody, his mouth slightly open. Two men climbing gently with something collapsed and, stricken in their arms, the little huddled form of Minga. Suddenly from the kitchen Dora's piercing wail, "Terry! Terry!"
THE MEDE AND THE PERSIAN
Thehandsome man and woman that drove up to the great door of the Bogarts' home got out with a leisureliness that seemed the result of good nerve structure rather than deliberate intention. Whatever the anxiety in their hearts they did not show it in gestures or voices. Mrs. Gerould, however, kept rather intent eyes upon the electric bell; her gloved finger pushed; she pulled the scarf around her shoulders with a little nervous twitch. Her husband flicked some dust from his shoes. The two talked in low voices until the Bogarts' cook opened the door; as they realized the absence of pretty Dora, their grave faces grew more apprehensive.
Cook was expansive; she smoothed the sleeve of Mrs. Gerould's silk motor coat. "Ye ain't been worried about Minga, Mrs. Gerould? There's nothing the matter with her, Praise be God!—only the fright, and they've given her somethin' to sleep on. But him! Oh, it seems that I can hear him callin' me now—Mr. Dunstan—our bye—it was me he was always teasin' and raisin' the divil wit." The cook trembled; she burst out again:
"Gawd love him, the poor child wanted to save our Terry, poor bye—now that wasn't no way to help,was it? Now, Mr. Dunstan's gone and got the law onto himself, he's under arrest! But them two," the cook wiped her streaming eyes, "their little hearts was broke over Terry bein' in the jug, and now look at it—Terry's dead! Yes'm," cook's motherly heart broke over it, her head went down into her red hands. "The guards was after them when they got him in the car, and fired. Yes'm, the poor boy's gorn. Well, he's better aff, that's what I tell Dora, he's better aff! I keep tellin' her that," blubbered cook.
The Mede and Persian looked increasingly grave. The telegram had been telephoned to them and they had stepped into a car and driven out at once without much sense of tragedy—before this the two had been hurried to scenes of Minga's dénouements, expecting some result of physical rashness, of too much dancing, or a bad sore throat and fever, some predicament of finance easy of rescue, but here was a prank with more serious development and one tragic result. Minga and Dunce had played for high stakes this time; perhaps their playing was forever over!
"Where's her room?" the two parents were at the door before cook could get the directions out of her mouth. On the way they encountered Miss Aurelia carrying a hot-water bottle in her hand, a flask of aromatic spirits of ammonia in the other. The lady had been wandering about with these for hours; now like a fountain of tears with fireworks of explanations round it, she began sending up hysterical rockets.
"Oh, Mrs. Gerould, Minga will be glad—I don't suppose I—you should talk to her now ... andMr. Gerould, how do you do? Sard will know; she is with Minga—but our Dunstan, did you know? Had you heard the—er particulars?—he—they, under arrest!" Sobbing, Miss Aurelia, with that superb power of tears that some people possess, talked through a steady sliding of drops that ran down sluices of pale cheeks until the two Geroulds in spite of anxiety looked on admiringly—"the poor—er—criminal, Terry—is dead—one can—er"—sniff,—"hardly grieve—but our boy, our Dunstan"—sob—"is gravely injured—the shoulders and head—fractures—they fear for his life——" To the gentle soothing of the Mede and Persian, Miss Aurelia leaned like a wind-blown branch, but the gusts of weeping came anew and the branch merely swayed; the two newcomers after a while detached themselves; with a sense of relief they stepped into Minga's room.
Sard rose swiftly out of the dark; Mrs. Gerould caught her two hands. "Minga's all right," the girl whispered. "They gave her something quieting because she was so horrified—Terry, you see—Terry is dead." The young form straightened; Sard spoke with grave calmness.
"Terry's troubles are over."
The Geroulds took her hands—together they spoke encouragingly to her. "Dear, you've been such a brick, we're proud of you; Eleanor Ledyard has told us how you worked to save Terry, and you've done our little Minga so much good." The big-hearted man and woman longed to take the strained look of tragedy from this young face. There were otherthings they knew that had turned Sard grave and old in this one summer. They scanned her anxiously, wishing she were not so set and stern. "When Dunstan gets out of the woods,"—they patted her hands—"you come to us for a while and—and—well, we want to help."
This kind man and woman, understanding her, standing by her, shook the girl to her depths. Sard's lips trembled.
"I'd like to," she said, her eyes thrilled—"I'd like," Sard said simply, "to earn my own living; maybe you would help me do that." Her eyes deepened and thrilled, and in them the Geroulds read the old story, Youth at bay, yet they heard her words, "But I mustn't leave my father now—not now." Sard, with a curious little gesture, motioned in the direction of Dunstan's room.
"Of course not." Mrs. Gerould looked at her understandingly; the tall, graceful woman went softly over to the little bed and turned the night-light to see her daughter's sleeping face. The little bobbed head was deep in the pillows. Minga opened her eyes slightly and drowsily closed them. "Sard," she spoke with the curious distinctness of a person speaking under a drug, "I thought the Mede and the Persian were here—they are so dear—if they were here, you know"—Minga spoke drowsily, "Dunstan would get all right and Terry would come alive, the Mede and the Persian would fix it. They—they are hummers."
The man and the woman looked long and lovingly at her; then they looked at each other, shaking theirheads, the little figure on the bed was so dear to them, yet they, absorbed in their love for each other, seemed to have so little power, so little direction over her. This was their only child; she had had all the care and love they could lavish on her, yet she seemed as remote as an alien to all they believed and felt. They, the Mede and Persian, were deliberate, slow-thinking people of the agricultural age; Minga, the one child of their union, was the strange electric vivacious spirit of a machine age. It was this simple fact that the couple hardly realized that made it impossible for them to train their little daughter in the way they thought she should go. Minga must train herself in the way she would go. Somehow, they believed, she would train herself right.
Sard, at last, remembered her duties as daughter of the house. "Your room is all ready," she whispered; "there's a nurse coming in here at about four and then I shall go to bed." She led them down the hall, halting ever so slightly outside Dunstan's door, half pausing to hear the footsteps of the nurse on guard there, explaining:
"The fracture isn't fatal, but it's a horrid splintered one, and they must torture him some more to-morrow, the car upset; it threw Minga free, but it fell on him—and Terry's body——" Sard drew a long shuddering sigh.
Somewhat bewildered the two parents waited to hear more. "But Terry," asked Mr. Gerould rather desperately, "how was it he was with Dunstan and Minga?"
"They had stolen him from a prison gang working on the highway." It was curious that these three desperately anxious people half smiled with appreciation of Dunstan's and Minga's method, while they realized its deadly solemnity. The two Geroulds looked aghast.
"The prison guard shot him like a rabbit." The girl turned a look of intense bitterness on the kindly man and woman standing there. "You see," said Sard, and her face and eyes were a mask of hardness, "Terry was sentenced to twenty years in prison at hard labor; it was thought to be a kind sentence; he was under the law, and the law must not be cheated." The girl's face was bitter in a way not good to see. The Mede and the Persian did not, however, meet it with cold logic. This was not a time for that.
When they were alone in their room the Geroulds locked the door and commenced talking to each other. As the Persian slipped into a frilly dressing-robe and groped in her bag for a flashlight, she cautioned the Mede, "You turn in and sleep a lot, dear; the long drive tired you. I'll come back in a few hours. I want to relieve Sard and watch Minga and see how she comes out of this."
The Mede acquiesced. Taking off his collar, he sought for his tooth paste. "Apparently your daughter is a body-snatcher," he remarked. "I'm glad I sold that stock last week and that call money is improving. I expect we'll have a lot of legal stuff on our hands. It will be Minga's Christmas present keepingher out of jail. I'll try to see Shipman to-morrow and find out what he thinks. Under arrest! your daughter, Madam, is—ahem—exceptional."
"Your daughter when she is in trouble," remarked the Persian blandly,—"I'm glad I have a permanent wave; your daughter's activities make it necessary for me to look my best at all times."
"Your daughter when she's discreditable, you know," returned the Mede with decision. They laughed. The Persian went over and rested her head against the Mede's arm. "No wonder I want Minga to be happy always," she said; "no wonder I've spoiled her so. I've always been so ridiculously happy and spoiled by you."
"You've been ridiculous, all right," said the Mede with conviction. "I've been the happy one—well," he kissed her, then bit off the end of a cigar, "we've got to pull Minga out of this scrape and read her the riot act and make her sit up and face her iniquities, by Jove!"
"You," the Persian looked back at him from the door, "must scold her terribly, cut half her allowance and forbid her to accept any more invitations for a year. You remember, I always wanted you to punish her when she was little."
"Oh, you did?" The Mede rummaged in the bathroom for his safety razor; he now fitted this instrument together, standing in dressing-gown surveying a blue chin. "I am to put on the thumbscrews, am I? Madam, I do not interfere with your peculiar offspring——" The Mede, looking in the glass, drew aruminative thumb over his chin. "I am for helping that poor child, Sard; she's a tigress in a crate here—I'm going to help uncrate her."
The Persian, lingering by the door, laughed a little helplessly. "Sard," she said in a low voice, "gives me the shivers; that fearful kind of girl who wants to reform the whole world before six o'clock, get life laundered before dinner, you know."
"I do know," said the thoughtful Mede, "and it's the kind I like; the kind that gets busy and doesn't wait for George to do it. I was like that myself. I mean, at Sard's age I wanted to reform the world. I began by marrying you."
"You didn't let George do that! Do you want to be pinched?" asked the Persian viciously.
"Come—come," said the Mede, "where are the matches? After I have a smoke—Patty," he looked toward the pretty rose-frilled figure at the door—"you can't suppose our little duck is hurt anyway, do you? They're not fooling us?" Mr. Gerould paused, turning a rather worried face on his wife. He waved the safety razor solemnly. That lady, to allay his fears, came close up to him.
"Minga Gerould is my child," she said emphatically; "she is made of rubber, the rest of her is steel, her mind is a duck's back. Her will is a kite, her imagination is fireproof, her humor is Charlie Chaplin and her heart is sound."
"I believe you." The Mede tinkered with his razor and looked about the room. "Rather comfy here," he remarked. "Who took the car to the garage,anybody? I didn't lock it. Well, I guess there's no need to worry; that fellow Colter is here yet, isn't he? Eleanor Ledyard heard a lot about him from Watts; thinks he may be her husband's brother. What rot you women invent and you call it intuition. I keep worrying about Sard's face. I'd like to get a look at the fellow. Did you say you wanted to kiss me again?"
"I did not," said the Persian, her soft eyes challenging him. "But I could give Minga another kiss for you when she wakes up. I am willing to do that," said the Persian with an air of benevolence.
"You will do what I tell you," said the Mede belligerently. He pulled the tall rosy lady toward him and lifted her face to his. "My life," said the Mede, "is a wreck between the two demons, wife and daughter." He pressed a second kiss on a face that seemed the rosier by something in that second kiss.
The two looked at each other with a sudden deep look of laughing devotion. Such things do sometimes happen!
PENALTIES
Sardcame into Dunstan's room with the mail. The nurse, a calm-faced, serious woman of mature years, smiled at her. "I'm glad you've come; we're getting a little sick of each other."
The haggard face of the boy looked out from the surgeon's trestlework of the fractured arm and shoulder. "Drool!" said the weak voice querulously. "Drool! she means that I've been nagging her until she's half crying." The lad looked his sick mortification; he knew he could not control his peevishness, not just yet. He tried to cover it with the old impishness. "Never mind, Miss Crayden, try to imagine I'm your husband; let me, the tender partner of your life, wipe up the floor with you."
In spite of the humorous quirk around the mouth, the nurse seemed glad to get away. She did not deny his self-accusation. "If you're going to be around for a while," to the sister, "I think I'll just take a brisk walk."
"Take a brisk walk" after the all-night vigil, "take a brisk walk" that late August day with its breathless depths of dusty overgrowth, its sultry world of tapestried leaf hangings. The thing made the youthful ones smile. Dunce looked after the retreating form, firm and crisp in its white uniform, murmuring—"A brisk walk—at ninety-two in the shade."
"She kids herself along pretty well, doesn't she?" demanded the invalid; then as his weak voice went into a squeak,—"Say, how long I got to hang here like a dry worm on the end of a fish-hook? Oh, Sard, when does this rotten weakness end? Say, why don't you get me some dog poison and put me out of my misery?"
There was a haunted look in the boy's eyes that tried to smile listlessly as he pawed over his mail. "Letter from Bumpy Dodge asking about college. Well, I guess I don't get back to college—— No, Bumpy, old sport, I guess I do a turn in jail, what?" He looked questioningly at his sister. "Nothing from Minga, I suppose? Well, I don't blame her; I did get her into a mess, the newspaper rot and all. I wonder," said Dunstan soberly, "what I was thinking of," he looked at Sard curiously, "I wonder if I thought at all. I don't believe I did think—I just felt, and feeling isn't the whole show, I guess. Well, Minga and I certainly gummed the game." The figure lying trussed in a bower of splints and bandages was silent a moment. "Gimme a cigarette, Sardine," then, at her denying look, "Why, haven't they lifted the ban yet? Say, when does this surgeon Sunday-school end, anyway? You'd think those tinkering old 'Docs' were women the way they go on. Why, in the war they gave the chaps cigarettes in their very coffins, and me with just a cracked rib and a little allegro adrumata medulla medusa Madonna crackiosis—can't have a smoke."
It was not the old Dunce so much as his determinedimitation of the Dunce that had been. A young chap of nineteen cannot go through the experience of having a man of his own age shot to death across his knees without some changes which, in spite of modern science, we will assume are more than chemical. With the sinking down of Terence O'Brien's fair, curly head, his gasping, his blood sprinkled over the car in its crazy speed, the crash, their own capture, and in his own mortal pain seeing the fugitive lying beside him, blood pouring out of his mouth, his eyes closing on the warm summer sunset—with this picture, Dunstan's inner youth closed. His boy's body, badly cracked and shaken, could be mended, made almost perfect again, but his soul with the one great wound in it now stood up and commanded strong meat for its sustenance. Under the law! Dunstan must now stand face to face with law!
In his first interview with his father, with his knowledge of the process of this law, came the sense of rising to punishment that he felt able, nay, glad to meet. After almost twenty years, and twenty years did not seem long against the years Terry had lost, after twenty years of glad life Dunstan instead of bringing freedom had brought death to the wild, young Irish lad; he, who had had the advantages of education, of some measured temperate views of life; he, who for a reckless impulse had not considered what it is a man or woman puts in motion when they start out to defy the accepted law, now saw reasons for law.
Such parts of the long frame as were not pinned in plaster writhed. Dunstan's thoughts went to Minga—what did she think of it all? Did she feel the same way, like one carrying a great burden? The bullet of the guard who had shot Terry had barely escaped Minga's head before the car had overturned and he, Dunstan, who ought by his very man's nature to have protected her, had brought her into all this. Oh, he was a nice chap, a splendid fellow. Ah, well, civilization was a trap anyway, a scheme, a plan to defeat frank square things. The thing to do was to cast off the whole silly rot, get off somewhere, where a man got out of the cheap lying pattern of things, where a man really lived, realized himself, rode, killed, loved, hated without a pink worsted design to remind him that he had "broken the law."
Sard looked over at him. "Stop squirming!" she ordered sternly, then—"Dear old Pirate, don't you know that convalescing is the hardest time of all?" She went over to the bed, scrutinizing her brother. "Is the light in your eyes?" she asked anxiously. "Shall I read to you? Do you want a fresh drink?"
"I want a fresh Hades," growled the invalid. "I want——" All of a sudden Dunstan's face broke; he could not move, but lay here shaking. The girl, looking away from him, was silent.
"If Minga would only write," at last he groaned.
"Perhaps she doesn't know what to say," comforted the sister.
"Dunce," said Sard thoughtfully; she stood by the bed. "Dunce," in a mild patience unlike her, "I guess you and I are up against it, aren't we? We must have, somewhere, ancestors not like Dad and little Mother and Aunt Aurelia, race-horse ancestors that wanted things to happen and to happen quick bang, right off, and they don't, they just won't. No matter what we do, we have to wait, no matter how much we care," said Sard slowly, "we just have to wait; everybody has to wait, I guess. It's a sort of law."
"Terry didn't wait," said Dunce bitterly; "he, thank God, got out."
"I've been reading," she returned thoughtfully, she was trying to draw him out of this mood, "a book that tells how Venice grew up out of the sea; and it seems like life somehow. The streams came down from the mountains carrying grains, just grains, Dunce, of sand, and the ice and snow rolled down more clay and sand, all the currents of the sea kept carrying deposits to one spot until," absorbedly the girl recounted the dreamy geologic tale, her eyes fixed on distance. Dunstan heard her through patiently.
"Sounds like the rags old Colter used to chew," he said, not uninterestedly. "By the way, Sard, what became of that mucker; turned out to be a ne'er-do-well, after all? What?"
His companion was silent. Something in her face contracted as she tried to answer lightly. "Oh, I guess he's all right. Mr. Shipman has been following him up. He was ill after he left here. Then he went to work somewhere, and then I don't exactly know," said Sard. "Mr. Shipman is keeping his eye on him. I don't exactly know——"
The invalid tried to change his position. "That so?Got him work, did he?" he asked. "Say, ain't Shipman the dear old prophet? By Gad, Sardine, what makes a gray-headed chap like that and what makes an old spinny like Miss Crayden homely, you know, and out of the game, what makes 'em do all they can for you and not cuss you back when you cuss and not let you get the blue devils, but hold umbrellas of hope over you and keep reminding you of another You that's back of you, sort of, and ringing up your good deeds like spiritual fares and everything. Say," said Dunstan earnestly, "I want to know. These old-timers, there ain't much in it for them. They must know it. Why in thunder do they keep making everybody on the Merry-go-round think they are going to get the Gold Ring?"
His sister laughed. Sard, perching on Dunstan's bed, thoughtfully traced out the pattern of the white counterpane. The girl, thinner, with a look of limpid patience in the brook-clear eyes, tried to answer the question to herself. What, indeed, had made Shipman, who she had guessed was a baffled, lonely man, turn from his own concerns to help and encourage her? Why should he, to whom she could give nothing, keep the dark eyes with their look of "courage" so fixed upon her that even when he was not there she saw the look, heard the words and knew that the lawyer's strength and help were hers to call upon? Sard did not know that Watts Shipman, after Colter's collapse and his subsequent recovery and revelations, had been to Judge Bogart's with astounding news. The lawyer had sat in the Judge's library giving factafter fact of the distinction, nay, the actual academic fame of the Judge's hired man.
"He's chipper enough now," he placidly told the Judge; "he's enormously improved! Last time I saw him he was walking up and down the campus at a reunion, laughing and talking with old comrades." The lawyer fixed rather scrutinizing eyes on his superior. "You wouldn't," he said tentatively, "I beg your pardon if I interfere, but your daughter is so noble, so superb a little fighter. You wouldn't stand in the way now—of anything?"
There was a long silence. The Judge, some obstinacy in his throat, sat staring ahead of him. The new sense of Sard, a girl, a young unformed girl, having somehow gotten at the fine intelligence and soul that had dwelt concealed in this man, staggered him.
Meticulously Shipman had given him every detail. Dr. Martin Ledyard's heroic effort to save his friends from the terrible scourge of Congo smallpox, the desertion of the natives with canoes, the subsequent shock of learning of his brother's trouble and suicide, the fever in the hospital, his sudden rising and escape with only the clothes he wore from the beginning of convalescence, the tale of his long wandering from farm to farm, the half sustained body and mind a blank, the exposure and terror of a partial memory, were things that Shipman had gotten from Ledyard's own lips bit by bit, and they had been confirmed by the specialist to whom the lawyer had taken Colter. That the eminent scientist had completely recovered, a recovery that had begun the very hour that Sard had recognized him ashe sat on the village curb for what he was, was an established medical fact. "Surely," Watts Shipman leaned forward, the face he bent on the Judge was solemn, "you could not interfere with your daughter's happiness now. Ledyard," said the lawyer mildly, "is not likely to come to her until he has your permission."
"Sard," said the Judge, his eyes had a light of the book of Moses in them, "Sard is to come to her father and acknowledge her impatience and disrespect."
"Pshaw!" The lawyer rose. He walked to the window and looked out. Then, his mouth torn between rage and amusement, he said politely, "Ahem! I don't exactly see how she could under the circumstances do that exact thing."
"That is all I ask," said the Judge finally. No sense of the ridiculous came to his rescue. He got up, went to a bookshelf and took down book after book, examined its cover for dust and blemish, and returned it without opening to the shelf. It was a curious habit of the Judge's to do this when deep in thought. Somehow it was like his treatment of human beings, thought Shipman.
"As for my son," remarked the gray-lipped mouth, "he will learn, he will learn something about the Law." Judge Bogart went back to his chair. He sat down, stretched out his legs and fixed his look upon the other man. "He will learn something about the Law," said he implacably. "I have done nothing to spare him," said the Judge with an air of satisfaction.
Yet Dunstan's first interview with his father hadnot had all this quality of implacability. The boy's fever over, his limbs lightened of certain casts and the eyes deep and haunted, were things to meet which the older man had braced, things from which the Judge, with all his hardness, had shrunk; even the judicial habit could not overlook the danger the Judge had been in, of losing his son, the man who bore his name. With a curious sense of pride he, himself, could not understand, a perception of the absurd gallantry, the chivalry underlying the actions of a fool breaker of laws, the old man, his own prerogatives negatived, had fairly to screw up his courage to begin the interview as he determined it should be begun.
"You know that you will have to meet the penalty," he rasped.
The dark eyes met the gooseberry ones squarely.
"Yes, sir, I've looked the thing up."
"It is likely," said the Judge dryly, "that you will have to give up college and go into business, if indeed you are spared incarceration. The fine is very heavy; you are, in spite of bail, under arrest."
At the word "incarceration" a swift gleam in Dunstan's eyes gave his father absurd hope. He was not injured, then—he was—all right—that was the old impudence, curse it.
"I shall be glad," said the young fellow slowly, "to take any penalty that is rightfully mine, that would come to any man that did what I did, that had," the boy gulped a moment, "that had broken the law he livedunder."
"Ah," the old gray face, the hard-boiled eyes, lookedwatchfully upon the young face with its fierce pride—"then you realize that you were a fool, that you risked my name, your own honor, to save from just punishment a ruffian who had broken the law?"
Something wild, desperate, leaped into the face on the pillows; it was a hurt, appealing look, different from Sard's fiery pride and steady intention; it was not so defiant, it was the more helpless and miserable, as who would say, "I am punished enough." The Judge's eyes on the thin young face at sight of this look felt a sudden strange pang. It reminded him of—
"We love Foddy—Foddy won't put us in prison with the naughty prisoners."
Oh, little woman lips; oh, soft little hands and sweet voice; oh, hundred innocent tendernesses and faiths and needs——
The Judge stared at his son; the dark eyes closed and Dunstan lay there like death, only one long, thin hand clenched and unclenched on his chest.
They rise up sometimes, these who were our forbears and become our good angels; when we need them and call sincerely they rise up in our eyes and hearts and speak for us. If we have kept the house garnished and clean only the best of them will come to us bearing in their hands lamps to light our paths; when we call out in sheer agony for light and leading, all the noblest and fairest of our line rise up for a hundred comforting and strengthening ministries, to lead us on our blind path. Dunstan's mother, standing in his lad's eyes, had risen once and looked at herhusband. "Dearest," said the little timid voice, "what are you doing with my son—our boy? Treat our little Dunstan fairly."
For a long time the old Judge stood at the window, the gray lips trembling, the gooseberry eyes desperately blinking. "The heart bowed down with weight of woe," thought the Judge, "I will go down and play that record—she—she was fond of it."
At last he turned toward his son's bed. "There," said the Judge. He cleared his throat with a rasp that could have been heard in the garage. "Hum—I—I guess I've been breaking a law, too, hey?" He glanced up at the nurse who had just entered. "I don't want to disobey the doctor's laws." He stood for a moment looking down at his son. "I have a letter from that little vixen Minga," said Dunstan's father; then as he saw the slow red creep into the boy's cheek, "I think—ahem—I think she shows character—she seems to realize that her conduct was—I'll send it up to you," said the Judge. He held out his hand. "You and I must protect Minga," he said slowly; "we must keep her out of this thing. Hey, What? Have her out here, hey? Cheer us up some—hey—What?"
The two men looked at each other; under their differing ages was the same cool facing of facts. Dunstan did not turn from his knowledge of himself, a man who had incurred the penalty of the law; neither did the Judge as father turn from that fact. Facts are sometimes the most wholesome curative things of life. When two people resolutely face them together, withthe same degree of earnestness and honesty, they construct a bridge over great abysses of distrust, misunderstanding and heart-break.
The Judge started for the door. "Take care of yourself," he said as he looked wistfully at those dark eyes that had held just for one moment the dear wife's look. Then the Judge remembered Dunstan's love of a joke. "If you ever steal a murderer again," he said, "I'll thrash you within an inch of your life."
It was a joke! It was made with an effort; the very machinery creaked and the finished product looked dusty and wizened, but it was a joke! Dunstan, the dark-eyed humorist, saw it and grinned. The Judge returned to the bed. Two hands went spontaneously out, a grim, dry, purple one and a slim, thin, weak one. They clinched—then the door closed and the Judge went down-stairs.
Late that evening Miss Bogart heard the phonograph circling forth the "heart bowed down with weight of woe."... She turned another page in the "pleasant" book. "My poor brother," said Miss Aurelia to herself; "he seems to turn naturally to the—er—melancholy—but I should think," the lady thought sleepily, "that now that Colter isn't Colter at all, but the celebrated scientist Dr. Ledyard, that he, she, they——"