Ester Ried Yet Speaking Part 16

Yet the lady herself thought that she had done very little. She had held her inclinations in check with severe judgment.

The door opened softly, and a ma.s.s of golden hair, from out of which peered great eyes, peeped cautiously in.

"Alone?" it said, nodding first toward the figure on the bed, and intimating that she was aware of Mark's presence, and did not mean him.

"Yes," said Sallie, "come in; Mark's asleep, but you won't disturb him; he don't disturb easy; he sleeps just like a baby since the doctor stopped that pain in his knee. There's my new chair; just try it and see how nice it is."

Saying which, she got herself out of the little rocker in haste, and pushed it toward her guest, meantime taking a plain wooden chair, also new, and adding:--

"Did you ever hear of anybody like her before?"

"Something's happened!" said Mart Colson, ignoring the reference to the mysterious p.r.o.noun,--her voice so full of a new and strange meaning that had Sallie been acquainted with the word she might have said it was filled with awe.

As it was, she only exclaimed, "What?" in an intensely interested tone.

"Why, look here! I brought it along to show you."

Whereupon she produced from under her piece of torn shawl a large broken-nosed pitcher, a piece of brown paper carefully tied over the top. She untied the bit of calico string with fingers that shook from excitement.

"Look in there!" she exclaimed at last, triumph in her tone, reaching forward the pitcher.

Sallie looked, and drew in her breath with a long, expressive "O-h!"

There, reposing in stately beauty, lay the great white lily with its golden bell.

"Yes, I should think so!" Mart said, satisfied with the expression.

"Did you ever see anything like that before? It ain't made of wax nor anything else that _folks_ ever made. It's alive! I felt of it. It looks like velvet and satin and all them lovely store things; but it doesn't feel so; it feels _alive_, and it _grew_. But, Sallie Calkins, if you should live a hundred years, and guess all the time, you never could guess where I got it. Sallie Calkins, if you'll believe it, Dirk gave it to me!"

"Dirk?"

"Yes, he did!"

Who would have supposed Mart Colson's voice capable of such a triumphant ring?

"You see the way of it was: Last night he didn't come for his supper at all, and that always scares me dreadful. I'm expecting something to happen, you know. Father, he didn't come either; for the matter of that, he hasn't come yet; and mother, she was awful tired, and hadn't had no dinner to speak of, and she just broke down and took on awful. Mother don't often cry, and it's good she don't, for she just goes into it with all her might when the time comes. It wasn't about father--she's used to him, you know, and don't expect nothing else; but Dirk drives her wild with what may happen to him. I was worried about him, too, but I was mad at him; it seemed too awful mean in him to stay away and scare mother.

At last I got her to go to bed, and she was all tuckered out, and went to sleep.

"Then I wrapped myself in the quilt and sat down to wait; but I got asleep, and I dreamed I saw _her_; she had wings to each side of her, and she flew over the tops of all those houses and made them turn white like the snow looks when it is coming down before it drops into the gutters. Wasn't that queer? Well, some noise woke me up. I was sitting flat on the floor by mother, and I sat up straight all of a tremble.

And there was the old stool, and the brown pitcher on it, half-full of water, and this wonderful thing stood in it looking at me. And Dirk, he stood off the other side looking at it.

"'It's for you, and she sent it.' That's what he said to me; and I wasn't real wide awake, you know. I suppose that's what made his voice sound so queer; and what do you think I said? I was thinking of my dream, and says I: 'Did she have her wings on?' Then Dirk made a queer noise; it was a laugh, but it sounded most like a cry. 'I guess so,'

says he, and then he turned and went off to bed. And I can't get any more out of him; he is as snarly when I ask any questions as though he was mad about it all. If it hadn't been for this great white thing I might have thought this morning that it all belonged to the dream. But Dirk brought this home from somewhere, and put it in the pitcher, and give it to me his own self; that's sure."

The story closed in triumph.

"It is beautiful!" said Sallie, the brown jacket slipping to the floor, while she bent over the lily. "It is beautiful, all of it, and it looks just like her, and sounds like her, wings and all; of course she sent it."

"And Dirk brought it." That part of the story Mart Colson did not forget.

Sometimes it seems to me a pity that hearts are not laid bare to the gaze of others. What, for instance, might not this little incident have done for Dirk Colson had he known how the starved heart of his sister fed on the thought that he brought her the flower?

Still, on the other hand, I don't know what the effect would have been on Mart had she known what a tremendous amount of courage it had taken to present the flower to her. A dozen times on the way home had Dirk been on the point of consigning it to the gutter. _He_ carry home a flower! If it had been a loaf of bread he thought it would be more consistent. Someway he recognized a fine sarcasm in the thought that he, who had never in his life contributed towards the necessities of the family, should carry to that dreary home a flower! Yet the fair lily did its work well during that long walk from East Fifty-fifth Street to the shadow of the alley. It made Dirk Colson tell it fiercely that he hated himself; that he was a brute and a loafer,--a blot on the earth, and ought not to live. Why didn't he go to work? Why didn't he have things to bring home to Mart every little while, as Mark Calkins did to Sallie?

Hadn't he seen Mark, only a few evenings before he was hurt, with a pair of girl's shoes strung over his shoulder, and heard him whistle as he ran, two steps at a time, up the rickety stairs? What would Mart think if he should bring her home a pair of shoes? What would she think of his bringing her a flower? She would sneer, of course: and, in the mood which then possessed him, Dirk said angrily that she had a right to sneer, and would be a fool not to; and yet he hated the thought of it.

There was nothing in life that Dirk hated more than sneers; and he had been fed on them ever since he could remember.

He was altogether unprepared for the reception which the lily received.

That suggestion about wings, which seemed so apt, had brought the "queer" sound to his voice that Mart had noticed. If only she had understood, and not spoiled, next morning, the effect of her words.

In the prosaic daylight, the illusion of "wings" being banished, she was bent on knowing how Dirk came into possession of the lily.

"Who sent it, Dirk? I don't believe anybody told you to give it to me.

Who would care about _my_ having a flower? Where did you get it?"

"Where do you s'pose?" Dirk's voice was ominously gruff. It is a painful truth that by daylight he was ashamed of his part of the transaction.

"I told you she sent it. It's noways likely that I'd take the trouble to make up a lie about that weed. How do I know what she wanted you to have it for? Maybe she thought it matched your looks."

There was a bitter sneer in Dirk's voice, yet all the time he heard the sweet, low voice saying, "That girl with the beautiful golden hair."

Suppose he should tell Mart that? Why not? Let me tell you that Dirk Colson would not have repeated that sentence for the world! And yet he did not know why.

Mart's face burned red under his sneer.

"How am I to know who 'she' is?" she said, in bitter scorn. "Some of your bar-room beauties, for whom you dance and whistle, I suppose. You can tell her I would rather have my shawl out of p.a.w.n, or some shoes for my feet, enough sight. What do I care for a great flower mocking at me?"

"Pitch it into the fire, then; and it will be many a long day before I bring you anything else," said Dirk, pus.h.i.+ng himself angrily back from the table, where he had been eating bread dipped in a choice bit of pork fat.

"There isn't a bit of danger of my doing that," she called after him, mockingly. "There isn't a spark of fire, nor likely to be to-day, unless some of your admirers send me a shovel of coal. Mercy knows, I wish they would."

He mercifully lost part of this sentence, for the reason that before it was concluded he was moving with long, angry strides up the alley.

And then Mart took the broken-nosed pitcher away into the furthermost corner, although she was alone in the room, and laid her face against the cool, pure lily, and wept into it great burning tears. Poor, ignorant soul! She wanted, oh, how she _wanted_ Dirk to be brave and good like Mark Calkins--her one type of manhood. Yet she did not know that she was crus.h.i.+ng out the germ which might have grown in his heart. True, she knew herself to be very different from Sallie, but the thought, poor soul, that that was because Mark was so different from Dirk.

Isn't it a pity that the sweet-faced lily could not have told its tender story to both these ignorant ones?

CHAPTER XV.

"WHAT MADE HER DIFFERENT?"

"I have heard a good deal about your sister that has interested me. Do you like to talk of her?"

This was the question which Gracie Dennis asked of young Ried as he stood beside her at the piano. She had been playing, and had come to the music alcove for the purpose of turning her music; but now she was touching sweet chords here and there aimlessly, and waiting for his answer.

At the further end of the parlor Mrs. Roberts was entertaining a caller; but the distance between them was so great that, in effect, the young people were alone.

"I like nothing better than to talk of her." Mr. Ried said, with animation; "but I don't know so much about her as I wish I did. She went away when I was quite young. I used to say 'she died,' but since I have awakened to see her cherished plans being carried on all around me I cannot think of her as dead."