The Shadow Part 20

"Never mind," Hertha answered, "it's cold for ice cream. Sit down and I'll make some cocoa," and she started to walk into the kitchen.

Kathleen followed her. "I'll make the cocoa myself."

"No you won't," Hertha declared. "You got the dinner and it's my turn now."

She put a big ap.r.o.n over her dress and went quietly about her work.

Kathleen, as she sat watching, felt a little tightening at her throat, so rarely did any one do her a service. She was a strong, capable woman, the eldest in the family, and it had naturally fallen to her to wait upon others. At eight her father had been killed in an accident, and the mill, not satisfied with his life, had dragged the loved school books from her hands and, opening its cruel door, held her from sunrise to sunset amid dirt and turmoil performing stupid, monotonous tasks. She had nursed her mother during her last illness, two weary years of suffering. Brother and sister had accepted her sacrifices, enjoying the education that she had been denied, receiving her ministrations thoughtlessly and as thoughtlessly giving nothing in return. She could never remember when either of them had waited upon her, had made her a cup of tea, had so much as hung up her hat and coat. Feeling herself the stronger, she had always waited upon others, and now for the first time, in this gentle, ladylike girl whom she had known less than a month, she had found a helpmate, one who showed her sympathy and consideration.

The cocoa was hot and foamy and delicious. They drank it sitting each at an end of the table with its white cloth that stood between the two windows.

"You're a smart young lady," Kathleen announced. "Who taught you to cook so well?"

"Oh, I just picked it up."

That was all the answer. Kathleen had already noticed that she received short replies when she questioned Hertha about her past.

"I can't keep that poor woman out of my head," Kathleen went on after a pause. "Here am I supping this elegant drink, and she without a crumb in the house."

"What woman?" Hertha asked. "Oh, yes, I know," guiltily. "You mean the woman the man told us about? But you don't know what may have happened.

Perhaps she has all she wants now."

"Perhaps she has, in heaven."

"Oh, you can't tell. Lucky things happen sometimes."

"Do they? I've mostly seen unlucky ones. But luck is a poor thing for any of us to be counting on."

"I don't know, I've been lucky, very lucky."

"Have you? When?"

"Well, once, down South, not so long ago. And I was lucky when I met you."

"Indeed it was I had the luck then."

"Indeed, I had. If you could have seen the awful room, Kathleen, that Miss Jones sent me to look at! In a cheap boarding house, and with a landlady who looked as though she would cheat you half the time and scold you the other half."

"That would have been a happy home to return to when you'd been out at night to see two lovers parted only to meet again! Now, sit where you are. The cook doesn't wash the dishes."

"No, but she dries them," Hertha said decisively; and together they cleared away the things.

"I'd give a penny to know your thoughts," Kathleen remarked as she wrung out the dishcloth and hung it up to dry.

Hertha did not answer. She was pulling a leaf from the geraniums, crus.h.i.+ng it in her fingers. She had left the lovers of the play and was back in an orange grove, her own lover close to her side. "You are Snowdrop of the fairy tale," he was saying. It had come true, she was Snowdrop, and yet of her own will she had destroyed the fairy tale. Whom might he not be making love to now? All at once she felt homesick and very tired.

Perhaps Kathleen a little guessed her thoughts. "It must be slow enough for you here with n.o.body but an old maid around like me. I wish I knew a fine young fellow to ask to dinner on Sunday."

"Ask Billy," Hertha said, looking up. "I'm sure it's time for him to come and look after the flowers."

CHAPTER XVI

William Applebaum, or Billy, as Kathleen called him, was a short man, stockily built, whose little length of limb and small hands were overtopped by a large head that commanded attention. It was well shaped, with an abundance of blond hair, a straight forehead, clear blue eyes and a fair, healthy skin. His mouth and chin were too small for the rest of his face, but he wisely concealed them with a beard which, as time went on, he kept closely clipped.

His grandfather, of whom he was justly proud, had been a revolutionist in Germany, in 1848, one of the band that strove bravely, but unsuccessfully, to bring political democracy to the Fatherland. Young Wilhelm was imprisoned for his activities, but he made his escape, and in a series of perilous adventures, in which his daring was only equaled by his good luck, at length found himself in America. There he settled in a small town in the Middle West, married, and brought up a family; and in his old age found himself with a son William and a grandson of the same name, living in the town of his adoption.

Those who love to dwell upon the past are grateful for any audience, and the grandfather, harking back at the end of his life to its one dramatic happening, was happy in the garden, working among his bright shrubs and clambering vines, or of a winter night seated by the ugly but heat-giving stove, to tell his always attentive small grandson of his great adventures. It would be, "Billy, I never hear a knock like that at the door that I don't remember the time I was drinking a gla.s.s of beer at the back of the house and the police knocked at the front and spoke my name." Or, "That's a strong grape-vine, Billy, growing against the arbor, and I like to see you climb up and get the fruit for us; but would you have been able to climb down the vine that saved my life the night I left prison?"

The story that Billy liked the best was the one where his grandfather--he must think of him not as gray-haired and rheumatic, but as a swift-running, strong youth--hid in a cart filled with hay. He lay close to the bottom, scarcely able to breathe for the seed about his face, jolting to the town on the seacoast. Suddenly there appeared the always pursuing soldiers. They came up, and the captain, staring suspiciously at the cart, called upon the driver to stop, and ordered the men to probe the hay with their bayonets. The soldiers reached over and jabbed again and again, going down deep until they touched the floor of the cart. But they found nothing and at length, turning about, put spurs to their steeds and galloped away. "When we reached the coast, and my good friend and comrade unloaded his hay, I lay there safe and sound," the old man would end impressively. "For it was not always the floor of the cart that they touched, but sometimes the board that I had put above my body as I lay huddled against the planks."

But while the first William had showed an adventurous spirit, the third of the name was content with a quiet and orderly existence. His grandfather became an intensely patriotic American, who fought through the Civil War, and to his death never voted any but the Republican ticket. To do otherwise would have seemed to him to doubt his adopted but intensely beloved land. He was impatient of any criticism of America. "It is only those who have fled from a despotism," he would say, "who can appreciate the United States." And so his grandson had taken things much as they came, and had done nothing more startling in his life than at twenty to come to New York where he found better opportunity for advancement than in the town of his birth. He obtained a position as bookkeeper, and for fifteen years, with absolute regularity, appeared at eight o'clock in the little stationer's shop, tucked among the great office buildings on the downtown street, to remain until half-past five when, with equal regularity, he returned to his well-kept boarding house, his only home in New York.

His annual vacation of two weeks for some years was spent in his western town, but marriage and death broke up the home there, the house was sold, and those remaining to him moved to the Pacific coast. After this, he rarely left the city, staying to care for the flowers that in the summer his landlady allowed him to plant in her back yard--though they were a trouble Monday with the wash--and to play long hours on the piano that stood against the wall by the further window in his south room.

Sometimes he went for a day to a beach, but night found him in his bed at home. Vacation over, he was quite ready to take up work. His German singing society was the greatest excitement in his methodical life, and if the chorus master a.s.signed him a solo part, never an ambitious one, he practised at home night after night, his pleasant ba.s.s sounding through the old house.

He was just the sort of man who should have married; but whether he was held by a romance of the days before he left his western town, or whether his elderly landlady, knowing that she could not have him herself was yet successful in guarding him against all comers, it was certain that he had made love to no woman since he had come to the great city, until, at thirty-five years of age, he met Kathleen. Then the pleasant clerk of precise ways, whose sentiment had been satisfied in singing "lieder" and watering tender plants, was consumed by a great, unselfish pa.s.sion. His life no longer moved about his books in the comfortable cage in the stationer's shop, nor about the boarding-house room in the quiet street, but day and night it found its happiness, its sorrow, too, and unrest, in the life of a woman.

It was at the bedside of an acquaintance, a clerk whom he had met in his work, that he first saw Kathleen. The sick man lived in a dingy, furnished-room house; and as William Applebaum mounted the stairs, noticed the dust in rolls against the wall, smelt to-day's dinner and yesterday's, he found himself extremely sorry for his sick friend. What must the end be if the beginning was like this? Then, fumbling in the dark to find his way, the k.n.o.b on which he had hesitatingly put his hand was pulled from his fingers, the door opened, and a large, comely woman, in a nurse's blue dress and white ap.r.o.n, stood before him.

"Is Mr. Saunders here?" he managed to ask.

"Indeed he is," was the answer, "and likely to remain here for some time. Will you come in and speak to him?"

"If I may."

Mr. Saunders proved to have typhoid fever, not a severe case but a long one, and Kathleen nursed him with Billy as her faithful a.s.sistant. "Mr.

Applebaum is too long a name for so short a man," she explained to him.

"But it's Billy all right with that beard." It was after this that he kept his beard closely clipped. He shared many a night's work with her; and long before Mr. Saunders was well, William Applebaum was at the feet of the lady of his choice.

If she knew it, she gave no sign. But as the sick man grew better and was able to sit in a chair, propped up with pillows, she stayed on in the evenings after her a.s.sistant came to relieve her, and the three visited together. Then Kathleen would regale them with stories of her work and of her plans for the future. She was always going to do something different, but always something held her to her present task.

Just now it was a brother who needed her to keep house for him. When she was free, however, she meant to buy a horse and cart, to stock it with goods, and drive across the continent as a peddler. They were two evenings filling that cart, and Mr. Saunders was each time so exhausted with merriment that he slept all night without waking. "I may never buy the cart," she once said confidentially to Billy, "but for many a year it's been a good stock in trade." Again, she meant to save enough to go to Paris where they were always wanting American nurses and paid fabulously for them, and where she could work for a year; and then, on the proceeds, travel for the rest of her days. And where to go? That brought up endless suggestions and much useful information. After Mr.

Saunders, who had gone once to South America as a salesman, had explained to her the ways of the insect life of the tropics, and his experience with snakes, she struck out everything south of thirty degrees of the equator. She could be as merry as a child in runabouts; but when the occasion came for discipline and serious work the men dared not jest with her, fearing the set look that came into her face.

Mr. Saunders got well and went back to his work, but before that time Mr. William Applebaum had asked Kathleen to be his wife.

"Marry an Appletree," she said, "you must think me Eve herself."

She always refused to give him a serious answer. "She had no idea of marrying any one. She had enough to do taking care of folk who took such ties upon themselves. And, if she did marry, did he suppose she'd choose a little man with a head on him like a comic supplement? Did he think he'd like to be a good husband sitting up nights for her, waiting patiently till he heard her footfall on the stair? As for wanting a home, she'd had more than enough home in her life. Caring for her own had worn her to the shadow she was, and it was a blessed comfort to be a free woman."

The last of Kathleen's rejoinders contained something more than mockery.

She had had her share in the rearing and supporting of her kin, and this winter with Hertha was proving a beautiful respite. Had her lover been of a jealous disposition he would have disliked the southern girl who occupied so strong a place in Kathleen's affection, but he was devoid of pettiness. For a year he had unavailingly striven to win his G.o.ddess, but there were more years in the calendar; and though he received nothing in return for his unstinted affection and admiration, his love did not take from him the right to give.

He came regularly to see Kathleen of a Sunday, to dinner if she were gracious enough to invite him; if not, then in the afternoon, when once in awhile she would go out with him to dinner, and to a meeting afterwards. Sometimes it would be at the forum at Cooper Union, sometimes in a liberal church, but always the great problem of the world, the relation of labor to capital, would come under discussion.

Then Kathleen would sit tense in her seat or lean forward to make sure that she caught each of the speaker's words. She would grunt with disgust at the rank conservatism of an argument; or again, applaud with all her might the denunciation of oppression and greed. The man at her side would watch her, filled with admiration at her splendid spirit, but himself moved not at all by what he heard. Only, occasionally, he would be almost angry at the invective hurled at the capitalist cla.s.s, and had once said as he went out, "If the dirty Jew didn't like America he might go back to Russia on the first boat, and the country be all the better."

Kathleen was furious at this heresy, and they walked the streets for an hour afterward discussing the sins and virtues of America. It was then that he told her of his grandfather, and she listened with enthusiastic interest to the recital of the revolutionist's political activities and his escape. "But what did he do after he got here?" was her question, and when she learned that he had then sat down and wors.h.i.+ped the land of his adoption, she lost interest. "His light burned out in his youth,"

was her comment. William Applebaum, third, for the first time resented her speech, and told hotly of the Civil War and of his grandfather's part in it. He won Kathleen's favor by his defense of his hero, and she never again spoke in any way but appreciatively of his revolutionary forbear, but she showed no greater favor to him.