Mrs. Budlong's Christmas Presents Part 5

"And what do you intend to do this time?" Mr. Budlong demanded. The skeptic in his tone stung her to revolt. She could usually be strong in the presence of her husband. She looked at least like Mrs.

Boadicea as she said:

"I intend to tell Sally Swezey what you told me to. And I will accept no apologies, none whatever."

When Mr. Budlong came home to dinner she avoided his gaze. She confessed that she had changed her program. She hadn't the heart to insult poor Sally, and she had admitted that she was a hit dizzy and qualmish and she had--well, she--she--

Mr. Budlong finished for her fiercely:

"I know! You ate a lot of her wine jelly, and you told her she was a love and you kissed her good-by, and would she excuse you from coming to the door because you were still a little wobbly."

Mrs. Budlong looked at him in surprise: "She told you!"

"Nah! I haven't seen her."

"Then how on earth did you ever guess?" she babbled.

"It was my womanly intuition!" he snarled, and that evening he went down town and sat in the hotel lobby for a couple of hours. He usually did this anyway--in summer he sat on the sidewalk--but this evening, he did it with a certain implication of escape. He expressed renunciation in the mere shutting of the door.

On the way home Mr. Budlong was busy with schemes. His mind turned again to his son.

In a smallish town, a growing boy is an unfailing source of _casus belli_.

As an inciter of feuds there was something almost Balkan or Moroccan about Ulysses Budlong Junior. Nearly every day he had come charging into the house with bad news in some form or other. Some rock or s...o...b..ll he had cast with the most innocent of intentions had gone through a window or a milk wagon or somebody's silk hat. Or he had pulled a small girl's hair, or taken the skates away from a helpless urchin. He had bad luck too in picking victims with belligerent big brothers.

Mr. Budlong recognized these desperado traits and he fully expected Ulysses Junior to make him the father of a convict. Suddenly now despair became hope. Let Mrs. Budlong capitalize her spats; he would promote Ulie's. The affair Detwiller had turned out badly, but Mr.

Budlong would not yield to one defeat. He watched eagerly for the next misdemeanor of his young hopeless. He relied on him to embroil, as it were, all Europe in an international conflict.

But the dove of peace seemed to have alighted on Ulysses' shoulder.

He even began to go to Sunday School--the Methodist this year because they had given the largest cornucopias in town the Christmas before.

And he talked nothing but Golden Texts till Mr. Budlong began to fear that he would one day be the father of a parson.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Budlong grew bellicose again. She snubbed people right and left, but they generously imputed it to absent-mindedness.

She failed to go to the dinner party the Teeples gave in her honor, and she sent no excuse. This was the unpardonable sin in Carthage and the Budlong chairs sat vacant through the dinner.

But Mrs. Teeple graciously a.s.sumed that she was ill and sent over the cut flowers off the table. And she hoped the poor dear would feel better soon.

A few days later Mrs. Budlong's pet Maltese kitten was done to nine deaths at once by the Disney's fox terrier. Mrs. Budlong mourned the kitten, but there was consolation in the thought that she could now cut the Disneys off her list.

Before she could get the kitten decently interred in the back yard, Mrs. Disney was at the front door. She flung her arms round Mrs.

Budlong and wept, declaring that she had resolved to give the murderous terrier away to a farmer, and had already sent to Chicago for a pedigreed Angora to replace the Maltese. It would arrive the day before Christmas.

IX

WORSE, AND MORE OF IT

As if that were not enough for one day, in the afternoon Johnetta Ackerley called. She saw Mrs. Budlong at an upper window and waved to her as she came along the walk. When the cook arrived upstairs like a grand piano moving in, Mrs. Budlong said in an icy tone:

"Not at home."

"But I told her you was. And she seen you at the windy."

"Not!--at!--home!"

"But I'm after telling her--"

Mrs. Budlong could be as stern as steel with her husband or her servants. She cowed Brigida into lumbering downstairs with the message. Mrs. Budlong went to the window to triumph over her victim's retreat in a panic of confusion.

Instead, she heard a light patter of footsteps and Johnetta Ackerley hurried into the room.

"Oh, my dear, are you ill? Pardon my coming right up, but the cook takes so long and I was so worried for fear you were--but you aren't, are you?"

Mrs. Budlong was at bay. She glared at the intruder and threw up her chin. Johnetta stared at her aghast.

"Why, my dear! you aren't mad at me, are you?"

Mrs. Budlong smiled bitterly, and said nothing. Johnetta shrilled:

"Why, what have I done?"

As a matter of fact, what had she done? All that Mrs. Budlong could think of was her husband's unused suggestion for a war with Sally Swezey. She spoke through locked teeth:

"It's not what you've done but what you've said."

"Why, what have I said?"

"You know well enough what you've been saying behind my back, and you needn't think that people don't come and tell me. I name no names, but I know! Oh, I know!"

Now, of course, everybody says things behind everybody else's back that n.o.body would care to have repeated to anybody. Through Johnetta Ackerley's memory dashed a hundred caustic comments she had made on Mrs. Budlong. She blushed and sighed, turned away and closed the door after her, like the last line of an elegy.

A surge of triumph swept over Mrs. Budlong. Success at last.

Then the door opened and Johnetta reappeared on the sill with a look of angelic contrition.

"I hardly know what to say," she said. "Of course, I must admit I did rather forget myself. It was at the last meeting of the Progressive Euchre Club and everybody was criticizing you for having solid gold prizes when they were at your house. They said it was vulgar ostentation. I didn't say anything for the longest time, but finally when they all said your money had gone to your head, hadn't it, I admit I did mumble, 'It seems so.' But it is only what everybody else says all the time, and I a.s.sure you I didn't really mean it. Of course n.o.body can behave just the same after they are a millionaire as they did before. But I am awfully fond of you and--and--"

"It was most disloyal," said Mrs. Budlong. "And to think that after tearing me to pieces behind my back, you could come and call on me."

It was a fine speech, but after she heard herself say it, Mrs. Budlong had a sinking feeling that if she herself had never called on anybody she had not criticized she would have stayed at home all her life. But Johnetta Ackerley took another line. She threw herself on Mrs.

Budlong's mercy, and if Mrs. Budlong boasted of anything more than another it was her mercy.

"I have just been at the church," said Johnetta, "helping to decorate it for Christmas week, and I was hanging up a big motto 'Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men' and I think it ought to apply to women, too.

I grovel in apology and I pray you to forgive me. You can't refuse your forgiveness when I implore it, can you?"

Mrs. Budlong wanted to but could not and the two women fell about each other's throats and exchanged moan for moan. As they were comfortably dabbing each other's tears from their cheeks and sniffing their own and laughing cosily after the rain, Johnetta giggled and sobbed at once:

"The idea of your thinking I didn't just love you--and me working my fingers to the bone making a Christmas present for you!"