At the Age of Eve Part 11

ALFRED

Cousin Eunice's new house in the city, which is really a very old house with the addition of all the wires and pipes and hardwood tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs which we think we can't live without these days, is a love of a place. They bought it for the height of the ceilings and the size of the rooms, where every member of the family can spread out like a fried egg. But its especial glory is the drawing-room, a long, stately apartment all tricked out in the deepest, wild-woodiest green.

The walls and hangings are of the hue that our Mother Nature loves best, while the antique furniture is the color of chestnuts at Hallowe'en. There are dark-toned pedestals at intervals, holding jars of ferns, and the entire room presents such a perfect reproduction of a shady nook in the woods that Rufe declared at first he dared not venture into it, for fear of being snake-bitten.

There is a big leather chair over in one secluded corner, a chair which will easily hold the entire Clayborne family, and, on nights when there is no company and they are in a sentimental mood, the married lovers pretend that the room is the ravine in which they did their courting, and that the big chair is the old gray rock they were sitting on when he proposed to her.

This is a delightful make-believe--for them. Usually Waterloo and I are thrown upon each other for companions.h.i.+p, if it is late in the evening and Grapefruit has gone home.

He often begs for music, which I am always glad to furnish, or would be if his taste were not so very p.r.o.nounced and so limited, and does not by any means include my favorite cla.s.sics.

"You play 'Ditsie,' and I'll play 'Little Ditsie,'" his baby voice suggests, as he finds his French harp and blows a violent accompaniment. But if I tire of this and my fingers wander off into the mournful notes of the _Miserere_ from _Il Trovatore_ (another love of my youth) his harp and the corners of his mouth drop simultaneously, and he implores me not to play that "poor song."

This has not happened very many times, however, for there is nearly always somebody here. The Gordons frequently, and sometimes Alfred.

They never come together, for whenever Doctor Gordon goes out anywhere at night Alfred has to stay at home and attend to the calls that come in. This is what a "cub" is for; then, too, it gives the Gordons a better chance to talk about him, which they take as much pleasure in doing as if he were their own dear son.

It is amazing how much they all think of Alfred. Not amazing, certainly, in any sense that he is not worthy of all the affection they bestow upon him, but I believe that it is seldom a girl has a young man thrown at her head so _unanimously_ as I have Alfred thrown at me by our loving friends.

If he threw himself I should die, but he never does.

He is frank, and loyal, and sober-sided; just a little merry with me now and then, but for the most part going his even-tenored way and doing his work without any more fuss and splutter than--a fireless cooker. He never talks about what he is going to do, although his eyes are so deep and brown that I feel sure he is a dreamer.

He is the kind of man who seems to walk, with deliberate yet sure step, into the things he wants. This denotes, of course, that he has sat up late many nights, smoothing out rough places in the road, so that his course might be dignified and steady when he gets ready to run it.

And, if Solomon--or whoever it was--told the truth about silence being golden, then Alfred Morgan is sinfully rich. He is timid, too, around women--_well_ women, I mean; and I don't believe he would ever have grown so fond of me if he had not first known me at an age when I wore such plain linen blouses and soft silk ties you couldn't tell whether I was a boy or girl.

Even after my dresses began to sweep the ground I think he still thought of me as a boy. "You're a good little chap," he would say to me occasionally when I had done something for his comfort or pleasure; and I so entirely considered _him_ a boy in spite of those six years between us that I seldom felt to see how my hair was arranged when I would hear his footsteps approaching.

Then, one day I had a rude shock about Alfred's degree of manhood.

Ann Lisbeth and I were in his private office waiting for Doctor Gordon to get through with a string of patients which was overflowing the reception-room, and write out a check for her to take on a shopping excursion. (Things have changed with them since the days of their early married life, when Ann Lisbeth got a new dress only once a year; and then had to have it made by somebody who was owing her husband for a baby or a spell of measles.)

There was plenty of s.p.a.ce in Alfred's room, poor boy, and I was sitting in front of his desk, idly fingering some papers and journals lying around in scattered confusion.

My attention was arrested presently by a small, oblong blotting-pad, with his name, Doctor Alfred Morgan, printed on the celluloid cover.

The drug firms of the city sent such things out to all the doctors occasionally, but this was a particularly pretty one, with a little raised medallion on it--a picture of a stately stork approaching a cheery little cottage, with the fat, rosy, inevitable burden in his bill. The moon and stars were s.h.i.+ning as they never shone on sea nor land, and there was a comfortable glow coming from the cottage windows, a glow of welcome, it seemed.

It was a happy-looking little picture, but it brought a curious feeling of uneasiness to my mind.

"Ann Lisbeth," I called, loud enough to cause her to look up from the magazine she was reading, yet not so loud as to be heard by Alfred, who was in the next room making a blood count. "Do you suppose they let anybody as young as Alfred do _this_?" I held up the picture.

"Oh, my goodness," she laughed, looking not so much at the picture as at my horrified face. "_Young!_ Why, he has two pairs of twins _named_ for him, besides a little girl whose happy parents are so fond of him that they made him name her. Her name is Ann Morgan."

"The Ann is for _you_," I cried, my face flus.h.i.+ng.

"Nay, for you," she insisted, still laughing so that Alfred heard her and came in to see what it was that was so funny.

"Some of Ann's nonsense," she explained, and I slapped the blotter into my purse before he turned and looked at me.

After that I naturally began to treat Alfred with a good deal more respect, which he never seemed to notice.

It was about this time that he began finding a "good cla.s.s" of patients who were trusting enough or reckless enough to let him operate on them; patients who remembered his work at the hospital, or who were willing to take Doctor Gordon's word for it when he a.s.sured them that Morgan could do the job as well as he himself. Of course this last happened only when there was an emergency case that Doctor Gordon could not attend to, or an out-of-town call that promised to have so little compensation that the elder doctor felt that he would not be justified in leaving the city for it.

And then it was that perhaps some old six-cylinder surgeon who happened to see the operation would go away and remark that he always knew Morgan was going to make good, for, by George! the fellow handled the knife like a veteran!

These stories never failed to bring a thrill of satisfaction to my breast, for Alfred is my old chum, and I have already mentioned in here my reverence for power.

Jean Everett likes Alfred almost as much as I do, and reads me long lectures upon the idiocy of my course. She religiously invites him out to her house when I am spending the week-end there and makes me dress up in absurdly coquettish things, in view of the fact that he has possibly seen me for the past seven days in the plainest of tailored clothes.

Jean has not grown up to be a beauty, that is, not a beauty that could be marked off by rule, but she has that indefinable something about her exquisite get-up which makes you suspect that all her lingerie is st.i.tched with thread number 120. So dainty is she in her pretty blue frocks that a poetic he-cozen of hers calls her a Wedgwood girl, but Guilford calls her his twenty-two carat girl, because her heart is as golden as her hair.

I have been in the city only a little while--if I take the calendar's word for it; but it has seemed long to me, for the season of the year is that when everything is very dull. All the people who have country homes are reluctantly bidding them good-by and the signs of fall cleaning are disfiguring all the city homes. The theaters are publis.h.i.+ng long lists of attractions which are coming later on, but now there is nothing.

The only politicians I have seen I have met accidentally up at the _Times_ office--and they are all old, and wear long frock coats,--and look as if they chewed tobacco.

So, as I promised in the first chapter that I was not going to bother you with daily details and venison pasties, I suppose I shall have to close this chapter without recording _one_ thing of interest. I can a.s.sure you, however, that you do not regret the dullness of it _half_ so much as I do.

But hold! Shall I forget Neva? Self-centered thing that I am! Because the last three weeks have been dreary and barren to me shall I not rejoice in the happiness of some one else?

Among the other unimportant things which I have done since coming up to the city I have helped Neva get installed in a boarding-school for young ladies. An expensive place, it is, where for a certain unnaturally large sum each year they teach you to broaden your a's, sharpen your eyes, and loath your home surroundings for ever afterward.

The matter had been under discussion for some days before I left home, and I set forth the pros and especially the _cons_ to Mrs. Sullivan.

But the humiliation of the fit doctor's visit was fresh and galling; and Neva's boarding-school experience would more than turn her rival's triumph into Dead Sea fruit. She must be entered as a student at the beautifully named college.

They came up together a week before time for the school to open, Neva and her mother, so that they could learn their way about the city a little and also buy Neva some new music and a supply of winter clothes.

Now, Neva's songs, while new and silly, are sung in her buoyant young voice with so much gusto on the caressing words that they are a kind of actual music; a joyous sort of wholesome music, like the sound of the postman's whistle on a suns.h.i.+ny morning, when you know that he is bringing you a love-letter! There goes my imagination again, for I never had a love-letter in my life! Not even a post-card, and it's been _three weeks_. Possibly dignified people do not write post-cards!

Especially gubernatorial timber!

Now, what started this digression? Oh, yes, Neva's silly songs which she bought while she was up here those few days before school commenced. I started out to say that they did not seem at all silly to me this time. I actually caught myself singing them over and over again and found considerable beauty in one that was a plea to some hardhearted beloved to make "ev'ry dream come true."

Yes, I was delighted with Neva's new songs, and Neva was delighted with everything she saw in the city: with the pure linen s.h.i.+rt-waists marked down to one dollar; with the vast, dim cathedral which we would drop into to enjoy its solemn beauty nearly every time we were near it, after I found that Neva responded to its appeal; she admired the Egyptian mummies in the museum--the terrified delight of my early years; but she found the greatest joy in watching the fire-engines at work.

Mrs. Sullivan remained strictly at home after her first day of tramping the city streets, which she declared "was the death o' her feet," so that Neva's bubbling accounts of the sights seen, when she would return to their hotel at night and try to cheer her mother up with her lively recitals, were by no means the least enjoyable part of the day's program.

"Oh, mamma, the cathedral's just _grand_," she declared with enthusiasm, after her first visit. "I told Miss Ann that I _wished_ papa had stayed a Catholic and had raised me that way."

Mrs. Sullivan's Baptist eyebrows flew up in horror, then her entire face settled into its normal look of hopelessness.

"Maybe you won't be so glib to wish it at the Great Day of Judgment,"

she said warningly, and the capital letters I have used were all in her voice.

"--And the mummies!" Neva hastened on, seeing that she had struck the wrong key, and her tones were as light and frolicksome as her mother's were lugubrious. "I just love mummies!"

Mrs. Sullivan still refused to show a smiling interest.

"Well, I reckon they're all right, if Miss Ann recommends 'em," she said grudgingly, but with a little wonder depicted on her face; "still, I make it a rule not to fill _my_ stomach too full of strange vittles!"