From a Bench in Our Square Part 39

"Don't be school-girlis.h.!.+" admonished the Bonnie La.s.sie severely. "Poor old Dominie! He doesn't know what's going on under his very nose. Where are your eyes?"

"In Mendel's top drawer, I suppose.... The question is how are we going to make it up to Plooie?"

"I don't think you need worry about that," returned the Bonnie La.s.sie loftily.

Nor was there any occasion for worry. Two days later there occurred an irruption of dismaying young men with casual squares of paper in their pockets, upon which they scratched brief notes. They were, I was subsequently given to understand, the pick and flower of the city's reportorial genius. (I could imagine the ghost of Inky Mike with his important notebook and high-poised pencil, regarding with wonder and disdain their quiet and unimpressive methods.) A freshly painted sign across the front of Plooie's bas.e.m.e.nt, was the magnet that drew them:

Emile Garin & Wife Umbrella Mender & Porch Cleanser

to

His Majesty

The King of the Belgians (By Royal Warranty)

No; Plooie and Annie Oombrella need no help from the humble now. Their well-deserved fortune is made.

TRIUMPH

The months go by--bleak March and May-day heat-- Harvest is over--winter well-nigh done-- And still I say, "To-morrow we shall meet."

MAY PROBYN

The Little Red Doctor sat on the far end of my bench. Snow fringed the bristling curve of his mustache. He s.h.i.+vered.

"Dominie," said he, "it's a wild day."

I a.s.sented.

"Dominie," said the Little Red Doctor, "it is no kind of a day for an old man to be sitting on a bench."

I dissented.

"Dominie," persisted the Little Red Doctor, "you can't deny that you're old."

"Whose fault is that but yours?" I retorted.

"Don't try to flatter me," said the Little Red Doctor. "You'd have licked my old friend, Death, in that bout you had with him, without any help of mine. And, anyway, you were already old, then. You're a tough old bird, Dominie. Otherwise you wouldn't be sitting here in a March blizzard staring at the Worth mansion and wondering what really happened there three years ago."

"Your old friend, Death, beat you that time," said I maliciously.

The Little Red Doctor chose to ignore my taunt. "Look your fill, Dominie," he advised. "You won't have much more chance."

"Why?" I asked, startled.

"The wreckers begin on it next month. Also a nice, new building is going up next door to it on that little, secret, walled jungle that Ely Crouch used to misname his garden. I'm glad of it, too. I don't like anachronisms."

"I'm an anachronism," I returned. "You'll be one pretty soon. Our Square is one solid anachronism."

"It won't be much longer. The tide is undermining us. Other houses will go as the Worth place is going. You'll miss it, Dominie. You love houses as if they were people."

It is true. To me houses are the only fabrications of man's hands that are personalities. Enterprise builds the factory, Greed the tenement, but Love alone builds the house, and by Love alone is it maintained against the city's relentless encroachments. Once hallowed by habitation, what warm and vivid influences impregnate it! Ambition, pride, hope, joys happily shared; suffering, sorrow, and loss bravely endured--the walls outlive them all, gathering with age, from grief and joy alike, kind memories and stanch traditions. Yes, I love the old houses. Yet I should not be sorry to see the Worth mansion razed. It has outlived all the lives that once cherished it and become a dead, unhuman thing.

That solid square of brown, gray-trimmed stone had grown old honorably with the honorable generations of the Worths. Then it had died. In one smiting stroke of tragedy the life had gone out of it. Now it stood staring bleakly out from its corner with filmed eyes, across the busy square. Pa.s.sing its closed gates daily, I was always sensible of a qualm of the spirit, a daunting prescience that the stilled mansion still harbored the ghost of an unlaid secret.

The Little Red Doctor broke in upon my reverie.

"Yes; you're old, Dominie. But you're not wise. You're very foolish.

Foolish and obstinate."

Knowing well what he meant, I nevertheless pampered him by asking: "Why am I foolish and obstinate?"

"Because you refuse to believe that Ned Worth murdered Ely Crouch. Don't you?"

"I do."

"Then why did Ned commit suicide?"

"I don't know."

"How do you explain away his written confession?"

"I don't. I only know that it was not in Ned Worth's character willfully to kill an old man. You were his friend; you ought to know it as well as I do."

"Ah, that's different," said the Little Red Doctor, giving me one of his queer looks. "Yes; you're a pig-headed old man, Dominie."

"I'm a believer in character."

"I don't know of any other man equally pig-headed, except possibly one.

He's old, too."

"Gale Sheldon," said I, naming the gentle, withered librarian of a branch library a few blocks to the westward, the only other resident of Our Square who had unfailingly supported me in my loyalty to the memory of the last of the Worths.

"Yes. He's waiting for us now in his rooms. Will you come?"

Perceiving that there was something back of this--there usually is, in the Little Red Doctor's maneuvers--I rose and we set out. As we pa.s.sed the Worth house it seemed grimmer and bleaker than ever before. There was something savage and desperate in its desolation. The cold curse of abandonment lay upon it. At the turn of the corner the Little Red Doctor said abruptly.

"She's dead."

"Who?" I demanded.

"The girl. The woman in the case."

"In the Ely Crouch case? A woman? There was never any woman hinted at."

"No. And there never would have been as long as she was alive.