The Gay Cockade Part 52

She tucked it in her bag and went to telephone to d.i.c.k.

And would he meet her on the corner under the street lamp that night when she came home from the office? She had something to tell him.

d.i.c.k met Nannie, and presently they pursued their rapturous way. A little later Tommy Jackson pa.s.sed by. Something caught his eye.

A bit of white paper.

He stooped and picked it up. It was Mary's letter to Nannie. Nannie had cried into her little handkerchief while she talked to d.i.c.k, and in getting the handkerchief out of the bag the letter had come with it and had dropped unnoticed to the ground.

It had been years since Tommy had seen any of Mary's writing. A sentence caught his eye, and he read straight through. After all, there are things permitted an officer of the law which might be unseemly in the average citizen.

And when he had read, Tommy began to say things beneath his breath. And the chances are that had Kingdon Knox appeared at that moment things would have fared badly with him.

But it was Mary Barker who came. She had under her arm in a paper parcel the fat doll with the blond curls and the blue socks. She did not see Tommy until she was almost upon him.

Then she said: "What are you doing here, Tommy?"

"Why shouldn't I be here?"

"This isn't your beat."

"It has been my beat since two weeks ago. I've seen you go by every night, Mary."

She stood looking up at him. And he looked down at her; and so, of course, their gaze met, and something that she saw in Tommy's eyes made Mary's overflow.

"Mary, darling," said Tommy tenderly.

"You said you wouldn't forgive me."

"That was fifteen years ago."

"Tommy, I'm sorry."

Tommy stood very straight as became an officer of the law with, the eyes of the world upon him.

"May," he said, "I just read your letter to Nannie. She dropped it. If I'd known the things in that letter fifteen years ago I'd have stayed on my job until I got you. But I thought you didn't care."

"I thought so too," said Mary.

"But the letter told me that you wanted a husband's loving heart and a strong arm," said Tommy, "and, please G.o.d, you are going to have them, Mary. And now you run along, girl, dear. I can't be making love when I'm on duty. But I'll come and kiss you at nine."

So Mary ran along, and her heart sang. And when she got home she unwrapped the fat doll and kissed every curl of her, and she set her under the lovely lamp; and then she got a long box and put something in it and wrapped it and addressed it to Kingdon Knox.

And after that she went to the window and stood there, watching until she saw Tommy coming.

And the next morning when Kingdon Knox found the long box on his desk, addressed in Mary's handwriting, he thought it was a Christmas present, and he opened it, smiling.

But his smile died as he read the note which lay on top of a string of jade beads:

"I am sending them back, Mr. Knox, with my resignation. I should never have taken them. But somehow you made me feel that I was a sort of fairy princess, and that jade beads belonged to me, and everything beautiful, and that some day life would bring them. But life isn't that, and you knew it and I didn't. Life is just warm human happiness, and a home, and work for those we love. And so, after all, I am going to marry Tommy. And Nannie is going to marry d.i.c.k. In a way it is a happy ending, and in a way it isn't, because I've grown away from the kind of life I must live with Tommy, and I am afraid that in some ways I am not fitted for it. But Tommy says that I am silly to be afraid. And in the future I am going to trust Tommy."

And so Mary went out of Kingdon Knox's life. And on Christmas Day at the head of a great table, with servants to the right of him and servants to the left, he carved a mammoth turkey; and there was silver s.h.i.+ning, and gla.s.s sparkling and lovely women smiling, all in honor of the merry season.

But Kingdon Knox was not merry as he thought of the jade beads and of Mary's empty desk.

BEGGARS ON HORSEBACK

I

With the Merryman girls economy was a fine art. Money was spent by them to preserve the family traditions. Nothing else counted. Everything was sacrificed to the G.o.ds of yesterday.

Little Anne Merryman had s.h.i.+vered all her short life in the bleakness of this domestic ideal.

"Why can't I have b.u.t.ter on my bread?" she had demanded in her long-legged schoolgirl days, when she had worn her fair hair in a fat braid down her back.

The answers had never been satisfying. Well-bred people might, Amy indicated, go without b.u.t.ter. Their income was not elastic, and there were things more important.

"What things? Amy, I'm so hungry I could eat a house."

It was these expressions of Anne's about food which shocked Amy and Ethel.

"I'd sell my soul for a slice of roast beef."

"Anne!"

"Well, I would!"

"I--I don't see how you can be so ordinary, Anne."

"Ordinary" in the lexicon of Amy and Ethel meant "plebeian." No one in the Merryman family had ever been so ordinary as Anne. Hitherto the Merrymans had been content to warm themselves by the fires of their own complacency, to feed themselves on past splendors; for the Merrymans were as old as Norman rule in England. They had come to America with grants from the king, they had family portraits and family silver and family diamonds, and now in this generation of orphaned girls, two of them at least were fighting the last battles of family pride. The fortunes of the Merrymans had declined, and Amy and Ethel, with their backs, as it were, to the wall, were making a final stand.

"We must have evening clothes, we must entertain our friends, we must pay for the family pew"; this was their nervous litany. The Merrymans had always dressed and entertained and wors.h.i.+ped properly; hence it was for lace or tulle or velvet, as the case might be, that their money went. It went, too, for the very elegant and exclusive little dinners to which, on rare occasions, their friends were bidden; and it went for the high place in the synagogue from which they prayed their pharisaical prayers.

"We thank thee, Lord, that we are not as others," prayed Amy and Ethel fervently.

But Anne prayed no such prayers. She wanted to be like other people. She wanted to eat and drink with the mult.i.tude, she wanted a warm, warm heart, a groaning board. She wanted snugness and coziness and comfort.

And she grew up loving these things, and hating the pale walls of their old house in Georgetown, the family portraits, the made-over dinner gowns that her sisters wore, her own made-over party frocks.

"Can't I have a new one, Amy?"

"It's Ethel's turn."

So it was when Anne went to a certain diplomatic reception in a made-over satin slip, hidden by a cloud of snowy tulle, that Murray Flint first waked to the fact of her loveliness.