Angela's Business Part 21

Pretty near everything."

"Well! I've noticed it hasn't been burning well. Need a new mantel, I suppose--"

"New mantel won't do you any good long's your air-draft's choked that way."

"Oh! So that's the trouble, is it?"

"That's one of them. P'r'aps you like it that way?"

The proprietor of the lamp having disclaimed such a fancy, the strange lad said: "Well, I'll fix it for you, then. Sit steady."

He reached up an arm long as a monkey's, which shed drops of water on the writing-table, and the green glow suddenly faded out, leaving the Studio in total darkness.

Out of the Stygian gloom Charles said: "There's another light there.

I'll--"

"I know. Thought I might as well look into that one, too, while I'm at it. Just give your globe and chimney a minute to cool."

"Oh, of course!--certainly."

"Don't s'pose you want to stand a new mantel for the lamp?"

"I'm enough of a sport, but I fear there's not a new one in the house."

"Hold it for me, please," said the boy.

A pinpoint of light had appeared in the blackness; it moved toward Charles's hand. He received the little searchlight, let it go out, hastily found and pushed the b.u.t.ton again. And then Miss Angela's brother began to take his lamp all apart, cleaning it, blowing through it at unexpected places, and wiping the parts with a dark oily rag, which, luckily enough, he seemed to have in his coat-pocket.

The lad's single-mindedness, his un-selfconscious matter-of-factness had attracted Charles at sight. He recalled what Mary Wing had told him of Wallie Flower's struggles to get an education. Thus, as the light-repairing proceeded in the almost total darkness, a conversation grew up, at first largely question and answer. And the upshot of it was that Charles, as a tutor, offered to instruct Wallie Flower, free gratis, in German and English, the two college entrance subjects in which he was still somewhat deficient.

This odd development came at the end of the talk, when the illuminating power of both Charles's and the Judge's lights had been notably improved. When the brother understood that further education was being offered him for nothing, a gleam came suddenly into his oddly mature gaze.

He almost exclaimed: "Do you know German?"

"You might say I wrote it."

He pondered. "That means you do know it?"

"Like a member of the family."

"Do you teach nights?"

"I'm going to teach you nights."

And it was so arranged, the lessons to begin directly after Christmas.

The boy became briefly embarra.s.sed, boggling over his thanks. But Charles cut him short. "I'm doing it because I want to. That's the only reason I ever do anything."

Relieved, Miss Angela's brother turned to the door, for all the world like one who had come to mend the lamps, and nothing else.

"By the way," said Charles, casually. "Thank your sister for her note, and say that I'll send an answer by mail."

He was left pleased with the interview, and with himself. In the generous gift of three hours a week to Angela's brother, he perceived something fitting and compensatory. If obligation existed--and it did, in a way--did not this discharge it, subtly and modernly? Kiss the sister on the sofa, tutor the brother in the Studio--what more fair or honorable than that?

One thing had rather struck him, of course--Wallie Flower's saying that he had hated to come away from Mitch.e.l.lton. This, it seemed, had been chiefly due to Mr. Bush, the boy's science teacher at the Mitch.e.l.lton Academy, whom Wallie clearly adored, whose eyebrows he had blown off in an experiment only last summer. As he had previously understood that both the Doctor and Mrs. Flower had also been attached to Mitch.e.l.lton, it really appeared that Miss Angela was the only member of the family who had actually desired to make the move. And she had moved.

But this thought--like the hypercriticisms on the note--merely knocked at the door of the young man's mind and pa.s.sed on. He felt himself warming anew toward this simple Type, with its charming friendly instincts and its sweet forgiveness of the stormy ways of men. On his return from his holiday, he resolved that he would give Angela some token of his regard more substantial than a note by mail: send her, say, with that book of hers, a costly box of appreciative blossoms.

XII

Unlike the ladies in the books, Angela, regrettably enough, did not get a "sheaf of letters" every morning. Mr. Garrott's answer to her note, which lay beside her breakfast-plate on the second day following, was, indeed, her only mail that week. Hence it was with feelings of excitement that she seized a table-fork and hastily slit the envelope.

Angela read:--

DEAR MISS FLOWER:

May I say how deeply I appreciate your note? And will you please believe that I have blamed myself entirely for what you so generously call our misunderstanding? While, of course, I must continue to blame myself, you cannot know how pleasant it is to be permitted to feel that you have forgiven me.

With the deepest appreciation, and all the good wishes of the season, believe me,

Yours sincerely,

CHARLES KING GARROTT.

It must be said of this note that it was the sort that puts its best foot foremost. First impressions of it were agreeable, but it did not wear. On the second reading, Angela perceived that, though as nice as possible, Mr. Garrott's reply said nothing about calling, which, in a manner of speaking, was the true subject of the correspondence. By the time she had read the reply half a dozen times, she found it flatly disappointing. Two days later, when she heard through Cousin Mary Wing that Mr. Garrott had gone to the country, not to return till after the New Year, she was conscious of a sudden and pervading hopelessness.

The feeling applied, not to her princ.i.p.al friend alone, but to all the conditions of her life.

Angela understood, of course, that Mr. Garrott's remarkable offer to tutor Wallie for nothing was an attention to her, and a very handsome one. Still, it was not just the sort of attention that a young girl prizes most, perhaps; and in especial it did not meet the needs of this particular situation. To have a busy man-friend teaching German to your little brother on your account is very flattering, indeed; but it does not necessarily lead to the early clearing-up of a personal misunderstanding. That Mr. Garrott had been much worried by their misunderstanding, all along, Angela had known, by means of that womanly intuition of which we read so much; now his note said so, in so many words. But, manlike, he still did not see that, at heart, she was the same girl that had attracted him so in the beginning, and that if he would but call, she would make everything as it had been before.

How was she ever to see him again now?

At nineteen, youth accepts life's vicissitudes unquestioningly, but at twenty-five, a womanly woman (if still without a home, a husband and three curly-headed little children) has had time to whittle a number of observations to a fairly sharp point. Angela thought her situation a hard one, and it was. Wealth, influence, valuable connections--these aids were not for her. All the ordinary opportunities enjoyed by girls "in society," she lacked--in chief, opportunities of meeting people casually, as at parties, of seeing the same people again and again, under the most agreeable auspices. Her family simply failed to put her in a party position, as it might be called; in consequence of which, it came to this, that really her only meeting-place for the few people she knew was on the street, walking. And even at the best, of course, that method (by the mere laws of choice and chance) was most unsatisfactory.

Suppose that Mr. Garrott _had_ been taking walks all the time, for instance, but, by reason of her having called him a brute, was choosing other streets--how was she to know? A city is a big place, and one young girl in a tight skirt cannot walk very fast or far, or cover a large amount of s.p.a.ce in a given time.

"Marna" alone was outstanding; and it carried but the slenderest antic.i.p.ations. Moreover, that question, all these depressing questions, were academic now, and would be for weeks to come. The little coterie had scattered far, and she had no means of filling the empty places.

There followed the dreariest days Angela had known since winter before last in Mitch.e.l.lton.

"How can you _expect_ anybody to notice us, mother?" she exclaimed, one day. "The family of a poor, obscure doctor, living in a _hut_ on a back street, with not a living soul to help us! I think it's remarkable I accomplish as much as I do."

It was on this day, a cold Sunday afternoon shortly before Christmas, that the lonely girl carried out a good intention she had had in mind for some time. She wrote a long, intimate, sisterly letter to her favorite brother Tommy, who had got so far away since he married money in Pittsburg.

Angela had just come in from a freezing, eventless walk with f.a.n.n.y Warder. (f.a.n.n.y, who as Mrs. Flower said, had made a great success of her life, marrying at twenty, seemed to be on an indefinite "visit"; there was talk, of course.) Having first thawed her hands at her register, which was supposed to waft up heat from the stove in the dining-room below, but didn't particularly, Angela drew up her rocking-chair into the zone of ostensible warmth. She sat with one slender foot curled under her, by a trick that no man has ever mastered. And this time she had not searched for the formal tools of a note-writer, but employed a stub of a pencil and a pad upon her lifted knee.