Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings Part 3

New work for me; I'm not used to putting kiddies to bed."

"Oh, I'm not either!" breathed Miss Theodosia, "but I might straighten one. I don't suppose you--you kissed her thumbs? Of course not!" She laughed softly. "But I shall."

Now it was the Shadow Man's turn to laugh with a funny, explosive little effect as though he were not used to m.u.f.fling his laughs,--as if this playing Shadow Man were a new role.

"Why thumbs?" he whispered. "Why not lips, say, or eyes? I thought women kissed kiddies' eyes. Hope I haven't made a mistake--" as if he had some secret desire for women to kiss the eyes of little children. "If you don't mind kissing 'em when you go in there--"

"I shall kiss her thumbs," Miss Theodosia said firmly. "They were burned at the stake for me. I know how burned thumbs feel."

But the Shadow Man stubbornly persisted.

"I'll tell you what," he said. "I'll go back now and kiss her thumbs, if you'll kiss her eyes when you go in; as--er--a favor. 'Stoop over the little sleeper,' you know, and 'press your mother's lips to the closed blue orbs.'" He seemed to be quoting something.

"But I haven't any mother's lips," sighed Miss Theodosia, "only the kind for thumbs--just thumbs. I'm sorry," she added humbly. Curiously she experienced no surprise at this intimate turn of a conversation with a Shadow Man at midnight.

"That's all right--that's all right," the Shadow Man a.s.sured her. "Only thought I'd feel a little better to prove it was done that way. Hadn't any business mixing up with women's lips and kiddies' orbs, anyway!

Serves me right." And now it was his turn to be humble. "Good night,"

and he was gone.

It was into a tiny bedroom off the kitchen, where a needle of light from a turned-down lamp barely p.r.i.c.ked the darkness, that Miss Theodosia found her way. She had a dim picture of littering little clothes about the room and on the flat pillows of the bed the round, flushed face of Evangeline. In a clothes basket beside the bed she dimly saw a little mound that might be Elly Precious--it was Elly Precious! The little mound stirred with a curious, nestling sound, and instantly Stefana stirred also and crooned. Even in her sleep she was the little Mother.

Miss Theodosia felt her own throat tighten and fill.

Stefana still clasped the bundle of ap.r.o.n in her arms, and Miss Theodosia did not dare try to take it away from her. She merely arranged it a little more comfortably and smoothed Stefana out. Queer!--as if at some other time, in some pa.s.sed-by existence, she had smoothed out a child. She seemed to know how. Suddenly she stooped and kissed, not Stefana's thumbs but her eyes.

"The starch!" murmured Stefana as Miss Theodosia turned away. "Some'dy get it!" The deep sleep had broken a little, and through the break trickled a thread of Stefana's troubles. Then, again, silence and peace.

No sound from bed or clothes basket on the floor.

Outside, in the faint starlight, Miss Theodosia drew a long breath. She softly laughed. Curious how much like a sob a little laugh can be! Oh, starlit night of adventuring! What next? Miss Theodosia's mantle of gentle melancholy slid from her shoulders; she no longer felt apprehensions of growing old. Continually she saw Evangeline's rosy face on that flat pillow, and the little mound of Elly Precious. She remembered how tiny the house had looked from the inside, and how many little littering clothes she had seen. The appealing quality of empty little clothes! In Miss Theodosia's inside room of her soul, something stirred behind the locked door.

The irons had cooled too much, and the fire was low. Miss Theodosia went to work again. As she worked, she talked to herself sociably.

"Adventures thicken! Stars, and angels in caps, and children that walk in their little sleeps! And little heaps in clothes baskets, that are babies! And--Theodosia Baxter--a Man! Out of a clear, inky sky! Why weren't you scared? How do you know--you never even saw his face--maybe he was a thief, and a marauder, and a thug!"

Granted, if thieves and marauders and those awful things, thugs, carry little loads or sleep as tenderly as women--and never wake them; if they are polite and say good night--. What kind of marauding and--and thugging is that?

"What will Stefana think when she finds my ap.r.o.n in bed with her!"

suddenly laughed Miss Theodosia, breaking the spell. "Funny Stefana! she goes to my heart, she and her starch--when they're asleep!"

But, awake, Stefana's starch went to Miss Theodosia's back and aching bones. It was three o'clock when she was ready to go to bed. Over chairs and the couch in her sitting-room, lay the three redeemed white dresses, soft again and very smoochless and smooth. Miss Theodosia stood and admired. She was full of pride and weariness. At last, at thirty-six, she had done real work; she loved the feel of it in her tired bones. She loved her night of adventuring. Life--she loved that. So she went to bed at three, when the birds were beginning to get up. If her throat--calm and grown-up throat--had not persistently tightened, she would have gone to sleep laughing at the remembrance of it all. All the funny night. Why wasn't it funny? Why couldn't she laugh? She sat up in bed.

On the morning after her adventurous night, as Miss Theodosia lingered luxuriously over her late breakfast, came bursting in Evangeline Flagg.

A gray-checked something waved from her hand like a flag of truce.

Evangeline always burst into things--houses, and rooms, and excited little speech.

"Here it is!--that is, if it's yours. Stefana says to ask. 'Tain't ours.

Mercy gracious, no! We don't take our aperns to bed. Stefana never heard of such a thing. Neither o' us never. In bed--right straight in bed! An'

Stefana hugging it up like everything! She says to ask you if it's yours because it ain't ours, nor anybody else's, an' it's got to be somebody's apern, and once I thought I saw a gray 'n' white one hanging through your window--I mean on a nail, but, mercy gracious, what was it doing in bed with me an' Stefana!"

Even Evangeline's breath had limitations. She stopped as headlong as she had begun. She unwound the large, voluminous-skirted ap.r.o.n from her grasp and extended it.

"Here 'tis, if it's yours," she gasped, spent. She was gazing at it with a species of awe; it was an "apern" of mystery, not a human apern. "An'

if 't isn't, take it--Stefana said not to dare to bring it back.

We--we're sort of afraid of it, honest. Though, of course, Stefana says it must 've blew in the window"--the tide of speech was coming in once more--"an'--an' sort of landed on the bed, an' Stefana kind of grabbed it in her sleep, thinking it was Elly Precious. But, mercy gracious!"

"Sit down," Miss Theodosia said, smiling. "Doesn't it tire you to talk as fast as that?"

"Some," admitted Evangeline, "but I don't mind. What I mind is ghosts--aperns an' the kind with--with legs." She dropped her voice. "I saw one las' night."

"Mercy gracious!" Miss Theodosia breathed.

Evangeline nodded solemnly. "Out the window. I woke up feelin' one, an'

I saw it goin' across the gra.s.s. White. Slinky."

"Oh, not--slinky!" protested Miss Theodosia, suddenly championing the ghost-with-legs.

"Slinky," firmly. "I guess I'd a-screeched right out if I hadn't remembered the baby. Elly Precious is terrible hard to put to sleep second time. You aren't much acquainted with babies, are you?"

Again--so soon! Miss Theodosia's humility returned.

"We're acquainted, over to our house! Mother says babies are great edge--edge--"

"Educators?"

"That's it! Mercy gracious, then I should think Mother'd be graduated!"

After Evangeline's departure, Miss Theodosia set down her coffee cup and gave herself up to laughter. The room rang with the pleasant sound of it.

"Will you l-listen to yourself, Theodosia Baxter!" she cried at length, out of breath. "You actually sound happy!"

In the afternoon, a bevy of Miss Theodosia's old friends called on her as she sat on her front porch. They had intended, they said, to wait till the proper time, according to etiquette, for calls upon returned travelers.

"But we wanted to see you so much, after all this time," one of them said. "We decided we couldn't wait to be proper. Besides, it would be such a risk. While we waited, you'd run off again. It was really our only way. Ladies, will you see how lovely and white she looks! Perfectly spotless!" The speaker sighed. Her own dress was dark and spot-colored.

"I don't see how you do it! I tell Andrew I'd rather dress in white than in velvet--I love it! But, there, I couldn't get a minute to wear the dresses; it would take all my days to do 'em up. Of course, with you it's different. I don't suppose you ever toiled over an ironing-board a day in your life."

Miss Theodosia gravely shook her head. "No," she said, curious little twinkling lines deepening round her eyes, "I never did--a day--in my life."

"That's what I thought! That's what I told Andrew. 'Theodosia Baxter don't know what work is,' I told him. It's easy enough for some women to wear lovely white things. Simplest thing in the world!"

Miss Theodosia's cryptic little smile lingered on her lips and in the clear windows of her eyes, as she gazed past the voluble wife of Andrew, through her vines, at the little House of Children next door. She imagined she heard Stefana singing, high up and sweet, over her work.

Wait!--that was not a singing sound!

A single shriek shot above the clear humming noise that might be Stefana. Then another--a third!

"Some one is hurt!" cried Miss Theodosia, and she kilted her smooth white skirts and ran.

Again that dread shriek! Over her shoulder, as she ran, Miss Theodosia gave directions to her startled callers.

"Telephone for a doctor--any doctor. In the side hall--on a table!" But could any doctor save the life of that terrible shriek? If it came once more--It came! Miss Theodosia involuntarily closed her eyes to shut out a sight of horror.