Susan Clegg and Her Love Affairs Part 16

"I d'n know whatever sins I committed in this world, Mrs. Lathrop," she began, dropping into the nearest chair and facing her friend in an upright, a little bent forward att.i.tude that was clearly pugnacious, "that I should have these things visited upon me. The Lord knows, just the same as you do, as I've always been a good and pure woman, loving my neighbors like myself and doing all my Christian duties as I was give to see 'em. When I was tore up from my home by the roots and cast wilted and faded upon Gran'ma Mullins, where the infant memories of Hiram certainly wasn't calculated to do no reviving, I made the best of it. I made the best of Lucy and a dog with a cold nose, too; and I bore up with courage and no complaint under Mrs. Allen and her Persian religion.

And I did it all to please you, Mrs. Lathrop, and your fool of a son, Jathrop, whose money, it's my opinion, has acted on him in a most injurious way. He never had much sense, as you yourself know, but now he ain't got no sense a _tall_."

"I don't--" Mrs. Lathrop started gently to protest.

"Well, I do," rejoined Susan Clegg spiritedly; "and if you don't, you ought to. Anyhow, I mean to tell you, if it's the last act of my life.

Anybody as has any sense a _tall_ must have seen that building over was just a mite removed from building new; and what's new never did go with what's old, and it never will. If we was to be built over, we ought to have been all built over or let alone. Jathrop's built the houses over, but he ain't built over the furnis.h.i.+ngs, and the built-over houses and the not-built-over furniture and carpets and window shades and pots and kettles and pans and china and linen and everything else don't agree and just naturally can't and never can. They're fighting now like sixty, and they'll go on fighting the longer they're kept together. My house was restful and peaceful before, but now it's like a circus with all the wild animals let loose. And I can tell you this, Mrs. Lathrop; my things is getting the worst of it. Why, before they went to storage at Mr.

Sh.o.r.es', they was in the best repair you ever see, and now it would make your heart ache to look at 'em. They've aged a century at least during the summer. They're wrinkled and halt and lame and blind, and the new paper on the walls and the new polish on the floors and the new paint on the woodwork is making 'em look sicker and sicker every minute. If there's a society for the prevention of cruelty to furniture and other household goods, it ought to put Jathrop Lathrop in prison. I feel so sorry for those poor tables and chairs and bedsteads and all the rest of 'em as I could cry my eyes out this very minute. There's one walnut, haircloth sofa as Father laid on before he was took to his bed as is pitiful to behold. It looks sicker than Father did even in his last hours, and I wouldn't be surprised any minute to see it just turn over all of itself and give up the ghost. And everything has on such a reproachful look it's more than human nature can bear to face it. If I'd ever thought as being built over would of come to this, I'd of gone on my knees and worked 'em to the bare bones before I'd of put up with it."

Mrs. Lathrop continued to rock in silence.

"Still, there's no cloud, however black, as hasn't got some silk in its lining, and the silk in this is the clock as Father gave Mother, which was supposed to be marble and wasn't. Much as I hated that clock, I couldn't have borne to see its agonies when set on by the new fireplace below, and the pink and gold wall paper behind, and the roses and cupids in the cornish above. It must just of shriveled in shame instead of going out in glorious flight, as it did when I set it flying at the end of the bed-slat. Lord knows, though, Mrs. Lathrop, that's a small thing to be thankful for; and it's the only thing. I haven't begun yet to tell you all. And I don't intend to. There's a limit to my temper, and if I once got started, there's no saying where I'd end. But there's one thing more as I can't hold in, and it's the thing as was marked on the plans: 'But. Pan.' I never did understand why I should be give a separate room to keep b.u.t.ter pans in, seeing as I ain't got no cow, let alone no dairy. And even if I had, why I should keep my b.u.t.ter pans or my milk pans either in a little alley-way between the kitchen and the dining-room, just where the heat and smells could get at 'em from one side and the flies from both, not to mention the added footsteps put on me journeying from the stove to the dinner table. You can see for yourself, Mrs. Lathrop, there's no sense in it, whatever. But I'd never say a word about it, if that was all. But it ain't all. It's the littlest part. For Jathrop's cruelty hasn't stopped with torturing the furniture. It's clear he couldn't be satisfied till he fixed up a trap as sooner or later would hit me square in the face and break my nose. At both ends of his 'But. Pan.' he's had hung doors as swing, and springs on 'em to make 'em swing hard and deadly. What either one of those swinging doors might do to my features, let alone to the pudding or stew I might be carrying, it isn't in mortal tongue to express. If I could find one thing as was right in the whole house, I'd be fair and square enough to overlook the others; but there ain't to my mind a single solitary betterment. There's gla.s.s k.n.o.bs on all the doors as will show every finger mark, and will keep me busy wiping from dawn to dark. The old brown k.n.o.bs never showed nothing and didn't never have to be thought of, let alone polished. It's always been my idea as a cupboard was a place to shut things up in out of sight, and here if he hasn't gone and put gla.s.s doors on the one in the corner of the dining room, so as every one can see just what's meant to be hid. It's clear to be seen he's crazy on the subject of gla.s.s, which I ain't and never have been. And I don't like the way he's stinted things as is necessary and put all the money in things as had better been left out. Necessities before everything is my motto. What use, I'd like to know, is that cupid and rose cornish? But he puts that there just to catch dust and leaves out the whole of one parlor wall. If you'll believe me, Mrs. Lathrop, there's not a hair or hide of a wall between my entry hall and my parlor. Nothing but a pair of white posts as most people use on their piazzas. How I'm ever going to keep that parlor dark I don't see; for he's got gla.s.s over the front door and on both sides of it, and no shutters to keep the sun out. He's built in both the kitchen stove and the ice box, and for the life of me, I can't find no reasonable way of taking the ashes out of the one or the water out of the other. The builder says the ashes dump into a place in the cellar and the water from the ice drains down a pipe underneath the house. But I don't like neither plan. The drip from a ice box is a very cheering sound, I think, and with hot ashes going down cellar where you can't see 'em, I'll be in deadly fear of the house going up in smoke while I'm dreaming in my bed.

The long and the short of it is, Mrs. Lathrop, I feel as I have been a.s.saulted and robbed. Jathrop's took away my home and left me a house as isn't a home to me and never can be. And as far as I can see, he's done the same to you, which is ten thousand times worse, you being his mother."

"I--" began Mrs. Lathrop, taking up the letter from her lap so that at last it was forced upon Susan's observance.

"From him, I suppose," Miss Clegg instantly concluded, reaching for it.

"If he's got anything to say in his defence, I'm sure I'd delight to read it. But no matter what he says, he can't undo to me what he's done to me. I'll never feel the same towards Jathrop, your son or not your son, Mrs. Lathrop, as long as I live."

Mrs. Lathrop pa.s.sed the letter to Miss Clegg. Like all of Jathrop's letters, it was brief and to the point. He announced that he would spend Christmas with his mother in her rebuilt home and would bring with him a friend as his guest. Susan read it over twice, turning the page each time, evidently in hope of finding an enlightening postscript.

"Well, of all things!" she exclaimed, as she pa.s.sed the letter back to her friend. "Coming to see his work of destruction and going to bring _her_ with him!"

"He don't--" Mrs. Lathrop endeavored to explain.

"He don't, because he don't dare; but there's no question what he means.

He's bringing the senora. And he wouldn't bring her if it wasn't that he's going to marry her. Even you must see that. And if there was ever a insult multiplied by perjury, Jathrop's done it in that action. It's a good thing he didn't ask: 'How's Susan Clegg?' this time, as he did the time he was coming back from the Klondike. For I don't believe I could ever have stood that. All I can say, Mrs. Lathrop, is as I'm sorry for you from the soles of my feet up. You'll never in the world be able to get up a Christmas dinner as will please any senora, you can take my word on that. And not to please her will be a bad beginning with a senora as is to be your future daughter-in-law. Senoras don't care shucks for turkey and mince pie. They're not used to 'em and likely to get indigestion from 'em, and think what it would mean to Jathrop, let alone to her, if she should be carried off by a acute attack right here in your new, built-over house, at the dinner table. He'd blame it on you, and like as not she'd haunt you the rest of your living days. No, sir. You've got to give her Spanish omelets with lots of red peppers in 'em, and everything else Creole style, which means all he't up with tabasco sauce fit to burn out your insides. It's eating like that as makes those Spaniards and Cubans so dark colored you can't tell 'em from mulattoes. The peppers and the tabasco sauce bakes 'em brown on the outside, after leaving 'em all scorched and parched within."

For once, however, Susan Clegg was wrong in her deduction. Jathrop arrived in a red automobile on the day before Christmas, with a chauffeur in bear-skins driving, and a guest in sealskin beside him. But the guest was not the senora. It was one of Jathrop's millionaire friends who, Jathrop said, could buy and sell him twenty times over. He was a small man with a bald head and a red beard and old enough to be Jathrop's father.

Miss Clegg viewed the arrival from her bedroom window and was so glad it wasn't the senora that she at once set about baking extra doughnuts and mince pie to contribute to the festivities of the morrow. This occupied her until supper time. Then she made a hurried meal, washed her one plate and cup and saucer, and loaded down with her thank offering, flitted through the pergola and in at Mrs. Lathrop's kitchen door. The kitchen was empty, but voices penetrating from the dining room told her that her friend and her visitors were still at table. Being a trifle nervous and unable to sit quietly, she began at once to put the disordered kitchen into some degree of order, purely for the sake of occupation.

She had just finished was.h.i.+ng and scouring the pots and pans and was flus.h.i.+ng the waste-pipe of Mrs. Lathrop's new porcelain sink with lye-water so strong that her eyes ran tears from the fumes, when the voices growing more and more audible told her that Jathrop was leading his mother and his guest toward the kitchen. She just had time hurriedly to dry her hands on the roller towel when they appeared.

"Well, well," exclaimed Jathrop, in apparent surprise, "if here ain't our old friend, Susan Clegg!"

There is no question that Miss Clegg was slightly fl.u.s.tered at thus being taken unawares, but she recovered herself promptly, and shook hands cordially with Jathrop and not less cordially with the little millionaire, whom he introduced as Mr. Kettlewell. And Mr. Kettlewell was cordiality itself. Everybody sat down, right there in the kitchen and talked for a full hour, and in the course of the talk, Jathrop told Susan that he had arranged with a department store in New York to let her have whatever she needed for her built-over house and charge the same to his account. She could select the things from the firm's catalogue, or go to the city at his expense and pick out the actual articles. It was his Christmas present to his mother's and his own oldest friend. In conclusion, Jathrop joined with his mother in an invitation to Susan to take Christmas dinner with them; and Mr.

Kettlewell smilingly begged her, for his sake, not to refuse. Altogether Susan had the pleasantest evening she had experienced in years, and the next morning, while Jathrop and Mr. Kettlewell were off in the car after evergreens with which to decorate the two houses, she ran over with the express purpose of telling Mrs. Lathrop so.

"Jathrop mayn't have much judgment when it comes to selecting architects," she began, "nor again when it comes to selecting servants, as was proved by his bringing that Hop Loo all the way from the Klondike. Nor again, neither, when it comes to wives, if it's a real fact that he's going to marry a brown-baked senora; but there's no getting away from the fact that he's a king in choosing his men friends.

I've seen men in my life of all sorts and descriptions, from the minister to the blacksmith, but I ain't never see before such a handsome, high-minded, superior gentleman as Jathrop's friend, Mr.

Kettlewell. I never thought much of bald-headed men before, but his head is so white and s.h.i.+ny, it's a pleasure to look at it. And I always just hated a red beard; but Mr. Kettlewell's beard is of a different red.

It's a nice, warm, comforting red as makes you feel as cosy as the glow of a red-hot stove when the thermometer's down around zero. I can't say either, Mrs. Lathrop, as I wasn't more or less prejudiced against men as never rightly grew up, but stopped in the women's sizes. But there's a something about Mr. Kettlewell's proportions as gives you the idea he's really taller than he seems. And there's only one thing to compare his voice to. It's milk and honey. My lands, what a sweet, clear-rolling, liquid voice that Mr. Kettlewell has!"

"Ja--" began Mrs. Lathrop.

"Yes, I heard him. But I don't put that against Mr. Kettlewell, not a _tall_. I'm sure he made every penny of it honestly, and if he's retired from business now, it don't mean he's quit work. It's no easy job cutting coupons off all the bonds he must have, and collecting rents is a occupation I don't envy n.o.body. It's the penalty that rich men have to pay for their success. They work hard to get the princ.i.p.al, and then they're made to work twice as hard to get the interest. There's no such thing as rest for the rich any more'n there is for the poor. I used to think before Father died as I'd like to roll in wealth, but it ain't no easy rolling, I can tell you that, Mrs. Lathrop, especially when you've got a tenant like Mrs. Macy, who won't buy so much as a gas-tip or do so much as drive a nail without charging it up to the owner."

Miss Clegg's partic.i.p.ation in the Christmas dinner at her neighbors' was twofold. She took part in its preparation as well as in its discussion.

It was her soup which began it, it was her "stuffing" which added zest to the roast turkey, it was her cranberry sauce which sweetened contrastingly the high seasoning, and it was her mince pie which brought the repast to a fitting and enjoyable close. Seated opposite to Mr.

Kettlewell, where she could revel in a full view of his s.h.i.+ning pate and his warmly comforting whiskers, her enjoyment was ocular as well as gustatory; and under the caressing sweetness of his voice it was likewise auricular. For the occasion Jathrop had provided a fine vintage champagne, and though Miss Clegg, whose total-abstinence principles forbade her to even taste, refrained from so much as touching her lips to the edge of her gla.s.s, she unquestionably warmed in the stimulating atmosphere of the sparkling, bubbling, golden juice of the grape. To her it was indeed the red-letter Christmas of her life, and every incident, of the dinner especially, was a matter for reflection and rumination in the succeeding hours.

In this vale of tears, however, there is apparently no great joy without its compensating sorrow; and in Susan Clegg's case the one followed swiftly on the heels of the other. In the pale gray of the dawn of the following day, Susan Clegg dashed wildly out of her kitchen door and flitted with lifted skirts across the brief intervening s.p.a.ce that led to Mrs. Lathrop's back door. As pallid as the morning itself, her scant hair streaming, her eyes wide with mixed terror and indignation, she burst into her neighbor's kitchen, where to her great relief she found her old friend already up and occupied.

One glimpse of Susan was enough for Mrs. Lathrop. Up went her hands and down went she on to the nearest chair with an inarticulate gasp of horrified yet questioning astonishment, while Miss Clegg flopped limply into another at the end of the kitchen table.

There she must have sat for a full minute before she could get breath to utter a word, which, being contrary to all her habits, was in itself terrifying to her friend. Eventually, however, she forced herself to a.s.sume an upright position and simultaneously attained a somewhat feeble attempt at speech.

"Well, of all things in this world to happen to me!" Then she paused for a fresh breath, which being utterly without precedent, added mightily to Mrs. Lathrop's alarm. "And even now at this minute I don't really know whether I'm more dead than alive, or more alive than dead."

Mrs. Lathrop, believing that the situation being extraordinary, some extraordinary effort on her part was demanded, stirred herself to a prolonged speech.

"Don't tell me I'm looking--"

"No, I'm not a ghost, if that's what you mean. You are looking at Susan Clegg in the flesh--all the flesh that ain't been scared clean off her.

But it's the greatest miracle as ever happened in this community that it's my body and not my spirit as is here to tell the tale. My house was broken into by a burglar, Mrs. Lathrop, and I was tied up and gagged in one of my own chairs."

Mrs. Lathrop just gasped. Susan drew herself up a little straighter, gaining courage from the sound of her own voice, and striking something like her old oral gait.

"I was gagged for five hours, Mrs. Lathrop, and knowing me as you do for all these years and years, maybe you can feel what being gagged for five hours and not able to say even 'boo' meant to a active person like me.

Every one of those hours was like a eternity in a Spanish inferno of torture. And everything I possess in this world, from my bonnet and striped silk dress to Father's deeds at the mercy of that gagger. And all I've got to say is this: If I hadn't of been built over, it never in the wide creation would have happened. And if your son Jathrop thinks he can ever make up to me for being gagged by inviting me to a Christmas dinner, most of which I cooked with my own hands, and offering to give me strange pieces of furniture to take the place of pieces as is old friends and dearer than the apples of my two eyes, he'd better do some more thinking. There never was nothing about the house I was born in and my mother and father died in to make a burglar look at it twice. No burglar as had any respect for himself or his calling, Mrs. Lathrop, would have looked at it once or knowed as it was there. But built over it's as different as diamon's is from pebbles. It looks money from the tips of its lightning rods to its cellar windows and is as inviting to robbers as if it had a sign on the gatepost, reading: 'Walk in!' So, however you look at it, there's n.o.body responsible for my gagging and for whatever is missing but one man, and that man is Jathrop Lathrop.

It's easy to be seen as he's no more fit to have money than a crow as steals gold trinkets that cost fortunes and goes and hides 'em in hollow trees. He was born poor, and the Lord meant him to stay poor, no matter what Mrs. Allen and her Persian religion has to say about things as happens being meant to happen. The Lord hadn't nothing to do with Jathrop going to the Klondike and getting rich, you can be certain about that. If he hadn't been fool enough to take a kicking cow for a perfectly good debt and then let it loose to ride over a peaceful and long-suffering community, he'd 'a' lived and died a pauper in this here very town. So's far as I can see it was the devil and not the Lord as guided Jathrop from the first, and everything as has happened since shows the devil is still guiding him. Everything he turns his mind to goes by contraries. I'm not saying anything against the goodness of Jathrop's intentions, mind you, Mrs. Lathrop, but no matter how good they are, evil and misery certainly seems sure to follow."

The tirade stirred Mrs. Lathrop to her feet, but she was not resentful.

She knew that Susan Clegg's bitterness was confined to her tongue, and that even with that she could salve as well as sting.

"Can't I--?" she suggested.

"Indeed you can," answered Miss Clegg. "I never felt as I needed a cup of tea more, and if the doughnuts I brought you ain't all eat up, I'd relish four or five of 'em right now."

"You haven't--" began Mrs. Lathrop, taking down the teapot.

"No; but I'm coming to it. I begun with the cause, and the effect'll come trailing after like the tails of Mary's little lambs. Only the tails in this case was bigger than the sheep. It may have been hearing the noise Jathrop makes when he eats, or it may have been your turkey gravy or your biscuits, Mrs. Lathrop, or all of 'em put together. Not knowing which, I'm not foolish enough to blame one more'n the other. But it's a fact as is undeniable that I never slept poorer than last night.

I was in bed by nine, but I never closed my eyes till eleven, and I certainly heard the clock strike midnight. I counted goats jumping over a stile, and I counted 'em backward as well as forward, but I heard one struck, and I heard two. And then I heard something as set my hair up on end and the gooseflesh sprouting all over me. It sounded like footsteps in the 'But. Pan.,' and they was too heavy for the cat's, I could tell that at once, though at two in the morning it's surprising how loud a cat's footsteps can sound, especially when it's reached the pouncing stage, and the rat ain't got no hole to run to. I'd forgot to put the turkey leg in the ice-box as I'd carried home with me, and all I could think of was that if it was the cat, there'd be nothing left on that bone by morning, unless I stopped things right then and immediately.

You'd never believe how cold a house can be at two o'clock in the morning of the day after Christmas unless you'd got up in it as I did; and now to look back at it, I see how lucky it was as it was as cold as it was, for if it hadn't of been, I'd a gone down just as I was, and I was in no trim to meet a man burglar, I can tell you _that_. So I just slipped into this flannel wrapper and a old pair of slippers, which I've got on now under these arctics, and I picked up the candle as I'd lit, and down-stairs I went. Well, Mrs. Lathrop, I hope you may never in your born days in this world or the other have such a shock as met me there face to face in my own new, built-over kitchen. If there wasn't the biggest giant of a man I ever see coming out of the shadows between the cookstove and the cellar door. And he with his head all wrapped around in one of my best plaid roller towels, so that nothing of him was to be seen but two fierce, staring, bloodshot eyes as gleamed like a wild beast's. Oh, my soul and body, Mrs. Lathrop, that minute! How I ever kept my senses I don't pretend to say, more especially as he was on me with one jump. There was no such thing as holding on to the candle, you can see that. It dropped, and I never knew I dropped it. For, of course, I shut my eyes, and when your eyes is shut, there's no knowing whether there's a lighted candle about or whether there isn't."

In her agitation over the recital, Mrs. Lathrop, who was placing cups and saucers on the table, let one of the cups slide cras.h.i.+ng to the floor. "Oh, Su--!" she exclaimed.

"You may well say: 'Oh, Susan!'" Miss Clegg continued. "There is times when 'Oh, Susan' don't half express the state of affairs, and this was one of 'em, Mrs. Lathrop. It wasn't in nature for me not to scream, so I screamed, and it was that scream that did the business. It showed the burglar I wasn't deaf and dumb, and people as isn't deaf and dumb is looked on by burglars as their natural enemies. Maybe some people can scream without opening their mouths, but I never was one of that kind, and the kind as open their mouths when they scream is the kind that all burglars prefer. It saves 'em the trouble of forcing apart their jaws. I never shut my mouth after opening it; for the burglar just shoved something in it as quick as scat, and then he tied a bandage around back of my head so I couldn't spit it out. Then he picked me up and plumped me down hard in a chair and tied me fast to it with my own clothesline.

And all the time he never no more opened his lips to speak than if he couldn't. It's my opinion he must have had a cold and lost his voice.

Either that, or his voice was such a unpleasant voice he was ashamed to let anybody hear it. For it ain't in common sense as a man, even if he is a burglar, could keep as still as he did, if he had a speaking voice that's in any way fit for use. I know in the time he took there was a lot of things I felt to say to him, and would if I could, and common sense'll tell you, Mrs. Lathrop, that he must have felt to say a lot of things to me. But he didn't make so much as a peep behind his roller towel."

"Did--?" asked Mrs. Lathrop, pouring the tea.

"I can't say as he did or he didn't. I haven't missed nothing yet, but then I haven't looked. Still, if he didn't I can't say as I'd have much respect for him. What sort of a burglar would a burglar be to take all that trouble of breaking in, binding and gagging, and then go away without helping himself to something for his trouble. I ain't got no love for burglars in general or in particular. But any burglar as 'ld do a fool trick like that I ain't got no respect for neither."

"How--?" queried her neighbor as she pa.s.sed Susan her cup.

"It was something of a job I can tell you, but when I sets my mind to a thing I sets my mind to it, and ropes and a kitchen chair ain't got the power to stop me. I begun wriggling as soon as I heard the burglar shut the door behind him, and I kept on wriggling for every minute of the five hours. A tramped-on worm never did more turning and wriggling than I did between two and seven this morning, and at last wriggling being its own reward, I wriggled free, first with my hands and then with my feet. But before I got my feet free, I undid the band and ungagged myself and said just a few of the things that was bottled up all that time. The Bible says there's a time to talk and a time to be still, but there's such a thing as overdoing the still time, I think, and when you're gagged by a burglar is one of 'em."