CHAPTER XVII. AN ERRAND OF MYSTERY.
It was some months afterward. Cherokee, gowned in violet and gold, was on her way to the Chrysanthemum Show, where she felt sure of meeting some of her friends. She was walking briskly, when she was importuned by an old man for help. Dropping some coins into his entreating palm, she passed on.
How little we know whom we may meet when we leave our doors, and before entering them again. Often one’s whole life is changed between the exit and entrance of a home.
“Ah, my dear Mrs. Milburn, how pleased I am to meet you here. Are you out for pleasure?”
Whose voice could that be but Willard Frost’s, sounding in her ears like clods on a coffin.
“Yes, I presume one would call it pleasure, going to the Chrysanthemum Show and to get some flowers for hospital patients. You know the sick love these little attentions.”
“There, that’s an illustration of what I am contemplating. Do you know I think you are just the person I wanted to meet this morning?”
“Why?” she asked, indifferently.
“Because you can do a great kindness as well as give pleasure to some one who is in need of both, if you will?”
“You want me to help some one who is in distress?”
“I do. Will you?”
“How much does the person need?”
“Your presence would be more good than any service you could render.”
“Then I will go and get my husband to accompany us. He is charitable, and likes to do these things with me.”
“I have just come from his studio; he is very busy now, and I think he would prefer not being interrupted. I have been down all the morning giving a few criticisms on that ‘Seaweed Gatherer.’ That is truly a work of art. But surely you will not refuse me that friendly service.”
“Where would you have me go, and whom to see?”
“A young girl who is dying without a kind word.”
“A woman—has she no friends or means?”.
“I am the only friend she has, the pure, noble, unfortunate,” he said, aiming at tenderness.
“Indeed, I never refuse to help anyone, when I can, but really I prefer someone to be the bearer.”
“Yes, but she has requested me to bring you; this desire comes from a dying human being.”
“But, pray what does she know of me; I do not understand?” she asked, disapprovingly. “You might get yourself and me into a scrape.”
“She has been a model for Robert as well as myself; you have seen her at the studio, and she fairly worships your beauty, your gentleness.”
“Strange my husband has never mentioned her reduced condition. I fail to recall her,” and she drew back with a sinking of heart; she wanted to do what was right, always.
“Oh, think again. I am sure you saw her when you and Robert came to see my ‘Madonna’; I was working on her then.”
“Yes, I do recall a beautiful girl who was posing that day. If it is from her, this request, I will go.”
“Thank you, thank you; she will be so nearly happy, for she has never failed to speak of you whenever I have seen her. I shall never forget how she raved when she saw you, and a question she asked.”
“What was that?”
“‘Does her heart fulfill the promise of her eyes?’ she asked me, as though the answer was of great importance.
“I asked what she meant.
“She answered, ‘They promise to make some one happy; to remove all troubles and cares, making a heavenly paradise upon this earth?’ She wanted to see you, so that you might swear that this promise would be kept.”
“She must be an enthusiast,” Cherokee reflected, losing all sense of the strangeness of this question for the time.
They started on in the direction that Frost wanted to go. She felt as though she was walking through yellow rustling leaves, as she had done back in her lesson-days, when she was trying to steal away from the teacher or playmates on the lawn.
More than once, as she hurried along, Cherokee asked herself if she were not imitating the leopard, and developing another spot of foolishness.
When they reached the place there was nothing strange or unusual about it. He opened the door and walked in, as though he was accustomed to going there; then he softly pushed an inner door and peeped in.
“She is sleeping now, poor tired soul; her greatest blessing is sleep”—offering Cherokee a chair, “we will wait awhile.”
She nervously looked about her. Her beautiful eyes, so pure, so clear, so unshadowed by any knowledge of sin, knew nothing of the misery that had been in the enclosure of these walls.
Presently a frail, crooked woman came in, abruptly. Cold and bitter was her gaze:
“Why did you not come sooner?” she demanded of Frost, sternly.
“It was impossible; am I not in good time?”
“Yes, for you a very good time—she is dead,” and a short, quick gasp came from the withered frame.
“Do you mean it?” he said, looking at the woman who seemed quite overcome, in spite of her hard, cruel face.
“Go and see for yourself,” and she pointed to the room he had entered before.
Cherokee stood silent, and bowed, as became the house of mourning.
“No, if she is dead, we need not go in,” Frost said, quickly.
But the old woman recoiled a step: “I understand you are ashamed of her.”
“No, not that, but it is now too late to grant her request.”
“I would know it, and it would do no harm for me to know that you could keep your word.”
“Then we will go in; you lead the way.”
Cherokee hesitated, and the miserable woman, seeing this, cried in sudden excitement:
“Is your wife afraid of her, now that she is dead?”
Willard Frost, at the mention of wife, started. He had, after all, forgotten to explain that to Cherokee.
“Do not heed her wild fancy,” he whispered, as he motioned her to go in front.
Instinctively the hag folded her wasted hands; most piteously she raised her bewildered eyes, imploringly, to Cherokee.
“Won’t you please go in, for if she can see from the other world to this, she will be pleased.”
“If it pleases you, I will go in for your sake.” As they entered the waiting doorway, Frost walked to the low lounge—he was more deeply moved than he cared to show. There, before him, lay the pulseless clay, the features horribly distorted, the hands and limbs terribly drawn.
“This,” he said to Cherokee, “was caused by paralysis. Nature was once a kind mother to her.”
He shook his head, musingly, and ran his fingers over the sleeper’s hands. At first he did it with a sort of tentativeness, as if waiting for something that eluded him. All at once he leaned over and kissed the hands—he seemed moved by a powerful impulse. Through his mind there ran a thousand incidents of his life, one growing upon the other without sequence; phantasmagoria, out of the scene-house of memory.
He saw a vast stretch of lonely forest in the white coverlet of winter, through which a man followed a desolate track. He saw a scanty home, yet mirthful, and warm from the winter wood. Again he saw that home, when even in the summer height it was chilled and blighted. Then, there, he saw a child with red-gold curls, and he wondered how fate would deal with that baby—a laughing, dimpled romper, without a name.
These are a few of the pictures he saw.
Cherokee, ever gentle in her ministries, spoke kind words to the old woman, whom she supposed was the mother.
She had come too late for another good; the dead do not answer even the most loving, the sweetest voices, and this girl had joined the mysteries. So, what was left but to offer prayers and tears for the living?
While Cherokee talked, the woman sat very still, her face ruled to quietness. At length she said:
“She is better dead.”
The comforter looked surprised; what a strange way for a mother to speak.
“Let us go, now,” urged Frost, impulsively. As they passed out, he placed money in the woman’s hand.
“Put her away nicely.”
Motioning him back, the woman caught his arm and whispered:
“By the right of a life-long debt, I now ask for peace.”
“Is that all?” he sneered.
“And I hope you will be a better man,” she added.
They were on their way home. A flush crept slowly up Willard Frost’s face, then, heaving a sigh and quickly repenting of it, he tried to laugh, to drive away the impression of it.
It had been dismal within, but it was lovely without. The gray transparency of the atmosphere lent a glamour to the autumn hues, like flimsy gauze over the face of some Eastern beauty, and the seductive harmony of the colors acted like magic music on the spirit.
“That dead girl was once the most exquisite piece of flesh I ever saw. This is truly a legend of the beautiful. She supported herself by posing for artists, as long as her beauty lasted,” so Frost began his story, “but six months ago she was stricken with paralysis, which so misused her that it took the bread from her mouth, and but for me they would have starved.
“I had great sympathy for the girl, and from her face I had made many hundreds, so I considered it my duty to look after her in this dark hour of affliction.”
“That was just and noble,” said Cherokee, forgetting for a moment the record of the man.
He went on: “She loved me devotedly, though she knew I was married, and during her illness she fancied she would be perfectly happy if she convinced herself that I was not ashamed to present her to my wife.”
“Then it was your wife she wanted to see, and I was to be presented under false colors,” she demanded, rather sternly.
“It would have been all the same to her, she never would have been wiser.”
“Mr. Frost, I believe you would do anything, and let me say, just here, my courtesy to you is not real. I do it because, strange to say, my husband likes you.”
Just then they reached her stopping place. There was considerable commotion on the car, Frost caught her arm:
“Wait a moment, until they put that drunken brute off.”
Suddenly, Cherokee wrenched herself away, and stepped quickly, unassisted, to the street.
In front of her was the man they had assisted from the car. A gentle arm was passed through his:
“Come, Robert, we will go home together.”
She never looked back, although Willard Frost stood and watched them, a mingled smile of pity and triumph upon his sinister face.