FOOTNOTES:
[10] By permission of Dr. E. H. Duncan and Harper & Brothers.
VAN VALKENBERG’S CHRISTMAS GIFT[11]
Elizabeth G. Jordan
The “Chicago Limited” was pulling out of the Grand Central Station in New York as Dr. Henry Van Valkenberg submitted his ticket to the gateman. He dashed through, pushing the indignant official to one side, and made a leap for the railing of the last car of the train. It was wet and slippery and maddeningly elusive, but he caught it, and clung to it valiantly, his legs actively seeking a resting-place on the snow-covered steps of the platform. Even as he hung there, offering to his fellow-travellers this inspiring illustration of athletic prowess and the strenuous life, he was painfully conscious that the position was not a dignified one for a stout gentleman of sixty with an exalted position in the scientific world. He pictured to himself the happy smiles of those who were looking on, and he realized that his conception of their hearty enjoyment had not been exaggerated when he glanced back at them after a friendly brakeman had dragged him “on board.” Dr. Van Valkenberg smiled a little ruefully as he thanked the man and rubbed the aching surface of his hand, which not even his thick kid gloves had protected. Then he pulled himself together, picked up the books and newspapers he had dropped and which the bystanders had enthusiastically hurled after him, and sought his haven in the sleeping-car. When he reached his section he stood for a moment, with his back to the passengers, to put some of his belongings in the rack above his head. As he was trying to arrange them properly he heard a voice behind him.
“O-oh! Were you hurt?” it said. “I was so ’fraid you were going to fall.”
Dr. Van Valkenberg, who was a tall man, turned and looked down from his great height. At his feet stood a baby; at least she seemed a baby to him, although she was very dignified and wholly self-possessed and fully four years old. She was looking up at him with dark brown eyes, which wore an absurdly anxious expression. In that instant of quick observation he noticed that her wraps had been removed and that she wore a white dress and had yellow curls, among which, on one side of her head, a small black bow lay sombrely.
She was so delicious in her almost maternal solicitude that he smiled irrepressibly, though he answered with the ceremoniousness she seemed to expect.
“Why, no, thank you,” he said. “I am not hurt. Didn’t you see the kind man help me onto the car?”
There was a subdivided titter from the other passengers over this touching admission of helplessness, but the human atom below drew a long, audible sigh of relief.
“I’m very glad,” she said, with dignity. “I was ’fraid he hurt you.” She turned as she spoke, and toddled into the section opposite his, where a plain but kindly faced elderly woman was sitting. She lifted her charge to the seat beside her, and the child rose to her knees, pressed her pink face against the window-pane, and looked out at the snow that was falling heavily.
Dr. Van Valkenberg settled back in his seat and tried to read his newspaper, but for some reason the slight incident in which he and the little girl had figured moved him strangely. It had been a long time since any one had looked at him like that! He was not a person who aroused sympathy. He conscientiously endeavored to follow the President’s latest oracular utterances on the Trust problem, but his eyes turned often to the curly head at the window opposite. They were well-trained, observant eyes, and they read the woman as not the mother, but a paid attendant—a trained nurse, probably, with fifteen years of admirable, cold, scientific service behind her. Why was she with the child, he wondered.
It was Christmas eve—not the time for a baby girl to be travelling. Then his glance fell again on the black bow among the yellow curls and on the white dress with its black shoulder-knots, and the explanation came to him. An orphan, of course, on her way West to a new home, in charge of the matter-of-fact nurse who was dozing comfortably in the corner of her seat. To whom was she going? Perhaps to grandparents, where she would be spoiled and wholly happy; or quite possibly to more distant relatives where she might find a grudging welcome. Dear little embryo woman, with her sympathetic heart already attuned to the world’s gamut of pain. She should have been dancing under a Christmas tree, or hanging up her tiny stocking in the warm chimney-corner of some cozy nursery. The heart of the man swelled at the thought, and he recognized the sensation with a feeling of surprised annoyance. What was all this to him—to an old bachelor who knew nothing of children except their infantile ailments, and who had supposed that he cared for them as little as he understood them? Still, it was Christmas. His mind swung back to that. He himself had rebelled at the unwelcome prospect of Christmas eve and Christmas day in a sleeping-car—he, without even nephews and nieces to lighten the gloom of his lonely house. The warm human sympathy of the man and the sweet traditions of his youth rose in protest against this spectacle of a lonely child, travelling through the night toward some distant home which she had never seen, and where coldness, even neglect, might await her. Then he reminded himself that this was all imagination, and that he might be wholly wrong in his theory of the journey, and he called himself a fool for his pains. Still, the teasing interest and an elusive but equally teasing memory held his thoughts.
Darkness was falling, but the porter had not begun to light the lamps, and heavy shadows were rising from the corners of the car. Dr. Van Valkenberg’s little neighbor turned from the gloom without to the gloom within, and made an impulsive movement toward the drowsy woman opposite her. The nurse did not stir, and the little girl sat silent, her brown eyes shining in the half-light and her dimpled hands folded in her lap. The physician leaned across the aisle.
“Won’t you come over and visit me?” he asked. “I am very lonely, and I have no one to take care of me.”
She slid off the seat at once, with great alacrity.
“I’d like to,” she said, “but I must ask Nana. I must always ask Nana now,” she added, with dutiful emphasis, “’fore I do anyfing.”
She laid her hand on the gloved fingers of the nurse as she spoke, and the woman opened her eyes, shot a quick glance at the man, and nodded. She had not been asleep. Dr. Van Valkenberg rose and lifted his visitor to the seat beside him, where her short legs stuck out in uncompromising rigidity, and her tiny hands returned demurely to their former position in her lap. She took up the conversation where it had been interrupted.
“I can take care of you,” she said, brightly. “I taked care of mamma a great deal, and I gave her her med’cin’.”
He replied by placing a cushion behind her back and forming a resting-place for her feet by building an imposing pyramid, of which his dressing-case was the base. Then he turned to her with the smile women loved.
“Very well,” he said. “If you really are going to take care of me I must know your name. You see,” he explained, “I might need you in the night to get me a glass of water or something. Just think how disappointing it would be if I should call you by the wrong name and some other little girl came!”
She laughed.
“You say funny things,” she said, contentedly. “But there isn’t any other little girl in the car. I looked, soon as I came on, ’cos I wanted one to play with. I like little girls. I like little boys, too,” she added, with innocent expansiveness.
“Then we’ll play I’m a little boy. You’d never believe it, but I used to be. You haven’t told me your name,” he reminded her.
“Hope,” she said, promptly. “Do you think it is a nice name?” She made the inquiry with an anxious interest which seemed to promise immediate change if the name displeased him. He reassured her.
“I think Hope is the nicest name a little girl could have, except one,” he said. “The nicest little girl I ever knew was named Katharine. She grew to be a nice big girl, too,—and has little girls of her own now, no doubt,” he added, half to himself.
“Were you a little boy when she was a little girl?” asked his visitor, with flattering interest.
“Oh, no; I was a big man, just as I am now. Her father was my friend, and she lived in a white house with an old garden where there were all kinds of flowers. She used to play there when she was a tiny baby, just big enough to crawl along the paths. Later she learned to walk there, and then the gardener had to follow her to see that she didn’t pick all the flowers. I used to carry her around and hold her high up so she could pull the apples and pears off the trees. When she grew larger I gave her a horse and taught her to ride. She seemed like my very own little girl. But by-and-by she grew up and became a young lady, and—well, she went away from me, and I never had another little girl.”
He had begun the story to interest the child. He found, as he went on, that it still interested him.
“Did she go to heaven?” asked the little girl, softly.
“Oh, dear, no,” answered the doctor, with brisk cheerfulness.
“Then why didn’t she keep on being your little girl always?” was the next leading question.
The doctor hesitated a moment. He was making the discovery that after many years old wounds can reopen and throb. No one had ever been brave enough to broach to him the subject of this single love-affair, which he was now discussing, he told himself, like a garrulous old woman. He was anxious to direct the conversation into other channels, but there was a certain compelling demand in the brown eyes upturned to his.
“Well, you see,” he explained, “other boys liked her, too. And when she became a young lady other men liked her. So finally—one of them took her away from me.”
He uttered the last words wearily, and the sensitive atom at his side seemed to understand why. Her little hand slipped into his.
“Why didn’t you ask her to please stay with you?” she persisted, pityingly.
“I did,” he told her. “But, you see, she liked the other man better.”
“Oh-h-h.” The word came out long-drawn and breathless. “I don’t see how she possedly could!”
There was such sorrow for the victim and scorn for the offender in the tone, that, combined with the none too subtle compliment, it was too much for Dr. Van Valkenberg’s self-control. He threw back his gray head, and burst into an almost boyish shout of laughter, which effectually cleaned the atmosphere of sentimental memories. He suddenly realized, too, that he had not been giving the child the cheerful holiday evening he had intended.
“Where are you going to hang up your stockings to-night?” he asked. A shade fell over her sensitive face.
“I can’t hang them up,” she answered, soberly. “Santa Claus doesn’t travel on trains, Nana says. But p’r’aps he’ll have something waiting for me when I get to Cousin Gertie’s,” she added, with sweet hopefulness.
“Nana is always right,” said the doctor, oracularly, “and of course you must do exactly as she says. But I heard that Santa Claus was going to get on the train to-night at Buffalo, and I believe,” he added, slowly and impressively, “that if he found a pair of small black stockings hanging from that section he’d fill them!”
Her eyes sparkled.
“Then I’ll ask Nana,” she said. “An’ if she says I may hang them, I will. But one,” she added, conscientiously, “has a teeny, weeny hole in the toe. Do you think he would mind that?”
He reassured her on this point, and turned to the nurse, who was now wide awake and absorbed in a novel. The car was brilliantly lighted, and the passengers were beginning to respond to the first dinner call.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I’ve taken a great fancy to your little charge, and I want your help to carry out a plan of mine. I have suggested to Hope that she hang up her stockings tonight. I have every reason to believe that Santa Claus will get on this train at Buffalo. In fact,” he added, smiling, “I mean to telegraph him.”
The nurse hesitated a moment. He drew his card-case from his pocket and handed her one of the bits of pasteboard it contained.
“I have no evil designs,” he added, cheerfully. “If you are a New-Yorker you may possibly know who I am.”
The woman’s face lit up as she read the name. She turned toward him impulsively, with a very pleasant smile.
“Indeed I do, doctor,” she said. “Who does not? Dr. Abbey sent for you last week,” she added, “for a consultation over the last case I had—this child’s mother. But you were out of town. We were all so disappointed. It seems strange that we should meet now.”
“Patient died?” asked the physician, with professional brevity.
“Yes, doctor.”
He rose from his seat.
“Now that you have my credentials,” he added, cordially, “I want you and Hope to dine with me. You will, won’t you?”
The upholstered cheerfulness of the dining-car found favor in the sight of Hope. She conducted herself, however, with her usual dignity, broken only occasionally by an ecstatic wriggle as the prospective visit of Santa Claus crossed her mind. Her dinner, superintended by an eminent physician and a trained nurse, was naturally a simple and severely hygienic one, but here, too, her admirable training was evident. She ate cheerfully her bowl of bread and milk, and wasted no longing glances on the plum-pudding.
Later, in the feverish excitement of hanging up her stockings, going to bed, and peeping through the curtains to catch Santa Claus, a little of her extraordinary repose of manner deserted her; but she fell asleep at last, with great reluctance.
When the curtains round her berth had ceased trembling, a most unusual procession wended its silent way toward Dr. Van Valkenberg’s section. In some occult manner the news had gone from one end to the other of the “Special” that a little girl in section nine, car Floradora, had hung up her stockings for Santa Claus. The hearts of fathers, mothers, and doting uncles responded at once. Dressing-cases were unlocked, great valises were opened, mysterious bundles were unwrapped, and from all these sources came gifts of surprising fitness. Small daughters and nieces, sleeping in Western cities, might well have turned restlessly in their beds had they seen the presents designed for them drop into a pair of tiny stockings and pile up on the floor below these.
A succession of long-drawn, ecstatic breaths and happy gurgles awoke the passengers on car Floradora at an unseemly hour Christmas morning, and a small white figure, clad informally in a single garment, danced up and down the aisle, dragging carts and woolly lambs behind it. Occasionally there was the squeak of a talking doll, and always there was the patter of small feet and the soft cooing of a child’s voice, punctuated by the exquisite music of a child’s laughter. Dawn was just approaching, and the lamps, still burning, flared pale in the gray light. But in the length of that car there was no soul so base as to long for silence and the pillow. Crabbed old faces looked out between the curtains and smiled; eyes long unused to tears felt a sudden, strange moisture. Dr. Van Valkenberg had risen almost as early as Hope, and possibly the immaculate freshness of his attire, contrasted with the scantiness of her own, induced that young lady to retire from observation for a short time and emerge clothed for general society. Even during this brief retreat in the dressing-room the passengers heard her breathless voice, high-pitched in her excitement, chattering incessantly to the responsive Nana.
Throughout the day the snow still fell, and the outside world seemed far away and dreamlike to Dr. Van Valkenberg. The real things were this train, cutting its way through the snow, and this little child, growing deeper into his heart with each moment that passed. The situation was unique, but easy enough to understand, he told himself. He had merely gone back twenty-five years to that other child, whom he had petted in infancy and loved and lost in womanhood. He had been very lonely—how lonely he had only recently begun to realize, and he was becoming an old man whose life lay behind him. He crossed the aisle suddenly and sat down beside the nurse, leaving Hope singing her doll to sleep in his section. There was something almost diffident in his manner as he spoke.
“Will you tell me all you know about the child?” he asked. “She interests me greatly and appeals to me very strongly, probably because she’s so much like some one I used to know.”
The nurse closed her book and looked at him curiously. She had heard much of him, but nothing that would explain this interest in a strange child. He himself could not have explained it. He knew only that he felt it, powerfully and compellingly.
“Her name is Hope Armitage,” she said, quietly. “Her mother, who has just died, was a widow—Mrs. Katharine Armitage. They were poor, and Mrs. Armitage seemed to have no relations. She had saved a little, enough to pay most of her expenses at the hospital, and—” She hesitated a moment, and then went on: “I am telling you everything very frankly, because you are you, but it was done quietly enough. We all loved the woman. She was very unusual, and patient, and charming. All the nurses who had had anything to do with her cried when she died. We felt that she might have been saved if she had come in time, but she was worked out. She had earned her living by sewing, after her husband’s death, three years ago, and she kept at it day and night. She hadn’t much constitution to begin with, and none when she came to us. She was so sweet, so brave, yet so desperately miserable over leaving her little girl alone in the world——”
Dr. Van Valkenberg sat silent. It was true, then. This was Katharine’s child. Had he not known it? Could he have failed to know it, whenever or wherever they had met? He had not known of the death of Armitage nor of the subsequent poverty of his widow, but he had known Katharine’s baby, he now told himself, the moment he saw her.
“Well,” the nurse resumed, “after she died we raised a small fund to buy some clothes for Hope, and take her to Chicago to her new home. Mrs. Armitage has a cousin there, who has agreed to take her in. None of the relatives came to the funeral; there are not many of them, and the Chicago people haven’t much money, I fancy. They offered to send Hope’s fare, or even to come for her if it was absolutely necessary; but they seemed very much relieved when we wrote that I would bring her out.”
Dr. Van Valkenberg did not speak at once. He was hardly surprised. Life was full of extraordinary situations, and his profession had brought him face to face with many of them. Nevertheless, a deep solemnity filled him and a strange peace settled over him. He turned to the nurse with something of this in his face and voice.
“I want her,” he said, briefly. “Her mother and father were old friends of mine, and this thing looks like fate. Will they give her to me—these Chicago people—do you think?”
Tears filled the woman’s eyes.
“Indeed they will,” she said, “and gladly. There was”—she hesitated—“there was even some talk of sending her to an institution before they finally decided to take her. Dear little Hope—how happy she will be with you!”
He left her, and went back to the seat where Hope sat, crooning to the doll. Sitting down, he gathered them both up in his arms, and a thrill shot through him as he looked at the yellow curls resting against his breast. Her child—her little helpless baby—now his child, to love and care for. He was not a religious man; nevertheless a prayer rose spontaneously in his heart. But there was a plea to be made—a second plea, like the one he had made the mother; this time he felt that he knew the answer.
“Hope,” he said, gently, “once, long ago, I asked a little girl to come and live with me, and she would not come. Now I want to ask you to come, and stay with me always, and be my own little girl, and let me take care of you and make you happy. Will you come?”
The radiance of June sunshine broke out upon her face and shone in the brown eyes upturned to his. How well he knew that look! Hope did not turn toward Nana, and that significant omission touched him deeply. She seemed to feel that here was a question she alone must decide. She drew a long breath as she looked up at him.
“Really, truly?” she asked. Then, as he nodded without speaking, she saw something in his face that was new to her. It was nothing to frighten a little girl, for it was very sweet and tender; but for one second she thought her new friend was going to cry! She put both arms around his neck, and replied softly, with the exquisite maternal cadences her voice had taken on in her first words to him when he entered the car:
“I’ll be your own little girl, and I’ll take care of you, too. You know, you said I could.”
Dr. Van Valkenberg turned to the nurse.
“I shall go with you to her cousin’s, from the train,” he announced. “I’m ready to give them all the proofs they need that I’m a suitable guardian for the child, but,” he added, with a touch of the boyishness that had never left him, “I want this matter settled now.”
The long train pounded its way into the station at Chicago, and the nurse hurriedly put on Hope’s coat and gloves and fastened the ribbons of her hood under her chin. Dr. Van Valkenberg summoned a porter.
“Take care of all these things,” he said, indicating both sets of possessions with a sweep of the arm. “I shall have my hands full with my little daughter.”
He gathered her into his arms as he spoke, and she nestled against his broad chest with a child’s unconscious satisfaction in the strength and firmness of his clasp. The lights of the great station were twinkling in the early dusk as he stepped off the train, and the place was noisy with the greetings exchanged between the passengers and their waiting friends.
“Merry Christmas,” “Merry Christmas,” sounded on every side. Everybody was absorbed and excited, yet there were few who did not find time to turn a last look on a singularly attractive little child, held above the crowd in the arms of a tall man. She was laughing triumphantly as he bore her through the throng, and his heart was in his eyes as he smiled back at her.