V
The boy stumbled down our front steps. By the time I had spoken to my mother and secured hat and coat, he had disappeared.
Where he went no one knows. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. Around eight o’clock he appeared at the box-shop. He unlocked the office door and groped his way inside.
The office had expanded in keeping with the rest of the plant. It now bore little resemblance to the room in which Nat had kept bitter-sweet rendezvous with Carol in those Memory Nights. A private office—two of them, because Johnathan had insisted upon one—had been constructed off on the right. And Nathan stumbled into his own, leaving all doors open and lamps burning. He sank in his swivel chair and his forehead went down in his arms.
“Hello!” called a cheery voice.
Nathan raised his head. His face was the countenance of a middle-aged man.
A girl was standing in the doorway. She was hatless, despite the winter chill. She wore an oversized cloak of heavy green plaid. The sleeves were too long and had been folded back. The cloak was unbuttoned; two of the buttons, in fact, were missing, and a third was due to fall off momentarily. Underneath the cloak was a plain white shirtwaist with an inappropriate low neck. But her hair was done very prettily and her face was flushed with health and the nip of the night wind. It was Milly Richards.
“Hello!” returned Nat lifelessly.
“Why! What’s the matter, Nathan? You’re sick!”
The boy’s hollow eyes fastened upon the girl. Deliberately he looked down her figure as she stood in the doorway, from the pile of brown hair with its marcelled wave to the curve of her neck, the slightly heaving bosom, the ample torso and hips, the stolid ankles.
“Shut the door!” said Nathan.
Milly was puzzled, not a little alarmed. But she shut the door. Across to a chair she moved. Keeping her eyes intently upon him, she raised her forearms, with locked hands, and rested them across the corner of the intervening desk top.
The lad continued to gaze upon her. The color of his lips was gruesome. No word was spoken.
The clock on the wall showed seventeen minutes past eight. The night wind blew some papers from Charley Newton’s desk in the outer office where the door had been left open.
“Nathan! Something horrible’s happened! Can’t you tell me?”
“Milly! You know how much trouble father and I are always having around the shop, here?”
“Yes! ’Course I know! So does everybody!”
“It’s reached the point, Milly, where I can’t stand it any longer.”
“All the fellers and girls would follow you out to a person, if you was to ask ’em.”
“I’m especially thinking—of—home. You can imagine, can’t you, that if dad quarrels with me here, he acts the same way at home. Well, he does, anyhow! And I’m sick of it!”
“Then I should think you’d get out and,” she dropped her eyes, adding unsteadily, “get a home o’ your own.”
“I—haven’t—any one—to do it with, Milly.”
His face returned to his arms. “I thought I had, but I haven’t.”
“You thought you had?”
“I thought I had, yes. But the girl went off and married somebody else. I just learned it—to-night!”
“She couldn’t have loved you very much to do that, Nathan.”
“I suppose not! No!”
“I’m—I’m—awful sorry, Nathan! Sorry for you! If there was anything I could do, you know I’d do it, don’t you?”
He raised his face again. His hands wandered around the desk top, as though groping blindly.
Fog! Fog! Or perhaps he was searching for something.
“Milly, I feel like the loneliest chap on God’s earth!” Two huge tears brimmed in his hot, hard eyes, blurred his sight, zigzagged down his haggard, unshaven cheeks. He arose, walked to the window. The girl’s eyes were riveted on him. When he came close to her, she only tilted her head back to look up into his face.
“Nathan,” she lisped, “is there anything I could do to make you—happy?”
It was her soft, ample bosom which he saw heaving that brought that constricted feeling across his own chest and words to his lips.
“I don’t know, Milly. Oh, God, I’m tired—tired!”
Milly found the strength to rise. She had seen Nat enter the office and followed to tell him there had been a mistake of ten cents in her weekly envelope. But it was plain she had come instead to encounter, all unwittingly, her Amethyst Moment.
She made an appealing picture, standing before the lad with wistful solicitation on her face,—half-frightened, not knowing whether to stay or to flee, held half by morbid curiosity, half by the titanic possibilities of the drama. Everything about her was cheap, but was that not because she had been denied something better—like the boy himself?
Hardly knowing that he did so, groping, the scion of the House of Forge raised his left hand. His fingers touched the fabric of her cloak sleeve.
He did not especially want Milly. He wanted Woman—the solacing, maternal spirit—wanted it horribly in one of life’s great disappointments. Milly at the moment only stood for Woman.
The girl did not shrink from his touch. She stood motionless, waiting, with the blood dying out of her face.
The boy’s other hand found the girl’s other arm. Both his hands crept up toward her ample shoulders.
Nathan took old Jake Richards’ daughter to his heart. And old Jake Richards’ daughter responded somehow, frightened out of her wits.
It was twenty-one minutes past eight. The town clerk’s office would be open until nine o’clock. The day was Saturday and taxpayers came in to settle their assessments and water rents. There was time, then, that night, to get a marriage license.
Nathan had no heart to take his hideous disappointment back to a home where father and mother were still “at it.” Forever “at it.”
Milly thought it a great lark. On the way uptown her head was swimming with the realization.
“I guess Pa and Maw ain’t got the stunning of their lives coming when they see I’ve copped off the boss!”