The Stingy Receiver

by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

"For two months," persisted the girl, "I have been haunting the warerooms you speak of! For two months I have been moving 94 heaven and earth in an effort to possess it! But my means being temporarily tied up," she shivered again ever so slightly, "I was not able immediately to—" With that odd, inert little smile she reached out for the plate of rusks and took one as the Young Doctor had requested. "Yes, here is the pain," she explained conscientiously. "But only last week," she winced, "on my birthday it was! I had every reason in the world to believe that Mrs. Tome Gallien was going to give the piano to me! She has given me so many wonderful things! But she sent me instead the deed to a duck blind down somewhere on the South Carolina coast,—shooting, you know? And dreadful guns! And dogs! And all that! I, who wouldn't even hurt a sparrow, or scare a kitten!"

With his hands clapped to his head the Young Doctor swung around suddenly and started for the window.

"Was this a comic opera? A farce? A phantasy of not enough work and too much worry? Was every mention of Mrs. Tome Gallien's name to be a scream? As long as life lasted? As long as—?" Startled by a tiny gasp he turned to find his little visitor 95convulsed with tears but still struggling bravely to regain her self-possession. "Oh, please don't think I'm always as—as weak as this," she pleaded through her sobs. "But with pain and disappointment and everything happening so all at once. And with my big loss so recent——"

"How long ago did you lose your father?" asked the Young Doctor, very gently.

"My father?" stammered the girl. White now as the death she mourned she lifted her stricken face to his. "Why it wasn't father I was talking about," she gasped. "It was my husband."

"Your husband?" cried the Young Doctor. Two minutes ago was this the situation that he had cursed out as a farce, a comic opera? This poor, stricken, exquisite, heartbroken little widow, tagged out by Mrs. Tome Gallien as an "Adventure" and foisted on his attention like some gay new kind of a practical joke? It was outrageous! he fumed. "Inexcusably brutal!"

"Colorado—is where it happened," he had to bend his head to hear. "Almost a year and a half ago," strangled the poor little voice, 96"and we hadn't been married a year. Lung trouble it was, something dreadfully acute. Mrs. Tome Gallien did everything. She's always done everything. It's something about my father I think. Oh, ages and ages ago they were lovers it seems. But—but she chose to make a worldier marriage. And later, my father—why she bought my whole trousseau for me!" suffered the sweet voice afresh. "Went to Paris herself for it, I mean!"

Across the Young Doctor's memory a single chance sentence came flashing back "The daughter of a man who once meant something to me in my youth." So this was the girl? The little "Stingy Receiver"? Among all Mrs. Tome Gallien's so- called "stingy receivers" the one unquenchable pang in an otherwise reasonably callous side? Precious undoubtedly, poignant, eternally significant, yet always and forever the flesh that was not of her flesh nor the spirit quite of her spirit. Familiar eyes—perhaps? An alien mouth? A dimple that had no right, possibly, haunting a lean, loved cheek line? Fire, flame, ice, ashes? A torch to memory, a scorch 97to hope! But whose smile was it, anyway? That maddeningly casual and inconsequent little "Thank You" smile searing its way apparently with equal impartiality across chiffon or crape,— a proffered chair, or eagerest promise of relief from pain? Had Mrs. Tome Gallien's life, by chance, gone a-wreck on just that smile? And why in Heaven's name, if people loved each other, did they let anything wreck them? And back of that— what did people want to love each other for anyway? What good was it? All this old loving-and-parting-and-marrying-some- one-else fretting its new path now all over again into chiffon-and-crape! "Bony-Ankylosis-of-the-Temporomandibular- Joint!" At the very taste of the phrase his mind jumped out of its reverie and back to the one real question at hand. "If you please, now!" he implored his visitor. "Just a little of the coffee! Just a crunch or two of the rusk!" Urgently as he spoke he began proffering first one and then the other. "And this crying?" he persisted. "Does this also hurt you?"

From the doorway beyond him he sensed suddenly the low sound of footsteps and looked 98up into Solvei Kjelland's laughing face. Blue as a larkspur in a summer hail-storm, crisp, shimmery, sparkling with frost, even her blonde hair tucked into a larkspur-blue storm hat, she stood there shaking a reproachful finger at both the Young Doctor and his patient.

"Oh, Ho! For what a pity!" she laughed. "If you had but told me that Mrs. Tome Gallien's adventure was to be a picnic then I also could have brought the food!"