MIDNIGHT
The heat was oppressive. Miss Gibbie turned off all lights save the one on the candle-stand by the high mahogany bed, with its valance of white pique, drew the large wing chair close to the open window and sat down in it. Over her gown she had put on a mandarin coat bought somewhere in China, and on her feet were the slippers embroidered for her by a Japanese girl she had sent to a hospital in Nagasaki.
The moon, coming out of its hiding place, for a moment poised clear and cool in a trough of gray banked by curling clouds of black, sent a thread of pale light upon the golden dragons on the coat, flashed on the slippers, and was lost in the darkness under which it darted. Miss Gibbie, watching, nodded toward it, and tapped the stool on which her feet rested with the tip of her toes.
"The moon is like one's self," she said. "Go where you will you can't get rid of it. Spooky thing, a moon. One big eye. Don't like it!"
She lay back in her chair and rested her hands on its arms. From the garden below the night wind brought soft fragrance of lilacs and crepe-myrtle, of bleeding-heart and wall-flower, of cow-slips and candy-tuft, and as they blew in and out, like the touch of unseen hands, they stirred old memories—made that which was dead, alive again.
"You're a fool, Gibbie Gault—a fool! You are too old to care as you care; too old to take up what you've turned your back on all these years. You are too old—too old!"
Suddenly she sat up. "Too old, am I? I'll see about that! The tail end of anything isn't its valuable part, and of a life it's usually useless, but it is all I have left, and I'll be jammed if I don't do something with it. And were I a man I wouldn't say I'll be jammed. Men have so many advantages over women!"
Again she leaned back in her chair and tapped its arms with her long, slender fingers. "I wonder how long I have to live. One—five—ten years? What puppets we humans are—what puppets! Born without permission, dying when it is neither pleasant nor convenient, we are made to march or crawl through life on the edge of a precipice from which at any moment we may be knocked over. And we're told we should believe the experience is a privilege!" Both hands were lifted. "A privilege! Mary thinks it is, thinks parts of it very pleasant, but Mary never was a field in which she didn't find a four-leaf clover, and I never saw one in which I did. 'Look for it,' she tells me." She shook her head. "It isn't that. The pitiful part of life is when one cares so little for what life gives!"
The tips of her fingers were brought together, then opened and shut mechanically. "And once I cared so much! Who doesn't care when they are young and wonderful things are ahead? Who doesn't care? And now to be caring again after the long, long, useless years! To be caring again!"
She closed her eyes and smiled a queer, twisted little smile. "It's got me!" she said. "Old or not, it's got me! and it's a poor life that it doesn't get! But who would have thought at your age, Gibbie Gault, you would let another life do with yours what it will? And that's what you are doing; you are letting Mary Cary do with you what she will! Well, suppose I am?" The keen gray eyes opened with a snap, and without warning stinging tears sprang in them. "Suppose I am? I've been a selfish old fool and shut out the only thing worth the having in life, and do you think now it's given me I am going to turn my back on it? In all this big world sheis the only person who really loves me—the only one I really love. And do you think?"—she nodded fiercely as if to some one before her, then crumpled in a sudden heap in her chair. "Oh, God, don't let her go out of my life! I'm an old woman and she's all I've got! All I've got!"