She did not read Mrs. Dow’s letter to the doctor, but spoke from memory, with which an unexpected quality of imagination blended with dangerous frequency.
Alack a day! How often are the overworked three graces, Faith, Hope, and Charity, pushed into the place of Truth, Experience, and Common Sense, and forced to bear responsibility not theirs!
When Miss Keith had finished, the good doctor naturally supposed that she had received a direct proposal from an old-time lover who, once rejected, had married some one else in pique. Also that the making of the sister’s home the meeting place was her own idea, born of her maidenly regard of the proprieties, which regard he well knew usually strengthens in inverse proportion to the need for it!
Finally, as he arose to go, she said, hovering tremulously between kitchen and sitting room, “Now that I know that you agree with me, I will ask one favour more. I have a letter that I would like to have posted in Gilead by your hand; these outdoor letter boxes sometimes leak, you know. Then I shall sleep content.”
“Most certainly,” said the doctor, turning back, a smile crossing his face and lurking at his mouth corners at this latest of many vocations given him—that of Cupid’s postman, though he could not but admit that his age made him a peculiarly suitable assistant in such a belated wooing.
As he took the letter, he involuntarily turned it face upward, and glanced at the address, saying in a dubious tone, his eyebrows raised: “Mrs. Dow? Why not James White himself?” Then adding, with a touch of irony in his voice that Miss Keith missed, “Is his sister acting the kindly part of go-between? Ah, so! Well, Miss Keith, no one but yourself can settle so delicate a matter finally, but one thing promise me: go to Boston, if you will; jig and jostle, hear reform lectures and eat health food, and see life if you must; but for God’s sake, woman, don’t commit yourself until you have seen the ‘sweet children’ and the man! Photographs can lie, as well as tongues!” Then, fearing he had been too harsh, he added kindly, “If you find that Tatters can’t transfer himself, as you call it, let me know,—there is always room for one more dog at Oaklands, and Barbara will pamper him.”
That night Miss Keith, buoyed by the doctor’s talk and a man’s recent presence in the house, albeit it was temporary, was in an exalted mood and trod on air. Already she saw visions of the future, and kept saying to herself, “I will do and see so and so when I go to Boston.”
When she lit her candle and went upstairs, she took the First Cause from the mantel and bore him with her. Where should she put him? Her dresser seemed too intimate a place; the spare room album, too remote. Finally she placed the photograph against the puffs and quills of the pillow-shams of the best room bed and then fled to her own chamber, where she blew out the candle and undressed in the dark, or, rather, by the half moonlight, saying aloud, as she got into bed, “Thank fortune for one thing, I’ve kept my own hair and teeth, and such as I am there is nothing of me that takes off.” And though the remark was apropos of nothing in particular, a wave of hot colour covered her face at the words, and she buried her head in her pillow and tried to sleep. This she didn’t do, for Tatters, whom she had utterly forgotten for the first time, and shut out when she closed the door, resented being forced to sleep out on the porch at such a frosty time, and at intervals throughout the night bayed dismally at the moon, thereby calling to her mind an old ballad of chilling and ominous portent.