THE CHRISTMAS BRIDE (13 page)

Probably he was foolish in the extreme to act this way about an utter stranger. He had done his best for her while she stayed and would have done far more. Surely he was not to blame if she came to further disaster. It was wholly her fault, running away like that. She knew he was coming at eleven o’clock. She should have waited, at least until her nurse returned. She should have trusted him.

And yet why should she? He was an utterly unknown quantity to her, and the insinuations of that head nurse were enough to send any self-respecting girl into hiding. It was easy to see that she had been carefully brought up and would shrink from having people question her relationship with a strange young man. And when you came to think about it, of course, it was utterly out of the ordinary.

Sometimes at night his heart had told him he was a fool to put so much time and thought on her. She might be anything but what he thought her. Yet he knew that was not so. She must be sweet and good and true, and very likely was horrified that she had listened to him for a moment. She probably now thought him a false-hearted adventurer.

That thought stabbed him like a knife. He could not bear the idea of her going on through life always thinking of him in that way. But more than that, he knew he could not bear the thought of her going on somewhere suffering all alone, toiling for a pittance, weary, sick, sad, and no one to help her. Always, especially at night, he saw her face as it had been that first night he found her white. Upturned against his shoulder, felt her frail weight in his arms. He had had her then, a sweet responsibility to care for, and he had been somehow so clumsy as to lose her. He was a fool of course, but he knew he never could be satisfied until he had done his utmost to find her and put her where she was safe. Then perhaps he could go on about his business. Well, perhaps tomorrow, if he found no trace of her, he would give it up.

Of course he might put the matter in the hands of the police, but he shrank from that. She would not like it, and he had no possible claim upon her. She would resent it he was sure.

So he went to bed to toss another night through in fitful slumber and wish he knew what to do that he had not already done.

But tomorrow brought no further light, and another Sunday dawned.

A new idea had come to him through the night. Perhaps if she were still alive and well enough, and still in this part of the world, she might go to church. He would go to a great many churches.

So he started early and made the rounds of all the churches in that part of the city, and he was amazed to find how many there were. He would slip into a backseat and carefully search the audience, then not finding her, would slip out again and go on to another.

Now and again he would see a familiar face, grown older since he went away, but he had a strange reluctance to make himself known to anyone. He hadn’t time, and he had lost interest.

Before the day was over, he had covered a good deal of denominational ground but had not found the object of his search, and he was heart weary and dog tired. Late in the afternoon, it had occurred to him that it was a cold day and Margaret had no warm coat. The little jacket to her suit that she had been wearing was wholly inadequate for the weather of today. Besides, it had been shabby. Perhaps she would not feel that she was well enough dressed to attend church, and he was only wasting time. He recalled the pitiful sentence in her grandmother’s letter bidding her save her money to get a warm coat. No, of course she would not be likely to go to church. He recalled the caustic remarks of her former landlady about her pawning her clothes. Probably her old coat had been pawned. But perhaps she would go and redeem them now if she found the money he had put in her purse.

He got up the next morning with an ache in his heart. He had resolved to give it up. Perhaps she would find her way the first time. At any rate, it was foolish to spend his time this way in a useless search. She was nothing to him, and the sooner he made himself realize it, the better. He would go this morning and look up his old home and try to turn his thoughts in another direction.

As he started out into the chill wind of a surly November day, he found himself longing with a sick thrill for the freedom and hard work of his western life. How ridiculous! Here he had had nearly two weeks of the hometown, and he hadn’t even approached doing the things he had planned to do when he came! It was high time he stopped this and got something new to think about. There would be no point in losing his mind, or getting dyspepsia, when he had money enough to do anything he pleased. He would just stop being philanthropic and think of himself. He was lonesome, and he must get himself some friends. He wished he could see Rhoderick Steele, the man he had met on the train. He had a feeling that an hour with him would be like a breath from his western mountain and give him new life and strength, blowing away the morbidness from his mind.

So he turned his footsteps toward Maple Street and the little white cottage of his boyhood, the house he had loved in those dear dead days when he was a boy with a home and a mother who cared for him.

Eventually, in spite of changes, he found the little white cottage where he used to live, but it was no longer white, nor pleasant in any way. A boiler factory had come to the section behind Maple Street that used to be a wide field where the boys of the neighborhood played baseball on summer evenings, and the consequent noise and dirt had changed the whole neighborhood. A railroad siding ran behind the house, cutting off a part of the yard where his mother used to have her garden.

The little white cottage was grimy and run-down. The steps were broken, a window light was replaced by a piece of cardboard, one shutter hung by a single hinge, the roof showed rotted shingles, the whole place needed paint.

A swarm of clamoring dirty children fought fiercely in the muddy front yard that used to be so trim and tidy with its speck of a lawn that he had always kept in order and its border of bright flowers that his mother tended so carefully.

The narrow boardwalk that led from the gate to the front door, the side door, and around to the back door had so many missing boards that one wondered why its framework was allowed to remain and rot. There wasn’t any gate, and many of the palings of the fence were gone. Later he discovered the gate down in the backyard in full view of the street, helping to house a pig under a rude roof of clumsy construction, and a bevy of hens swarmed around the house, contending for a late bug they had found in the rotten wood of the walk.

He stood in dismay and surveyed the surroundings. The neighboring houses were just as badly run down. How could all that have happened in ten years? Did neighborhoods always change like that? How ghastly, how terrible it seemed! He wished he had not come. Why, he had long harbored intentions to buy that house and live in it, to make it as nearly as possible as it had been when his mother was living. He had even thought that perhaps there would be a way of tracing her furniture that had been sold after her death to pay her funeral expenses. He had spent time on his journey thinking about that, writing down a list of the things he could remember. Her old walnut bedroom set that her father had given her when she was married, just a year before his death. How many times she had told him the tale of her surprise and delight when he showed it to her. It had marble tops. He had thought every feature of it out. He had tried to remember the name of the auctioneer who had sold the things.

Then there had been the round dining room table, the chairs, and the sideboard—golden oak his mother called it. And there was an old sofa that he used to go to sleep on nights when he had finished his lessons. It had been because of that sofa that he had bought the old lumpy couch for his shack. And there had been the parlor table with the big glass lamp that had lambs and a shepherd painted on the shade. How dear it had all been. Why, he could remember his mother in the evening when the lamp was lighted and she sat in the corner in her haircloth-covered mahogany rocker, singing softly, “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” The memory of the soft quaver in her voice in those last months when she was ill brought tears to his eyes now as he stood in the wind and looked at the wreck that house had become. There were green shades at the windows, and a woman with untidy hair and an unclean, yelling baby in her arms, opened the front door, paused to spank a two-year-old screaming on the top step, and then went in and slammed the door. His one brief glimpse of the inside of the house had showed a cluttered floor and a drunken man sprawled at full length on a wooden settee across the room, sound asleep. So his home had become that! It seemed somehow to strike at all that was holy and dear in the past. It filled him with a disgust for life. To think that a little white sanctuary such as his mother had made and kept could become a place of horror like this. No wonder the man drank, the woman was untidy, the children fought, and the baby screamed! Was life all like this? Had it always been so? Was it so everywhere? If so, why had he come back? What was the use? Better loneliness and the desert.

Just to cheer himself, he walked about the streets. Alice Blair had lived on a wider street with three-story twin brick houses. He had always had an ambition to grow up and buy his mother a brick house someday. It had seemed grand to his youthful ideas. Yet when he walked the three or four blocks to Alice’s old street and paused before the door where he had so often waited to say good-bye and hand Alice her armful of schoolbooks that he had carried home for her, somehow the house had shrunken to squalor. This street, even more than his own home street, was swarming with dirty, yelling children. The houses were grimy and ill kept. A vacant one here and there had every pane of glass broken, the targets of the neighborhood. And the house where Alice used to live had become a shop! A dirty, grimy little cigar shop, where cheap sensational newssheets hung in the window beside chewing gum and pipes and a few loaves of bread!

There were discouraged-looking bananas, too, and a small measure of specked apples. A mere travesty of a store. He gazed aghast at what had once seemed to him a fine home. He gave a quick, furtive look up and down the length of the street, which appeared to be pretty much all alike, and beat a hasty retreat. There was a feeling at the pit of his stomach that made him want to lie down. A single line of an old hymn that his mother used to sing sometimes around the house at work came to him, utterly out of its setting:
“Change and decay in all around I see!”

He did not know what came next. He did not want to know. He was filled with sorrow at having come home and found no home. Life was a great delusion. Why should one live?

He walked on over toward the old schoolhouse, but here, too, the boiler factory and an iron foundry had encroached upon what had been a pleasant memory, and a crowded population had swarmed into the happy wide areas and changed them almost beyond recognition. Still, he kept on. The school building was there, evidently still being used as a schoolhouse. There were a lot of little boys playing in the cinder court outside. He walked past them, up the old steps, into the long, musty halls smelling of chalk, stale lunches, and little, unwashed humanity. Even the school had degenerated!

Still he forced himself to go upstairs to the senior room where last he had sat over by the window, with Alice at her desk across the room, smiling, signaling, flipping notes across!

He looked sadly around and was comforted that at least here there was no change. The desk a little more marred and scratched perhaps, but still in the same place. He sat down in his old seat and realized that it was hard to get his long legs under the desk. He tried to think of himself as he used to be, to feel that the rest of the class would presently march in and take their places, and that Alice would give him a golden glance and go on to her place. But the empty spaces gave back a solitary look and sound to his eagerness. He wanted to put his head down on the desk and cry!

He got up and walked quickly down the stairs and out the door. He got himself out of that street and vicinity. He went up where the banker used to live, near the great stone church that his mother and he used to attend. The church was there, yes, with a dim and distant dignity. There was a new name on the bulletin board under the word
Pastor
Another new name for the janitor. Nobody anywhere around that he knew! Only ten years and everything changed! It seemed incredible. There must be some familiar faces somewhere.

He walked on past the stone mansion where the bank president used to live, and there was a great board announcing T
his
P
roperty for
S
ale
. A
pply to
H
amilton
R
eal
E
state
T
rust
C
ompany
.

He asked a workman who was resetting the curbstone, “Don’t the Hamiltons live here anymore?”

It was a foolish question. One could see at a glance that no one lived there now.

The man looked at him curiously and shook his head.

“Not sence the bank shut down, and that’s ben most two year now. Folks say they went to Europe somewheres ‘cause they could live cheaper there.”

Greg gave a startled look at the ornate old mansion that used to represent to him all that was grand in the way of a residence and walked on thoughtfully.

Away to the upper end of the town he walked where the sunset used to stretch out beyond wide, sunny meadows filled with violets and daisies and buttercups girdling the hometown with rest and peace.

But the sunset was hidden now behind giant apartment houses, tier upon tier of brick colonnades, windows and windows! How the town had grown! And beyond those, more new mansions, greater and more pretentious than any that the town had boasted before he went away.

And then a great rolling expanse of green, even late in the fall though it was, and far in the center a low, rambling building, neither mansion nor dwelling. He did not quite know how to rank it till he came to the stone-arched gateway bearing the inscription “Meadow Springs Golf Club.” Golf! He looked at the words, startled. He knew what it was, of course; he’d read about it. A silly way for the idle rich to spend their time! People who did not know how to do real things! That was the impression he had.