Ragged Lady, Complete

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"He says he thinks he can go, now," she ended, when she had told the
vice-consul. "And I know he can. It wasn't anything but poor living."

"It looks more like no living," said the vice-consul. "Why didn't the old
fool let some one know that he was short of money?" He went on with a
partial transfer of his contempt of the preacher to her, "I suppose if
he'd been sick instead of hungry, you'd have waited over till the next
steamer for him."

She cast down her eyes. "I don't know what you'll think of me. I should
have been sorry for him, and I should have wanted to stay." She lifted
her eyes and looked the vice-consul defiantly in the face. "But he hadn't
the fust claim on me, and I should have gone--I couldn't, have helped
it!--I should have gone, if he had been dying!"

"Well, you've got more horse-sense," said the vice-consul, "than any ten
men I ever saw," and he testified his admiration of her by putting his
arms round her, where she stood before him, and kissing her. "Don't you
mind," he explained. "If my youngest girl had lived, she would have been
about your age."

"Oh, it's all right, Mr. Bennam," said Clementina.

When the time came for them to leave Venice, Mr. Orson was even eager to
go. The vice-consul would have gone with them in contempt of the official
responsibilities which he felt to be such a thankless burden, but there
was really no need of his going, and he and Clementina treated the
question with the matter-of-fact impartiality which they liked in each
other. He saw her off at the station where Maddalena had come to take the
train for Florence in token of her devotion to the signorina, whom she
would not outstay in Venice. She wept long and loud upon Clementina's
neck, so that even Clementina was once moved to put her handkerchief to
her tearless eyes.

At the last moment she had a question which she referred to the vice
consul. "Should you tell him?" she asked.

"Tell who what?" he retorted.

"Mr. Osson-that I wouldn't have stayed for him."

"Do you think it would make you feel any better?" asked the consul, upon
reflection.

"I believe he ought to know."

"Well, then, I guess I should do it."

The time did not come for her confession till they had nearly reached the
end of their voyage. It followed upon something like a confession from
the minister himself, which he made the day he struggled on deck with her
help, after spending a week in his berth.

"Here is something," he said, "which appears to be for you, Miss Claxon.
I found it among some letters for Mrs. Lander which Mr. Bennam gave me
after my arrival, and I only observed the address in looking over the
papers in my valise this morning." He handed her a telegram. "I trust
that it is nothing requiring immediate attention."

Clementina read it at a glance. "No," she answered, and for a while she
could not say anything more; it was a cable message which Hinkle's sister
must have sent her after writing. No evil had come of its failure to
reach her, and she recalled without bitterness the suffering which would
have been spared her if she had got it before. It was when she thought of
the suffering of her lover from the silence which must have made him
doubt her, that she could not speak. As soon as she governed herself
against her first resentment she said, with a little sigh, "It is all
right, now, Mr. Osson," and her stress upon the word seemed to trouble
him with no misgiving. "Besides, if you're to blame for not noticing, so
is Mr. Bennam, and I don't want to blame any one." She hesitated a moment
before she added: "I have got to tell you something, now, because I think
you ought to know it. I am going home to be married, Mr. Osson, and this
message is from the gentleman I am going to be married to. He has been
very sick, and I don't know yet as he'll be able to meet me in New Yo'k;
but his fatha will."

Mr. Orson showed no interest in these facts beyond a silent attention to
her words, which might have passed for an open indifference. At his time
of life all such questions, which are of permanent importance to women,
affect men hardly more than the angels who neither marry nor are given in
marriage. Besides, as a minister he must have had a surfeit of all
possible qualities in the love affairs of people intending matrimony. As
a casuist he was more reasonably concerned in the next fact which
Clementina laid before him.

"And the otha day, there in Venice when you we'e sick, and you seemed to
think that I might put off stahting home till the next steamer, I don't
know but I let you believe I would."

"I supposed that the delay of a week or two could make no material
difference to you."

"But now you see that it would. And I feel as if I ought to tell you--I
spoke to Mr. Bennam about it, and he didn't tell me not to--that I
shouldn't have staid, no not for anything in the wo'ld. I had to do what
I did at the time, but eva since it has seemed as if I had deceived you,
and I don't want to have it seem so any longer. It isn't because I don't
hate to tell you; I do; but I guess if it was to happen over again I
couldn't feel any different. Do you want I should tell the deck-stewahd
to bring you some beef-tea?"

"I think I could relish a small portion," said Mr. Orson, cautiously, and
he said nothing more.

Clementina left him with her nerves in a flutter, and she did not come
back to him until she decided that it was time to help him down to his
cabin. He suffered her to do this in silence, but at the door he cleared
his throat and began:

"I have reflected upon what you told me, and I have tried to regard the
case from all points. I believe that I have done so, without personal
feeling, and I think it my duty to say, fully and freely, that I believe
you would have done perfectly right not to remain."

"Yes," said Clementina, "I thought you would think so."

They parted emotionlessly to all outward effect, and when they met again
it was without a sign of having passed through a crisis of sentiment.
Neither referred to the matter again, but from that time the minister
treated Clementina with a deference not without some shadows of
tenderness such as her helplessness in Venice had apparently never
inspired. She had cast out of her mind all lingering hardness toward him
in telling him the hard truth, and she met his faint relentings with a
grateful gladness which showed itself in her constant care of him.

This helped her a little to forget the strain of the anxiety that
increased upon her as the time shortened between the last news of her
lover and the next; and there was perhaps no more exaggeration in the
import than in the terms of the formal acknowledgment which Mr. Orson
made her as their steamer sighted Fire Island Light, and they both knew
that their voyage had ended: "I may not be able to say to you in the
hurry of our arrival in New York that I am obliged to you for a good many
little attentions, which I should be pleased to reciprocate if
opportunity offered. I do not think I am going too far in saying that
they are such as a daughter might offer a parent."

"Oh, don't speak of it, Mr. Osson!" she protested. "I haven't done
anything that any one wouldn't have done."

"I presume," said the minister, thoughtfully, as if retiring from an
extreme position, "that they are such as others similarly circumstanced,
might have done, but it will always be a source of satisfaction for you
to reflect that you have not neglected them."

XXXVII.

In the crowd which thronged the steamer's dock at Hoboken, Clementina
strained her eyes to make out some one who looked enough like her lover
to be his father, and she began to be afraid that they might miss each
other when she failed. She walked slowly down the gangway, with the
people that thronged it, glad to be hidden by them from her failure, but
at the last step she was caught aside by a small blackeyed, black-haired
woman, who called out "Isn't this Miss Claxon? I'm Georrge's sisterr. Oh,
you'rre just like what he said! I knew it! I knew it!" and then hugged
her and kissed her, and passed her to the little lean dark old man next
her. "This is fatherr. I knew you couldn't tell us, because I take afterr
him, and Georrge is exactly like motherr."

George's father took her hand timidly, but found courage to say to his
daughter, "Hadn't you betterr let her own fatherr have a chance at herr?"
and amidst a tempest of apologies and self blame from the sister, Claxon
showed himself over the shoulders of the little man.

"Why, there wa'n't no hurry, as long as she's he'a," he said, in prompt
enjoyment of the joke, and he and Clementina sparely kissed each other.

"Why, fatha!" she said. "I didn't expect you to come to New Yo'k to meet
me."

"Well, I didn't ha'dly expect it myself; but I'd neva been to Yo'k, and I
thought I might as well come. Things ah' ratha slack at home, just now,
anyway."

She did not heed his explanation. "We'e you sca'ed when you got my
dispatch?"

"No, we kind of expected you'd come any time, the way you wrote afta Mrs.
Landa died. We thought something must be up."

"Yes," she said, absently. Then, "Whe'e's motha?" she asked.

"Well, I guess she thought she couldn't get round to it, exactly," said
the father. "She's all right. Needn't ask you!"

"No, I'm fust-rate," Clementina returned, with a silent joy in her
father's face and voice. She went back in it to the girl of a year ago,
and the world which had come between them since their parting rolled away
as if it had never been there.

Neither of them said anything about that. She named over her brothers and
sisters, and he answered, "Yes, yes," in assurance of their well-being,
and then he explained, as if that were the only point of real interest,
"I see your folks waitin' he'e fo' somebody, and I thought I'd see if it
wa'n't the same one, and we kind of struck up an acquaintance on your
account befo'e you got he'e, Clem."

"Your folks!" she silently repeated to herself. "Yes, they ah' mine!" and
she stood trying to realize the strange fact, while George's sister
poured out a voluminous comment upon Claxon's spare statement, and
George's father admired her volubility with the shut smile of toothless
age. She spoke with the burr which the Scotch-Irish settlers have
imparted to the whole middle West, but it was music to Clementina, who
heard now and then a tone of her lover in his sister's voice. In the
midst of it all she caught sight of a mute unfriended figure just without
their circle, his traveling shawl hanging loose upon his shoulders, and
the valise which had formed his sole baggage in the voyage to and from
Europe pulling his long hand out of his coat sleeve.

"Oh, yes," she said, "here is Mr. Osson that came ova with me, fatha;
he's a relation of Mr. Landa's," and she presented him to them all.

He shifted his valise to the left hand, and shook hands with each,
asking, "What name?" and then fell motionless again.

"Well," said her father, "I guess this is the end of this paht of the
ceremony, and I'm goin' to see your baggage through the custom-house,
Clementina; I've read about it, and I want to know how it's done. I want
to see what you ah' tryin' to smuggle in."

"I guess you won't find much," she said. "But you'll want the keys, won't
you?" She called to him, as he was stalking away.

"Well, I guess that would be a good idea. Want to help, Miss Hinkle?"

"I guess we might as well all help," said Clementina, and Mr. Orson
included himself in the invitation. He seemed unable to separate himself
from them, though the passage of Clementina's baggage through the
customs, and its delivery to an expressman for the hotel where the
Hinkles said they were staying might well have severed the last tie
between them.

"Ah' you going straight home, Mr. Osson?" she asked, to rescue him from
the forgetfulness into which they were all letting him fall.

"I think I will remain over a day," he answered. "I may go on to Boston
before starting West."

"Well, that's right," said Clementina's father with the wish to approve
everything native to him, and an instinctive sense of Clementina's wish
to befriend the minister. "Betta come to oua hotel. We're all goin' to
the same one."

"I presume it is a good one?" Mr. Orson assented.

"Well," said Claxon, "you must make Miss Hinkle, he'a, stand it if it
ain't. She's got me to go to it."

Mr. Orson apparently could not enter into the joke; but he accompanied
the party, which again began to forget him, across the ferry and up the
elevated road to the street car that formed the last stage of their
progress to the hotel. At this point George's sister fell silent, and
Clementina's father burst out, "Look he'a! I guess we betty not keep this
up any Tonga; I don't believe much in surprises, and I guess she betta
know it now!"

He looked at George's sister as if for authority to speak further, and
Clementina looked at her, too, while George's father nervously moistened
his smiling lips with the tip of his tongue, and let his twinkling eyes
rest upon Clementina's face.

"Is he at the hotel?" she asked.

"Yes," said his sister, monosyllabic for once.

"I knew it," said Clementina, and she was only half aware of the fullness
with which his sister now explained how he wanted to come so much that
the doctor thought he had better, but that they had made him promise he
would not try to meet her at the steamer, lest it should be too great a
trial of his strength.

"Yes," Clementina assented, when the story came to an end and was
beginning over again.

She had an inexplicable moment when she stood before her lover in the
room where they left her to meet him alone. She faltered and he waited
constrained by her constraint.

"Is it all a mistake, Clementina?" he asked, with a piteous smile.

"No, no!"

"Am I so much changed?"

"No; you are looking better than I expected."

"And you are not sorry-for anything?"

"No, I am--Perhaps I have thought of you too much! It seems so strange."

"I understand," he answered. "We have been like spirits to each other,
and now we find that we are alive and on the earth like other people; and
we are not used to it."

"It must be something like that."

"But if it's something else--if you have the least regret,--if you would
rather"--He stopped, and they remained looking at each other a moment.
Then she turned her head, and glanced out of the window, as if something
there had caught her sight.

"It's a very pleasant view, isn't it?" she said; and she lifted her hands
to her head, and took off her hat, with an effect of having got home
after absence, to stay.

XXXVIII.

It was possibly through some sense finer than any cognition that
Clementina felt in meeting her lover that she had taken up a new burden
rather than laid down an old one. Afterwards, when they once recurred to
that meeting, and she tried to explain for him the hesitation which she
had not been able to hide, she could only say, "I presume I didn't want
to begin unless I was sure I could carry out. It would have been silly."

Her confession, if it was a confession, was made when one of his returns
to health, or rather one of the arrests of his unhealth, flushed them
with hope and courage; but before that first meeting was ended she knew
that he had overtasked his strength, in coming to New York, and he must
not try it further. "Fatha," she said to Claxon, with the authority of a
woman doing her duty, "I'm not going to let Geo'ge go up to Middlemount,
with all the excitement. It will be as much as he can do to get home. You
can tell mother about it; and the rest. I did suppose it would be Mr.
Richling that would marry us, and I always wanted him to, but I guess
somebody else can do it as well."

"Just as you say, Clem," her father assented. "Why not Brother Osson,
he'a?" he suggested with a pleasure in the joke, whatever it was, that
the minister's relation to Clementina involved. "I guess he can put off
his visit to Boston long enough."

"Well, I was thinking of him," said Clementina. "Will you ask him?"

"Yes. I'll get round to it, in the mohning."

"No-now; right away. I've been talking with Geo'ge about it; and the'e's
no sense in putting it off. I ought to begin taking care of him at once."

"Well, I guess when I tell your motha how you're layin' hold, she won't
think it's the same pusson," said her father, proudly.

"But it is; I haven't changed a bit."

"You ha'n't changed for the wohse, anyway."

"Didn't I always try to do what I had to?"

"I guess you did, Clem."

"Well, then!"

Mr. Orson, after a decent hesitation, consented to perform the ceremony.
It took place in a parlor of the hotel, according to the law of New York,
which facilitates marriage so greatly in all respects that it is strange
any one in the State should remain single. He had then a luxury of choice
between attaching himself to the bridal couple as far as Ohio on his
journey home to Michigan, or to Claxon who was going to take the boat for
Boston the next day on his way to Middlemount. He decided for Claxon,
since he could then see Mrs. Lander's lawyer at once, and arrange with
him for getting out of the vice-consul's hands the money which he was
holding for an authoritative demand. He accepted without open reproach
the handsome fee which the elder Hinkle gave him for his services, and
even went so far as to say, "If your son should ever be blest with a
return to health, he has got a helpmeet such as there are very few of."
He then admonished the young couple, in whatever trials life should have
in store for them, to be resigned, and always to be prepared for the
worst. When he came later to take leave of them, he was apparently not
equal to the task of fitly acknowledging the return which Hinkle made him
of all the money remaining to Clementina out of the sum last given her by
Mrs. Lander, but he hid any disappointment he might have suffered, and
with a brief, "Thank you," put it in his pocket.

Hinkle told Clementina of the apathetic behavior of Mr. Orson; he added
with a laugh like his old self, "It's the best that he doesn't seem
prepared for."

"Yes," she assented. "He wasn't very chee'ful. But I presume that he
meant well. It must be a trial for him to find out that Mrs. Landa wasn't
rich, after all."

It was apparently never a trial to her. She went to Ohio with her husband
and took up her life on the farm, where it was wisely judged that he had
the best chance of working out of the wreck of his health and strength.
There was often the promise and always the hope of this, and their love
knew no doubt of the future. Her sisters-in-law delighted in all her
strangeness and difference, while they petted her as something not to be
separated from him in their petting of their brother; to his mother she
was the darling which her youngest had never ceased to be; Clementina
once went so far as to say to him that if she was ever anything she would
like to be a Moravian.

The question of religion was always related in their minds to the
question of Gregory, to whom they did justice in their trust of each
other. It was Hinkle himself who reasoned out that if Gregory was narrow,
his narrowness was of his conscience and not of his heart or his mind.
She respected the memory of her first lover; but it was as if he were
dead, now, as well as her young dream of him, and she read with a curious
sense of remoteness, a paragraph which her husband found in the religious
intelligence of his Sunday paper, announcing the marriage of the Rev.
Frank Gregory to a lady described as having been a frequent and bountiful
contributor to the foreign missions. She was apparently a widow, and they
conjectured that she was older than he. His departure for his chosen
field of missionary labor in China formed part of the news communicated
by the rather exulting paragraph.

"Well, that is all right," said Clementina's husband. "He is a good man,
and he is where he can do nothing but good. I am glad I needn't feel
sorry for him, any more."

Clementina's father must have given such a report of Hinkle and his
family, that they felt easy at home in leaving her to the lot she had
chosen. When Claxon parted from her, he talked of coming out with her
mother to see her that fall; but it was more than a year before they got
round to it. They did not come till after the birth of her little girl,
and her father then humorously allowed that perhaps they would not have
got round to it at all if something of the kind had not happened. The
Hinkles and her father and mother liked one another, so much that in the
first glow of his enthusiasm Claxon talked of settling down in Ohio, and
the older Hinkle drove him about to look at some places that were for
sale. But it ended in his saying one day that he missed the hills, and he
did not believe that he would know enough to come in when it rained if he
did not see old Middlemount with his nightcap on first. His wife and he
started home with the impatience of their years, rather earlier than they
had meant to go, and they were silent for a little while after they left
the flag-station where Hinkle and Clementina had put them aboard their
train.

"Well?" said Claxon, at last.

"Well?" echoed his wife, and then she did not speak for a little while
longer. At last she asked,

"D'he look that way when you fust see him in New Yo'k?"

Claxon gave his honesty time to get the better of his optimism. Even then
he answered evasively, "He doos look pootty slim."

"The way I cypher it out," said his wife, "he no business to let her
marry him, if he wa'n't goin' to get well. It was throwin' of herself
away, as you may say."

"I don't know about that," said Claxon, as if the point had occurred to
him, too, and had been already argued in his mind. "I guess they must 'a'
had it out, there in New York before they got married--or she had. I
don't believe but what he expected to get well, right away. It's the kind
of a thing that lingas along, and lingas along. As fah fo'th as Clem
went, I guess there wa'n't any let about it. I guess she'd made up her
mind from the staht, and she was goin' to have him if she had to hold him
on his feet to do it. Look he'a! W hat would you done?"

"Oh, I presume we're all fools!" said Mrs. Claxon, impatient of a sex not
always so frank with itself. "But that don't excuse him."

"I don't say it doos," her husband admitted. "But I presume he was
expectin' to get well right away, then. And I don't believe," he added,
energetically, "but what he will, yet. As I undastand, there ain't
anything ogganic about him. It's just this he'e nuvvous prostration,
resultin' from shock, his docta tells me; and he'll wo'k out of that all
right."

They said no more, and Mrs. Claxon did not recur to any phase of the
situation till she undid the lunch which the Hinkles had put up for them,
and laid out on the napkin in her lap the portions of cold ham and cold
chicken, the buttered biscuit, and the little pot of apple-butter, with
the large bottle of cold coffee. Then she sighed, "They live well."

"Yes," said her husband, glad of any concession, "and they ah' good
folks. And Clem's as happy as a bud with 'em, you can see that."

"Oh, she was always happy enough, if that's all you want. I presume she
was happy with that hectorin' old thing that fooled her out of her
money."

"I ha'n't ever regretted that money, Rebecca," said Claxon, stiffly,
almost sternly, "and I guess you a'n't, eitha."

"I don't say I have," retorted Mrs. Claxon. "But I don't like to be made
a fool of. I presume," she added, remotely, but not so irrelevantly,
"Clem could ha' got 'most anybody, ova the'a."

"Well," said Claxon, taking refuge in the joke, "I shouldn't want her to
marry a crowned head, myself."

It was Clementina who drove the clay-bank colt away from the station
after the train had passed out of sight. Her husband sat beside her, and
let her take the reins from his nerveless grasp; and when they got into
the shelter of the piece of woods that the road passed through he put up
his hands to his face, and broke into sobs. She allowed him to weep on,
though she kept saying, "Geo'ge, Geo'ge," softly, and stroking his knee
with the hand next him. When his sobbing stopped, she said, "I guess
they've had a pleasant visit; but I'm glad we'a together again." He took
up her hand and kissed the back of it, and then clutched it hard, but did
not speak. "It's strange," she went on, "how I used to be home-sick for
father and motha"--she had sometimes lost her Yankee accent in her
association with his people, and spoke with their Western burr, but she
found it in moments of deeper feeling--"when I was there in Europe, and
now I'm glad to have them go. I don't want anybody to be between us; and
I want to go back to just the way we we'e befo'e they came. It's been a
strain on you, and now you must throw it all off and rest, and get up
your strength. One thing, I could see that fatha noticed the gain you had
made since he saw you in New Yo'k. He spoke about it to me the fust
thing, and he feels just the way I do about it. He don't want you to
hurry and get well, but take it slowly, and not excite yourself. He
believes in your gleaner, and he knows all about machinery. He says the
patent makes it puffectly safe, and you can take your own time about
pushing it; it's su'a to go. And motha liked you. She's not one to talk a
great deal--she always leaves that to father and me--but she's got deep
feelings, and she just worshipped the baby! I neva saw her take a child
in her ahms before; but she seemed to want to hold the baby all the
time." She stopped, and then added, tenderly, "Now, I know what you ah'
thinking about, Geo'ge, and I don't want you to think about it any more.
If you do, I shall give up."

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