Ragged Lady, Complete

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"To be sure," she said, when this had happened, "it isn't as if she were
a servant in the house; and the position can be regarded as a kind of
public function, anyhow. I can't say that I've hired her to take the
part, but I can give her a present afterwards, and it will be the same
thing."

The question of clothes for Clementina Mrs. Milray declared was almost
as sweeping in its implication as the question of the child's creation.
"She has got to be dressed new from head to foot," she said, "every
stitch, and how am I to manage it in twenty-four hours?"

By a succession of miracles with cheese-cloth, and sashes and ribbons, it
was managed; and ended in a triumph so great that Mrs. Milray took the
girl in her arms and kissed her for looking the Spirit of Summer to a
perfection that the victim of the mumps could not have approached. The
victory was not lastingly marred by the failure of Clementina's shoes to
look the Spirit of Summer as well as the rest of her costume. No shoes at
all world have been the very thing, but shoes so shabby and worn down at
one side of the heel as Clementina's were very far from the thing. Mrs.
Milray decided that another fold of cheese-cloth would add to the
statuesque charm of her figure, and give her more height; and she was
richly satisfied with the effect when the Middlemount coach drove up to
the great veranda the next morning, with all the figures of her picture
in position on its roof, and Clementina supreme among them. She herself
mounted in simple, undramatized authority to her official seat beside the
landlord, who in coachman's dress, with a bouquet of autumnal flowers in
his lapel, sat holding his garlanded reins over the backs of his six
horses; and then the coach as she intended it to appear in the parade set
out as soon as the turnouts of the other houses joined it. They were all
to meet at the Middlemount, which was thickly draped and festooned in
flags, with knots of evergreen and the first red boughs of the young
swamp maples holding them in place over its irregular facade. The coach
itself was amass of foliage and flowers, from which it defined itself as
a wheeled vehicle in vague and partial outline; the other wagons and
coaches, as they drove tremulously up, with an effect of having been
mired in blossoms about their spokes and hubs, had the unwieldiness which
seems inseparable from spectacularity. They represented motives in color
and design sometimes tasteless enough, and sometimes so nearly very good
that Mrs. Milray's heart was a great deal in her mouth, as they arrived,
each with its hotel-cry roared and shrilled from a score of masculine and
feminine throats, and finally spelled for distinctness sake, with an
ultimate yell or growl. But she had not finished giving the
lady-representative of a Sunday newspaper the points of her own tableau,
before she regained the courage and the faith in which she remained
serenely steadfast throughout the parade.

It was when all the equipages of the neighborhood had arrived that she
climbed to her place; the ladder was taken away; the landlord spoke to
his horses, and the Middlemount coach led the parade, amid the renewed
slogans, and the cries and fluttered handkerchiefs of the guests crowding
the verandas.

The line of march was by one road to Middlemount Centre, where the prize
was to be awarded at the judges' stand, and then the coaches were to
escort the triumphant vehicle homeward by another route, so as to pass as
many houses on the way as possible. It was a curious expression of the
carnival spirit in a region immemorially starved of beauty in the lives
of its people; and whatever was the origin of the mountain coaching
parade, or from whatever impulse of sentimentality or advertising it
came, the effect was of undeniable splendor, and of phantasmagoric
strangeness.

Gregory watched its progress from a hill-side pasture as it trailed
slowly along the rising and falling road. The songs of the young girls,
interrupted by the explosion of hotel slogans and college cries from the
young men, floated off to him on the thin breeze of the cloudless August
morning, like the hymns and shouts of a saturnalian rout going in holiday
processional to sacrifice to their gods. Words of fierce Hebrew poetry
burned in his thought; the warnings and the accusals and the
condemnations of the angry prophets; and he stood rapt from his own time
and place in a dream of days when the Most High stooped to commune face
to face with His ministers, while the young voices of those forgetful or
ignorant of Him, called to his own youth, and the garlanded chariots,
with their banners and their streamers passed on the road beneath him and
out of sight in the shadow of the woods beyond.

When the prize was given to the Middlemount coach at the Center the
landlord took the flag, and gallantly transferred it to Mrs. Milray, and
Mrs. Milray passed it up to Clementina, and bade her, "Wave it, wave it!"

The village street was thronged with people that cheered, and swung their
hats and handkerchiefs to the coach as it left the judges' stand and
drove under the triumphal arch, with the other coaches behind it. Then
Atwell turned his horses heads homewards, and at the brisker pace with
which people always return from festivals or from funerals, he left the
village and struck out upon the country road with his long escort before
him. The crowd was quick to catch the courteous intention of the victors,
and followed them with applause as far beyond the village borders as wind
and limb would allow; but the last noisy boy had dropped off breathless
before they reached a half-finished house in the edge of some woods. A
line of little children was drawn up by the road-side before it, who
watched the retinue with grave eagerness, till the Middlemount coach came
in full sight. Then they sprang into the air, and beating their hands
together, screamed, "Clem! Clem! Oh it's Clem!" and jumped up and down,
and a shabby looking work worn woman came round the corner of the house
and stared up at Clementina waving her banner wildly to the children, and
shouting unintelligible words to them. The young people on the coach
joined in response to the children, some simply, some ironically, and one
of the men caught up a great wreath of flowers which lay at Clementina's
feet, and flung it down to them; the shabby woman quickly vanished round
the corner of the house again. Mrs. Milray leaned over to ask the
landlord, "Who in the world are Clementina's friends?"

"Why don't you know?" he retorted in abated voice. "Them's her brothas
and sistas."

"And that woman?"

"The lady at the conna? That's her motha."

When the event was over, and all the things had been said and said again,
and there was nothing more to keep the spring and summer months from
going up to their rooms to lie down, and the fall and winter months from
trying to get something to eat, Mrs. Milray found herself alone with
Clementina.

The child seemed anxious about something, and Mrs. Milray, who wanted to
go and lie down, too, asked a little impatiently, "What is it,
Clementina?"

"Oh, nothing. Only I was afraid maybe you didn't like my waving to the
children, when you saw how queea they looked." Clementina's lips
quivered.

"Did any of the rest say anything?"

"I know what they thought. But I don't care! I should do it right over
again!"

Mrs. Milray's happiness in the day's triumph was so great that she could
indulge a generous emotion. She caught the girl in her arms. "I want to
kiss you; I want to hug you, Clementina!"

The notion of a dance for the following night to celebrate the success of
the house in the coaching parade came to Mrs. Milray aver a welsh-rarebit
which she gave at the close of the evening. The party was in the charge
of Gregory, who silently served them at their orgy with an austerity that
might have conspired with the viand itself against their dreams, if they
had not been so used to the gloom of his ministrations. He would not
allow the waitresses to be disturbed in their evening leisure, or kept
from their sleep by such belated pleasures; and when he had provided the
materials for the rarebit, he stood aloof, and left their combination to
Mrs. Milray and her chafing-dish.

She had excluded Clementina on account of her youth, as she said to one
of the fall and winter months, who came in late, and noticed Clementina's
absence with a "Hello! Anything the matter with the Spirit of Summer?"
Clementina had become both a pet and a joke with these months before the
parade was over, and now they clamored together, and said they must have
her at the dance anyway. They were more tepidly seconded by the spring
and summer months, and Mrs. Milray said, "Well, then, you'll have to all
subscribe and get her a pair of dancing slippers." They pressed her for
her meaning, and she had to explain the fact of Clementina's destitution,
which that additional fold of cheese-cloth had hidden so well in the
coaching tableau that it had never been suspected. The young men
entreated her to let them each buy a pair of slippers for the Spirit of
Summer, which she should wear in turn for the dance that she must give
each of them; and this made Mrs. Milray declare that, no, the child
should not come to the dance at all, and that she was not going to have
her spoiled. But, before the party broke up, she promised that she would
see what could be done, and she put it very prettily to the child the
next day, and waited for her to say, as she knew she must, that she could
not go, and why. They agreed that the cheese-cloth draperies of the
Spirit of Summer were surpassingly fit for the dance; but they had to
agree that this still left the question of slippers untouched. It
remained even more hopeless when Clementina tried on all of Mrs. Milray's
festive shoes, and none of her razorpoints and high heels would avail.
She went away disappointed, but not yet disheartened; youth does not so
easily renounce a pleasure pressed to the lips; and Clementina had it in
her head to ask some of the table girls to help her out. She meant to try
first with that big girl who had helped her put on the shoeman's bronze
slippers; and she hurried through the office, pushing purblindly past
Fane without looking his way, when he called to her in the deference
which he now always used with her, "Here's a package here for you,
Clementina--Miss Claxon," and he gave her an oblong parcel, addressed in
a hand strange to her. "Who is it from?" she asked, innocently, and Fane
replied with the same ingenuousness: "I'm sure I don't know." Afterwards
he thought of having retorted, "I haven't opened it," but still without
being certain that he would have had the courage to say it.

Clementina did not think of opening it herself, even when she was alone
in her little room above Mrs. Atwell's, until she had carefully felt it
over, and ascertained that it was a box of pasteboard, three or four
inches deep and wide, and eight or ten inches long. She looked at the
address again, "Miss Clementina Claxon," and at the narrow notched ribbon
which tied it, and noted that the paper it was wrapped in was very white
and clean. Then she sighed, and loosed the knot, and the paper slipped
off the box, and at the same time the lid fell off, and the shoe man's
bronze slippers fell out upon the floor.

Either it must be a dream or it must be a joke; it could not be both real
and earnest; somebody was trying to tease her; such flattery of fortune
could not be honestly meant. But it went to her head, and she was so
giddy with it as she caught the slippers from the floor, and ran down to
Mrs. Atwell, that she knocked against the sides of the narrow staircase.

"What is it? What does it mean? Who did it?" she panted, with the
slippers in her hand. "Whe'e did they come from?" She poured out the
history of her trying on these shoes, and of her present need of them and
of their mysterious coming, to meet her longing after it had almost
ceased to be a hope. Mrs. Atwell closed with her in an exultation hardly
short of a clapping the hands. Her hair was gray, and the girl's hair
still hung in braids down her back, but they were of the same age in
their transport, which they referred to Mrs. Milray, and joined with her
in glad but fruitless wonder who had sent Clementina the shoes. Mrs.
Atwell held that the help who had seen the girl trying them on had
clubbed together and got them for her at the time; and had now given them
to her for the honor she had done the Middlemount House in the parade.
Mrs. Milray argued that the spring and summer months had secretly
dispatched some fall and winter month to ransack the stores at
Middlemount Centre for them. Clementina believed that they came from the
shoe man himself, who had always wanted to send them, in the hope that
she would keep them, and had merely happened to send them just then in
that moment of extremity when she was helpless against them. Each
conjecture involved improbabilities so gross that it left the field free
to any opposite theory.

Rumor of the fact could not fail to go through the house, and long before
his day's work was done it reached the chef, and amused him as a piece of
the Boss's luck. He was smoking his evening pipe at the kitchen door
after supper, when Clementina passed him on one of the many errands that
took her between Mrs. Milray's room and her own, and he called to her:
"Boss, what's this I hear about a pair o' glass slippas droppin' out the
sky int' youa lap?"

Clementina was so happy that she thought she might trust him for once,
and she said, "Oh, yes, Mr. Mahtin! Who do you suppose sent them?" she
entreated him so sweetly that it would have softened any heart but the
heart of a tease.

"I believe I could give a pootty good guess if I had the facts."

Clementina innocently gave them to him, and he listened with a
well-affected sympathy.

"Say Fane fust told you about 'em?"

"Yes. 'He'e's a package for you,' he said. Just that way; and he couldn't
tell me who left it, or anything."

"Anybody asked him about it since?"

"Oh, yes! Mrs. Milray, and Mrs. Atwell, and Mr. Atwell, and everybody."

"Everybody." The chef smiled with a peculiar droop of one eye. "And he
didn't know when the slippas got into the landlo'd's box?"

"No. The fust thing he knew, the' they we'e!" Clementina stood expectant,
but the chef smoked on as if that were all there was to say, and seemed
to have forgotten her. "Who do you think put them thea, Mr. Mahtin?"

The chef looked up as if surprised to find her still there. "Oh! Oh, yes!
Who d' I think? Why, I know, Boss. But I don't believe I'd betta tell
you."

"Oh, do, Mr. Mahtin! If you knew how I felt about it--"

"No, no! I guess I betta not. 'Twouldn't do you any good. I guess I won't
say anything moa. But if I was in youa place, and I really wanted to know
whe'e them slippas come from--"

"I do--I do indeed--"

The chef paused before he added, "I should go at Fane. I guess what he
don't know ain't wo'th knowin', and I guess nobody else knows anything.
Thea! I don't know but I said mo'n I ought, now."

What the chef said was of a piece with what had been more than once in
Clementina's mind; but she had driven it out, not because it might not be
true, but because she would not have it true. Her head drooped; she
turned limp and springless away. Even the heart of the tease was touched;
he had not known that it would worry her so much, though he knew that she
disliked the clerk.

"Mind," he called after her, too late, "I ain't got no proof 't he done
it."

She did not answer him, or look round. She went to her room, and sat down
in the growing dusk to think, with a hot lump in her throat.

Mrs. Atwell found her there an hour later, when she climbed to the
chamber where she thought she ought to have heard Clementina moving about
over her own room.

"Didn't know but I could help you do youa dressin'," she began, and then
at sight of the dim figure she broke off: "Why, Clem! What's the matte?
Ah' you asleep? Ah' you sick? It's half an hour of the time and--"

"I'm not going," Clementina answered, and she did not move.

"Not goin'! Why the land o'--"

"Oh, I can't go, Mrs. Atwell. Don't ask me! Tell Mrs. Milray, please!"

"I will, when I got something to tell," said Mrs. Atwell. "Now, you just
say what's happened, Clementina Claxon!" Clementina suffered the woful
truth to be drawn from her. "But you don't know whether it's so or not,"
the landlady protested.

"Yes, yes, I do! It was the last thing I thought of, and the chef
wouldn't have said it if he didn't believe it."

"That's just what he would done," cried Mrs. Atwell. "And I'll give him
such a goin' ova, for his teasin', as he ain't had in one while. He just
said it to tease. What you goin' to say to Mrs. Milray?"

"Oh, tell her I'm not a bit well, Mrs. Atwell! My head does ache, truly."

"Why, listen," said Mrs. Atwell, recklessly. "If you believe he done
it--and he no business to--why don't you just go to the dance, in 'em,
and then give 'em back to him after it's ova? It would suv him right."

Clementina listened for a moment of temptation, and then shook her head.
"It wouldn't do, Mrs. Atwell; you know it wouldn't," she said, and Mrs.
Atwell had too little faith in her suggestion to make it prevail. She
went away to carry Clementina's message to Mrs. Milray, and her task was
greatly eased by the increasing difficulty Mrs. Milray had begun to find,
since the way was perfectly smoothed for her, in imagining the management
of Clementina at the dance: neither child nor woman, neither servant nor
lady, how was she to be carried successfully through it, without sorrow
to herself or offence to others? In proportion to the relief she felt,
Mrs. Milray protested her irreconcilable grief; but when the simpler Mrs.
Atwell proposed her going and reasoning with Clementina, she said, No,
no; better let her alone, if she felt as she did; and perhaps after all
she was right.

XI.

Clementina listened to the music of the dance, till the last note was
played; and she heard the gay shouts and laughter of the dancers as they
issued from the ball room and began to disperse about the halls and
verandas, and presently to call good night to one another. Then she
lighted her lamp, and put the slippers back into the box and wrapped it
up in the nice paper it had come in, and tied it with the notched ribbon.
She thought how she had meant to put the slippers away so, after the
dance, when she had danced her fill in them, and how differently she was
doing it all now. She wrote the clerk's name on the parcel, and then she
took the box, and descended to the office with it. There seemed to be
nobody there, but at the noise of her step Fane came round the case of
letter-boxes, and advanced to meet her at the long desk.

"What's wanted, Miss Claxon?" he asked, with his hopeless respectfulness.
"Anything I can do for you?"

She did not answer, but looked him solemnly in the eyes and laid the
parcel down on the open register, and then went out.

He looked at the address on the parcel, and when he untied it, the box
fell open and the shoes fell out of it, as they had with Clementina. He
ran with them behind the letter-box frame, and held them up before
Gregory, who was seated there on the stool he usually occupied, gloomily
nursing his knee.

"What do you suppose this means, Frank?"

Gregory looked at the shoes frowningly. "They're the slippers she got
to-day. She thinks you sent them to her."

"And she wouldn't have them because she thought I sent them! As sure as
I'm standing here, I never did it," said the clerk, solemnly.

"I know it," said Gregory. "I sent them."

"You!"

"What's so wonderful?" Gregory retorted. "I saw that she wanted them that
day when the shoe peddler was here. I could see it, and you could."

"Yes."

"I went across into the woods, and the man overtook me with his wagon. I
was tempted, and I bought the slippers of him. I wanted to give them to
her then, but I resisted, and I thought I should never give them. To-day,
when I heard that she was going to that dance, I sent them to her
anonymously. That's all there is about it."

The clerk had a moment of bitterness. "If she'd known it was you, she
wouldn't have given them back."

"That's to be seen. I shall tell her, now. I never meant her to know, but
she must, because she's doing you wrong in her ignorance."

Gregory was silent, and Fane was trying to measure the extent of his own
suffering, and to get the whole bearing of the incident in his mind. In
the end his attempt was a failure. He asked Gregory, "And do you think
you've done just right by me?"

"I've done right by nobody," said Gregory, "not even by myself; and I can
see that it was my own pleasure I had in mind. I must tell her the truth,
and then I must leave this place."

"I suppose you want I should keep it quiet," said Fane.

"I don't ask anything of you."

"And she wouldn't," said Fane, after reflection. "But I know she'd be
glad of it, and I sha'n't say anything. Of course, she never can care for
me; and--there's my hand with my word, if you want it." Gregory silently
took the hand stretched toward him and Fane added: "All I'll ask is that
you'll tell her I wouldn't have presumed to send her the shoes. She
wouldn't be mad at you for it."

Gregory took the box, and after some efforts to speak, he went away. It
was an old trouble, an old error, an old folly; he had yielded to impulse
at every step, and at every step he had sinned against another or against
himself. What pain he had now given the simple soul of Fane; what pain he
had given that poor child who had so mistaken and punished the simple
soul! With Fane it was over now, but with Clementina the worst was
perhaps to come yet. He could not hope to see the girl before morning,
and then, what should he say to her? At sight of a lamp burning in Mrs.
Atwell's room, which was on a level with the veranda where he was
walking, it came to him that first of all he ought to go to her, and
confess the whole affair; if her husband were with her, he ought to
confess before him; they were there in the place of the child's father
and mother, and it was due to them. As he pressed rapidly toward the
light he framed in his thought the things he should say, and he did not
notice, as he turned to enter the private hallway leading to Mrs.
Atwell's apartment, a figure at the door. It shrank back from his
contact, and he recognized Clementina. His purpose instantly changed, and
he said, "Is that you, Miss Claxon? I want to speak with you. Will you
come a moment where I can?"

"I--I don't know as I'd betta," she faltered. But she saw the box under
his arm, and she thought that he wished to speak to her about that, and
she wanted to hear what he would say. She had been waiting at the door
there, because she could not bear to go to her room without having
something more happen.

"You needn't be afraid. I shall not keep you. Come with me a moment.
There is something I must tell you at once. You have made a mistake. And
it is my fault. Come!"

Clementina stepped out into the moonlight with him, and they walked
across the grass that sloped between the hotel and the river. There were
still people about, late smokers singly, and in groups along the piazzas,
and young couples, like themselves, strolling in the dry air, under the
pure sky.

Gregory made several failures in trying to begin, before he said: "I have
to tell you that you are mistaken about Mr. Fane. I was there behind the
letter boxes when you came in, and I know that you left these shoes
because you thought he sent them to you. He didn't send them." Clementina
did not say anything, and Gregory was forced to ask: "Do you wish to know
who sent them? I won't tell you unless you do wish it."

"I think I ought to know," she said, and she asked, "Don't you?"

"Yes; for you must blame some one else now, for what you thought Fane
did. I sent them to you."

Clementina's heart gave a leap in her breast, and she could not say
anything. He went on.

"I saw that you wanted them that day, and when the peddler happened to
overtake me in the woods where I was walking, after I left you, I acted
on a sudden impulse, and I bought them for you. I meant to send them to
you anonymously, then. I had committed one error in acting upon
impulse-my rashness is my besetting sin--and I wished to add a species of
deceit to that. But I was kept from it until-to-day. I hoped you would
like to wear them to the dance to-night, and I put them in the
post-office for you myself. Mr. Fane didn't know anything about it. That
is all. I am to blame, and no one else."

He waited for her to speak, but Clementina could only say, "I don't know
what to say."

"You can't say anything that would be punishment enough for me. I have
acted foolishly, cruelly."

Clementina did not think so. She was not indignant, as she was when she
thought Fane had taken this liberty with her, but if Mr. Gregory thought
it was so very bad, it must be something much more serious than she had
imagined. She said, "I don't see why you wanted to do it," hoping that he
would be able to tell her something that would make his behavior seem
less dreadful than he appeared to think it was.

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