THE ELOPEMENT
The next morning Pelleas and I sat before our drawing-room fire talking over our amazing trip to Inglese.
“In that love affair of yesterday,” Pelleas said sadly, “we were good for absolutely nothing.”
“Ah, well, now,” I protested feebly, “we chaperoned.”
“Chaperons,” Pelleas said sententiously, “are nothing, per se. Chaperons are merely the evidence that everything is not seen.”
“At least,” said I, “that arietta of the Inutile Precauzione gives great charm to ‘The Barber.’”
“I know,” Pelleas assented; “so does the property man. But I should like us to be really good for something on our own account. In some pleasant affair or other—I don’t greatly care what.”
I looked out the window at New York.
“Think,” said I, “of all the people out there who are in love and who absolutely need our help.”
“It is shocking,” Pelleas assented gravely. “I could almost find it in my heart to advertise. How should we word it? ‘Pelleas and Etarre, Promoters of Love Stories Unlimited. Office Hours from Time to Eternity—’”
He broke off smiling, but not at any fancied impracticality.
“Why not?” said I. “The world needs us. You yourself said that the world is the shape of a dollar instead of a heart.”
“Ah, I’m not so sure, though,” Pelleas returned with an air of confidence. “We don’t know the ways of the North Pole. Perhaps we shall yet find that the world is the shape of a heart.”
“At all events,” said I, “we can act as if it were. And no one now can possibly prove the contrary.”
How would one act if the world were the shape of a heart? I was considering this seriously when, five minutes later, I selected with especial care a book to take to the park. I was going over alone that morning, for Pelleas was obliged to be downtown. This happens about three times a year, but the occasions are very important and Nichola and I make a vast ado over his departure and we fuss about until he pretends distraction, though we well know how flattered he is. Nichola even runs after him on the street with a newspaper to be read on the elevated, though we are all three perfectly aware that even with both pairs of spectacles he cannot possibly read on the jolting car. But he folds the paper and thanks Nichola and, as I believe, sits with the paper spread before him all the way to Hanover Square.
On that particular morning Pelleas left very early, and I arrived in the park when it was not yet a playground and a place for loitering but a busy causeway for the first pedestrians. I found a favourite bench near a wilding mass of Forsythia, with a curve of walk and a cherry-tree in sight. There I sat with my closed book—for in the park of a Spring morning one need never open one’s book providing only that the book shall have been perfectly selected. I remember that Pelleas once took down, as he supposed, a volume of well-beloved essays to carry with us and when we reached the park we found by accident that we had brought a doctor’s book instead. It was such a glad morning that we had not intended to read, but we were both miserable until Pelleas went back to exchange it. I cannot tell how we knew but certain voices refused to sing in the presence of that musty, fusty volume. When he had returned with the well-beloved book they all drew near at once. Therefore we will not go even in the neighbourhood of the jonquil beds with a stupid author.
But on this morning of Spring my book was in tune and all the voices sang, so that they and the sun and the procession of soft odours almost lulled me asleep. You young who wonder why the very dead do not awake in Spring, let me say that one has only to be seventy to understand peace even in May.
I was awakened by the last thing which, awake or asleep, one would expect to hear on such a morning; a sound which was in fact an act of high treason to be tried in a court of daffodils. It was a sob.
I opened my eyes with a start, expecting that a good fairy had planted some seeds which by having failed to come up on the instant had made her petulant. The sob, however, proceeded from a very human Little Nursemaid who sat at the extreme end of my bench, crying her eyes out. I could not see her face but her exquisitely neat blue gown and crisp white cap, cuffs and apron were a delight. She had a fresh pink drawn through her belt. Both plump hands were over her eyes and she was crying to break her heart. Her Little Charge sat solemnly by in a go-cart, regarding her, and dangling a pet elephant by one leg. The elephant, I may add, presented a very singular appearance through having lost large patches of its cloth and having been mended by grafting on selections from the outside of some woolly sheep.
I was in doubt what to do; but when I am not sure about offering my sympathy I always scan the victim to see whether she shows any signs of “niceness.” If she does I know that my sympathy will not come amiss. The sight of that fresh pink determined me: Little Nursemaid was “nice.”
“My dear,” said I, “what is it?”
This sounds as if I have no dignity. I have, up to the moment that some one cries, and then I maintain that dignity loses its point. There is a perfectly well-bred dignity which has hurt more hearts than ever sympathy has bound up, but you do not learn that until you are seventy and then no one listens to what you have learned.
Little Nursemaid showed me one eye, blue as her gown.
“Nothink, ma’am,” she said shamelessly, and fell to sobbing anew.
“Nonsense,” said I gently, “you are not crying for nothing, are you?”
Think of the times that all the women in the world require to have that said to them.
Little Charge whimpered slightly as if to say that he could cry all day if he chose, and only be scolded for his pains. He was doubtless justly aggrieved at my sympathy for a performance borrowed from his own province. Little Nursemaid pushed the go-cart with her foot, such a trim little well-shod foot, without openwork stockings.
“Tell me about it,” I urged with even more persuasiveness. “Perhaps I could help you, you know.”
She shook her head. No; nobody could help her.
“Is it that some one is dead?” I asked.
No; no one was dead.
“Well, then!” I exclaimed triumphantly, “that is all I need to know. Tell me—and we can do something, at any rate.”
Bit by bit she told me, pulling at her trim little cuffs, twirling the head of the pink, rolling the go-cart until Little Charge smiled as upon an unexpectedly beneficent world.
And the trouble was—how, I wondered as I listened, could I ever have doubted that the world is the shape of a heart—the trouble was that Little Nursemaid had intended to elope that very day, and now she couldn’t!
Cornelia Emmeline Ayres, for so she subsequently told me that she was called, was by her own admission pathetically situated.
“I am a orphan nursemaid, ma’am,” she confessed, shaking her brown head in pleasant self-pity.
Briefly, she was living with a well-to-do family just off the avenue, who had cared for her mother in her last illness and had taken charge of Cornelia herself when she was a child. She had grown up in the family as that most pitiful of all creatures, an unpaid dependant, who is supposed to have all the advantages of a home and in reality has only its discomforts. Until a year ago the life of the little maid had been colourless enough, and then the Luminous Inevitable happened. He was a young drug clerk. He had had two “rises” of salary within seven months, probably, I surmised, averaging some seventy-five cents each. And she had fourteen dollars of her own.
“Well, well,” said I in bewilderment, “what more do you want? Why wait?”
“Oh, ma’am,” sobbed Cornelia Emmeline, “it’s the unthankfulness I’m bothered about. Why, She raised me an’ I just can’t a-bear to leave Her like this.”
“What does She say about it?” I inquired, gathering from the reverential tone of the pronoun that the Shrewd Benefactress was in her mind. O, these women whose charity takes the form of unpaid servants who have “homes” in return.
“That’s just it, ma’am. She won’t hear to it,” said Cornelia Emmeline sadly. “She says I’m too young to have the care of a home.”
I looked at the stout proportions of Little Charge who had to be carried and lifted all day.
“So you planned to elope?” I tempted her on. “And why didn’t you?”
Then her heart overflowed.
“We was to go to the church to-night,” she sobbed. “Evan, he told the m-m-minister, an’ I was goin’ to wear my new p-p-plum-colour’ dress, an’ it was a-goin’ to be at six-fifteen. Evan has a hour off at six. An’ th-then th-this morning She gimme a bright fifty cents an’ a watered ribbin—an’ O, ma’am, I just can’t a-bear to go an’ do it!”
So—Benefactress was even shrewder than I had thought.
“Have you told him?” I asked, feeling with Evan the hopelessness of competing with “a bright fifty cents an’ a watered ribbin.”
She nodded speechlessly for a moment.
“Jus’ now,” she burst out finally. “I went to the drug store an’ told him. He d-d-didn’t say a word, but he jus’ went on makin’ a egg-phosphate, in a heartbroke way, for a ole gentleman. He never l-l-looked at me again.”
I sat in sad silence going over the principal points of the narrative. Nothing makes me so sorrowful as the very ordinary sight of two young lovers juggling with their future. There are so few chances for happiness in every life, “and that hardly,” and yet upon these irreverent hands are constantly laid, and all the hues despoiled. Thereafter the two despoilers are wont to proclaim happiness a bubble. I do not know if that be true, but say that it is a bubble. Is it not better to have so luminous a thing ever trembling over one’s head than to see, through one’s tears, its fragments float away? If happiness be a bubble, Pelleas and I know of one that has outlasted many a stouter element and will last to the end. Yet what can Seventy say of this to Seventeen? It can only wring its hands, and Seventeen has but one answer: “But this is different!” I could have shaken Cornelia Emmeline had it not been for our brief acquaintance.
As I sat considering this and pulling at the fringe of my reticule, the last words that she had spoken began to assert themselves with a vague, new significance.
“He d-d-didn’t say a word, but he jus’ went on makin’ a egg-phosphate, in a heartbroke way, for a ole gentleman,” she had said. My attention had been so fixed on the image of Evan behind the counter that a supreme coincidence had escaped me.
I touched Cornelia Emmeline’s arm—I have dignity, I repeat, but not in the face of such a sorrow as this.
“What drug store?” I inquired.
There was only one in the world for her, so she knew what I meant.
“How long ago were you there to tell him?” I asked next, breathlessly.
Cornelia Emmeline thought that it might have been a matter of twenty minutes.
“The very same!” I cried, and fell to smiling at Little Nursemaid in a fashion that would have bewildered her had she not been so occupied in wiping her eyes.
For who in the world should be the old gentleman of the egg-phosphate but Pelleas?
Had I not, morning after morning, waited in that very drug store, amusing myself before a glass case of chest-protectors while Pelleas drank his egg-phosphate which he loathed? And so that handsome, curly-headed, long-lashed youngster who fizzed and bubbled among his delicacies with such dexterity was none other than Evan! Why, indeed, he was a friend of Pelleas’. Pelleas had given him a red muffler of his own only last Christmas.
I do not know whether you have what I call the quality of making mental ends meet when you ought to be concerned with soberer matters. For myself, being a very idle and foolish and meddlesome old woman, I can not only make them meet but I can tie them into bowknots, veritable love knots. And so I did now, sitting there on the bench in the sunshine with the fragrance of Forsythia and cherry blossoms about, and my eyes fixed on the all-wool elephant of Little Charge. And yet, remembering now, I disown that plan; for I protest that it came pealing to me from some secret bell in the air—and what could I, a most unwise and helpless old woman, do against such magic? And how else could one act—in a world the shape of a heart?
“Don’t you want to tell me,” said I shyly, “how you had planned your elopement? It will do no harm to talk about it, at any rate.”
Little Nursemaid liked to talk about it. With many a sob and sigh she brought forth her poor little plans, made with such trembling delight and all come to naught. They were to have met that very night at precisely quarter-past six at the door of a chapel that I knew well. The curate had been engaged by Evan, and a “little couple” who lived over the drug store were to be witnesses. The new plum-colour’ dress figured extensively and repeatedly in the account. Then they were to have marched straight and boldly to the Benefactress and proclaimed their secret, and Evan was to have been back behind the counter at seven o’clock, while Cornelia Emmeline would have been in time to put Little Charge to bed, as usual. The remainder of their lives, so far as I could determine, did not enter importantly into the transaction. The main thing was to be married.
And all this bright castle had toppled down before the onslaught of “a bright fifty cents an’ a watered ribbin.” Ah, Cornelia Emmeline! Yet she truly loved him—mark you, if I had not believed in that I would have left her to the solitary company of Little Charge and the all-wool elephant. But since I did believe in that I could not see those two dear little people make a mess of everything.
“It is too bad,” said I innocently, “and let me tell you what I suggest. You’ll be very lonely to-night about six o’clock—and you will probably cry and be asked questions. Don’t you want to run down to my house for a few minutes to help me? I have something most important to do.”
I had much trouble to keep from laughing at that “something most important to do.”
Cornelia Emmeline promised readily and gratefully. She had always that hour to herself, it appeared, because then He came home—the husband of Benefactress, I inferred—and wanted Little Charge to himself before dinner. That was such a pleasant circumstance that I began to feel kindly toward even the Shrewd Benefactress and “Him.” But I did not relent. I made Cornelia Emmeline promise, and I saw that she had my card tucked away for safe-keeping, and when we had talked awhile longer about the danger of unthankfulness, and the prospects of drug clerks, Little Charge suddenly straightened out stiffly in the go-cart and demanded his “bread’n’butter’n’sugar.” So she took him away and nodded me a really bright farewell; and when she had gone a few steps she came running back and shyly laid something on my knee. It was the fresh pink. After that you may be sure that I would have carried on my plan in the face of all disaster, save indeed the opposition of Pelleas.
But Pelleas is to be counted on in everything. He has failed me but once, and that was in a matter of a wedding which took place anyway and is therefore an incident which hardly counts against him. I could hardly wait for him to come home. I was at the window when he reached the steps, and before he could unbutton his greatcoat he knew the whole story. But Pelleas is not inventive. He is sympathetic, corroborative, even coöperative, but not inventive. To him the situation simply closed down.
“Poor little souls,” he said ruefully, “now that is hard. So that young rascal is in love. I didn’t know he ever thought of anything but soda. It’s a blessing he didn’t fix me up a chloroform phosphate this morning in sheer misery. Too bad, too bad. Won’t matters ever be straightened out, do you think?”
“No later,” said I, “than seven o’clock to-night.”
“Bless my soul!” cried Pelleas. “How?”
I told him, quivering with the pleasant occupation of minding somebody else’s affairs. Pelleas listened a little doubtfully at first—I have a suspicion that all men strive to convince you of their superior judgment by doubting, at first, every unusual project; all, that is, save Pelleas, whose judgment is superior. But presently as I talked a light began to break in his face and then he wrinkled his eyes at the corners and I knew that I had won the day.
“Will you, Pelleas?” I cried breathlessly.
“I will,” Pelleas answered magnificently, “if I have to take three egg-phosphates in succession to win his confidence.”
Nichola knew very well that something unusual and delightful was at harbour in the house that afternoon. For Pelleas and I found it impossible to read, and she kept coming in the room and finding us with our heads together. Nichola is one of those who suspect every undertone to mean a gigantic enterprise. I think, moreover, that she believes us wholly capable of turning the drawing-room into a theater with boxes, and presenting a comedy. Ah, well—that we may, as the days grow colourless.
At a little before six o’clock Pelleas set out, I figuratively dancing on the doorstep with excitement.
“Pelleas,” I whispered him in the hall, “don’t you fail! Pelleas, if you fail, attractive as you are, I shall be divorced from you!”
He smiled confidently.
“I feel as if we were eloping ourselves,” he said, “and this is something like.”
Before the clock had gone six Nichola ushered into the drawing-room Cornelia Emmeline Ayres. In one glance I knew that I had not counted on her in vain. To do honour to me she appeared in full regalia of plum colour. But she had been crying all day—I saw that in the same glance, and her attempt to be cheerful in her sadness and shyness went to my heart.
We sat beside the fire where I could watch the clock, but it seemed to me as if the very hands were signaling to her what my plan was. Nichola came in with more coals, which we needed considerably less than more wall paper; but Nichola’s curiosity is her one recreation and almost her one resource, as I sometimes think. I trembled afresh lest she knew all about this, as she did about everything else, and would suddenly face about on the hearth rug and recite the whole matter. She went out in silence, however, and had heard us discuss nothing but the best makes of go-carts, which was the matter that first presented itself to my mind.
“Now, my dear,” said I, when we were alone, “haven’t you thought better of it? Shall we not be married at fifteen past six, after all?”
She shook her head, and the tears started as if by appointment. No; we would not be married that night, it would appear.
“Nor ever?” I put it point-blank. “Evan won’t wait forever, you know.”
She looked forlornly in the fire.
“Not as long as She needs me around.”
“Rubbish!” cried I, at this. “There are a thousand nursemaids as good as you, I dare say—but there is only one wife for Evan.”
“That’s what he keeps a-sayin’,” she cried, and broke down and sobbed.
The hands of the clock pointed rigidly at six. Then and there I cast the die.
“I wish to go for a walk,” I said abruptly. “Will you give me your arm for a block or so?”
My bonnet was ready on the hall-table and I had kept the pink quite fresh to pin on my cloak. We were off in no time and went down the avenue at a brisk pace, while Nichola lurked about the area, pretending to sweep and really devoured with curiosity.
Cornelia Emmeline looked up longingly at all the big, beautiful homes, and down the cross-streets at all that impertinent array of comfort, so hopelessly professional, so out of sympathy with the amateur in domesticity.
“So many homes all fixed up for somebody else,” she said wistfully.
My heart ached as I thought of all the little people, divinely in love, who have looked up at those grim façades with the same thought. Personally, I prefer a flat, but it takes one seventy years to learn even this.
I talked on as well as I could about little in particular and most of all I encouraged her to talk, since I was becoming every moment more excited. For every step was bringing us nearer and nearer to the little chapel, and at last we rounded the corner and were full upon it. A clock in a near-by steeple showed six-fifteen. I looked anxiously up the street and the street was empty.
“Let us,” said I, guilelessly, “go in here and rest awhile.”
Little Nursemaid’s mouth trembled.
“Oh, ma’am—no, please—not in there! I couldn’t go in there to-night,” she stammered.
“Nonsense!” said I sharply, pretending to be very cross. “I am tired and I must have rest.”
She could do nothing but lead me up the steps, but her poor little face was quite white. So was mine, I suspect. Indeed, I fancy that neither of us could have borne matters very much longer. Happily there was no need; for when the double green doors had closed behind us there in the dim anteroom stood the faithful Pelleas and a bewildered Evan—who very naturally failed to understand why a strange old gentleman, whom he had hitherto connected only with egg-phosphates and one red muffler, should have decoyed him from his waiting supper to a chapel of painful association.
Pelleas and I are not perfectly agreed on what did happen next. For we had planned no farther than the church door, trusting to everything to come right the moment that those two little people saw each other in the place of their dream. The first thing that I recall is that I fairly pushed Cornelia Emmeline into the arms of the young soda-fountain king, and cried out almost savagely:—
“Be married—be married at once! And thank the Lord that you love each other!”
“But She—what’ll She—” quavered Cornelia Emmeline on a coat-lapel.
Then young Evan rose magnificently to the occasion. He took her little white face in his hands, kissed her very tenderly, and decided for her.
“Now, then, Sweetheart,” said he, “so we will! And no more trouble about it!”
Little Nursemaid gave him one quick look—shy, beseeching, delicious—and glanced down.
“I’ve got on my plum-colour’,” she consented.
Whereat Pelleas and I, who had been standing by, smiling and nodding like mandarins, turned ecstatically and shook hands with each other.
Evan, in the midst of all his bliss, looked at his watch. It was plain to be seen that Cornelia Emmeline had not put her trust in a worthless fellow.
“Six-twenty,” said he; “I’ll run across and get the minister. O,” he turned to us helplessly, “what if he can’t come—now?”
I shared his anxiety, being suspicious that in the event of a postponement the store of “bright fifty cents and watered ribbins” might prove inexhaustible.
Then very leisurely the green baize doors swung open and without undue haste or excitement in walked the curate.
“Ah!” we four said breathlessly.
“Ah, my young friends,” said the curate, and seemed to include us all—and at the time this did not impress me as impossible—“I have been until this moment detained at the bedside of a sick parishioner. I regret that I am five minutes tardy.”
“Why, sir—why, sir—” stammered Evan, “we meant—we didn’t mean—”
The curate looked his perplexity.
“Is this not the same?” he inquired, adjusting his pince-nez and throwing his head back. “Did you not make an appointment with me for six-fifteen to-day? Surely I have not mistaken the day?”
At this young Evan burst into a laugh that sorely tried the echoes of the anteroom.
“Bless me!” he cried, “if I ain’t forgot to tell ’im not to come!”
So there we were, snug as a planned-out wedding with invitations and bells.
They were married in the vestry, and Pelleas and I had the honour of writing our names below theirs, and we both wiped our eyes right through the entire process in a fashion perfectly absurd.
“Parents of the—?” hesitated the curate, regarding us consultingly.
I looked at Pelleas in some embarrassment, and I think we felt that he was concealing something when he said simply: “No.” Perhaps it would not have been legal or churchly had the curate known that we had never seen Cornelia Emmeline until that day and knew nothing of Evan save egg-phosphates.
On the steps of the chapel the two kissed each other with beautiful simplicity, and young Evan shook our hands with tears in his eyes.
“How—how come you to do it?” he asked, this phase of the hour having now first occurred to him.
“Yes,” said Cornelia Emmeline, “I’ve been a-wantin’ to ask.”
Pelleas and I looked at each other somewhat foolishly.
“Bless you!” we mumbled together. “I don’t know!”
Off went young Evan like a god to his star, and Cornelia Emmeline walked back with us, and we all waved our hands at the far end of the street. Then we left her at the door of the Shrewd Benefactress, and with broken words the dear little soul in her best plum-colour’ went blithely to Little Charge and the all-wool elephant, and all the age was gold.
Pelleas and I walked soberly home.
“Suppose,” said he darkly, “that they are minors?”
“I really don’t care if they are,” cried I, with great courage. “They have acted far less like minors than we have.”
“Suppose—” he began again.
“Pelleas,” I said, “how did you say that advertisement was to be? ‘Pelleas and Etarre, Promoters of Love Stories Unlimited—’”
“Ah, yes, that’s all very well,” he insisted, “but suppose—”
“And who was it,” I pursued, “who was half persuaded that the world is the shape of a heart?”
“I’m afraid it was I,” Pelleas admitted then, shaking his head.
But I could see that his eyes were without remorse.