by Jean Webster
"She just waved her hand toward the table and didn't say a word. And there it was, wide open!"
Patty took a key from her pocket, unlocked the suit-case, and threw back the lid. A man's dress suit was neatly folded on the top, with a pipe, a box of cigarettes, some collars, and various other masculine trifles filling in the interstices.
"Oh!" they gasped in breathless chorus.
"They belong to him," Conny murmured fervently.
Patty nodded.
"And when I showed Uncle Tom that suit-case, he nearly died laughing. He telephoned to the station, but they didn't know anything about it, and I didn't know where the glee club was going to perform, so we couldn't telegraph Mr. Hilliard. Uncle Tom lives five miles from town, and there simply wasn't anything we could do that night."
"And just imagine his feelings when he started to dress for the concert, and found Patty's new pink evening gown spread out on top!" suggested Priscilla.
"Oh, Patty! Do you s'pose he opened it?" asked Conny.
"I'm afraid he did. The cases are exact twins, and the keys both seem to fit."
"I hope it looked all right?"
"Oh, yes, it looked beautiful. Everything was trimmed with pink ribbon. I always pack with an eye to the maid, when I visit Uncle Tom."
"But the dinner and the wedding? What did you do without your clothes?" asked Priscilla, in rueful remembrance of many trips to the dressmaker's.
"That was the best part of it!" Patty affirmed. "Miss Lord simply wouldn't let me get a respectable evening gown. She went with me herself, and told Miss Pringle how to make it--just like all my dancing dresses, nine inches off the floor, with elbow sleeves and a silly sash. I hated it anyway."
"You must remember you are a school girl," Conny quoted, "and until--"
"Just wait till I tell you!" Patty triumphed. "Louise brought me one of her dresses--one of her very best ball gowns, only she wasn't going to wear it any more, because she had all new clothes in her trousseau. It was white crêpe embroidered in gold spangles, and it had a train. It was long in front, too. I had to walk without lifting my feet. The maid came and dressed me; she did my hair up on top of my head with a gold fillet, and Aunt Emma loaned me a pearl necklace and some long gloves and I looked perfectly beautiful--I did, honestly--you wouldn't have known me. I looked at least twenty!
"The man who took me in to dinner never dreamed that I hadn't been out for years. And you know, he tried to flirt with me, he did, really. And he was getting awfully old. He must have been almost forty. I felt as though I were flirting with my grandfather. You know," Patty added, "it isn't so bad, being grown up. I believe you really do have sort of a good time--if you're pretty."
Six eyes sought the mirror for a reflective moment, before Patty resumed her chronicle.
"And Uncle Tom made me tell about the suit-case at the dinner table. Everybody laughed. It made a very exciting story. I told them about the whole school going to the Glee Club, and falling in love in a body with the third man from the end, and how we all cut his picture out of the program and pasted it in our watches. And then about my sitting across from him in the train and changing suit-cases. Mr. Harper--the man next to me--said it was the most romantic thing he'd ever heard in his life; that Louise's marriage was nothing to it."
"But about the suit-case," they prompted. "Didn't you do anything more?"
"Uncle Tom telephoned again in the morning, and the station agent said he'd got the party on the wire as had the young lady's case. And he was coming back here in two days, and I was to leave his suit-case with the baggage man at the station, and he would leave mine."
"But you didn't leave it."
"I came on the other road. I'm going to send it down."
"And what did you wear at the wedding?"
"Louise's clothes. It didn't matter a bit, my not matching the other bridesmaids, because I was maid of honor, and ought to dress differently anyway. I've been grown up for three days--and I just wish Miss Lord could have seen me with my hair on the top of my head talking to men!"
"Did you tell the Dowager?"
"Yes, I told her about getting the wrong suit-case; I didn't mention the fact that it belonged to the third man from the end."
"What did she say?"
"She said it was very careless of me to run off with a strange man's luggage; and she hoped he was a gentleman and would take it nicely. She telephoned to the baggage man that it was here, but she couldn't send Martin with it this afternoon because he had to go to the farm for some eggs."
Recreation was over, and the girls came trooping in to gather books and pads and pencils for the approaching study hour. Everyone who passed number Seven dropped in to hear the news. Each in turn received the story of the suit-case, and each in turn gasped anew at sight of the contents.
"Doesn't it smell tobaccoey and bay rummish?" said Rosalie Patton, sniffing.
"Oh, there's a button loose!" cried Florence Hissop, the careful housewife. "Where's some black silk, Patty?"
She threaded a needle and secured the button. Then she daringly tried on the coat. Eight others followed her example and thrilled at the touch. It was calculated to fit a far larger person than any present. Even Irene McCullough found it baggy.
"He had awfully broad shoulders," said Rosalie, stroking the satin lining.
They peered daintily at the other garments.
"Oh!" squealed Mae Mertelle. "He wears blue silk suspenders."
"And something else blue," chirped Edna Hartwell, peering over her shoulder. "They're pajamas!"
"And to think of such a thing happening to Patty!" sighed Mae Mertelle.
"Why not?" bristled Patty.
"You're so young and so--er--"
"Young!--Wait till you see me with my hair done up."
"I wonder what the end will be?" asked Rosalie.
"The end," said Mae unkindly, "will be that the baggage man will deliver the suit-case, and Jermyn Hilliard, Junior, will never know--"
A maid appeared at the door.
"If you please," she murmured, her amazed eyes on Irene who was still wearing the coat, "Mrs. Trent would like to have Miss Patty Wyatt come to the drawing-room, and I am to take the suit-case down. The gentleman is waiting."
"Oh, Patty!" a gasp went around the room.
"Do your hair up--quick!"
Priscilla caught Patty's twin braids and wound them around her head, while the others in a flutter of excitement, thrust in the coat and relocked the suit-case.
They crowded after her in a body and hung over the banisters at a perilous angle, straining their ears in the direction of the drawing-room. Nothing but a murmur of voices floated up, punctuated by an occasional deep bass laugh. When they heard the front door close, with one accord they invaded Harriet Gladden's room, which commanded the walk, and pressed their noses against the pane. A short, thick-set man of German build was waddling toward the gate and the trolley car. They gazed with wide, horrified eyes, and turned without a word to meet Patty as she trudged upstairs lugging her errant suit-case. A glance told her that they had seen, and dropping on the top step, she leaned her head against the railing and laughed.
"His name," she choked, "is John Hochstetter, Jr. He's a wholesale grocer, and was on his way to a grocers' convention, where he was to make a speech comparing American cheese with imported cheese. He didn't mind at all not having his dress-suit--never feels comfortable in it anyway, he says. He explained to the convention why he didn't have it on, and it made the funniest speech of the evening. There's the study bell."
Patty rose and turned toward Paradise Alley, but paused to throw back a further detail:
"He has a dear little daughter of his own just my age!"
* * *
V
The Flannigan Honeymoon
The Murphy family, with a judicious eye to the buttered side of the bread, had adopted Saint Ursula as their patron saint. The family--consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Murphy, eleven little Murphys and "Gramm
a" Flannigan--occupied a five-room cottage close to the gates of St. Ursula's school. They subsisted on the vicarious charity of sixty-four girls, and the intermittent labor of Murphy père, who, in his sober intervals, was a sufficiently efficient stone-cutter and mason.
He had built the big entrance gates, and the long stone wall that enclosed the ten acres of "bounds." He had laid the foundation of the new west wing--known as Paradise Alley--and had constructed all the chimneys and driveways and tennis courts on the place. The school was a monument to his long and leisurely career.
Mr. and Mrs. Murphy, with an unusual display of foresight, had christened their first baby after the school. Ursula Murphy may not be a euphuistic combination, but the child was amply repaid for carrying such a name, by receiving the cast-off clothes of generations of St. Ursula girls. There was danger, for a time, that the poor little thing would be buried beneath a mountain of wearing apparel; but her parents providentially discovered a second-hand clothes man, who relieved her of a part of the burden.
After Ursula, had come other little Murphys in regular succession; and it had grown to be one of the legendary privileges of the school to furnish the babies with names and baptismal presents. Mrs. Murphy was not entirely mercenary in her yearly request. She appreciated the artistic quality of the names that the girls provided. They had a distinction, that she herself, with her lack of literary training, would never have been able to give. The choosing of the names had come to be a matter involving politics almost as complicated as the election of the senior president. Different factions proposed different names; half-a-dozen tickets would be in the field, and the balloting was conducted with rousing speeches.
There was one hampering restriction. Every baby must have a patron saint. Upon this point, the Murphys stood firm. However, by a careful study of early Christian martyrs, the girls had managed to unearth a list of recondite saints with fairly unusual and picturesque names.
So far, the roll of the Murphy offspring read:
Ursula Marie, Geraldine Sabina, Muriel Veronica and Lionel Ambrose (twins), Aileen Clotilda, John Drew Dominick, Delphine Olivia, Patrick (he had been born in the summer vacation, and the long-suffering priest had insisted that the boy be named for his father), Sidney Orlando Boniface, Richard Harding Gabriel, Yolanda Genevieve. This completed the list, until one morning early in December, Patrick Senior presented himself at the kitchen door, with the news that another name--a boy's--would be seasonable.
The school immediately went into a committee of the whole. Several names had been put up, and the discussion was growing heated, when Patty Wyatt jumped to her feet with the proposal of "Cuthbert St. John." The suggestion was met with cheers; and Mae Van Arsdale indignantly left the room. The name was carried by unanimous vote.
Cuthbert St. John Murphy was christened the following Sunday, and received a gold-lined porridge spoon in a green plush box.
So delighted was the school at Patty's felicitous suggestion, that, by way of reward, they elected her chairman of the Christmas Carnival Committee. The Christmas Carnival was a charitable institution contemporaneous with the founding of the school. St. Ursula's scheme of education was broad; it involved growth in a wide variety of womanly virtues, and the greatest of these was charity. Not the modern, scientific, machine-made charity, but the comfortable, old-fashioned kind that leaves a pleasant glow of generosity in the heart of the giver. Every year at Christmastide a tree was decked, a supper laid, and the poor children of the neighborhood bidden to partake. The poor children were collected by the school girls, who drove about from house to house, in bob-sleighs or hay-wagons, according to the snow. The girls regarded it as the most diverting festival of the school year; and even the poor children, when they had overcome their first embarrassment, found it fairly diverting.
The original scheme had been for each girl to have an individual protégé, that she might call upon the family and come into personal relations with a humbler class. She was to learn the special needs of her child, and give something really useful, such as stockings or trousers or flannel petticoats.
It was an admirable scheme on paper, but in actual practice it fell down. St. Ursula's was situated in an affluent district given over to the estates of the idle rich, and the proletarian who clung to the skirts of these estates was amply provided with an opportunity to work. In the early days, when the school was small, there had been sufficient poor children to go round; but as St. Ursula's had grown, the poor seemed to have diminished, until now the school was confronted by an actual scarcity. But the Murphys, at least, they had always with them. They yearly offered thanks for this.
Patty accepted her chairmanship and appointed sub-committees to do the actual work. For herself and Conny and Priscilla she reserved the privilege of choosing the recipients of St. Ursula's bounty. This entailed several exhilarating afternoons out of bounds. A walk abroad is as inspiring to the inmates of a prison as a trip through Europe to those at large. They spent the better part of a week canvassing the neighborhood, only to reveal the embarrassing fact that there were nine possible children, aside from the Murphy brood, and that none of these nine were from homes that one could conscientiously term poor. The children's sober industrious parents could well supply their temperate Christmas demands.
"And there are only six Murphys the right age," Conny grumbled, as they turned homewards in the cold twilight of a wintry day, after an unprofitable two hours' tramp.
"That makes about one child to every five girls," Priscilla nodded dismally.
"Oh, this charity business makes me tired!" Patty burst out. "It's fun for the girls, and nothing else. The way we dole out stuff to perfectly nice people, is just plain insulting. If anybody poked a pink tarlatan stocking full of candy at me, and said it was because I'd been a good little girl, I'd throw it in their face."
In moments of intensity, Patty's English was not above reproach.
"Come on, Patty," Priscilla slipped a soothing hand through her arm, "we'll stop in at the Murphys' and count 'em over again. Maybe there's one we overlooked."
"The twins are only fifteen," said Conny hopefully. "I think they'll do."
"And Richard Harding's nearly four. He's old enough to enjoy a tree. The more Murphys we can get the better. They always love the things we give."
"I know they do!" Patty growled. "We're teaching the whole lot of them to be blooming beggars--I shall be sorry I ever used any slang, if we can't put the money to better use than this."
The funds for the carnival were yearly furnished by a tax on slang. St. Ursula demanded a fine of one cent for every instance of slang or bad grammar let fall in public. Of course, in the privacy of one's own room, in the bosom of one's chosen family, the rigor was relaxed. Your dearest friends did not report you--except in periods of estrangement. But your acquaintances and enemies and teachers did, and even, in moments of intense honorableness, you reported yourself. In any case, the slang fund grew. When the committee had opened the box this year, they found thirty-seven dollars and eighty-four cents.
Patty allowed herself, after some slight protest, to be drawn to the door of the Murphy domicile. She was not in an affable mood, and a call upon the Murphys required a great deal of conversation. They found the family hilariously assembled in an over-crowded kitchen. The entire dozen children babbled at once, shriller and shriller, in a vain endeavor to drown each other out. A cabbage stew, in progress on the stove, filled the room with an odorous steam. Shoved into a corner of the hearth, was poor old Gramma Flannigan, surrounded by noisy, pushing youngsters, who showed her gray hairs but scant consideration. The girls admired the new baby, while Yolanda and Richard Harding crawled over their laps with sticky hands. Mrs. Murphy, meanwhile, discanted in a rich brogue upon the merits of "Coothbert St. Jawn" as a name. She liked it, she declared, as well as any in the list. It sure ought to bring luck to a child to carry the name of two saints. She thanked the young ladies kindly.
Patty left Conny and Priscilla to carry off
the social end of the call, while she squeezed herself onto the woodbox by Gramma Flannigan's chair. Mrs. Murphy's mother was a pathetic old body, with the winning speech and manners of Ireland a generation ago. Patty found her the most remunerative member of the household, so far as interest went. She always liked to get her started with stories of her girlhood, when she had been a lady's maid in Lord Stirling's castle in County Clare, and young Tammas Flannigan came and carried her off to America to help make his fortune. Tammas was now a bent old man with rheumatism, but in his keen blue eyes and Irish smile, Gramma still saw the lad who had courted her.
"How's your husband this winter?" Patty asked, knowing that she was taking the shortest road to the old woman's heart.
She shook her head with a tremulous smile.
"I'm not hearin' for four days. Tammas ain't livin' with us no more."
"It's a pity for you to be separated!" said Patty, with quick sympathy, not realizing on how sore a subject she was touching.
The flood gates of the old woman's garrulity broke down.
"With Ursuly an' Ger-r-aldine growin' oop an' havin' young min to wait on thim, 'twas needin' a parlor they was, an' they couldn't spare the room no longer for me'n Tammas. So they put me in the garret with the four gurrls, an' Tammas, he was sint oop the road to me son Tammas. Tammas's wife said as Tammas could sleep in the kitchen to pay for carryin' the wood an' watter, but she couldn't take us both because she takes boarders."
Patty cocked her head for a moment of silence, as she endeavored to pluck sense from this tangle of Tammases.
"It's too bad!" she comforted, laying a sympathetic hand on the old woman's knee.
Gramma Flannigan's eyes filled with the ready tears of old age.
"I'm not complainin', for it's the way o' the world. The owld must step off, an' make room for the young. But it's lonely I am without him! We've lived together for forty-seven years, an' we know each other's ways."
"But your son doesn't live very far away." Patty offered what solace she might. "You must see Thomas very often."