THE CHRISTMAS BRIDE (17 page)

Margaret suddenly stopped reading, put her head down, and sobbed softly into her two hands, thankful that there was so much noise in the station that no one could hear her.

Presently she summoned strength to brush away the tears and read the rest of the letter.

There was a paragraph of loving trust and resignation, and then down at the bottom in fine hasty writing a postscript:

Eventually Margaret got control of herself, but not until she had decided to spend some of her precious money to send a telegram. She ought to have written before. It was dreadful to let them wait so long and be anxious, but she had been in such a frenzy to get those awful envelopes finished that she hadn’t had time. Besides, there hadn’t been any paper or envelope or stamp or pen or anything. Well, there wasn’t now either, and if she bought all those necessities to a letter, it would cost almost as much as a telegram, and then wouldn’t reach home for two days, because one always had to allow for someone to go down the mountain to the village to bring up the mail.

So she walked steadily to the telegraph desk and wrote out her telegram. It had to be abrupt, but they would understand.

She paid for the message and turned away somewhat relieved in mind. They would get it sometime tomorrow, and it would set their fears at rest. But where was she to get the twenty-five dollars?

She counted over in her mind the few dollars she had just been paid, well knowing the least amount she could live on, remembering that the sixty cents she had just paid for that telegram would have kept her almost two days, living as she had been doing, yet was glad she had sent it. But now she must get a real job somehow. And to that end she must have at least one good night’s rest. So she went to the Traveler’s Aid and asked questions, discovering a place where she could get a clean bed for thirty-five cents.

She stopped at a drugstore on the way and got a cup of hot soup and a sandwich, realizing that when she had paid for her bed, nearly two of her precious hard-earned dollars would be gone.

Her heart sank as she hurried down the street toward the sleeping quarters. She had relieved the minds of her dear family for the moment and had fed and housed herself for the night, but she was in a desperate situation. Great walls seemed to be rising on every side around her and closing in to crush her to death. What was she to do? Twenty-five dollars! Twenty-five dollars! Where could she get it? She had had the boldness to promise to send it in time, and how was she to get it? She counted the days to Thanksgiving. There would be no way to get it but to ask her Grandfather’s God! And how
could
God give it to her? There seemed no human means. Did God ever really nowadays use any other? There were no miracles now as in the Bible times. One had to depend on human means. How silly she had been to think that handsome young Sterling had been God’s miracle to care for her and lead her to a job!

She sighed deeply as she entered the clean, bare precincts of the charity dormitories. Twenty-five dollars! Twenty-five dollars!

She paused inside the warm entrance hall to slip her grandmother’s letter into the little compartment with the other letter she knew was there, patted it tenderly, choked back a sob, strapped it in with the other, and went in to the desk to apply for a bed.

G
regory Sterling looked down upon that little jeweled hand on his arm, and something protective flared in his heart. He looked up at the flabby Mortie triumphantly. He was needed here to shelter Alice from these half-drunken people. Poor little Alice! She had never been half taught. He would get her away from them presently and bring her home and try to dissuade her from this sort of thing. He remembered their beautiful, intimate dinner and looked down at her again, her face turned in profile there against his shoulder. What did that remind him of?

There had been another face quite recently, turned thus against his shoulder, closer than this, white and sweet and fragile in its beauty. Margaret! Involuntarily, he drew back just a fraction and looked at this beautiful painted face. Somehow it did not belong there. Somehow it gave him a start. What was it like? Those red lips, glaringly red under the bright light of the vestibule chandelier?

Ah! Those girls on the train. Those girls who had advised him to go and get his hair cut! Those fresh, uncouth girls! How he disliked their memory. They had dogged his steps on the train, come through and tried to find him more than once.

The day he had his hair cut by the barber on the train they had spied him again. He had forgotten all about them and taken a walk to the front end of the train. He had seen them too late to turn back. They were sprawled over their seats in various stages of afternoon naps, their kinked hair in disorder, their bright dresses creased and soiled with travel, their painted faces smeary, one red mouth wide open. He walked by them in disgust. When he returned from the front of the train, they were just coming awake and recognized him. The one in red called out chummily to him as he went by, “Good old boy! Got ‘em cut after all, didn’t ya?” And the one in blue had added in a high falsetto, “It looks just
darling
, buddie!” He remembered that now and recalled how Alice had called him darling! Then it was a kind of nomenclature of the present day, a thing they had in common, Alice and these girls of the lower class.

He had been angry with himself for having put himself in their way again and strode on back to his place without a glance in reply. An hour later when the train stopped to change engines and make some slight repair, most of the passengers alighted to stretch tired limbs, walking up and down the platform, or to partake of the refreshments offered at the little wayside booth. He had gone out to walk with the rest and had suddenly found himself surrounded by these girls all clamoring at once.

“Be a good sport and take us to a soda over there at the counter! We’re parching for a drink!” shouted the red one.

“I want ginger ale!” cried the blue one.

“I’m simply dying for chocolate ice-cream soda,” said the third.

Greg had surveyed their eagerness with disgust. Then moved by a kind of pitying contempt, he marched over to the counter and tossed a bill to one of the busy waiters behind the counter, saying, “There, Buddie, give these girls what they want and keep the change!” and then turning, strode away, back to the train.

The three had looked after him disappointed, a blankness coming over their eagerness. “Gosh! Can you beat it?” he heard the red one call in dismay. “I can’t get his number, can you?”

A half hour later when he was sitting quietly reading the paper he had purchased at the newsstand, he heard a bubble of laughter in chorus emerge from the front end of his car and, stealing a quick glance over his paper, he caught a glimmer of red and blue and green. Although he was a young man acquainted with emergencies, used to stalking wild animals, never swerving in critical times, he crouched low behind his paper as a screen and vanished from his seat to the washroom before they had even discovered his identity. They had been all too evidently hunting for him, to thank him perhaps, or compel further intimacy. He had heard them later bubbling noisily by, calling out fresh remarks to the passengers, making their conversation most public. He could hear fragments of their talk outside the heavy green curtains of the men’s compartment.

“He mebbe got off at the station. He mebbe waited for another train.”

“Aw, guess again. He’s on board all rightie. He’s jus’ tryin’ to give us the slip.”

And then nothing daunted, they had had the audacity to stop the conductor who happened to be passing and question him. They stopped just outside the men’s compartment to do it.

“Say, we’re lookin’ for a young fella in khaki, looks like a cowboy. We wanta thank him for something he did fer us. He didn’t get off at that last station did he?”

The conductor looked at them amusedly, a mask upon his face.

“I really couldn’t say,” he answered noncommittally.

“Aw, think a minute. You know who we mean,” said the one in red—Greg knew her voice by this time. “Looks like a regular guy. Got a cartridge belt on, and boots. You’ve noticed him—you know you have. You couldn’t help it. He looks diffrunt.”

“I may have noticed him,” said the conductor in a disinterested tone, “but I can’t say what’s become of him. I can’t keep track of every passenger.”

“Aw shucks!” said the girl in blue as they reluctantly gave up the search and drifted back to their own car.

A moment later, the conductor parted the green curtains and stood in the doorway, sending a swift glance around the little room and letting his eyes rest upon Sterling for one quizzical instant. But Greg did not lift his eyes from his paper nor relax the studied frown on his face, and with a quickly suppressed smile, the conductor passed on his way again.

Greg stayed in the men’s compartment until time to retire and went to sleep at last behind his own curtains, glad that they were due to arrive in Chicago the next morning.

So now as he stood there with Alice’s jeweled hand upon his arm, he remembered it, and a sudden likeness in her face to those girls flashed upon him.

Of course it was ridiculous. Those had been cheap, common girls without refinement, tawdrily dressed, crudely painted; and Alice was exquisite in every detail, the makeup so perfectly applied, and yet she reminded him of them, and a certain shock came to him with the recognition. Refined, educated, exquisitely garbed as Alice was, she yet resembled somehow those girls, those dreadful girls! Or
was
she refined? He didn’t know. He honestly didn’t. His mother didn’t use to think she was refined as a girl, but he had thought her wrong. If he had asked himself that question at the dinner table, he would have unhesitatingly said she was, but since her friends had come into the picture, there had been something about her that grated upon his finer senses, and now as he looked down at those red, red lips, that confident alluring face so near his shoulder, she looked like those other girls! So utterly unlike the girl he had taken to the hospital! The girl who had run away from him because a nurse had insinuated that he was not respectable. The girl who even now might be in some kind of peril and he not there to help!

Suddenly he felt as he had felt when those girls had asked him to treat them. Then, as suddenly, with all the ease and nonchalance with which he had flung that bill to the soda clerk and told him to treat them and keep the change, he lifted the lady’s hand from his arm and held it out to Mortie.

“With all appreciation of the honor you would put upon me,” he said to Alice, “I must forgo the pleasure. This gentleman, I believe, has prior claim, and I have a duty in another direction. I will bid you good evening—Alice!”

Then, with a slight inclination of his head toward the others of the party who had not noticed him until now, he went out the door and left them.

He heard a clamor of exclamation behind him, partly subdued by the opening and closing and reopening of the apartment door.

“Oh
Alice
! Alice
darling
! You got it in the neck that time!” shouted one hilarious feminine voice. “You thought you had someone to pay your gambling debts, didn’t you, darling? But you thought too soon!” And then a perfect avalanche of laughter gurgled after him and echoed down the corridor as he stepped into the elevator and dropped to the level below out of sound of it.

Greg stepped gravely forth from the elevator and out into the night, the hot blood burning in his cheeks.

So that was Alice! His old sweetheart!

And he had almost been caught by her wiles!

If it had not been for her little, brightly painted lips, so like those crude painted lips on the train, if it had not been for the memory of that other girl, so sweet and white and frail against his shoulder, he might have yielded. He recognized suddenly in himself a weakness toward the old Alice, toward what he had thought was her womanhood and beauty. A weakness that was vulnerable to her wiles.

Yet now as he thought of her silly laugh, that had come after she had had a drink or two, of the way she let that cur of a Mortie hover around her with flattery, his heart was hot with anger and shame.

Was there in every man a tendency toward degradation? He had always been doubtful about the story of man’s fall as his mother had taught him from the Bible. He had always felt that Adam was worse than most men, yielding in that easy way to temptation. He had always as a boy felt that if he had been in Adam’s place, and had really seen and talked with God, that he never would have sinned. Adam was just a poor fish, that was all, and not a self-respecting man at all. He had looked upon him as a forefather of whom to be ashamed, and one with whom he had nothing in common. Now he suddenly began to suspect that there were possibilities of sin and weakness in himself, and that somehow, by some power beyond his own, he had been hedged about by thoughts and memories, or by his mother’s prayers, or even by his mother herself as guardian angel, showing him his danger.

Alice! Lovely Alice, with her divorces and her tearful confidences, her delicate, fragile startling beauty! And then Alice with her wine glasses and her men friends and her drinking, smoking women friends! Alice with
gambling debts
!