Part 5

“I don’t blame you now. I thought there was at least ten in my clothes. Four dollars is mighty little to begin housekeeping upon. Keep it for me, will you, until the last cent of the gentleman who did not know it was loaded is gone.”

Later:

“You might as well come and help to spend the old man’s money. We will travel in private cars. Two maids for you, two valets for me. Our pictures in the newspapers. A retinue to smile welcome to us at each city. Another to weep as we depart. We shall leave a trail of American gold in our wake across Europe!”

He had caught her interest. Only he thought it was something which she said it was not.

“Look here. You do like me a little. I have seen you watch me while I pretended to sleep. And I’ll try to learn what love is and to make you love me. I think I can.”

The girl looked down.

“Look here, I was a gentleman and a lawyer before I was a drunkard, and I can be again, if any one cares to have me be. Please marry me!”

“I don’t love you,” said the girl again, with her head still down.

“I know. But I love you—I’m sure now that that is what it is. You see, it’s one of two things for me—you or rum. That’s why I’m working at it overtime. You won’t regret it—hanged if you do.”

VI THE OLD MAN’S LAST CENT

Well, she did marry him, and she did not regret it—nor did he.

To me it is a wonder that she did not. For he had done the threatened newspapering so well that already upon their arrival at the steamer all the passengers were lined up to await them. And the smile they got there followed them to Europe, and into the most remote corners of the globe where they penetrated to escape it. It became at last a smile of contempt. And he began to understand that it was for him alone and that the world had exempted his wife from it.

“I’m glad for that,” he told her. “If I am to go about the world a cad and a fool, to be laughed at—I am glad that you are—”

“To be _pitied_ as your victim?” laughed his happy wife. “No. I don’t want anything that is not yours, and you shall have nothing that is not mine.”

If they escaped it for a day, they never did for two. Always the servants were in line where they arrived, with the expectation of them in their banal faces. But always she was excepted.

“I wish I could rise with you,” sighed Ravant, whimsically. “I hate to be separated from you. But they won’t have me, and they won’t do without you. I suppose my claws still show somewhere.”

“Whither I go, you shall go,” his wife threatened. “I am too happy—that is what the world sees. What care I—for anything but joy and you!”

She kissed Ravant.

But presently her “beauty” and her “magnetism” began to be paragraphic with him in the newspapers—of which he said he was glad, and was not.

“Beloved,” he told her, “it is a pity you married me.”

“Why?—beloved also.”

“Because you might have had any one of the effete noblemen of Europe, and escaped newspapering.”

“But I would only have been satisfied with a crowned head.”

“I suppose even that is possible to the ‘prevalent goddess’”—he was reading from a newspaper.

“I have it!” laughed his wife, touching the plate which covered his wound.

And then, I am almost sorry to say, yet not quite, that a little mist came into the eyes of the Ravant who had once been a brute, and he remembered all those hospital days.

“How splendid you have become,” he said.

“Thanks to you,” she whispered in his arms, where still he was the savage Ravant and always would be.

“But all I am you have made of me!”

“But, too, all I am you have made of me!” she laughed.

“One thing I take credit for,” he joyed with her, “smiles _do_ become your face.”

“And thought and care yours. The lines of which we once spoke—are gone! From both our faces! Is not that wonderful?”

“Wonderful,” he agreed.

Suddenly she was serious.

“I think we belong together. I thank God always that we met. You were what I needed—the man God meant to complete me. Before you came I was worse than you were before I came. Thank God we met—no matter how!”

“Not forgetting to thank the loaded gun! For a long time I have been sorry for the old man. It has not seemed long—but there are indications that the last cent has been reached. I would pay him back if I could!”

“You never, never could!” laughed his wife.

“But how much do you suppose we have spent?”

“Don’t know! Don’t know,” she chanted. “That is the beauty of it. We don’t have to! No accounts to keep! Money carefully ahead of us at each stopping place! It is like a slot machine! You put in a nickel and get a thousand dollars!”

“It’s wonderful how well he has done it. Hasn’t kicked or funked once! Well, when I get back to America I mean to hunt him up and get down on my knees and God bless him!” laughed Ravant.

“We’ll go together!” said his wife.

“Yes! And confess all! I’ll show him _you_! He’ll forgive us then and won’t regret—”

“His poverty!” laughed Ravant’s happy wife.

“Yes. Hang it! That’s the horror of it. Once I thought it would be the joy of it! And how he must have writhed under the newspapering! Such a sensitive chap as he is! It has been torture to even me. But I deserve that punishment.”

“You do!” cooed his wife.

“Let us go home,” said Ravant, “and live in a little house—alone!”

“Done!” cried his wife.

“We’ll change our names and the newspapers will not be able to find us!”

“Done!”

“But—there wasn’t any money here, you know” (it was Rouen).

“Perhaps in a day or two.”

So, at Rouen, they waited for the money to take them home to a new happiness.

VII HER BIG TRUMP

One day she got a big letter with the American postmark. She laughed, made a certain mystery of it, and kept it from him.

“And this is my nurse!” he joyed.

“Yes!” she admitted.

He was opening a letter of his own which he was keeping from her.

“But there must be no secrets between chums.”

She tried to take the letter, but he withheld it.

“Ah, I must first confess? Well—how much do you love me?”

“As much as I can,” said her husband, seriously.

“I know that to be a great deal. How much can you forgive?”

Now she was in his arms.

“As much as I love,” said Ravant.

“Then I am quite safe.”

She crept a little deeper into his arms and opened her letter.

“Dearest, I married you under an assumed name.”

“Thank God!” laughed Ravant—“unless it is a worse one than Brown.”

“I could have been very happy as Mrs. Brown—as happy as I am as Mrs. Ravant.”

She ignored the rest and withdrew the contents of the letter. They appeared to be a deed.

“_Dearest, I have a house._ Are you angry that I am so rich? Part of an inheritance. But now it must be sold. This is from my lawyer. He tells me that I must sign the deed both with my proper maiden name and as your wife”—she stooped there to kiss him, and repeated the word—“and you must join in it as my husband. It is a bore to own a house, isn’t it, dearest?”

But her lightness found him full of terror. She heard him breathe:

“What was your maiden name?”

“Ruth Fenton,” smiled his wife.

Again that exclamation.

“What is it?” she begged.

“No,” he said. “There must be no secret between chums. My punishment has come. And it is greater than I could possibly have conceived. I must read you this, and then if you wish—go away from you.”

“Not while I am here,” she laughed, beginning to understand. “Whither thou goest, I will go. You can’t—cannot lose me—me, your lawful wife!”

Though she laughed with tremendous happiness, he read the letter through with no abatement of his terror.

“As you know, I have been all these two years finding the person who shot you. At last I have her—yes, _her_! It is a woman. Her name is Ruth Fenton. Her large fortune has been exhausted by your world-renowned extravagances, and she is now selling the last thing she owns—her house. I hope you feel as mean as I do—for you!

GAST.”

“Yes, I am the old man,” laughed Ravant’s happy wife into her husband’s face.

“Yes,” he said, and then again, “yes—you are—the—old—man! The old man! You! Me!”

“_We!_” cooed his wife.

“All those things I said about him were about you! _To_ you!”

“_Yes!_ Wasn’t it funny?”

A long time they sat there, she looking up, he down—eye to eye. But she never ceased to smile.

He tried to go.

“Not while I am here!” she laughed, and, slipping down, held him by the knees.

“No, beloved, after this there shall be, indeed, no secrets between us. I was so unhappy and alone that night that I meant to kill myself. No one cared for me, and I _had_ to have some one care for me or die! My hand must have slipped, or, perhaps, I grew afraid. But God himself directed that bullet! You were mine and you were passing—going away from me! If you had gone on, we would never have met. It was the only way to stop you and give you to me, me to you. I went to the hospital and paid to nurse you. They said you needed no nursing, only care and quiet. And when they knew how important it was to me, for I told them all, they broke their rules all to pieces, and let me do it. And, now, dear one, you must keep what I have given you, what the good God has! You _shall_ keep it!” (as he tried to dislodge her) “and you shall keep _me_! For I will _not_ go! There, I am a beggar!” She laughed gloriously. “But the happiest beggar on earth, and you have got to support your happy beggar wife forever hereafter. That is to be your punishment.”

“Happy punishment!” was the thought which flashed through Ravant.

But he grimly put it out, and for one more last moment the old, brutal Ravant tried to come back. Alas! she was on the floor there before him, her elbows on his knees, her face, halting between smiles and tears, upraised to his, looking out of its glory of living hair, watching the portents there.

And when they did not develop fast enough toward joy, she locked her hands behind his neck suddenly and drew his head down, to the peril of a dislocation.

“You _must_ stay to support your beggar wife; don’t you see?—_won’t_ you understand?—and perhaps her beggar—_child_!”

“What!” cried Ravant, everything else out of his head in an instant.

“I always keep my biggest trump for the last, dearest. All women do, don’t they? It’s so lovely to play it then—when every one thinks all is lost. Oh, beloved! smile, laugh, shout with me! How _can_ you go away now when you have a beggar wife to support, and a beggar—ch—! Ah! ha! ha!”

How could the old, brutal Ravant come back? He never did. How could he go? He did not.

“But we will _not_ sell your house. We will go back, even if it must be in the steerage, and work _together_, live _together_, happily ever after!”

“Dominus vobiscum!” cried Ravant’s happy wife, leaping into his arms.

And all this, save the steerage, they did. And at this very moment they are living as happily as they planned.

[Illustration: “_She was on the floor there before him, her face upraised to his_”]

LIEBEREICH[4]

I THE HOUSE THAT HE AND EMMY BUILT

“He’d be better off,” said Mrs. Schwalm, referring to the possible death of old Liebereich.

“You don’t mean you’d be?” grinned Hermann Schlimm.

He had drifted into Mrs. Krantz’s kitchen, among the women, after the funeral. No one gave him any attention.

Old Liebereich’s wife had just been buried, and they were met to pay Mrs. Krantz their respects. She had been the “next-door neighbor” through Mrs. Liebereich’s illness.

There was some strawberry preserve presently, and some “field tea.”

Then Mrs. Krantz said to Mrs. Schwalm:

“You had better go now.”

Mrs. Schwalm was “next door” on the other side. She would now housekeep for old Liebereich for a week. Then Mrs. Engwein, who lived next to Mrs. Krantz, would take her turn, and so on while old Liebereich lived—which it was thought would not be long. For no one ever went to “the poor-house” or “the home” from this German vicinage.

These things were so well understood that they were not even discussed at this gathering. But there was a well-defined understanding that the brief management of old Liebereich would be difficult. Mrs. Schwalm rose to go.

“He won’t fold his britches unless you make him,” warned Mrs. Krantz.

“And I’ve heared,” said another, “that he never hangs ’em on the back of a cheer if he kin put ’em on the floor.”

Old Liebereich had an odious reputation for this sort of thing.

“You know Emmy she spoiled him.”

“If _he_ didn’t do things, _she_ done ’em.”

“That’s a good way to spoil ’em!”

Mrs. Krantz warned again:

“You got to keep the clock on him all the time, or it’s no use. At six he’s got to eat his supper. You’ll have to push him right in his cheer, and see that he gits things in his mouth. If you don’t, you’ll have to clean ’em off the floor. Seven, to bed with him. Yisterday he says to me, says he: ‘I ain’t no dog-gone baby! Lemme alone! I kin git to bed myself.’ But I had him asleep by that time.”

Mrs. Schwalm sighed. It was plain that she was going to a house of trouble. But it was her duty, and she would do it, as they all would.

I do not know at what point, precisely, along the pike, east and west from old Liebereich, the “next-door neighbor” obligation ceased. It was very far. Nevertheless, before the year which succeeded the death of his wife had passed, its courtesies had been exhausted. Each neighbor had served two turns, and each had murmured dismally at the prospect of a third. Finally, they all joined in discussing out-and-out rebellion against custom and Liebereich.

Indeed, one morning the doctor, whose business it was to keep the people up to their duties, found an interregnum. He brought Mrs. Krantz from her house to old Liebereich’s as one does a detected criminal.

“I’ve had three turns a’ready,” she defended.

“The man has had no breakfast,” said the doctor. “He must eat while he lives!”

“Well, he’d be better off, and so would we, if he was—”

The doctor stopped her with a solemn up-lifted finger:

“‘Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’”

She thought it made no difference that she gave grudgingly. But old Liebereich felt the touch of impatience. And he saw that she swept the dirt into a corner, stood the broom where it did not belong, and left the stale water in his pitcher.

“You git out!” he quavered senilely. “I kin housekeep for myself!”

“Git your other leg in your britches, or I’ll—”

He did it so suddenly, in his fright, that Mrs. Krantz’s humor returned, and she laughed. She was dressing him. He broke out afresh at this evidence of safety:

“I built this here house before I was twenty-one or you was born—I did. My mother she says, says she: ‘Bill, soon it will be a man in the house. Don’t you think you’d better git the house? You and Emmy’s mighty thick.’ I took the hint. And, on the morning I got twenty-one, here I was! And, begosh, there”—he pointed to the other side of the fireplace—“was Emmy! She and me done it all—together. She drawed the plan. You see them bricks that ain’t the right color? Emmy laid ’em! Yessir! With her little hands—and a trowel—and mortar! They are all right except the color. I says, says I, ‘Take ’em right out!’ But she threw the mortar on me, and it went in my hair and eyes, and she had to wash it out—that’s why they was never changed. And I’m glad they wasn’t. Whenever I look at ’em—one of ’em’s a little loose—I kin see my Emmy laying ’em! Well, you never see nothing as nice, I’ll bet you, as Emmy laying bricks! Old Gaertner made the bricks—out there where the boys swim now. That was all clay once. None of the ground clods like you git in bricks nowadays! It’s too long for you to remember, I expect. You not more’n sixty-five or so.” Then his mind flew back to the cause of his rebellion, and he was all the more angry that he had forgotten it in thinking of Emmy. “And now you want to boss me! I won’t stand it. Git out! You’re just a spring chicken.”

“You shut up!” cried Mrs. Krantz.

At this anathema he gasped in fresh fear.

“Betsy,” he said humbly when he could speak, “you’re too young to talk to me like that!”

“I’m going on seventy!” snapped Mrs. Krantz; which boast was untrue.

“So?”

Old Liebereich caught the insincerity and turned to inspect her.

“’Tain’t so!” he said, with old-fashioned passion against a lie. “You think you kin shut me up that-a-way and I’ll go to bed easy! You git right out!”

“If you don’t take keer I will!” cried the exasperated housekeeper. “Let’s see what the Lord says!”

She closed her eyes and put a finger on a text of the Bible which lay open there, meaning, if it were favorable, to take him at his word and leave the consequences to heaven.

But what she read was:

“Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

II EMMY AND HE WERE NEVER APART

When seven o’clock came, old Liebereich, unrebuked, still reviled her and her housekeeping. For the Scriptures had spoken and the woman knew her duty. She did it. And not a word delayed or hastened by an instant old Liebereich’s relentless progress to bed.

Even when he was there he said:

“You can’t keep no house! My Emmy kin beat you all! Look at that!”

It was an andiron which had become dull.

“When my Emmy gits back you kin go to grass!”

But the last word was mumbled in the delicious sleep Mrs. Krantz had brought him.

Then Mrs. Krantz humbly polished the dulled andiron, cleaned the dirt out of the corners, restored the broom to its rightful corner, folded old Liebereich’s trousers and hung them over the back of a chair, lighted the lamp, shaded it, looked again at that scriptural text, as if to ask whether every cross had been borne, then went out, to return at five in the morning. For old Liebereich was permitted to sleep late. He was no trouble when he slept.

Now, while old Liebereich sleeps, I shall tell you some things you ought to know. In the idiom of the vicinage he was considered “funny,” which means only queer. Happiness had made him so, they said. His most constant and odious boast was that he had loved his wife for eighty years. It began, he said, when he was four and she was born.

And old Liebereich did not know that she was dead. Something had dulled his faculties when they told him she would die, and now he believed (as they told him, so that he would not “bother” them) that she was at her sister’s in Maryland to get well, and would be home soon. So the curious jerk of his head toward the door by the fireplace meant only that he was vigilant for his wife’s return. The neighbors thought it part of his aberration.

But even the little intelligence he retained made out this return to have been logically too long delayed. It was no longer “very soon,” as they had at first told him; it was scarcely “soon,” as they had at last told him.

And Christmas was coming!

“Do you think she will be here for Christmas?” he asked each one of them.

They assured him of this.

“Then I’ll hang up the old stockings and su’prise her!”

Here, again, I must explain that they had always cherished the element of surprise in their Christmas giving.

You will have seen that old Liebereich was living too long for his neighbors. I must be careful how I put their sentiments into words, so that no injustice be done them. I think I had better say that it began to seem to them like effrontery for him to live on. They said oftener now and with greater unction that he would be better off. And they answered Hermann Schlimm’s query (in the second paragraph of this story), when he repeated it, with accumulating anger now.

But you are not to suppose that old Liebereich was made unhappy by the least knowledge of this. On the contrary, nothing of it reached him. He found another reason for their brusqueness. They were simply _women_—and unlike Emmy.

One day, Mrs. Schwalm, wearily responding to his questions about his wife, asked him why he did not write to her. This at least, she thought cunningly, would consume time, keep him quiet, and give death added opportunity.

Now, in all his thoughts there had never been that one.

“Why, you see,” he said, “Emmy and me was never apart for a day. It was no need to write. And,” he went on, “I ain’t no scholar. But—say—you got any ink?”

The letter was a secret office which he attended to himself. It took many days. But he was very happy afterward, and delivered it to Mrs. Schwalm and Mrs. Krantz, who were to get a stamp and mail it.

“What we going to do with it?” whispered Mrs. Schwalm. “Burn it?”

“No. Open it.”

However, Mrs. Schwalm, who was known to be sentimental, opposed this.

“But it’s got to be answered.”

This was so. Mrs. Krantz cumulated her arguments.

“He’ll ask for the answer a dozen times a day till you’re crazy!”

“Well, anyhow, let’s wait a little. He may die any day,” was the way Mrs. Schwalm temporized.

“You’re interfering with the Lord’s business!” chided the curious Mrs. Krantz, finally.

III “VERGISSNICHTMEIN”

So, while they went away with this letter which was never to be mailed, old Liebereich sat by the fire in the fireplace which he had built, and rocked gently, and sang old German songs, and would not go to bed, but fell asleep there. And even in his sleep he was found singing:

“Blau ist ein Blümlein Das heiszt Vergissnichtmein—”

None of us will ever agree with those old German wives, I think. How could old Liebereich ever be better off—how could any one—than singing old German songs by the fire and waiting for the coming of his wife—and Christmas?