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Ebook has 652 lines and 37163 words, and 14 pages

They sat down on the slippery horsehair, and talked softly and quickly. Ticket--train--telegrams--the little money that was necessary--he advised her about them all. He called her "Nancy" to-day, for the first time. He remembered afterward that she had called him nothing. She went to get Mrs. Venable, after a while, and later Sis' Sally Anne drew him aside and told him to make Nancy drink her good hot tea. She drank it, at his command. Clark Belknap came that evening; others came--all too late. Before the first of them, Bert had taken her to the train, had made her as comfortable as he could, had sat beside her, with her soft gloved hand tight in his, murmuring to her that she had so much to be thankful for--no pain, no illness, no real age. But she had left him, she said, her lip trembling and her eyes brimming again. He reminded her of her pretty, dependent step-mother, of the two little half-brothers who were just waiting for Nancy to come and straighten everything out.

"Yes--I've got to keep up for them!" she said, smiling bravely. And in a tense undertone she added, "You're wonderful to me!"

"And will you have some supper--just to break the evening?"

"I had tea." She leaned back, and shut her eyes. "I couldn't--eat!" she whispered pitifully. His response was to put his clean, folded handkerchief into her hand, and at that she opened the wet eyes, and smiled at him shakily.

"Just some soup--or a salad," he urged. "Will you promise me, Nancy?"

"I promise you I'll try," she said in parting.

Walking home with his head in a whirl, Bert said to himself: "This is the second of October. I'll give her six months. On the second of April I'll ask her."

However, he asked her on Christmas night, after the Venables' wonderful Christmas dinner, when they all talked of the Civil War as if it were yesterday, and when old laces, old jet and coral jewelry, and frail old silk gowns were much in evidence. They were sitting about the coal fire in the back drawing-room, when Nancy and Bert chanced to be alone. Mrs. Venables had gone to brew some punch, with Sis' Sally Anne's help. The other young men of the party were assisting them, Augusta had gone to the telephone.

Bert always remembered the hour. The room was warm, fragrant of spicy evergreen. There was a Rogers group on the marble mantle, and two Dresden china candlesticks that reflected themselves in the watery dimness of the mirror above. Nancy, slender and exquisite, was in unrelieved, lacy black; her hair was as softly black as her gown. Her white hands were locked in her lap. Something had reminded her of old Christmases, and she had told Bert of running in to her mother's room, early in the chilly morning, to shout "Christmas Gift!"

Not moving his sympathetic eyes from her Checking Page back In, Please Wait ... to town again, and his own pleasure in their visit was talking of Nancy; how wise, how sweet, how infinitely desirable she was. Dorothy had wanted Cousin Albert to come to her for Thanksgiving. No, a thousand thanks--but Miss Barrett was so much alone now. He must be near her. Dorothy kept her thoughts on the subject to herself, but he so far impressed his mother that her own hopes came to be his, she dreaded the thought of what might happen to her boy if that southern girl did not chance to care for him.

But the southern girl cared. She locked the lace-clad arms about his neck, on this memorable Christmas night and laid her cheek against his. "Are you sure you want me, Bert?" she whispered.

They had not much altered their positions when Mrs. Venables came back half an hour later, and a general time of kissing, crying and laughing began.

It was a happy time, untroubled by the thought of money that was soon to be so important. Bert's various aunts and cousins sent him checks, and Nancy's stepmother sent her all her own mother's linen and silver, and odd pieces of mahogany on which the freight charges were frightful, and laces and an oil portrait or two. The trousseau was helped from all sides, every week had its miracle; and the hats, and the embroidered whiteness, and the smart street suit and the adorable kitchen ginghams accumulated as if by magic. Bert's mother sent delightfully monogrammed bed and table-linen, almost weekly. Nancy said it was preposterous for poor people to start in with such priceless possessions!

Among the happy necessities of the time was the finding of a proper apartment. Nancy and Bert spent delightful Saturdays and Sundays wandering in quest of it; beginning half-seriously in February, when it seemed far too early to consider this detail, and continuing with augmented earnestness through the three succeeding months. Eventually they got both tired and discouraged, and felt dashed in the very opening of their new life, but finally the place was found, and they loved it instantly, and leased it without delay. It was in a new apartment house, in East Eleventh Street, four shiny and tiny rooms, on a fourth floor. Everything was almost too compact and convenient, Nancy thought; the ice box, gas stove, dumb-waiter, hanging light over the dining table, clothes line, and garbage chute, were already in place. It left an ambitious housekeeper small margin for original arrangement, but of course it did save money and time. The building was of pretty cream brick, clean and fresh, the street wide, and lined with dignified old brownstone houses, and the location perfect. She smothered a dream of wide old-fashioned rooms, quaintly furnished in chintzes and white paint. They had found no such enchanting places, except at exorbitant rents. Seventy-five dollars, or one hundred dollars, were asked for the simplest of them, and the plumbing facilities, and often the janitor service, were of the poorest. So Nancy abandoned the dream, and enthusiastically accepted the East Eleventh Street substitute, Bert becoming a tenant in the "George Eliot," at a rental of thirty-five dollars a month. Some of the old Barrett furniture was too large for the place, but what she could use Nancy arranged with exquisite taste: fairly dancing with pleasure over the sitting room, where her chair and Bert's were in place, and the little droplight lighted on the little table. In this room they were going to read Dickens out loud, on winter nights.

They were married on a hot April morning, a morning whose every second seemed to Nancy flooded with strange perfumes, and lighted with unearthly light. The sky was cloudless; the park bowered in fresh green; the streets, under new shadows, clean-swept and warm. Her gown was perfection, her new wide hat the most becoming she had ever worn; the girls, in their new gowns and hats, seemed so near and dear to her to-day. She was hardly conscious of Bert, but she remembered liking his big brother, who kissed her in so brotherly a fashion. Winter was over, the snow was gone at last, the trying and depressing rains and the cold were gone, too, and she and Bert were man and wife, and off to Boston for their honeymoon.

They had been married eleven days, and were loitering over a Sunday luncheon in their tiny home, when they first seriously discussed finances; not theoretical finances, but finances as bounded on one side by Bert's worn, brown leather pocket-book, and on the other by his bank-book, with its confusing entries in black and red ink.

Here on the table were seventeen dollars and eighty cents. Nancy had flattened the bills, and arranged the silver in piles, as they talked. This was Sunday; Bert would be paid on Saturday next. Could Nancy manage on that?

Nancy felt a vague alarm. But she had been a wage earner herself. She rose to the situation at once.

"Manage what, Bert? If you mean just meals, of course I can! But I won't have this much every week for meals ...?"

Bert took out a fountain pen, and reached for a blank envelope.

"Do you mind working it out?--I think it's such fun!"

"I love it!" Nancy brought her brightest face to the problem. "Now let's see--what have we? Exactly one hundred a month."

"Thirteen hundred a year," he corrected.

"Yes, but let's not count that extra hundred, Bee!" Nancy, like all women, had given her new husband a new name. "Let's save that and have it to blow in, all in a heap, for something special?"

"All right." Bert digressed long enough to catch the white hand and kiss it, and say: "Isn't it wonderful--our sitting here planning things together? Aren't we going to have FUN!"

"Rent, thirty-five," Nancy began, after an interlude. Bert, who had secured a large sheet of clean paper, made a neat entry, "Rent, ."

"You make such nice, firm figures, mine are always wavy!" observed Nancy irrelevantly, at this. This led nowhere.

"Now one quarter of that rent ought to come out every week," Bert submitted presently. "Eight dollars and a half must be put aside every week."

"Out of this, too?" Nancy asked, touching the money on the table.

"Well, that's all that's left of half my salary, drawn in advance," Bert said, pondering. "Yes, you see--we pay a month in advance on the first!"

"And what have we besides this, Bee? Your Aunt Mary's check, and--and what else?"

"Aunt Mary's hundred, which will certainly take care of the freight bills," Bert calculated, "and that's all, except this."

"But, Bert--but, Bert--all that money we had in Boston?"

Bert pointed to the table.

"You behold the remainder."

"Weren't we the extravagant wretches!" mused Nancy. "Taxis--tea-parties--breakfast upstairs--silly pink silk stockings for Nancy, a silly pongee vest for Bert--"

"But oh, what a grand time!" her husband finished unrepentantly.

"Wasn't it!" Nancy agreed dreamily. But immediately she was businesslike again. "However, the lean years have set in," she announced. "I'll have to count on a dollar a week laundry--laundry and rent nine dollars and a half; piano and telephone at the rate of three dollars a month--that's a dollar and a half more; milk, a quart of milk and half a pint of cream a day, a dollar and seventy-five cents more; what does that leave, Bert?"

"It leaves twelve dollars and twenty-five cents," said Bert.

"But what about your lunches, dearest?"

"Gosh! I forgot them," Bert stated frankly. "I'll keep 'em under fifteen cents a day," he added, "call it a dollar a week!"

"You can't!" protested Nancy, with a look of despair.

"I can if I've got to. Besides, we'll be off places, Sundays, and I'll come home for lunch Saturday, and you'll feed me up."

"But, Bert," she began again presently, "I'll have to get ice, and car fares, and drugs, and soap, and thread, and butter, and bread, and meat, and salad-oil, and everything else in the world out of that eleven-fifty!" Bert was frowning hard.

"You can't have the whole eleven-fifty," he told her reluctantly, "I can walk one way, to Forty-Eighth Street, but I can't walk both. I'll have to have some car fare. And my office suit has got to be pressed about once every two weeks--"

"And newspapers!" added Nancy, dolefully. "Seven cents more!" And they both burst into laughter. "But, Bee," she said presently, ruffling his hair, as she sat on the arm of his chair, "really I do not know what we will do in case of dentist's bills, or illness, or when our clothes wear out. What do people do? Is thirty-five too much rent, or what?"

"I'm darned if I know what they do!" Bert mused.

They both were destined to learn how it was managed, and being young and healthy and in love, they learned easily, and with much laughter and delight. Bert's share was perhaps the easier, for although he manfully walked to his office, polished his own shoes, and ate a tiresome and unsatisfying lunch five days a week, he had his reward on the sixth and seventh days, when Nancy petted and praised him.

Her part was harder. She never knew what it was to be free from financial concern. She fretted and contrived until the misspending of five cents seemed a genuine calamity to her, She walked to cheap markets, and endured the casual scorn of cheap clerks. She ironed Bert's ties and pressed his trousers, saving car fares by walking, saving hospitality by letting her old friends see how busy and absorbed she was, saving food by her native skill and ingenuity.

But they lived royally, every meal was a triumph, every hour strangely bright. Of cooking meat, especially the more choice cuts, Nancy did little this year, but there was no appetizing combination of vegetables, soups, salads, hot breads, and iced drinks that she did not try. Bert said, and he meant it, that he had never lived so well in his life, and certainly the walls of the little apartment in the "George Eliot" were packed with joy. When their microscopic accounts balanced at the end of the week, they celebrated with a table-d'hote dinner down town--dinners from which they walked home gloriously happy, Nancy wondering over and over again HOW the restaurateurs could manage it, Bert, over his cigar, estimating carefully: "Well, Sweet, there wasn't much cost to that soup, delicious as it was, and I suppose they buy that sole down at the docks, in the early morning..."

When Nancy had learned that she could live without a telephone, and had cut down the milk bill, and limited Bert to one butter ball per meal, she found she could manage easily. In August they gave two or three dinners, and Nancy displayed her pretty table furnishings to "the girls," and gave them the secret of her iced tea. She told her husband that they got along because he was "so wonderful"; she felt that no financial tangle could resist Bert's neatly pencilled little calculations, but Bert praised only her--what credit to him that he did not complain, when he was the most fortunate man in the world?

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