The Province of a Friend
JAMIE stood in Margaret Cameron’s back door and called cheerfully: “Oh, neighbour, where have you been for the past fifty years?”
Margaret Cameron stepped to the living-room door and braced herself with a hand on each side of the casing, and Jamie was shocked to the depths. He found himself crossing the room in a sweep and catching her in his arms.
“Oh,Margaret!” he cried. “Margaret!”
He held her from him and looked at her, and her face was the face of a stricken woman. She was there. She seemed all right herself. There was only one thing to think.
“Lolly?” he questioned. “What happened to your girl?”
Margaret Cameron opened her mouth but no words came. Jamie helped her to a chair and rushed to the kitchen for a glass of water. Then he knelt on one knee beside her and took both her hands and stared at her with questioning eyes.
“Tell me, friend of mine,” he urged. “Tell me what I can do for you. Where can I go? Whom can I get?”
Slowly the woman shook her head, and at last her voice came, a hoarse, rasping voice with which he was not familiar.
“She went on that hiking trip up in the northern part of the state. She fell over a bluff and hurt herself terribly. Nobody knew how bad it was. They were where they couldn’t get anything. It must have been appendicitis or peritonitis. Her body was all bandaged. Anyway, Lolly is beside her father out in Pinehurst Cemetery.”
“Oh!” cried Jamie. “Oh!”
He dropped back on his heels and possessed himself of both Margaret Cameron’s hands and sat staring at her.
“I had a ’phone call,” she said presently, “from my niece, Molly, to come to her place in town quick, that she was worried about Lolly. She just said that to make it easier for me to get there. They must have sent her word from the start that Lolly was gone. Molly had written her a letter and they got the address off it and sent Lolly to her. They were always, not like sisters, more than sisters. If they had been sisters, they’d not have gotten along half so well as they did. I’ve been kind of sore at Molly for a good while. I thought she had a good deal to do with Lolly going away, but maybe she didn’t. Maybe I was so hurt at her going that I just imagined it. You know, a mother has got a lot of time to think and her children are so bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh that to save her she can’t help worrying over them. But I needn’t worry over Lolly any more. There’s nothing more I am ever going to do for her.”
She sat still in dry-eyed resignation.
Jamie gripped her hands.
“Go on and cry! Cry your heart out about it!” he said. “Put your head over here on my shoulder and let me hold you tight. If it tears you to pieces, you had better cry than to sit dry eyed like that.”
Margaret Cameron shook her head.
“I think I am cut too deep for tears,” she said. “I am just about killed. I wish to God I had something to do besides the routine of the house, something different, somebody who needed me! I wanted Molly to come home with me, but she seemed to have things keeping her in town, and she wanted me to come with her, and awful as it seems here now that Lolly is never going to come again, I don’t seem to be able even to think about leaving. I am hit pretty hard, losing my neighbour and all the light of love and laughter that there was in my life and in my home. I don’t mind telling you, Jamie, that the Bee Master did not care anything about me. His heart had been broken on the question of women.
“I don’t know all the details, but I know this much. He had had a first wife that he idolized, and after her death he had let another woman fool him into the idea that she would take care of his child and make a home for him and comfort him. But she wasn’t the right kind of a woman and she had a child of her own, and there was a tragedy about the Bee Master’s little girl. I don’t think he could prove it, but I think he knew in his heart that the other child had pushed her, and when they got to her, her spine was injured and she never could walk again. Her agony was fearful and she couldn’t stand it long. When she died, he turned everything over to the woman but enough to buy this place, and asked the courts for his freedom and came here. He was free and he could have married me, but he did not want me. He did not want any woman in that way. He had had his punishment. He was worn out with sorrow and disappointment. He didn’t love me, but, oh! Jamie! I did love him! I couldn’t help loving him. Whenever I look at his chair beside the fireplace, I see his white, silken hair, his noble forehead, his lean slender face fine as parchment, always gentle, always patient—I would have given my life to have comforted him! And just when I knew this couldn’t ever be, Lolly went, so suddenly and so needlessly.
“Jamie, I can’t understand it! There was no reason why she should have left home. Her grades were always good. Her school work was fine. She was offered positions here at the close of the war, when teachers were so scarce, when so many girls preferred the freedom of the shops and offices to the confinement of teaching. I can’t get away from the fact that she went because she didn’t want to stay at home. She didn’t want to be around me, and I can’t see why. I spent my days and I lay awake at night trying to think of things that would please her, but I couldn’t keep up with the procession. I can’t think that a lot of things the youngsters are doing are right. I can’t think that they won’t end in humiliation and pain and maybe death, and now death’s come to her just from a little foolish accident. She must have slipped on the mountains, and I can’t understand that. She was sure-footed as a goat. She’d been in the mountains all her life. Oh, Jamie, it’s all so useless. What am I going to do?”
Jamie hesitated.
“Margaret,” he said, “I came over here to tell you a tale of woe, but what I have to say seems feeble compared to what you are enduring.”
Margaret Cameron straightened in her chair. She drew her hands from Jamie’s and laid one of them on his head.
“Oh, my boy, my poor boy!” she cried. “Has that awful thing gone and broken open again? Have we got it all to do over?”
“No! No!” Jamie hastened to assure her. “No, it isn’t that. My side’s fine. I’m fairly sure I won’t have to wear either the pads or bandages more than two or three months more. I haven’t been able to stick to diet so well since you’ve been gone because I’m not much of cook and I haven’t been places where I could get what I needed.”
Margaret Cameron went on smoothing his hair.
“I guess you’re about all that’s left to me, Jamie,” she said. “I guess you are my job. It’s fair hell to stay at home, and it’s blacker hell to try to leave it. I doubt if I can go to Molly. If she wants to be with me, I guess she will have to come here. And as for you, lad, if it isn’t your side, what is it that’s hurting you?”
With Scot brevity Jamie told her.
“About the time I came here I married a girl. A few days ago her baby was born at the Star of Mercy Hospital and she was not strong enough to make it. All I have to show for her is the baby.”
Margaret Cameron pushed him back and looked at him quietly.
“Why, Jamie,” she said, “Jamie, I can’t understand that. Why didn’t you bring her here to the garden? Why didn’t you let me take care of her, too? Maybe if her diet had been right and she had been cared for as a woman can care for a girl, maybe it wouldn’t have happened.”
“‘Maybes’ don’t do any good now,” said Jamie. "The circumstances were such that I couldn’t bring her here. The point is that she is gone and there is a splendid boy baby and his name is James Lewis MacFarlane, Junior.”
“At the hospital? He’s at the hospital?”
“No,” said Jamie. “She’d told them before I got there that she wanted me to have him, that she wanted him named for me. They had him all ready and they put him in my arms and without knowing what I was going to do, I walked out with him. I am the same kind of a dog that you are, Margaret. I came home, to the only place I’ve got, to the only place on earth that knows me or wants me. It hasn’t been long, but as long as I live, this spot right here is home to me. So I came home with a little raw, new-born baby.”
Margaret Cameron arose.
“You have him over at the house?” she asked. “You’re trying to take care of him yourself?”
Jamie shook his head.
“No, I couldn’t do that,” he said. “I’m too big and clumsy. I don’t know enough. The little Scout was there and went to the telephone and had a conversation and half an hour later Mrs. Meredith came. She has a small person of her own and it seems that one more didn’t bother her.”
Margaret Cameron made a curious sound, a dry intake of breath which might have been a short laugh if she had not been too unhappy to laugh.
“No,” she said, tersely, “one more doesn’t bother that woman! I’ve heard about her. At the birth of her first child, there was a charity baby and a little millionaire baby at the same hospital and both of them were starving, and for the length of time she was there, along with her own baby she nursed the others and she saved both of them. She got them past a critical period where they could take proper nourishment and retain it, and then they could go on feeding them. And when her next baby came, there were a couple more starving babies and she took them under her wing and shared the nourishment for her own baby with them. And when her third one came there had been a Cæsarean operation a few days before and the baby lived and there was no milk for it, and she nursed it as well as her own. Mrs. Meredith doesn’t stick at doing anything for any baby, that you can depend on. It isn’t hard to see where the little Scout gets a large bunch of lovable qualities, but if she’s got a little person of her own she doesn’t need yours. Maybe that’s the job that I was looking for. Maybe something alive that will put in a demand will be the thing that will tide me over. Go and get your baby, Jamie, and bring him to me.”
Jamie arose and went to the telephone. He called Mrs. Meredith and asked to have the baby brought home. Margaret Cameron had returned and was willing to undertake his care. In only a short time a small brown car appeared down the street. Jamie stood at the gate and watched it coming. The car was the colour of the hair of the woman who drove it. Her eyes, wide and bright, shone out smilingly. On the front seat beside her sat the little Scout, carefully holding the bundle. Jamie looked at it curiously and wondered what he would think and what he would feel if that child were truly his.
In an effort to spare Margaret Cameron he stretched his arms for the baby, but Mrs. Meredith was a genial person. She had to deliver the baby herself. She had to spread out his wardrobe and explain how she had used things. She was dubious as to whether Margaret Cameron, who had not had a baby in more than twenty years, was going to know enough to oil a baby and put the right kind of clothing on it and handle it properly in the present year of our Lord. Twenty years is a long stretch, and science figures out numerous things in that length of time. She was so full of good nature, so full of high spirits, so pleased with herself for having taken care of the baby until Margaret Cameron came, that she did not notice the white, drawn face of the woman, a woman whom she scarcely knew to begin with. She shocked Margaret’s old-fashioned soul by putting into her arms a baby that was wearing no flannel, whose feet were bare and kicking, whose dress was no longer than the feet. It seemed to Margaret Cameron the only thing Mrs. Meredith did that had been done to old-fashioned babies was to watch that the little eyes were screened, that strong lights did not penetrate.
Margaret lifted her voice in protest.
“Where are his flannels?” she said, and Mrs. Meredith spread a pair of expressive hands in a gesture that both Margaret and Jamie recognized immediately.
“There ain’t going to be no flannels!” she laughingly quoted. “California babies have graduated from flannel. It’s too hot for them and chafes their delicate skins and makes them fret and cry.”
Then she sat down on the davenport and opened up the baby basket she had brought and displayed the implements she used in the morning toilet of James Lewis MacFarlane, Junior.
Margaret sat and stared. She listened to what was said. She watched what was done. She looked the baby over and then slowly shook her head.
“Jamie,” she said, “if I take this child and try to take care of him in this way and he dies, are you going to hold it against me?”
Jamie and Mrs. Meredith laughed unrestrainedly.
“No,” promised Jamie, “I won’t lay it up against you, and since Mrs. Meredith seems to have had fine success with a baby of her own that isn’t so many months older than our Jamie, let’s try what she says. The things she has here are the things the baby’s mother made for him. You see they are short. She intended to use the little dresses and clothing she had made.”
“Why, yes,” said Mrs. Meredith, “all these things are what Mr. MacFarlane brought from the hospital.” She turned to him. “Are there any more?”
“Yes,” said Jamie, “there were. But the nurse said the small package was personal belongings of the baby’s mother. It is in the middle drawer of my highboy, Margaret. Any time you need anything you haven’t got, maybe it’s there. I haven’t reached the point of trying to go through it myself, but I don’t mind your looking enough to see if there are any other things that the baby might need.”
“Well,” said Margaret, “I must say frankly that this beats me! I’m sure he’ll be killed. I’m sure he’ll take cold and die of the croup. I thought babies and flannel were inseparable.”
“Just cut off the ‘in,’” laughed Mrs. Meredith. “Cut off the ‘in’ and make it ‘separable’! My baby is the best baby you ever saw. He isn’t roaring with the colic and keeping us awake at night. He is getting so fat his face is round like a full moon. We never know he’s in the house unless he is hungry or needs attention, and he is the kind of a little gentleman that lets me know instanter when he does need attention. Aside from that, I haven’t got a baby for all I know. You try the new way on this other little Jamie; try it on him, and if he isn’t a better baby and an easier baby to take care of, less trouble in every way, and happier, why, then you can call in a doctor and figure out what you think would serve better.”
She turned to Jamie.
“You must fix up some kind of a bed for him. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to get a clothes basket. Put a couple of pillows in it and fold something over for a padding. Our little Scout will bring you out a real softy pillow for his head. Our Jimmy has two or three. He can always divide with another baby, and I think he has enough little covers that we can spare a couple, and there is a world of clothes in that suitcase. He won’t be needing anything for months, unless he grows so fast that he walks out of them.”
She arose and went to the telephone, picked up a pencil attached to a string, and on the margin of a list hanging there wrote a number.
“That’s my number, and a ring will find me at eight o’clock in the morning, or twelve at noon, or six in the evening. If anything goes wrong, call me and I’ll come right out and see what I can do to help you.”
Then she picked up the baby and held it tight to her and kissed its little face and its hands and finished with its feet and handed it to Margaret Cameron. Jamie escorted Mrs. Meredith and the little Scout back to the car. As he closed the door, the Scout Master leaned forward and laid a hand on Jamie’s and lifted a pair of lips that had something to say. Jamie brought his ear in range.
“May I tell Mother about that girl off the Santa Fe buttin’ in on our garden?” came the whisper.
Jamie drew back and looked at the small person in surprise.
“Haven’t you told her?” he inquired.
The little Scout shook a vigorous head.
“No. You said it might worry her, not to tell until Dad came, but he’s coming to-night.”
“Since it’s all over,” said Jamie, “there’s nothing to worry about. You didn’t leave the lady a leg to stand on. You got her confession before three good witnesses, and it just happened that there were two more in the background that you did not know about. We have the papers in our possession, and that reminds me that, while the lock of the chest is broken, I’d better go over that stuff and select what really is important and put it in a safe somewhere. I think likely I’d better turn it over to Mr. Meredith.”
“What are you two talking about?” inquired Mrs. Meredith.
“Since I wasn’t in on the whole performance,” said Jamie, “the little Scout had better tell you from start to finish exactly how things were, and then, if there are any details I can add as to what I saw and heard personally, I’ll be glad to furnish all the corroborative evidence that I can.”
As the car started Jamie heard the voice of the little Scout saying: “A long time ago, one day when he was blue, the Bee Master told me——” and that was all he heard of the story. What he had seen of it was sufficient for him. He went back to the house laughing and without realizing that Margaret Cameron would expect him to be in mourning. He saw the surprise in her eyes and straightened his face immediately. His Scotch honesty instantly asserted itself.
“Margaret,” he said, “I am not sailing under any false colours with you. There are some things that I don’t want to talk about, because I don’t understand them well enough to make them plain to anybody else. But there is this I am going to tell you. I saw the girl I married only once and very little of her before we were married, and I did not see her afterward until she was at the point of making her crossing. This baby bears my name and has been left to me, and I am going to do the best job I can in rearing him properly, but I am not in mourning for his mother, and you needn’t expect me to exhibit any deep symptoms of grief, because I can’t when I don’t feel them.”
Margaret Cameron stood still, looking at the baby.
“That kind of a tale doesn’t sound like you, Jamie,” she said, “but if I understand the province of a friend at all it consists largely in keeping one’s mouth shut and doing the things that will be of most benefit. Naturally, I would like to know what this baby’s mother looked like and what kind of a girl she was, but I suppose, after all, she looked like the baby since a boy generally resembles his mother, and I can’t tell what any baby three or four days old looks like. If she were to be judged by this suit-case of baby clothing, she was pretty fine. These are dainty little things, carefully and exquisitely made. That tells a big story about any mother.”
As the days went by, it seemed to Jamie that there never had been a greater blessing afforded a woman than the Storm Baby was to Margaret Cameron. He had the feeling very largely that that tiny bit of humanity had the same pull for Margaret Cameron that it had for Mrs. Meredith and the little Scout. Its appeal to him was strong. Half-a-dozen times a day he made some excuse to slip into the living room and look in the basket in which tiny Jamie lay. If the little fellow were sleeping, he covered him up and went quietly away. If he were awake, he leaned over and talked to him and examined his hands and his feet. They were hands that had been fashioned to play music, to paint pictures, to hold rare books, possibly to write them.
Sometimes when he went he found Margaret Cameron busy bathing the small person, or dressing him, or washing little garments, or carefully ironing them. One day he realized suddenly that exactly the thing that Margaret had asked for had been given to her. Something alive, something that she could work for, something different, something that would appreciate what she did. So he ceased to feel guilty over the physical strength he was asking her to spend on the tiny baby and felt instead that the child might be the greatest boon that could come into Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/462 Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/463 Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/464 surged up the strongest, in his heart came a great, throbbing, gushing, overwhelming sense of relief. However she had lied, with whatever motive she had deceived him, one big fact remained on Jamie's horizon. The Storm Girl had fulfilled his thought of her. He had not felt that a woman with sage in her hair and sand verbena and primroses rising like an incense around her knees, her midnight garments trailing in them, he had not thought that the hair of silk binding across his face, that the physical strength, the quick assurance of speech, he had not thought that these things possibly could be coupled with a shame woman. He had been ready to accept any excuse, to believe anything. Now there was nothing to believe except that there had been a lie—but, after all, there had been lies in the world that were rather magnificent. There was just a bare possibility that this lie, that this thing that had been done, had a reason backing it that he might be willing to countenance. So Jamie spent largely of his days and somewhat of his nights torn by conflicting emotions.