The Gay Cockade
great width and of strangely disproportionate length. And the coverlet
and the canopy were of rose-colored chintz.
"I think I shall fit it," he said slowly.
Mrs. Brand's critical glance weighed his smallness, his immaculateness,
his difference from her own great sons.
"Yes," she said, with the open rudeness of the country-bred; "yes, you
ain't very big."
Van Alen winced. Even from the lips of this uncouth woman the truth
struck hard. But he carried the topic forward with the light ease of a
man of the world.
"My grandfather had the bed sawed to his own length," he explained; "did
you ever hear the story?"
"No," she said; "I ain't been here long. They kept the house shut up
till this year."
"Well, I'll tell you when I come down," and Van Alen opened his bag with
a finality that sent the old woman to the door.
"Supper's ready," she told him, "whenever you are."
At the supper table the four big sons towered above Van Alen. They ate
with appetites like giants, and they had big ways and hearty laughs
that seemed to dwarf their guest into insignificance.
But the insignificance was that of body only, for Van Alen, fresh from
the outside world and a good talker at all times, dominated the table
conversationally.
To what he had to say the men listened eagerly, and the girl who waited
on the table listened.
She was a vivid personality, with burnished hair, flaming cheeks, eyes
like the sea. Her hands, as she passed the biscuits, were white, and the
fingers went down delicately to little points. Van Alen, noting these
things keenly, knew that she was out of her place, and wondered how she
came there.
At the end of the meal he told the story of the Canopy Bed.
"My great-grandfather was a little man, and very sensitive about his
height. In the days of his early manhood he spent much time in devising
ways to deceive people into thinking him taller. He surrounded himself
with big things, had a big bed made, wore high-heeled boots, and the
crown of his hat was so tall that he was almost overbalanced.
"But for all that, he was a little man among the sturdy men of his
generation, and if it had not been for the Revolution I think he would
have died railing at fate. But the war brought him opportunity. My
little great-grandfather fought in it, and won great honors, and
straight back home he came and had the bed sawed off! He wanted future
generations to see what a little man could do, and his will provided
that this house should not be sold, and that, when his sons and
grandsons had proved themselves worthy of it by some achievement, they
should come here and sleep. I think he swaggered a little when he wrote
that will, and he has put his descendants in an embarrassing position.
We can never sleep in the canopy bed without taking more upon ourselves
than modesty permits!"
He laughed, and instinctively his eyes sought those of the girl who
waited on the table. Somehow he felt that she was the only one who could
understand.
She came back at him with a question: "What have you done?"
"I have written a book," he told her.
She shook her head, and there were little sparks of light in her eyes.
"I don't believe that was what your grandfather meant," she said,
slowly.
They stared at her--three of the brothers with their knives and forks
uplifted, the fourth, a blond Titanic youngster, with his elbows on the
table, his face turned up to her, as to the sun.
"I don't believe he meant something done with your brains, but something
fine, heroic--" There was a hint of scorn in her voice.
Van Alen flushed. He was fresh from the adulation of his bookish world.
"I should not have come," he explained, uncomfortably, "if my mother had
not desired that I preserve the tradition of the family."
"It is a great thing to write a book"--she was leaning forward, aflame
with interest--"but I don't believe he meant just that--"
He laughed. "Then I am not to sleep in the canopy bed?"
The girl laughed too. "Not unless you want to be haunted by his ghost."
With a backward flashing glance, she went into the kitchen, and Van
Alen, lighting a cigarette, started to explore the old house.
Except for the wing, occupied by the caretaker, nothing had been
disturbed since the family, seeking new fortunes in the city, had left
the old homestead to decay among the desolate fields that yielded now a
meagre living for Mrs. Brand and her four strapping sons.
In the old parlor, where the ancient furniture showed ghostlike shapes
in the dimness, and the dead air was like a tomb, Van Alen found a
picture of his great-grandfather.
The little man had been painted without flattery. There he
sat--Lilliputian on the great charger! At that moment Van Alen hated
him--that Hop-o'-my-Thumb of another age, founder of a pigmy race, who,
by his braggart will, had that night brought upon this one of his
descendants the scorn of a woman.
And even as he thought of her, she came in, with the yellow flare of a
candle lighting her vivid face.
"I thought you might need a light," she said; "it grows dark so soon."
As he took the candle from her, he said abruptly: "I shall not sleep in
the canopy bed; there is a couch in the room."
"Oh," her tone was startled, "you shouldn't have taken all that I said
in earnest."
"But you meant it?"
"In a way, yes. I have been in here so often and have looked at your
grandfather's picture. He was a great little man--you can tell from his
eyes--they seem to speak at times."
"To you?"
"Yes. Of how he hated to be little, and how he triumphed when fame came
at last."
"I hate to be little--"
It was the first time that he had ever owned it. Even as a tiny boy he
had brazened it out, boasting of his mental achievements and slurring
the weakness of his stunted body.
"I know," she had shut the kitchen door behind her, and they were
standing in the hallway alone, "I know. Every man must want to be big."
She was only the girl who had waited on the table, but as she stood
there, looking at him with luminous eyes, he burned with dull
resentment, envying the blond boy who had sprawled at the head of the
supper table. After all, it was to such a man as Otto Brand that this
woman would some day turn.
He spoke almost roughly: "Size isn't everything." She flushed. "How rude
you must think me," she said; "but I have been so interested in
dissecting your grandfather that I forgot--you--"
Van Alen was moved by an impulse that he could not control, a primitive
impulse that was not in line with his usual repression.
"I am tempted to make you remember me," he said slowly, and after that
there was a startled silence. And then she went away.
As he passed the sitting-room on his way up-stairs, he looked in, and
spoke to Otto Brand.
More than any of the other brothers, Otto typified strength and beauty,
but in his eyes was never a dream, his brain had mastered nothing. He
was playing idly with the yellow cat, but he stopped at Van Alen's
question.
"Her great-grandfather and yours were neighbors," the boy said, with his
cheeks flushing; "they own the next farm."
"The Wetherells?" Van Alen inquired.
The boy nodded. "They ain't got a cent. They're land poor. That's why
she's here. But she don't need to work."
"Why not?"
"There's plenty that wants to marry her round about," was the boy's
self-conscious summing up.
With a sense of revolt, Van Alen left him, and, undressing in the room
with the canopy bed, he called up vaguely the vision of a little girl
who had visited them in the city. She had had green eyes and freckles
and red hair. Beyond that she had made no impression on his callowness.
And her name was Mazie Wetherell.
He threw himself on the couch, and the night winds, coming in through
the open window, stirred the curtains of the canopy bed with the light
touch of a ghostly hand.
Then dreams came, and through them ran the thread of his hope of seeing
Mazie Wetherell in the morning.
But even with such preparation, her beauty seemed to come upon him
unawares when he saw her at breakfast. And again at noon, and again at
night. But it was the third day before he saw her alone.
All that day he had explored the length and breadth of the family
estate, finding it barren, finding that the population of the little
village at its edge had decreased to a mere handful of laggards, finding
that there was no lawyer within miles and but one doctor; gaining a
final impression that back here in the hills men would come no more
where once men had thronged.
It was almost evening when he followed a furrowed brown road that led
westward. Above the bleak line of the horizon the sun hung, a red gold
disk. There were other reds, too, along the way--the sumac flaming
scarlet against the gray fence-rails; the sweetbrier, crimson-spotted
with berries; the creeper, clinging with ruddy fingers to dead
tree-trunks; the maple leaves rosy with first frosts.
And into this vividness came the girl who had waited on the table, and
her flaming cheeks and copper hair seemed to challenge the glow of the
autumn landscape.
She would have passed him with a nod, but he stopped her.
"You must not run away, Mazie Wetherell," he said; "you used to treat me
better than that when you were a little girl."
She laughed. "Do you remember my freckles and red hair?"
"I remember your lovely manners."
"I had to have nice manners. It is only pretty children who can afford
to be bad."
"And pretty women?" he asked, with his eyes on the color that came and
went.
She flung out her hands in a gesture of protest "I have seen so few."
His lips were opened to tell her of her own beauty, but something
restrained him, some perception of maidenly dignity that enfolded her
and made her more than the girl who had waited on the table.
"You were a polite little boy," she recalled, filling the breach made by
his silence. "I remember that you carried me across the street, to save
my slippers from the wet. I thought you were wonderful. I have never
forgotten."
Neither had Van Alen forgotten. It had been a great feat for his little
strength. There had been other boys there, bigger boys, but he had
offered, and had been saved humiliation by her girlish slimness and
feather weight.
"I was a strong little fellow then," was his comment: "I am a strong
little fellow now."
She turned on him reproachful eyes. "Why do you always harp on it?" she
demanded.
"On what?"
"Your size. You twist everything, turn everything, so that we come back
to it."
He tried to answer lightly, but his voice shook. "Perhaps it is because
in your presence I desire more than ever the full stature of a man."
He was in deadly earnest. Hitherto he had been willing to match his
brain, his worldly knowledge, his ancestry, against the charms of the
women he had met; but here with this girl, standing like a young goddess
under the wide, sunset sky, he felt that only for strength and beauty
should she choose her mate.
He wondered what he must seem in her eyes; with his shoulder on a level
with hers, with his stocky build that saved him from effeminacy, his
carefulness of attire--which is at once the burden and the salvation of
the small man.
As for his face, he knew that its homeliness was redeemed by a certain
strength of chin, by keen gray eyes, and by a shock of dark hair that
showed a little white at the temples. There were worse-looking men, he
knew, but that, at the present moment, gave little comfort.
She chose to receive his remark in silence, and, as they came to a path
that branched from the road, she said:
"I am going to help take care of a child who is sick. You see I am
mistress of all trades--nurse, waitress, charwoman, when there is
nothing else."