He might have known that it would bring her story, but he had not schemed for this, and, unwilling, yet eager, to hear, was a prey to compunctions on more than one ground when, after a little gulp and sniff, she burst forth:

"I've seen perfectly dreadful times, Geraldino. Some of them were the sort of thing you can get over, but some of them--upon my word, I wonder at myself how I've got over them as I have. The queer thing is--I haven't, in a way. It will come over me sometimes, in the queerest places, at the oddest moments, that I am still that woman to whom such awful things happened, that I, playing my silly monkey-shines, am that heart-broken woman."

"I know," murmured Gerald, and took her plump hands steadyingly between his hard, thin ones.

"I've never had any sense," she let herself go. "Anybody can see that; and when I was younger I had even less, naturally, than I have now.

Always, always, I wanted so to be happy! I wanted to have a good time. I was born wanting to have a good time. And everything was against it. But I managed somehow. One way or another, I got to the circus 'most every time. My mother used to wonder what my finish would be, and try to lick the Old Boy out of me. But it couldn't be done. I'm just like my father, my dear old pa, who was a sinner. He let ma have her way in everything, as he thought it right to do. Not, I guess, because he always liked her way, but because after my sister, who was a beautiful child, died in such a terrible way that I can't even bear to mention it,--she caught fire,"--Aurora hurriedly interjected, "ma came so near going out of her senses that pa humored her in everything. He thought the world of her; so did we all, but it couldn't be called a happy home. There were three boys, besides me,--I was the last,--and we were all such everlastingly lively young ones, and ma was so strict! Pa was away most of the time getting a living. My pa, you know, was a pilot. It wasn't a fat living for so many of us, but that wouldn't have mattered long as we had enough to eat. But ma, poor soul, because of that twist her mind had taken through sorrow, was always seeing something wrong in everything we did; she never could be quiet or contented. The boys didn't get so much of it: they were off out of doors and later at their trades; but me, I was kept in to help with the housework, and kept in for company, and kept in for no other reason, I guess, than because my wicked heart longed so to go out and play with the girls and boys. I dare say it was good for me.

Ma meant all right, that I know, but ma was all along a sick woman. We realized later that though she was round and about, busy every minute, she was sick for years with the trouble that finally took her away. I don't want you to think I didn't have a real good mother, for I did--a first-rate mother who did her honest best to make a good woman of me."

"I know, I know." By a reminding pressure of her hands he begged she would trust him not to misunderstand.

"But my pa--you should have known my pa!" Aurora's face brightened immensely, and Gerald suspected that it was like him she looked when she screwed her lips to one side in a manner humorously suggesting a pipe at the corner of her mouth, and said in a voice not her own, "Golly, Nell, can't you whistle for a snifter?" He could almost see a sailor's chin-whiskers.

"He took me with him once in a while. Golly, those were good times, if you please! Free as air, all the peanuts I could eat, out in the boat with my pa, and catch fish, and catch a steamer if we could. We had an 8 big as a house on our sail. He was as good a seaman, my pa was, as any in East Boston, but he wasn't a hustler. But there, if he'd been a hustler, he wouldn't have been my pa. Wouldn't for a house with a brownstone front have had my pa any different from what he was. Grandma was just the same sort, G.o.d bless her! easy-going, jolly, come a day, go a day, do as she please and let you do as you please. I used to have such lovely times at her house, summers, down on the Cape, before my sister died!

"It was there I first knew Hattie--Estelle. Her aunt's house was next to my grandma's. I used to think her the luckiest child that ever was born.

Seemed to me she had just about everything--a gold locket and chain, bronze boots, and paper dolls by the dozen. We used to play together, day in day out, one of those plays that last all the time, where you pretend you're some one else and act it out in all you do. We kept it up for years. I don't see that we've changed much with growing up. Seems to me we were pretty near the same then as we are now, having our spats, but having lots of fun, and wanting to share everything. Estelle lived in East Boston, too, and was going to be a school-teacher. It seemed to me that to be a school-teacher was just about the finest thing anybody could do. That would have been my ambition, to be a school-teacher. But I never got beyond the grammar school, I was needed at home to help mother. Then my poor pa died--an accident down in the docks,"--Aurora, lowering her voice, began to hurry and condense,--"then Ben, then Joe, then--will you believe it?--Charlie, that I loved best. They all had the same delicate const.i.tution as ma, it turned out, and a predisposition to the same trouble. Then finally, after going through with so much, my poor mother went, too, and for that I could only be thankful. And I had taken care of them all. I wasn't twenty-three when I was the last left.

Doesn't it seem strange! I sometimes can't believe it even now."

This rapid enumeration of calamities so great robbed them of terror and pathos, yet Gerald had somewhat the startled, shocked feeling of a man who knows he has been struck by a bullet, though his nerves have not yet announced it by suffering.

Aurora, who after the pa.s.sing of years could think of these things without tears, yet in speaking of them to a sympathetic hearer had obvious difficulty in keeping a stiff upper lip. Gerald turned away his eyes while with her hand she covered and tried to stop her mouth's trembling.

"Poor child!" he said, with a sincerity which saved the words from insignificance.

"Yes," she half laughed. "Wouldn't one think it enough to sort of subdue anybody, take the starch out of them for some time? When I came out of that house of sickness I couldn't think of anything else but sickness and death. It stuck to me like the smell of disinfectants after you've been in a hospital. I couldn't think of anything but that it would take me next. I supposed I must be affected, too. But the doctor examined me, and do you know what he said? 'Sound as a trout,' he said. 'You're so sound,' he said, 'you're so healthy, that we'll have to shoot you to get you to the resurrection.' Then I felt better. He was a new doctor that we'd called in toward the end. He knew how I was situated, and as he seemed to think I'd make a good nurse, he got me a chance in the City Hospital, where I could get my training. And Hattie, dear Hattie, what a friend she's been! She and her ma and pa made me come and make my home with them. It's since then that we've been like sisters."

At the sound, appositely occurring, of a cough in the neighboring room, Aurora stopped and listened.

"Dear me!" she whispered. "D'you suppose she's lying awake?"

"She may be coughing in her sleep," he suggested.

"Yes," Aurora said dubiously, after further listening, and hearing nothing more. "And if I should go in to see, I might wake her. The bell-rope is right at the head of her bed; all she has to do is pull it if she wants somebody to come. I was entertaining you with the story of my life, wasn't I? Where had I got to? Oh, yes. There in the hospital I just loved it. Perhaps you can't see how I could. I just did. I had lots of hard work. The training was sort of thrown in in my case with other duties, but there were the other nurses and the house-doctors, I grew chummy with them all. I had fun with the patients, too. You don't know how much good it does you to watch anybody get well; the majority get well. It's good for them, besides, to have you jolly."

"Your gaiety of heart makes me think of the gra.s.s, Aurora, the blessed ineradicable gra.s.s, that will grow anywhere, that you see pushing up between the paving-stones of the hard city, and finding a foothold on the blank of the rock, and fringing the top of the ruined castle, and hiding the new-made graves."

Aurora, always simple-mindedly charmed with a compliment, paused long enough to investigate Gerald's comparison, then resumed, with the effect of taking a plunge into deep waters:

"But it was there I met the fellow who did me the worst turn of any....

"They brought him in with broken ribs one rainy night, after he'd been knocked down in the street by a team and kicked by the horses. I wasn't his regular nurse, but I was in and out of his room, and if he rang while his regular nurse was at her meals, I'd go. Everybody knows that when a man's sick he's liable to get sweet on this or that one of his nurses.

"How I could have been mistaken in Jim Barton I can't see now. Since knowing him, if I ever see anybody that looks a bit like him, I shun them like poison, because I know as well as I need to that however nice they may appear, you can't depend upon them. But before I knew him I'd never stop to distrust anybody.

"It began with our setting up jokes together; he could be awfully funny even when he was swearing like a pirate about his luck landing him in a hospital. Bad language didn't seem so awful coming from him, because he was so light-complexioned and boyish-looking. He was only pa.s.sing through the city, in an awful hurry to get West, when he got hurt, and he was madder than a hornet at the delay. But after a while he quieted down, because he'd got something else to think about, which was getting me to go along with him to California, where he'd bought a share in a mine. And me, star idiot of the world, it seemed the grandest thing that had ever happened. I'd never had anybody in love with me that way before. The boys had always liked me, but I'd been like another fellow among them, and I'd never more than just been silly for a week or two at a time over one fellow and another at a distance. And here was a solid offer from a perfectly splendid man who had everything, money included.

They'd found several thousand dollars on him when he was picked up. And the yarns he told about gold-mines!... But it wasn't that, it wasn't the gold-mines, it was 'the way with him' that caught me. I guess when you're in love you're no judge of your man. We two, I tell you, seemed made for each other. He was as fond of a good time as I, and he loved fun, like me. We were going to California to make our everlasting fortune. You'd have thought there was no more doubt about it than the Gospels being true. And the good times we were going to have while doing it were nothing to the good times we'd have after, when I'd have my diamonds and he'd have his horses and things. As I said, the diamonds weren't needed; I'd have gone with him anywhere just for the fun of being together. I couldn't see what I'd done to deserve my blessings. I guess he was in love, too, as far as it was in him to be; I'll do him that justice.

"Hattie and her ma, while they had nothing to say against Jim, wanted me to wait awhile. But Jim couldn't wait. The moment he was well enough he wanted to be off. And I didn't care much about waiting either. I felt as if I'd known him all my life. So they said nothing more and gave us a perfectly lovely wedding from their house. They didn't see through him any more than I did, and in a way it wasn't strange, because he wasn't hiding anything in particular or misrepresenting anything. He believed all he said about the big money he was going to make and the grand times we should have. He was born with the sort of nature that always believes things are going to turn out right without labor and perseverance on your part. He wasn't fond of work, that's sure. What we ought to have done was find out something about his past; but even that, I guess, wouldn't have opened our eyes, with him before us looking like one of ourselves. And it wasn't a very long past; he was young. He came of good folks, I guess. I never saw them, but there are ways of telling. Good folks, but not wealthy, and so as to get rich easily he had tried one thing after another. He was quick' discouraged, and the moment the thing didn't look so big or easy he wanted to throw it over and try something else. Then I've come to the conclusion he loved change for its own sake--go somewhere else, take a new name, and start a new business, talking big. It came out after he died that he'd been known under half a dozen names in as many States. There simply wasn't anything _to_ him. I don't believe he meant to act like a skunk, but, then, he hadn't any principles either to keep him from acting like a skunk, or meaner than a skunk, when it came to getting himself out of difficulty. And I, for my sins, had to marry such a fellow as that! It was like there had stood the good times I'd always wanted, right before me in the body, and I took them for better, for worse, and got what my ma said I deserved to get when she tried to cure me of my fancy for good times!"

"Don't!" protested Gerald, softly. "Don't regard as wrong what was so natural. All who have the benefit of knowing you must thank the stars which permitted your beautiful love of life to survive the dreadfulness of which you have given me a glimpse."

"The dreadfulness, Geraldino! I haven't told you anything yet of the dreadfulness. I haven't come to it. I haven't come to what makes her"--she nodded toward the portrait,--"look like that."

"Then tell me!" he encouraged her.

"It isn't Jim. When I think of Jim, it only makes me mad. My heart is hard as stone toward him." She clenched her jaws and looked, in fact, rather grim. "That he's dead doesn't change it. I hope I forgive him as a Christian ought to who asks forgiveness for her own trespa.s.ses. I know I don't feel revengeful. There wasn't enough _to_ Jim for me to wish him punished in h.e.l.l. But if you think I have any sentiment because I used to love him, or that I was sorry I woke up from my fool dream when I once had seen it was a dream--Not a bit of it. There was a time, though, when I first began to suspect and understand, that makes me rather sick to think of even now. I was so far from home, you see. I hadn't a friend, and I wouldn't for worlds have written back to my old friends that I'd made a bad bargain--not while I wasn't dead sure. And I kept on hoping.

"At first we had a real good time. We lived in a miner's cottage, but that seemed sort of jolly. I'd been used to hard work all my life, so I didn't mind that, and I wanted him to have as nice a home as any man could on the same money. So I cleaned and contrived and baked and brewed and fixed up. I wanted him to be pleased with me and proud among the other men. But pretty soon I found I didn't care to make acquaintances, because I was ashamed of the way Jim did. He kept putting all his money into the mine, sending good money after bad, and let me keep house on nothing, and then was in a worse and worse temper because the mine didn't pan out and things weren't more comfortable at home. I began to wake up in the night and lie there in a cold sweat, clean scairt. I haven't told you that we were looking for an addition to the family.

That's one reason I was so scairt. But I shut my teeth, and said I to myself, 'This baby's going to have a chance if his mother can give it to him by not getting excited or letting things prey on her mind.' So I kept a hold on myself and didn't let anything count except guarding that baby. I seemed to care more about it than all the rest of the world put together. Oh, I can't begin to tell you how much more than for all the rest of the world put together. I don't know that a man would understand."

"Yes, he would; of course he would," spoke Gerald, gently reverent, yet a little impatient; then he qualified his a.s.sertion: "He could imagine, I mean to say, how you would have felt that way."

"Well, that matter was going to be put safely through, no matter what.

The first mistake I made was not making friends with my women neighbors, so that everybody in Elsinore supposed that Jim's wife was the same stripe as he,--or that's what I thought they supposed,--and when I needed friends I couldn't think of any to turn to except those at home.

The other mistake I made was not to write them at home and tell them the truth and then wait for them to send me money to come. But I guess my mind stopped working when the shock came."

Aurora appeared to brace herself, while decently considering how to minimize to her audience the brutality of her next revelation.

"Jim cleared out one night while I was asleep, taking every cent we'd got and every last thing he could hope to turn into a cent," she said, hardening her voice and lips. Gerald was given a moment in which to visualize the situation, before she went on: "I guess, as I said before, that I wasn't in my right mind for a spell; all I could think of was getting home to my own folks, and I was going to do it somehow, though I hadn't a cent. I hadn't even my wedding-ring. I'd put it off because my finger had grown fatter, and he'd taken even that to go and try his luck somewhere else.--What do you think of it?" she mechanically added.

She was pale, remembering these things. Gerald drew in a long, unsteady breath, oppressed.

"I was going to get home somehow," Aurora repeated, "and I wasn't going to waste time waiting for anything. And how was I going to do it? I don't suppose I really thought; I followed instinct like an animal. I hid in a freight-car going East--"

A definite difficulty here stopped Aurora. While she felt for words in which to clothe what followed, the images in her mind made her eyes, which were not seeing the things actually before them, more descriptive of the anguish of remembered scenes than her words were likely to be.

"I'm going to skip all that, Gerald." With a gesture, she suddenly rolled up a part of her story and threw it aside. "But when I came to see and understand rightly again, weeks after, in a hospital at Denver, I cried, oh! how I cried, and didn't care what became of me. Because I'd lost him; they hadn't succeeded in saving him. He had lived, mind you,"

she emphasized with pride--"he had lived a little while, he was all right, perfect in every way--a son."

His due of tears was not withheld from the wee frustrated G.o.d. Aurora gave up talking, so as to have her cry in quietness.

Gerald, holding back a sound of distress, twisted on his chair, not daring to recall himself to Aurora's notice either by speaking or touching her.

"I'm plain sorry for myself," she explained her tears while trying to stop them. "You can't be sorry, for their own sakes, for the little children who go back to G.o.d without knowing anything of this life's troubles. It's for myself I'm sorry. I never can bring up those times without the _feeling_ of them coming over me again, and then, as I tell you, I'm sorry for that poor fool in her empty house, and then in the thundering freight-car, and then in the hospital. I see her outside of me just as plain as I would another person. Then, too"--she dried her eyes as if this time for good--"I feel a burning here"--she touched her breast--"like anger. Angry. I feel angry at being robbed, in a way I never seem to get over. To think I might have had him all my life, like millions of other women, and I never even saw him! And he was as real to me all those months before!... I don't see how I could have loved him more than I did. I'm hungry for him sometimes, just as I might be for food. And then I'm angry and rebellious. But I couldn't tell you against who. It isn't G.o.d, certainly. He's our best friend, all we've got to rely on. And He's been mighty good to me. There in Denver, when I hadn't a friend or a penny, He raised up friends for me and gave me the most wonderful luck.

"I stayed right there in Denver till less than a year ago. I guess you've heard me speak of the Judge. The doctor in the hospital where they carried me was his son; that's how it all came about--friends, good luck, money, everything. When I say I found friends, let me mention that I found enemies, too, the meanest, the bitterest! I--but there"--she interrupted herself as, on the very verge of further confidences, a change of mind was effected in her by sudden weariness or by a deterrent thought, or both--"I guess I've talked enough about myself for one evening. I didn't have a soft time of it there in Denver," she summed up the remainder of her story, "but I'd got back to being my old self.

You'd never have known what I'd been through. I was just about as you've known me here. Funny, isn't it,"--Aurora seemed almost ashamed, apologetic,--"how the disposition you're born with hangs on?"

"Golden disposition," Gerald commented soothingly. Timid about looking directly at her just yet, he looked instead at the portrait, whereon lay the shadow of the events just related.

After a little period of thought in silence Aurora said, with the shamefaced air she took when venturing to talk of high things:

"I heard a sermon once on the text, 'Mary kept all these things in her heart.' The minister said that it wasn't only Mary who did this, but ordinary women, so often. And I know from myself how true it is. You see a woman all dressed up at a party, laughing with the others, dancing perhaps, and she'll be saying inside of herself, 'If baby had lived, he'd have been three years old.' Or thirteen, or thirty. I've no doubt it goes on as long as she lives. And she can see him before her just as plain, as he would have been.... My baby would have been five last October."

Gerald remembered how sweet he had always thought it of her to wish to stop and fondle little children, often wee beggars, stuffing little grimy fists with pennies, not avoiding to touch soiled little cheeks with her clean gloves. He had attributed this propensity to a simple womanly talent for motherliness.

"I've got this to be thankful for," she came out again from silence, farther down along the line of her meditations, "that he did live for a few hours. I've got a son, just as much as if he'd grown to be a man."