Myrtle Reed - At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern

Suddenly, a pair of soft arms stole around his neck, a childish, tear-wet cheek was pressed close to his, and a sweet voice whispered, tenderly: “Dear, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry I can’t live another minute unless you tell me you forgive me!”

“Am I really a loafer?” asked Harlan, half an hour later.

“Indeed you’re not,” answered Dorothy, her trustful eyes looking straight into his; “you’re absolutely the most adorable boy in the whole world, and it’s me that knows it!”

“As long as you know it,” returned Harlan, seriously, “I don’t care a hang what other people think.”

“Now, tell me,” continued Dorothy, “how near are we to being broke?”

Obediently, Harlan turned his pockets inside out and piled his worldly wealth on the table.

“Three hundred and seventy-four dollars and sixteen cents,” she said, when she had finished counting. “Why, we’re almost rich, and a little while ago you tried to make me think we were poor!”

“It’s all I have, Dorothy – every blooming cent, except one dollar in the savings bank. Sort of a nest egg I had left,” he explained.

“Wait a minute,” she said, reaching down into her collar and drawing up a loop of worn ribbon. “Straight front corset,” she observed, flushing, “makes a nice pocket for almost everything.” She drew up a chamois-skin bag, of an unprepossessing mouse colour, and emptied out a roll of bills. “Two hundred and twelve dollars,” she said, proudly, “and eighty-three cents and four postage stamps in my purse.

“I saved it,” she continued, hastily, “for an emergency, and I wanted some silk stockings and a French embroidered corset and some handmade lingerie worse than you can ever know. Wasn’t I a brave, heroic, noble woman?”

“Indeed you were,” he cried, “but, Dorothy, you know I can’t touch your money!”

“Why not?” she demanded.

“Because – because – because it isn’t right. Do you think I’m cad enough to live on a woman’s earnings?”

“Harlan,” said Dorothy, kindly, “don’t be a fool. You’ll take my whole heart and soul and life – all that I have been and all that I’m going to be – and be glad to get it, and now you’re balking at ten cents that I happened to have in my stocking when I took the fatal step.”

“Dear heart, don’t. It’s different – tremendously different. Can’t you see that it is?”

“Do you mean that I’m not worth as much as two hundred and twelve dollars and eighty-three cents and four postage stamps?”

“Darling, you’re worth more than all the rest of the world put together. Don’t talk to me like that. But I can’t touch your money, truly, dear, I can’t; so don’t ask me.”

“Idiot,” cried Dorothy, with tears raining down her face, “don’t you know I’d go with you if you had to grind an organ in the street, and collect the money for you in a tin cup till we got enough for a monkey? What kind of a dinky little silver-plated wedding present do you think I am, anyway? You – ”

The rest of it was sobbed out, incoherently enough, on his hitherto immaculate shirt-front. “You don’t mind,” she whispered, “if I cry down your neck, do you?”

“If you’re going to cry,” he answered, his voice trembling, “this is the one place for you to do it, but I don’t want you to cry.”

“I won’t, then,” she said, wiping her eyes on a wet and crumpled handkerchief. In a time astonishingly brief to one hitherto unfamiliar with the lachrymal function, her sobs had ceased.

“You’ve made me cry nearly a quart since morning,” she went on, with assumed severity, “and I hope you’ll behave so well from now on that I’ll never have to do it again. Look here.”

She led him to the window, where a pair of robins were building a nest in the boughs of a maple close by. “Do you see those birds?” she demanded, pointing at them with a dimpled, rosy forefinger.

“Yes, what of it?”

“Well, they’re married, aren’t they?”

“I hope they are,” laughed Harlan, “or at least engaged.”

“Who’s bringing the straw and feathers for the nest?” she asked.

“Both, apparently,” he replied, unwillingly.

“Why isn’t she rocking herself on a bough, and keeping her nails nice, and fixing her feathers in the latest style, or perhaps going off to some fool bird club while he builds the nest by himself?”

“Don’t know.”

“Nor anybody else,” she continued, with much satisfaction. “Now, if she happened to have two hundred and twelve feathers, of the proper size and shape to go into that nest, do you suppose he’d refuse to touch them, and make her cry because she brought them to him?”

“Probably he wouldn’t,” admitted Harlan.

There was a long silence, then Dorothy edged up closer to him. “Do you suppose,” she queried, “that Mr. Robin thinks more of his wife than you do of yours?”

“Indeed he doesn’t!”

“And still, he’s letting her help him.”

“But – ”

“Now, listen, Harlan. We’ve got a house, with more than enough furniture to make it comfortable, though it’s not the kind of furniture either of us particularly like. Instead of buying a typewriter, we’ll rent one for three or four dollars a month until we have enough money to buy one. And I’m going to have a cow and some chickens and a garden, and I’m going to sell milk and butter and cream and fresh eggs and vegetables and chickens and fruit to the sanitarium, and – ”

“The sanitarium people must have plenty of those things.”

“But not the kind I’m going to raise, nor put up as I’m going to put it up, and we’ll be raising most of our own living besides. You can write when you feel like it, and be helping me when you don’t feel like it, and before we know it, we’ll be rich. Oh, Harlan, I feel like Eve all alone in the Garden with Adam!”

The prospect fired his imagination, for, in common with most men, a chicken-ranch had appealed strongly to Harlan ever since he could remember.

“Well,” he began, slowly, in the tone which was always a signal of surrender.

“Won’t it be lovely,” she cried ecstatically, “to have our own bossy cow mooing in the barn, and our own chickens for Sunday dinner, and our own milk, and butter, and cream? And I’ll drive the vegetable waggon and you can take the things in – ”

“I guess not,” interrupted Harlan, firmly. “If you’re going to do that sort of thing, you’ll have people to do the work when I can’t help you. The idea of my wife driving a vegetable cart!”

“All right,” answered Dorothy, submissively, wise enough to let small points settle themselves and have her own way in things that really mattered. “I’ve not forgotten that I promised to obey you.”

A gratified smile spread over Harlan’s smooth, boyish face, and, half-fearfully, she reached into her sleeve for a handkerchief which she had hitherto carefully concealed.

“That’s not all,” she smiled. “Look!”

“Twenty-three dollars,” he said. “Why, where did you get that?”

“It was in my dresser. There was a false bottom in one of the small drawers, and I took it out and found this.”

“What in – ” began Harlan.

“It’s a present to us from Uncle Ebeneezer,” she cried, her eyes sparkling and her face aglow. “It’s for a coop and chickens,” she continued, executing an intricate dance step. “Oh, Harlan, aren’t you awfully glad we came?”

Seeing her pleasure he could not help being glad, but afterward, when he was alone, he began to wonder whether they had not inadvertently moved into a bank.

“Might be worse places,” he reflected, “for the poor and deserving to move into. Diamonds and money – what next?”