Richmond Palladium (Daily), Volume 34, Number 236, 3 July 1909 — Page 6

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Copy? igh't 1909, by Ben j." B. Hampton

HEN Hal Gil man got home from college he had left all such things as youth and folly !iehind him. He was never more conscious of this than when, after the welcome Jiomc had quieted down a bit, he "strolled out and , elanced at the Blanchard porch. A dazzling young lady over there was arranging her fluffy summer gown picturesquely as she sat down in one of the ibig rocking chairs. She was supplied with a pink book, the color of which matched her gown and her checks, perfectly, but before she opened the book she gave the neighborhood a satisfied inspection and so saw the young man looking out upon his boyhood surroundings, with the new eyes of extremely serious maturity. "Welcome to our ibeautiful city!" "called the girl gaily, ri sing from her chair. It was Miss Blanchard after all. He had been in some doubt about it. "Pickles" he" had used to tall her. He shuddered at the memory of the deradful word. A year ago, too, he would have vaulted over the picketfence that separated the two lawns, and in an instant more would have been sprawled upon the Blanchard steps. He remembered this also with a pang as he lifted his hat and made a dignified bow to her; then he walked sedately down the Gilman path and out at the Gilman gate; he walked sedately over to the Blanchard gate and opened it; he walked sedately up the Blanchard path and upon the Blanchard porch, where he deposited himself and his rigid Prince Albert carefully upon a chair, after having shaken hands most politely with the Blanchrd young lady "How you have blossomed!" he observed with a fatherly gravity that forbade any suspicion of gallantry. "I , should scarcely have known you." . "We all change," she solemnly replied, through hps that were full and red .and most deliciously curved. "We bud, we blossom, we ripen and decay. Life ah; life is merciless!" "Yes," he admitted pensively, "we are always growing older." He was twenty-two and feeling for a mustache; so the weight of advancing years lay heavily upon him. Alice Blanchard reached over to lay her pink book upon the tabourette at her right hand, and the bookmark fell out. It was a large, square, cream-tinted envelope and very fat. The address was in a man's boldchirography, and Mr. Gilman frowned as he noted it. This sort of thing was a part of the folly he hadjeft behind him forever. Miss Alice picked up the letter, but she did not do it hastily, nor blush. She put it carefully back in the book; it was too sacred a thing to be treated flippantly. Already Miss Blanchard had met her Fate. She was a woman, now, with all the responsibilities) and cares that come to a mature woman of nineteen. Silence ensued. They looked out upon the pretty suburban street with thoughtful eyes. The sun was exerting itself to the utmost to please, a pleasant breeze fluttered the flashing green and white leaves of the ; treesbirds were singing, and flowers, in carefully kept beds upon both sides of the street, were nodding their bright heads happily Oh, well, these things, though doubtless pleasant trivialities, were for the young, for those who had not yet arrived at an age where life and its tremendous problems bear heavily down. ur. mUStubeJfie to b? . man" presently sighed Miss Blanchard; "to be able to go out into the world and tight for fame and fortune." turend reproachful eyes upon her. Fame! he expostulated. "Fortune! There are too many of the world's greedy host after those empty honors." Miss Blanchard was startled but gave him instant comprehension. She, too, was just back from college. . . "True," she sighed. "How true." "As for myself," he went on,'my die is cast. I have already engaged to devote myself, after a short period of repose with the good grandparents who raised me, to the uplifting of humanity. Settlement a wvupjr uijr nine jicnccionn. x snail live among the poor and lowly. One-fourth of the income my father left me will suffice for my humble needs, and the rest I shall devote to the regeneration of ray less fortunate brothers." His eye was calm but stern. He did not glow with enthusiasm. The Cause was not one for mere boyish fervor. It was a man's serious, sober, solemn mission that he was undertaking. "How noble!" breathed the girl. "No I" he protested. "It is merely a debt that our family owes to humanity. I consider is a debt of my father's, and it is my solemn obligation to repay it. He was a good man you knew him but he was too busy in his lifetime, trying to place me above want, to consider the needy and offlicted and those, shrouded in moral darkness. Oh, you do not knowl Miss Blanchard, you cannot conceive of the misery that abonds in this world!" Miss Blanchard turned upon him large, wide eyes that were deep and somber with sudden sorrow "Perhaps I do, though," she replied softly. "Our own burdens teach us sympathy and understanding." She too, then, had suffered! Ah, well, such is life! Her eyes turned from him, in explanation, to the fat envelope where its edge peeped out from the book. The envelope did not interest him much and he returned to. the eyes They were remarkably pretty eyes, very blue indeed and full of expression. The lashes above them were long and curved. The hair clustered about her white brow was of the exact golden shade that had let him stretch a point to call it red when he was a boy. Below its shining waves the tip of a pink ear was revealed. Her cheeks were rounded and creamy. Her neck was a firm, white, beautifully modeled column that 'supported her small bead most gracefully. Pickles! To think that he had ever called her Pickles! Grandfather and Grandmother Gilman were looking out of the side window at them. "Look ot that, now!" said Grandfather Gilman. "Honestly, I feel like I wanted to paddle that boy! There he sits as stiff as a poker, talking to the prettiest girl in Oakdale with no more life in him than if she was a sack of potatoes. Did I, at his age, ever sit like a tailor's dummy on any girl's front porch?" "Adam," retorted Grandma Gilman, "my distinct recollection is that at twenty-two you was the biggest fool in the county." V She pinched Grandfather Gilman's ear and he grinned. The mail-man came up the street. ( Miss Blanchard ran down to the gate and he handed her a large, fat. square, creamtinted envelope. Mr. Gilman had fol- : lowed her. .. "Have you anything for me?" he asked the mailman.:, "Mr. Halfred Joyce Gilman?" . v The mail-man looked up with a start "Why, hello, Harry!; he cried heartily and held out his hand. "I didn V recognize you. How you have grown I Youll be a man before you know it!" Mr. Halfred Joyce Gilman was too dignified to wince. He kindly shook .hands with Jinks Powell. Jinks had shown him, away in the crude past, how to make box kites and other useless things. "There's scarcely any change in you, Mr. Powell," he said with lofty graciousness. "The years treat you very kindly indeed." "Getting gray -gray as a rat," And the mail-man jerked oft his hat a moment. "Let me see. You asked about a letter. I got one here, but I hadn't any idea that Halfred Joyce Gilman could be you." ni take it, if you please," said the settlement worker and brother to all mankind with grave frigidity It was time to check this undue familiarity. The mail-man felt the rebuff so keenly that he grinned. The letter he hunted out was in a long, lesil envelope. It bore, printed in one corner, the

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address of the Tenement House Sunshine League. Mr. Gilman took it with reverence, while the deep frown of concentration creased his brow. "I shall have to ask you to excuse me," he said briskly to Miss Blanchard. "I have been waiting with some anxiety for this delayed communication." Jinks Powell moved on, smiling benignly. "It is of the utmost importance, and I shall have to attend to it at once. It is well the call of duty." He glanced at the fat envelope. "You, too, will be naturally anxieus to see what Uncle Sam has brought you." "I know beforehand," she said. "These envelopes bring me no surprises. They are my only rays of sunshine." He smiled sadly and shook his head. He had it upon the tip of his tongue to tell her how selfish it was tog rasp this sort of sunshine when she should be bringing sunshine into the lives of others. But he efrained. He doubted if she had vthe depth yet to take the thought home. As for himself, he did not intend to marry or think of marriage for many, many years. He intended to devote himself solely and undividedly to humanity, and if he ever married at all it would be to some good woman who could aid him in his settlement work; even then only if he was convinced that they could do more together than they could separately. "You must come over 'often," invited Miss Blanchard. "I am interested in your work. I think it is perfectly grand." L HER EYES TURNED TO THE ENVELOPE I should be glad indeed if I could interest you seriously in it," he assured her. "I shall consider it my duty to do so if I can." In the pursuit of his duty he came over nearly every day and most of the evenings. Miss Blanchard did not go out much. The fat, square, creamtinted envelopes kept her at home; made her refuse many invitations that she might have been glad to accept had she been the unsettled, frivolous girl she used to be when she was young say, seventeen or '.eighteen. It was not long until Mr. Halfred Joyce Gilman knew all about the envelopes. She told him one evning when the family had gone out and they were alone on the Blanchard porch in the moonlight "Mr. Gilman," she observed tremulously, "I may trust you. We have known each other all our lives, and I never knew you to betray a confidence, even when we had our worst spats. Mr. Gilman " "You may call me Halfred," he interrupted with quite elderly gentleness, laying his hand protectingly upon hers, where it rested upon the arm of her chair. "You have no brother. You need one." "Thank you, Halfred," she gratefully replied. "I am going to confide in you. I have no one to whom I may go with the sorrows that oppress me. Halfred, my parents are bent on ruining my life. They do not understand that when love true love comes, then all the world beside must sink into in-, significance. I have an attachment, a deep and lasting attachment, and they frown upon it. I have never met HIM but twice, but .we have corresponded ever since. At first it was only the ordinary boy and girl correspondence, of course; but as it grew it deepened and ripened into something far too precious for them to understand. You, however, are a man of the world. You can, perhaps, appreciate how vital an attachment like this becomes." And she quoted four verses from the "Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam to prove it. ' "Yes,-; I know, I know," replied Halfred with dreary emphasis. "I had also, when I was younger, an attachment that might have altered the course of my entire life, bat it was nipped in the. bud. She"

George Randolph Chester

he choked up a little bit very successfully "she proved faithless." "I am so sorry, brother," she said, turning her . hand palm upward to clasp his strong and supple fingers with a grip of understanding. "I would not have reopened your wound for worlds." "It is nothing," he replied in a hollar voice, leaving his hand in hers. "Nothing whatever. That day has passed and I am glad that it happened so. She was not worth the devotion with which I was prepared to surround her throughout life; and, moreover, by her fickleness she turned my thoughts into more serious channels, her very inconsequence therefore becoming a means of benefiting all humanity. The same devotion I would have poured out for her I now intend to pour out for the weak and the fallen." "I am so proud, so proud, of my brother," she murmured. After that they were no longer Mr. Gilman and Miss Blanchard; they were Halfred and Alice, and they were more together than ever, if possible. She had no brother and he had no sister, and they made up to each other very fully for theabsence of that sweet relationship. Now that she had a near and dear relative to escort her. Miss Blanchard found it possible to go to places and to take her normally active part in the life and gaiety of Oakdale. Halfred himself did not care about these things much but as a brother he felt that she ought to have them. It was her due as a young woman who must WHICH PEEPED OUT FROM THE BOOK. soon leave frivolity behind and face the serious responsibilities of life. They were an ideal couple for mere brother and sister. They found so much to talk about that they scarcely needed other companionship, and even when they were with gay parties they could always be found by themselves some place, discussing the glory of self-abnegation as .evidenced in settlement work, or the callousness of parents who frowned upon providentially ordained attachments. Meanwhile, there was peace on Oak Street. Grandfather Gilman became almost reconciled to Hal's stiffness, and the Blanchards began to rest somewhat easier about the cream-tinted envelopes. One evening at dinner, however, Mr. Blanchard ventured to banter his daughter about Hal. "Father," the fair young girl sternly reproved him, "how blind you are; how utterly mistaken! Mr. Gilman Hal and I are brother and sister, as we have always been. You must have but little respect for your daughter if you think she can be so fickle as your remarks would seem to indicate. Only one heart, father is attuned to each other heart in this world. There is but one such harmony for me." The fair young girl's eyes filled with tears. Mr. Blanchard put the bite that was poised upon his fork back into his plate. - "I wish your divine harmony would get aronnd this way occasionally and let us judge his tune, then," he said. "Why doesn't he ever come to Oakdale?" . V- ' - "You do not want him, father. You do not like him. Yott know it and he knows it. You did not treat him with more than the barest of civility the day he passed through here and dropped in to calL" "I didn't like his looks," replied Mr. Blanchard in a weak attempt at self-defense. - "Exactly! And you do not like him now!" . From her corsage peeped the corner of the latest fat, cream-tinted letter, and Mr. Blanchard eyed it with extreme disfavor. Those letters had been the cause of more than one dispute between father and -daughter, but Mr. Blanchard would not have surreptitiously read one under any circumstances, and she knew it .

"No," he admitted. "I do not Hke him; but I think that if I were a young man and knew this I would ' make it a point to come around and display my better side often enough to win confidence." "And be insulted again," was the retort. "No, father, he will not come. I shall not permit him to do so." And that night the sad, fair young girl wrote HIM that he must not come to Oakdale. Her father did not wish him to do so. In this she was not prevaricating; she merely wished to be oppressed. It was so sorrowfully and sobfuily grand. Strangely enough, she did not confied this latest oppression to brother Halfred. Of late they had referred less and less often to the cream-tinted envelopes, talking more about settlement work in place of it. It was very pleasant to discuss the hardships and distasteful features of living in slums while walking with a dear brother in the moonlight on balmy -summer evenings. " It was very pleasant, when the crisp nights of fall came on, to sit in the parlor after the old folks had gone to bed and pic- -ture out the same distressful things with a sympathetic sister -night after night. It was very pleasant to tuck this dainty blood-relative protectingly under an arm and take her. radiant in her beauty, to receptions and dinners and theatres. They were very, very proud indeed of each other, almost more so than if they had been actual brother and sister; but nevertheless, in the fall, just before . Hall was to go away, a change came over sister Alice. She grew abstracted, and sometimes when the square envelopes came she seemed to hesitate about opening them. Sometimes she put them away for a full half-day before she read them, and her answers to them were always delayed and always most painstakingly and laboriously written. The result of this, at the other end of the correspondence, was but natural and logical. One day came a letter that threw her into a flutter of excitement. It made her gasp and hold her breath and turn pale and pink by turns. This thrilling letter why, it was the very apotheosis of her- carefully built-up romance! The stern demand it laid upon her was a call to heroism. The thrill of great deeds possessed her and urged her on, sweeping judgment, and even inclination, aside. They were going to Hal's last function that night, an anniversary dinner at the Weatherlys, and her brother was her escort. About nine o'clock Grandfather Gilman and Mr. Blanchard, who were chatting together, noticed Miss Alice put t on her wraps and slip out of the front door. Five 'minutes later Hal came to bid them good-by, and Mrs. Weatherly went to the door with Hal and his grandmother. Grandfather G"'man looked at Mr. Blanchard. Mr. Blanchard looked at Grandfather Gilman. Half an hour later Alice had not come back. Grandfather Gilman and Mr. Blanchard were still talking. "By George!" said Mr. Blanchard, "I wonder where Alice has gone!" "Possibly to the depot with Hal," replied Grandfather Gilman with a curious hesitation. "He has gone to New York to arrange for his fool settlement work; he will be back in about ten days, he ' says." "Hum," said Mr. Blanchard, and he fidgeted for just a few minutes longer. "Say, Adam, there is a train due to leave within five minutes. Suppose we hurry down to the depot. I I scarcely like to have her come home alone." In the meantime Mr. Halfred Joyce Gilman had telephoned for a cab to be at his door and had hurried over home to get his suit-case. He threw it in the cab and was just about to follow it, when a fieure flew down the Blanchard path and a voice called out to him to wait It was Alice. He gripped her hand tensely when she came running up to him. "You didn't come over here to say good-fey again?" he asked. "No, I am going along," she half-laughed and half-sobbed: "I'll tell you in the cab." He noticed for, the first time that she carried a suit-case. Time, however, was pressing. He handed her in and sat beside her. v "Now tell me about h," he- said, bewildered, but she had changed her mind She could not tell him now. She only clung to his arm, herself gasping at the audacity of what she was doing. At the depot he tried to persuade her to go back home, knowing that something must be wrong. She immediately became the sad, fair young friendless girl. "You are my only friend and you must do as I say. This is the crisis of my life, brother Hal, and I must meet it like a brave woman." " He shook his head, but she had already picked up her suit-case briskly, and was walking on with a determined step." All he could do was to take her suitcase from her and carry both. The train had just pulled out when Grandfather Gilman and Mr. Blanchard arrived at the depot. They had no difficulty in finding out that Hal, who was known, and Alice, whom they could easily describe, had purchased tickets for New York. Grandfather Gilman and Mr. Blanchard turned as by one impulse and shook hands until their eyes watered. Nothing could have pleased them better. "Lefs go telegraph them," said Grandfather Gilman. "I know Hal's hotel. Th young rascals!" In the meantime Mr. Halfred Joyce Gilman was compelling his sister to tell him things, insisting on a brother's rights in the matter. Here, in a welloccupied car, with the bright lights streaming npon her, and forced by these necessities to keep her features straight and her voice clear, she could tell him much better. She was eloping! She did not throw any heroics about the process, such as the histrionic promptings of her years and her inexperience would ordinarily have called forth. Instead, she seemed a bit scared about it Mr. Halfred Joyce Gilman moistened his lips. He had a peculiar grip at his throat, and he felt very lonesome all at once. A profound distate for settlement work, even, settled upon him. The prospect of immuring himself in the slums for a lifetime of self-abnegation did not appeal to him so much as it had usually done. Nevertheless, he stiffened himself. If his sister Alice was so deeply and irrevocably attached as this it was his duty to see that she attainde happiness, and he would do it like a man. He told her so. They chatted very practically now. They discussed the deep and solemn sacrifice that a woman must make when she gave up her girlhood home to make a new home for a noble man. They were quite agreed upon every point of this subject, it seemed Sometimes it even .struck her that he was a trifle too ready with his acquiescence. By way of variety he told her of his matured plans for settle- ' ment work, in as solemn, woe -begone tones as if he were going to the grave, and often she found herself clutching his sleeve while he talked. His nearness was such a support to her. She would never have had the courage to take the step if he had not been coming on this train. Never! She snuggled closer to him and wanted to cry. She didn't know why. It was only about a three hours ride to the city,' and she grew more and more nervous as they approached it When they had alighted from the train a young man, though considerably older than HaV came toward them. He was not a very prepossessing young man. , There were pouches beneath bis eyes and his lips were thick and wide. He wore a loud tie, and a suit and overcoat of wondrously checked patterns. Alice saw him first and she

gripped Hal's arm more lightly. She did not experience the bounding joy to which she had so long -looked forward when she should greet this Prince of the World. She had it npon the tip .of hit tongue to cry out to Hal that she did not want to elope, that she wanted to go back home, bat the pride which had made her keep op the romance she had builded, even after it had lost its interest to her, and which had made her plunge into this daring escapade in spite of both her judgment and her inclination, now held her silent to meet her devouring fate. Thousands of foolish girls have done the same thing, to repent throughout their lives. Shf. glanced half in terror from the approaching young man to Hal. She was startel at the change in her quasi-brother.- He had stiffened himself to his full five-foot-eleven of athletic height His nostrils . were dilated and his eyes were glaring, but he smiled, actually smiled, as if in the glee of coining battle. The approaching young man suddenly caught sight of young Gilman and stopped short, as if startled. Then he came on slowly, hesitatingly, looking from one to the other.

"Why didn t you tell me this fellow's name? Why didn't I ask?" demanded Hal; but he really seemed pleased. There was no time for a reply. The young man had come up to them. Hal turned to him savagely. "Well, Peyson?" he inquiried. "How do, Gilman?" said Mr. Peyson with a jerky nod, and then held out his hands to Alice, with an evident intention to ignore her escort from that moment on. . t Hal stepped between them. - - "Peyson, 111 give you just two minutes to get est of sight," he pleasantly observed. "If youll remember, we gave you twenty-four hoars at college. Yoa naa tnings 10 pactc up mere. . xon naven t nerer Mr. Peyson set his jaws. He seemed to have some idea of resistance. Hal jerked oat his watch and cn a nnrt it nnait TLff Pviah keen I ously for an instant and moistened his lips, then he suaaeniy wneciea, ana a moment later tney saw, him worming his way through the crowd. .J . "I'm sorry, Alice, that I can't tell yoa the details about him," Hal said. . - V C;h waa ctanHinnr vrv staff ant tra!arti liAMlf "I don't care to hear. I know enough. I am just praying my gratitude that I am not to be linked for; life to any man whom another man could make ran: without explanation." - Hal scarcely heard her. Already he was consulting a time-taWe." It had taken them three hoars to make the trip. They had started at nine-thirty, and it was now twelve-thirty. There was not another iiui um uuui uiiK uuu u iuc umiiiuif, uu it would not land her in Oakdale until daylight She had not comprehended to the fall this phase of it as yet But Hal swiftly decide that whatever they did and wherever they went they could not stand there and he bundled her into a cab. "".''' It was not until they were rolling away' from th depot that she thought with a gasp of the possible - consequences of her act, and cried: "What arc we to do?" "I pass," replied the young man, suddenly and briskly losing all the dignity that had weighted him down when he got his sheepskin and reverting once more to the slang of early college days. "It looks to me as if we were in a jam. Never you mind, though. Rely on your Uncle Dudley. Hell pat roage and cold cream and . violet talcum on the face of this thing, and don't forget it Do yon know anybody here that yoa could visit?" "Not a soul," 'she wailed, "I only now one family, and they are abroad." - "Never mind," he said, patting her hand where it lay trembling on his arm. "You just keep year eye on Little Willie. First of all we are driving over to my hotel, where I shall leave my suit-case and send a couple of telegrams. Then well do a real quick thinking stunt Did you ever see me think? It witt! te a positive joy to you." bhe nestled confidently up to him. His voice sounded so good and strong, and she liked him somuch better since he had dropped his age. She was ' glad, oh so glad, that he had happened to come with' er! After all, though, she reflected, it was only b cause she knew that he was to be along that she had emboldened herself to make the plunge. What would she have done without him? He was positively necessary to her always. Now that she could permit herself to think about Hal freely, she found out a few things that had been developing inside her; about him during the past few months, and She first' thing she knew she was having a perfectly splendid -time, blushing away all to herself. At the hotel Hal jumped oat with his sah-caseJ He left her in the cab, bat presently he came oat,; chuckling. He had two telegrams in. his hand.! One of them he had not opened, but the other he ' read and re-read with evident appreciation. "You'd better open this one before I show yoa mine," he said, handing the unopened telegram to', her. . She looked at the inscription. It was addressed . to Mrs. Halfred Joyce Gilman. She handed it back ' demurely. , "It certainly isn't for me," she said with a laugh' that had a suspicion of a tear or two in it "It doesn't seem to be for anybody," he retorted, t laughing a bit nervously himself, and tore it open. ' It was from her father. "My. dear girl," it read, "yon are a very, very: foolish child, but it is no trouble at all to forgive'. you. - Come back home as soon as yon can." He handed them both to her. "You precious young rascals," read Grandfather ' Gilman's message, "if yon are already married when yon get this,' remember there's got to be another ceremony in Oakdale." "It looks to me as if we had to make good. Pickles," laughed Hal "I inow where there is a preacher that works overtime." And giving a crisp direction, he jumped into the cab with her. Someh.w or other her bead happened on his shoulder. Fanny that women should cry when they are happy.