Miss Theodosias Heartstrings | Page 9

little clothes about the room and on the flat pillows of the bed the round, flushed face of Evangeline. In a clothes basket beside the bed she dimly saw a little mound that might be Elly Precious--it was Elly Precious! The little mound stirred with a curious, nestling sound, and instantly Stefana stirred also and crooned. Even in her sleep she was the little Mother. Miss Theodosia felt her own throat tighten and fill.
Stefana still clasped the bundle of apron in her arms, and Miss Theodosia did not dare try to take it away from her. She merely arranged it a little more comfortably and smoothed Stefana out. Queer!--as if at some other time, in some passed-by existence, she had smoothed out a child. She seemed to know how. Suddenly she stooped and kissed, not Stefana's thumbs but her eyes.
"The starch!" murmured Stefana as Miss Theodosia turned away. "Some'dy get it!" The deep sleep had broken a little, and through the break trickled a thread of Stefana's troubles. Then, again, silence and peace. No sound from bed or clothes basket on the floor.
Outside, in the faint starlight, Miss Theodosia drew a long breath. She softly laughed. Curious how much like a sob a little laugh can be! Oh, starlit night of adventuring! What next? Miss Theodosia's mantle of gentle melancholy slid from her shoulders; she no longer felt apprehensions of growing old. Continually she saw Evangeline's rosy face on that flat pillow, and the little mound of Elly Precious. She remembered how tiny the house had looked from the inside, and how many little littering clothes she had seen. The appealing quality of empty little clothes! In Miss Theodosia's inside room of her soul, something stirred behind the locked door.
The irons had cooled too much, and the fire was low. Miss Theodosia went to work again. As she worked, she talked to herself sociably.
"Adventures thicken! Stars, and angels in caps, and children that walk in their little sleeps! And little heaps in clothes baskets, that are babies! And--Theodosia Baxter--a Man! Out of a clear, inky sky! Why weren't you scared? How do you know--you never even saw his face--maybe he was a thief, and a marauder, and a thug!"
Granted, if thieves and marauders and those awful things, thugs, carry little loads or sleep as tenderly as women--and never wake them; if they are polite and say good night--. What kind of marauding and--and thugging is that?
"What will Stefana think when she finds my apron in bed with her!" suddenly laughed Miss Theodosia, breaking the spell. "Funny Stefana! she goes to my heart, she and her starch--when they're asleep!"
But, awake, Stefana's starch went to Miss Theodosia's back and aching bones. It was three o'clock when she was ready to go to bed. Over chairs and the couch in her sitting-room, lay the three redeemed white dresses, soft again and very smoochless and smooth. Miss Theodosia stood and admired. She was full of pride and weariness. At last, at thirty-six, she had done real work; she loved the feel of it in her tired bones. She loved her night of adventuring. Life--she loved that. So she went to bed at three, when the birds were beginning to get up. If her throat--calm and grown-up throat--had not persistently tightened, she would have gone to sleep laughing at the remembrance of it all. All the funny night. Why wasn't it funny? Why couldn't she laugh? She sat up in bed.
On the morning after her adventurous night, as Miss Theodosia lingered luxuriously over her late breakfast, came bursting in Evangeline Flagg. A gray-checked something waved from her hand like a flag of truce. Evangeline always burst into things--houses, and rooms, and excited little speech.
"Here it is!--that is, if it's yours. Stefana says to ask. 'Tain't ours. Mercy gracious, no! We don't take our aperns to bed. Stefana never heard of such a thing. Neither o' us never. In bed--right straight in bed! An' Stefana hugging it up like everything! She says to ask you if it's yours because it ain't ours, nor anybody else's, an' it's got to be somebody's apern, and once I thought I saw a gray 'n' white one hanging through your window--I mean on a nail, but, mercy gracious, what was it doing in bed with me an' Stefana!"
Even Evangeline's breath had limitations. She stopped as headlong as she had begun. She unwound the large, voluminous-skirted apron from her grasp and extended it.
"Here 'tis, if it's yours," she gasped, spent. She was gazing at it with a species of awe; it was an "apern" of mystery, not a human apern. "An' if 't isn't, take it--Stefana said not to dare to bring it back. We--we're sort of afraid of it, honest. Though, of course, Stefana says it must 've blew in