第10章

I went into the station waiting-room to write a note. I laid my bonnet, my veil, my packages upon the table. I wrote my note. I went away. The next morning, when I would have arrayed myself to resume my journey, there was no veil. Iremembered that I had taken it into the station the night before, and that I had not taken it out. At the station we inquired of the waiting-woman concerning it. It is as much as your life is worth to ask these people about lost articles.

They take it for granted at the first blush that you mean to accuse them of stealing. "Have you seen a brown veil lying about anywhere?" asked Crene, her sweet bird-voice warbling out from her sweet rose-lips. "No, I 'a'n't seen nothin' of it," says Gnome, with magnificent indifference.

"It was lost here last night," continues Crene, in a soliloquizing undertone, pushing investigating glances beneath the sofas.

"I do' know nothin' about it. _I_ 'a'n't took it"; and the Gnome tosses her head back defiantly. "I seen the lady when she was a-writin' of her letter, and when she went out ther' wa'n't nothin' left on the table but a hangkerchuf, and that wa'n't hern. I do' know nothin' about it, nor I 'a'n't seen nothin' of it."O no, my Gnome, you knew nothing of it; you did not take it.

But since no one accused or even suspected you, why could you not have been less aggressive and more sympathetic in your assertions? But we will plough no longer in that field. The ploughshare has struck against a rock and grits, denting its edge in vain. My veil is gone,--my ample, historic, heroic veil. There is a woman in Fontdale who breathes air filtered through--I will not say STOLEN tissue, but certainly through tissue which was obtained without rendering its owner any fair equivalent. Does not every breeze that softly stirs its fluttering folds say to her, "O friend, this veil is not yours, not yours," and still sighingly, "not yours! Up among the northern hills, yonder towards the sunset, sits the owner, sorrowful, weeping, wailing"? I believe I am wading out into the Sally Waters of Mother Goosery; but, prose or poetry, somewhere a woman,--and because nobody of taste could surreptitiously possess herself of my veil, I have no doubt that she cut it incontinently into two equal parts, and gave one to her sister, and there are two women,--nay, since niggardly souls have no sense of grandeur, and will shave down to microscopic dimensions, it is every way probable that she divided it into three unequal parts, and took three quarters of a yard for herself, three quarters for her sister, and gave the remaining half-yard to her daughter, and that at very moment there are two women and a little girl taking their walks abroad under the silken shadows of my veil! And yet there are people who profess to disbelieve in total depravity.

Nor did the veil walk away alone. My trunk became imbued with the spirit of adventure, and branched off on its own account up somewhere into Vermont. I suppose it would have kept on and reached perhaps the North Pole by this time, had not Crene's dark eyes,--so pretty to look at that one instinctively feels they ought not to be good for anything, if a just impartiality is to be maintained, but they are,--had not Crene's dark eyes seen it tilting into a baggage-crate, and trundling off towards the Green Mountains, but too late. Of course there was a formidable hitch in the programme. A court of justice was improvised on the car-steps. I was the plaintiff, Crene chief evidence, baggage-master both defendant and examining-counsel.

The case did not admit of a doubt. There was the little insurmountable check, whose brazen lips could speak no lie.

"Keep hold of that," whispered Crene, and a yoke of oxen could not have drawn it from me.

"You are sure you had it marked for Fontdale," says Mr. Baggage-master.

I hold the impracticable check before his eyes in silence.

"Yes, well, it must have gone on to Albany."

"But it went away on that track," says Crene.

"Couldn't have gone on that track. Of course they wouldn't have carried it away over there just to make it go wrong."For me, I am easily persuaded and dissuaded. If he had told me that it must have gone in such a direction, that it was a moral and mental impossibility should have gone in any other, and have it times enough, with a certain confidence and contempt of any other contingency, I should gradually have lost faith in my own eyes, and said, "Well, I suppose it did."But Crene is not to be asserted into yielding one inch, and insists that the trunk went to Vermont and not to New York, and is thoroughly unmanageable. The baggage-master, in anguish of soul, trots out his subordinates, one after another,--"Is this the man that wheeled the trunk away? Is this?

Is this?"

The brawny-armed fellows hang back, and scowl, and muffle words in a very suspicious manner, and protest they won't be got into a scrape. But Crene has no scrape for them. She cannot swear to their identity. She had eyes only for the trunk.

"Well," says Baggage-man, at his wits' end, "you let me take your check, and I'll send the trunk on by express, when it comes.

I pity him, and relax my clutch.

"No," whispers Crene; "as long as you have your check, you as good as have your trunk; but when you give that up, you have nothing. Keep that till you see your trunk."My clutch re-tightens.

"At any rate, you can wait till the next train, and see if it doesn't come back. You'll get to your journey's end just as soon.""Shall I? Well, I will," compliant as usual.

"No," interposes my good genius again. "Men are always saying that a woman never goes when she engages to go. She is always a train later or a train earlier, and you can't meet her."Pliant to the last touch, I say aloud,--"No, I must go in this train"; and so I go, trunkless and crestfallen, to meet Halicarnassus.