Part 29 (1/2)
Lida Bowman bringing her little brood sometimes would sit silently watching the children, and look at Laura as if about to speak, but she always went away with her mind unrelieved. Violet Hogan, who brought her beruffled and bedizened eldest, made up for Mrs. Bowman's reticence.
Moreover Violet brought other mothers and there was much talk on the topics of the day--talk that revealed to Laura Nesbit a whole philosophy that was new to her--the helpfulness of the poor to the poor.
But if others brought to Laura Van Dorn material strength and spiritual comfort in her enterprise, Grant Adams waved the wand of his steel claw over the kindergarten and made it live. For he was a power in the Wahoo Valley. Her friends knew that his word gave the kindergarten the endors.e.m.e.nt of every union there and thus brought to it mothers with children and with problems as well as children, whom Laura Van Dorn otherwise never could have reached. The unions made a small donation monthly to the work which gave them the feeling of proprietors.h.i.+p in the place and the mothers and children came in self-respect. But if Grant gave life to the kindergarten, he got more than he gave. For the restraining hand of Laura Van Dorn always was upon him, and his friends in the Valley came to realize her friends.h.i.+p for them and their cause.
They knew that many a venture of Grant's Utopia would have been a wild goose chase but for the wisdom of her counsel. And the two came to rely upon each other unconsciously.
So in the ugly little building near Dooley's saloon in South Harvey the two towns met and worked together; and all to heal a broken heart, a bruised life. From out of the unexplored realm where our dreams are blooming into the fruit of reality one evening came Mr. Left with this message: ”Whoever in the joy of service gives part of himself to the vast sum of sacrificial giving that has remained unspent, since man began to walk erect, is adding to humanity's heritage, is building an unseen temple wherein mankind is sheltered from its own inhumanity. This sum of sacrificial giving is the temple not made with hands!”
Now the foundations of that part of the temple not made with hands in South Harvey, may be said to have been laid and the watertable set on the day when Laura Van Dorn first laughed the bell-chime laugh of her girlhood. And that day came well along in the summer. It was twilight and the Doctor was sitting with his wife and daughter on their east veranda when Morty Sands came flitting across the lawn like a striped miller moth in a broad-banded outing suit. He waved gayly to the little company in the veranda and came up the steps at two bounds, though he was a man of thirty-eight and just the least bit weazened.
”Well,” he said, with his greetings scarcely off his lips, ”I came to tell you I've sold the colt!”
The chorus repeated his announcement as a question.
”Yes, sold the colt,” solemnly responded Morty. And then added, ”Father just wouldn't! I tried to get that two hundred in various ways--adding it to my cigar bill; slipping it in on my bill for raiment at Wright & Perry's, but father pinned Kyle down, and he stuttered out the truth. I tried to get the horse-doctor to charge the two hundred into his bill and when father uncovered that--I couldn't wait any longer so I've sold the colt!”
”Well, Morty, what for in Heaven's name?” asked Laura. Morty began fumbling in his pockets before he spoke. He did not smile, but as his hand came out of an inside pocket, he said gently: ”For two hundred and seventeen dollars and a half! I fought an hour for that half dollar!” He handed it to the Doctor, saying: ”It's for the kindergarten. You keep it for her, Doctor Jim!”
When Morty had gone Mrs. Nesbit said: ”What queer blood that Sands blood is, Doctor. There is Mary Sands's heart in that boy, and Daniel has bred nothing into him. They must have been a queer breed a generation or two back!”
The Doctor did not answer. He took the money which Morty had given to him, handed it to Laura and said: ”And now my dear, accept this token of devotion from Sir Mortimer Sands, of the golden heart and wooden head!”
And then Laura laughed, not in derision, not in merriment even, but in sheer joy that life could mean so much. And as she laughed the temple not made with hands began to rise strong and beautiful in her heart and in the hearts of all who touched her.
How they would have sneered at Laura Van Dorn's niche in the temple, those practical folk who helped her because they loved her. How George Brotherton would have laughed; with what suspicion John Kollander would have viewed the kindergarten, if he had been told that it was part of a temple. For he had no sort of an idea of letting the rag-tag and bob-tail of South Harvey into a temple; he knew very well they deserved no temple. They were s.h.i.+ftless and wicked. How Wright & Perry would have sniffed at any one who would have called the dreary little shack, where Laura Van Dorn held forth, a temple. For they all pretended to see only the earthly dimensions of material things. But in their hearts they knew the truth. It is the American way to mask the beauty of our n.o.bler selves, or real selves under a gibing deprecation. So we wear the veneer of materialism, and beneath it we are intense idealists. And woe to him who reckons to the contrary!
Perhaps the town's views on temples in general and Laura's temple in particular, was summed up by Hildy Herd.i.c.ker, Prop., when she read Mr.
Left's reflections in the _Tribune_. ”Temples--eh?--temples not made with hands--is it? Well, Miss Laura can get what comfort she can out of her baby shop; but me? Every man to his trade as Kyle Perry said when he tried to buy a dozen scissors and got a sewing machine--me?--I get my heart balm selling hats, and if others gets theirs coddling brats--'tis the good G.o.d's wisdom that makes us different and no business of mine so long as they bring grist to the profit mill! The trouble with their temples is that they don't pay taxes!”
So in the matter of putting up temples--particularly in the matter of erecting temples not made with hands, the town worked blindly. But so far as Laura Van Dorn was concerned, while she was working on her part of the temple, she had the vision of youth still in her heart. Youth indeed is that part of every soul that life has not tarnished, and if we keep our faith, hold ourselves true and bow to no circ.u.mstance however arrogant it may be, youth still will abide in our hearts through many years. Now Laura, who was born Nesbit and became Van Dorn, was taking up life with that large charity that comes to every unconquered soul. She held her illusions, she believed in herself, and youth shone like a beacon from her face and glowed in her body.
For Thomas Van Dorn, who had been her husband, she had trained herself to hold no unkind thought. She even taught Lila--when the child asked for him--to harbor no rancor toward him. So the child turned to her father when they met, the natural face of a child; it was a sad little face that he saw--though no one else ever saw it sad; but the child smiled when she spoke and looked gently at him, in the hope that some day he would come back to her.
Now it happened that on the night when Laura's laugh first echoed through her temple another rising temple witnessed a ceremony entirely befitting its use.
That night--late that night when a pale moon was climbing over the valley below the town, Margaret and her lover stood alone in the great unfinished house which they were building.
Through the uncurtained windows the moonlight was streaming, making white splashes upon the floors. Across the plank pathways they wandered locating the halls, the great living-room, the s.p.a.cious dining-room, the airy, comfortable bedrooms exposed to the south, the library, the kitchen, and the ballroom on the third floor. It was to be a grand house--this house of Van Dorn. And in their fancy the man and the woman called it the temple of love erected as an altar to the love G.o.d whom they wors.h.i.+ped. They peopled it with many a merry company. They saw the rich and the great in the dining-room. They pictured in this vision pleasure capering through the ball room. They enshrined wisdom and contentment in the library. In the great living-room they installed elegance and luxury, and hospitality beckoned with ostentatious pride for the coming of such of the n.o.bility as Harvey and its environs and the surrounding state and Nation could produce. A grand, proud temple, a rich, beautiful temple, a strong, masterful temple would be this temple of love.
”And, dearest,” said he--the master of the house, as he held her in his arms at the foot of the stairway that swept down into the broad hall like the ghost of some baronial grandeur, ”dearest, what do we care what they say! We have built it for ourselves--just for you, I want it--just for you; not friends, not children, not any one but you. This is to be our temple of love.”
She kissed him, and whined wordless a.s.sent. Then she whispered: ”Just you--you, you, and if man, woman or child come to mar our joy or to lessen our love, G.o.d pity the intruder.” And like a flaming torch she fluttered in his arms.
The summer breeze came caressingly through an unclosed window into the temple. It seemed--the summer breeze which fell upon their cheeks--like the benediction of some pagan G.o.d; their G.o.d of love perhaps. For the grand house, the rich house, the beautiful, masterful temple of their mad love was made for summer breezes.
But when the rain came, and the storms fell and beat upon that house, they found that it was a house built upon sand. But while it stood and even when it fell there was a temple, a real temple, a temple made with hands--a temple that all Harvey and all the world could understand!
CHAPTER XXVI
DR. NESBIT STARTS ON A LONG UPWARD BUT DEVIOUS JOURNEY