What would it mean to have no parents, no home, no name? No name!
That was the worst of all. That was to be lost--indeed--utterly and
hopelessly lost. The Angel lifted her hands to her dazed head and
reeled, as she tried to face that
proposition. She dropped on her
knees beside the bed, slipped her arm under the pillow, and leaning
over Freckles, set her lips on his
forehead. He smiled
faintly, but
his
wistful face appeared worse for it. It hurt the Angel to the heart.
"Dear Freckles," she said, "there is a story in your eyes this
morning, tell me?"
Freckles drew a long, wavering
breath.
"Angel," he begged, "be generous! Be thinking of me a little.
I'm so
homesick and worn out, dear Angel, be giving me back me promise.
Let me go?"
"Why Freckles!" faltered the Angel. "You don't know what you
are asking. `Let you go!' I cannot! I love you better than
anyone, Freckles. I think you are the very finest person I ever knew.
I have our lives all planned. I want you to be educated and learn
all there is to know about singing, just as soon as you are well enough.
By the time you have completed your education I will have
finished college, and then I want," she choked a second, "I want
you to be my real
knight, Freckles, and come to me and tell me that
you--like me--a little. I have been counting on you for my
sweetheart from the very first, Freckles. I can't give you up,
unless you don't like me. But you do like me--just a little--don't
you, Freckles?"
Freckles lay whiter than the
coverlet, his staring eyes on the
ceiling and his
breath wheezing between dry lips. The Angel awaited
his answer a second, and when none came, she dropped her crimsoning
face beside him on the pillow and whispered in his ear:
"Freckles, I--I'm
trying to make love to you. Oh, can't you help me
only a little bit? It's awful hard all alone! I don't know how,
when I really mean it, but Freckles, I love you. I must have you,
and now I guess--I guess maybe I'd better kiss you next."
She lifted her shamed face and
bravely laid her
feverish, quivering
lips on his. Her
breath, like clover-bloom, was in his nostrils, and
her hair touched his face. Then she looked into his eyes with reproach.
"Freckles," she panted, "Freckles! I didn't think it was in you to
be mean!"
"Mean, Angel! Mean to you?" gasped Freckles.
"Yes," said the Angel. "Downright mean. When I kiss you, if you had
any mercy at all you'd kiss back, just a little bit."
Freckles' sinewy fist knotted into the
coverlet. His chin pointed
ceilingward while his head rocked on the pillow.
"Oh, Jesus!" burst from him in agony. "You ain't the only one that
was crucified!"
The Angel caught Freckles' hand and carried it to her breast.
"Freckles!" she wailed in
terror, "Freckles! It is a mistake? Is it
that you don't want me?"
Freckles' head rolled on in wordless
suffering.
"Wait a bit, Angel?" he panted at last. "Be giving me a little time!"
The Angel arose with controlled features. She bathed his face,
straightened his hair, and held water to his lips. It seemed a long
time before he reached toward her. Instantly she knelt again,
carried his hand to her breast, and leaned her cheek upon it.
"Tell me, Freckles," she whispered softly.
"If I can," said Freckles in agony. "It's just this. Angels are
from above. Outcasts are from below. You've a sound body and you're
beautifulest of all. You have everything that
loving, careful
raising and money can give you. I have so much less than nothing
that I don't suppose I had any right to be born. It's a sure
thing--nobody wanted me afterward, so of course, they didn't
before. Some of them should have been telling you long ago."
"If that's all you have to say, Freckles, I've known that quite a
while," said the Angel stoutly. "Mr. McLean told my father, and he
told me. That only makes me love you more, to pay for all you've missed."
"Then I'm wondering at you," said Freckles in a voice of awe.
"Can't you see that if you were
willing and your father would come
and offer you to me, I couldn't be
touching the soles of your feet,
in love--me, whose people brawled over me, cut off me hand, and
throwed me away to
freeze and to die! Me, who has no name just as
much because I've no RIGHT to any, as because I don't know it.
When I was little, I planned to find me father and mother when I
grew up. Now I know me mother deserted me, and me father was maybe a
thief and surely a liar. The pity for me
suffering and the watching
over me have gone to your head, dear Angel, and it's me must be
thinking for you. If you could be forgetting me lost hand, where I
was raised, and that I had no name to give you, and if you would be
taking me as I am, some day people such as mine must be, might come
upon you. I used to pray ivery night and morning and many times the
day to see me mother. Now I only pray to die quickly and never risk
the sight of her. 'Tain't no ways possible, Angel! It's a wildness
of your dear head. Oh, do for mercy sake, kiss me once more and be
letting me go!"
"Not for a minute!" cried the Angel. "Not for a minute, if those
are all the reasons you have. It's you who are wild in your head,
but I can understand just how it happened. Being shut in that Home
most of your life, and
seeing children every day whose parents did
neglect and desert them, makes you sure yours did the same; and yet
there are so many other things that could have happened so much
more easily than that. There are thousands of young couples who
come to this country and start a family with none of their
relatives here. Chicago is a big,
wicked city, and grown people
could disappear in many ways, and who would there ever be to find
to whom their little children belonged? The minute my father told
me how you felt, I began to study this thing over, and I've made up
my mind you are dead wrong. I meant to ask my father or the Bird
Woman to talk to you before you went away to school, but as matters
are right now I guess I'll just do it myself. It's all so plain
to me. Oh, if I could only make you see!"
She buried her face in the pillow and
presently lifted it, transfigured.
"Now I have it!" she cried. "Oh, dear heart! I can make it
so plain! Freckles, can you imagine you see the old Limberlost trail?
Well when we followed it, you know there were places where ugly,
prickly thistles overgrew the path, and you went ahead with your
club and bent them back to keep them from stinging through my clothing.
Other places there were big shining pools where lovely, snow-white
lilies grew, and you waded in and gathered them for me. Oh dear
heart, don't you see? It's this! Everywhere the wind carried
that thistledown, other thistles
sprang up and grew prickles;
and
wherever those lily seeds sank to the mire, the pure white
of other lilies bloomed. But, Freckles, there was never a
place
anywhere in the Limberlost, or in the whole world, where the
thistledown floated and
sprang up and blossomed into white lilies!
Thistles grow from thistles, and lilies from other lilies.
Dear Freckles, think hard! You must see it! You are a lily,
straight through. You never, never could have drifted from the
thistle-patch.
"Where did you find the courage to go into the Limberlost and face
its
terrors? You
inherited it from the blood of a brave father,
dear heart. Where did you get the pluck to hold for over a year a
job that few men would have taken at all? You got it from a plucky
mother, you bravest of boys. You attacked single-handed a man
almost twice your size, and fought as a demon, merely at the
suggestion that you be deceptive and
dishonest. Could your mother
or your father have been untruthful? Here you are, so hungry and
starved that you are dying for love. Where did you get all that
capacity for
loving? You didn't
inherit it from hardened, heartless
people, who would
disfigure you and purposely leave you to die,
that's one sure thing. You once told me of saving your big bullfrog
from a rattlesnake. You knew you risked a
horrible death when you
did it. Yet you will spend
miserable years torturing yourself with
the idea that your own mother might have cut off that hand. Shame on
you, Freckles! Your mother would have done this----"
The Angel
deliberately turned back the cover, slipped up the
sleeve, and laid her lips on the scars.
"Freckles! Wake up!" she cried, almost shaking him. "Come to
your senses! Be a thinking,
reasoning man! You have brooded too much,
and been all your life too much alone. It's all as plain as plain
can be to me. You must see it! Like breeds like in this world!
You must be some sort of a
reproduction of your parents, and I am not
afraid to vouch for them, not for a minute!
"And then, too, if more proof is needed, here it is: Mr. McLean
says that you never once have failed in tact and
courtesy. He says
that you are the most perfect gentleman he ever knew, and he has
traveled the world over. How does it happen, Freckles? No one at
that Home taught you. Hundreds of men couldn't be taught, even in
a school of
etiquette; so it must be
instinctive with you. If it
is, why, that means that it is born in you, and a direct
inheritance from a race of men that have been gentlemen for ages,
and couldn't be anything else.
"Then there's your singing. I don't believe there ever was a mortal
with a sweeter voice than yours, and while that doesn't prove
anything, there is a point that does. The little training you had
from that choirmaster won't
account for the wonderful
accent and
ease with which you sing. Somewhere in your close blood is a
marvelously trained vocalist; we every one of us believe that, Freckles.
"Why does my father refer to you
constantly as being of fine
perceptions and honor? Because you are, Freckles. Why does the Bird
Woman leave her precious work and come here to help look after you?
I never heard of her losing any time over anyone else. It's because
she loves you. And why does Mr. McLean turn all of his valuable
business over to hired men and watch you
personally? And why is he
hunting excuses every day to spend money on you? My father says
McLean is full Scotch-close with a dollar. He is a hard-headed
business man, Freckles, and he is doing it because he finds you
worthy of it. Worthy of all we all can do and more than we know how
to do, dear heart! Freckles, are you listening to me? Oh! won't you
see it? Won't you believe it?"
"Oh, Angel!" chattered the bewildered Freckles, "are you truly
maning it? Could it be?"
"Of course it could," flashed the Angel, "because it just is!"
"But you can't prove it," wailed Freckles. "It ain't giving me a
name, or me honor!"
"Freckles," said the Angel
sternly, "you are unreasonable! Why, I
did prove every word I said! Everything proves it! You look here!
If you knew for sure that I could give you a name and your honor,
and prove to you that your mother did love you, why, then, would
you just go to
breathing like
perpetualmotion and hang on for dear
life and get well?"
A bright light shone in Freckles' eyes.
"If I knew that, Angel," he said
solemnly, "you couldn't be killing
me if you felled the biggest tree in the Limberlost smash on me!"
"Then you go right to work," said the Angel, "and before night I'll
prove one thing to you: I can show you easily enough how much your
mother loved you. That will be the first step, and then the
remainder will all come. If my father and Mr. McLean are so anxious
to spend some money, I'll give them a chance. I don't see why we
haven't comprehended how you felt and so have been at work weeks ago.
We've been
awfullyselfish. We've all been so comfortable, we never
stopped to think what other people were
suffering before our eyes.
None of us has understood. I'll hire the finest
detective in
Chicago, and we'll go to work together. This is nothing compared
with things people do find out. We'll go at it, beak and claw, and
we'll show you a thing or two."
Freckles caught her sleeve.
"Me mother, Angel! Me mother!" he marveled
hoarsely. "Did you say
you could be
finding out today if me mother loved me? How? Oh, Angel!
Nothing matters, IF ONLY ME MOTHER DIDN'T DO IT!"
"Then you rest easy," said the Angel, with large confidence.
"Your mother didn't do it! Mothers of sons such as you don't do things
like that. I'll go to work at once and prove it to you. The first