in her hard little Scandinavian face, as if some fairy godmother had
caressed her there and left a cryptic promise. Her brows were usually
drawn together defiantly, but never when she was with Dr. Archie. Her
affection for him was prettier than most of the things that went to make
up the doctor’s life in Moonstone.
The windows grew gray. He heard a tramping on the attic floor, on the
back stairs, then cries: “Give me my shirt!” “Where’s my other
stocking?”
“I’ll have to stay till they get off to school,” he reflected, “or
they’ll be in here tormenting her, the whole lot of them.”
II
For the next four days it seemed to Dr. Archie that his patient might
slip through his hands, do what he might. But she did not. On the
contrary, after that she recovered very rapidly. As her father remarked,
she must have inherited the “constitution” which he was never tired of
admiring in her mother.
One afternoon, when her new brother was a week old, the doctor found
Thea very comfortable and happy in her bed in the parlor. The sunlight
was pouring in over her shoulders, the baby was asleep on a pillow in a
big rocking-chair beside her. Whenever he stirred, she put out her hand
and rocked him. Nothing of him was visible but a flushed, puffy forehead
and an uncompromisingly big, bald cranium. The door into her mother’s
room stood open, and Mrs. Kronborg was sitting up in bed darning
stockings. She was a short, stalwart woman, with a short neck and a
determined-looking head. Her skin was very fair, her face calm and
unwrinkled, and her yellow hair, braided down her back as she lay in
bed, still looked like a girl’s. She was a woman whom Dr. Archie
respected; active, practical, unruffled; goodhumored, but determined.
Exactly the sort of woman to take care of a flighty preacher. She had
brought her husband some property, too,—one fourth of her father’s
broad acres in Nebraska,—but this she kept in her own name. She had
profound respect for her husband’s erudition and eloquence. She sat
under his preaching with deep humility, and was as much taken in by his
stiff shirt and white neckties as if she had not ironed them herself by
lamplight the night before they appeared correct and spotless in the
pulpit. But for all this, she had no confidence in his administration of
worldly affairs. She looked to him for morning prayers and grace at
table; she expected him to name the babies and to supply whatever
parental sentiment there was in the house, to remember birthdays and
anniversaries, to point the children to moral and patriotic ideals. It
was her work to keep their bodies, their clothes, and their conduct in
some sort of order, and this she accomplished with a success that was a
source of wonder to her neighbors. As she used to remark, and her
husband admiringly to echo, she “had never lost one.” With all his
flightiness, Peter Kronborg appreciated the matter-of-fact, punctual way
in which his wife got her children into the world and along in it. He
believed, and he was right in believing, that the sovereign State of
Colorado was much indebted to Mrs. Kronborg and women like her.
Mrs. Kronborg believed that the size of every family was decided in
heaven. More modern views would not have startled her; they would simply
have seemed foolish—thin chatter, like the boasts of the men who built
the tower of Babel, or like Axel’s plan to breed ostriches in the
chicken yard. From what evidence Mrs. Kronborg formed her opinions on
this and other matters, it would have been difficult to say, but once
formed, they were unchangeable. She would no more have questioned her
convictions than she would have questioned revelation. Calm and even
tempered, naturally kind, she was capable of strong prejudices, and she
never forgave.
When the doctor came in to see Thea, Mrs. Kronborg was reflecting that
the washing was a week behind, and deciding what she had better do about
it. The arrival of a new baby meant a revision of her entire domestic
schedule, and as she drove her needle along she had been working out new
sleeping arrangements and cleaning days. The doctor had entered the
house without knocking, after making noise enough in the hall to prepare
his patients. Thea was reading, her book propped up before her in the
sunlight.
“Mustn’t do that; bad for your eyes,” he said, as Thea shut the book
quickly and slipped it under the covers.
Mrs. Kronborg called from her bed: “Bring the baby here, doctor, and
have that chair. She wanted him in there for company.”
Before the doctor picked up the baby, he put a yellow paper bag down on
Thea’s coverlid and winked at her. They had a code of winks and
grimaces. When he went in to chat with her mother, Thea opened the bag
cautiously, trying to keep it from crackling. She drew out a long bunch
of white grapes, with a little of the sawdust in which they had been
packed still clinging to them. They were called Malaga grapes in
Moonstone, and once or twice during the winter the leading grocer got a
keg of them. They were used mainly for table decoration, about
Christmas-time. Thea had never had more than one grape at a time before.
When the doctor came back she was holding the almost transparent fruit
up in the sunlight, feeling the pale-green skins softly with the tips of
her fingers. She did not thank him; she only snapped her eyes at him in
a special way which he understood, and, when he gave her his hand, put
it quickly and shyly under her cheek, as if she were trying to do so
without knowing it—and without his knowing it.
Dr. Archie sat down in the rocking-chair. “And how’s Thea feeling
to-day?”
He was quite as shy as his patient, especially when a third person
overheard his conversation. Big and handsome and superior to his fellow
townsmen as Dr. Archie was, he was seldom at his ease, and like Peter
Kronborg he often dodged behind a professional manner. There was
sometimes a contraction of embarrassment and self consciousness all over
his big body, which made him awkward—likely to stumble, to kick up
rugs, or to knock over chairs. If any one was very sick, he forgot
himself, but he had a clumsy touch in convalescent gossip.
Thea curled up on her side and looked at him with pleasure. “All right.
I like to be sick. I have more fun then than other times.”
“How’s that?”
“I don’t have to go to school, and I don’t have to practice. I can read
all I want to, and have good things,”—she patted the grapes. “I had
lots of fun that time I mashed my finger and you wouldn’t let Professor
Wunsch make me practice. Only I had to do left hand, even then. I think
that was mean.”
The doctor took her hand and examined the forefinger, where the nail had
grown back a little crooked. “You mustn’t trim it down close at the
corner there, and then it will grow straight. You won’t want it crooked
when you’re a big girl and wear rings and have sweethearts.”
She made a mocking little face at him and looked at his new scarf-pin.
“That’s the prettiest one you ev-ER had. I wish you’d stay a long while
and let me look at it. What is it?”
Dr. Archie laughed. “It’s an opal. Spanish Johnny brought it up for me
from Chihuahua in his shoe. I had it set in Denver, and I wore it to-day
for your benefit.”
Thea had a curious passion for jewelry. She wanted every shining stone
she saw, and in summer she was always going off into the sand hills to