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Page 62

Jimmy had taken his full place in the household. The best room,
which had been Anna's, had been given up to him. Here, carefully
tended, with a fire all day in the stove, Jimmy reigned from the
bed. To him Harmony brought her small puzzles and together they
solved them.

"Shall it be a steak to-night?" thus Harmony humbly. "Or chops?"

"With tomato sauce?"

"If Peter allows, yes."

Much thinking on Jimmy's part, and then:--

"Fish," he would decide. "Fish with egg dressing."

They would argue for a time, and compromise on fish.

The boy was better. Peter shook his head over any permanent
improvement, but Anna fiercely seized each crumb of hope. Many
and bitter were the battles she and Peter fought at night over
his treatment, frightful the litter of authorities Harmony put
straight every morning.

The extra expense was not much, but it told. Peter's carefully
calculated expenditures felt the strain. He gave up a course in
X-ray on which he had set his heart and cut off his hour in the
coffee-house as a luxury. There was no hardship about the latter
renunciation. Life for Peter was spelling itself very much in
terms of Harmony and Jimmy those days. He resented anything that
took him from them.

There were anxieties of a different sort also. Anna's father was
failing. He had written her a feeble, half-senile appeal to let
bygones be bygones and come back to see him before he died. Anna
was Peter's great prop. What would he do should she decide to go
home? He had built his house on the sand, indeed.

So far the threatened danger of a mother to Jimmy had not
materialized. Peter was puzzled, but satisfied. He still wrote
letters of marvelous adventure; Jimmy still watched for them,
listened breathless, treasured them under his pillow. But he
spoke less of his father. The open page of his childish mind was
being written over with new impressions. "Dad" was already a
memory; Peter and Harmony and Anna were realities. Sometimes he
called Peter "Dad." At those times Peter caught the boy to him in
an agony of tenderness.

And as the little apartment revolved round Jimmy, so was this
Christmas-Eve given up to him. All day he had stayed in bed for
the privilege of an extra hour propped up among pillows in the
salon. All day he had strung little red berries that looked like
cranberries for the tree, or fastened threads to the tiny cakes
that were for trimming only, and sternly forbidden to eat.

A marvelous day that for Jimmy. Late in the afternoon the
Portier, with a collar on, had mounted the stairs and sheepishly
presented him with a pair of white mice in a wooden cage. Jimmy
was thrilled. The cage was on his knees all evening, and one of
the mice was clearly ill of a cake with pink icing. The Portier's
gift was a stealthy one, while his wife was having coffee with
her cousin, the brushmaker. But the spirit Of Christmas does
strange things. That very evening, while the Portier was
roistering in a beer hall preparatory to the midnight mass, came
the Portier's wife, puffing from the stairs, and brought a puzzle
book that only the initiated could open, and when one succeeded
at last there was a picture of the Christ-Child within.

Young McLean came to call that evening--came to call and remained
to worship. It was the first time since Mrs. Boyer that a visitor
had come. McLean, interested with everything and palpably not
shocked, was a comforting caller. He seemed to Harmony, who had
had bad moments since the day of Mrs. Boyer's visit, to put the
hallmark of respectability on the household, to restore it to
something it had lost or had never had.

She was quite unconscious of McLean's admiration. She and Anna
put Jimmy to bed. The tree candles were burned out; Peter was
extinguishing the dying remnants when Harmony came back. McLean
was at the piano, thrumming softly. Peter, turning round
suddenly, surprised an expression on the younger man's face that
startled him.

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Wed 24th Dec 2025, 19:08

The Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart