The Melting of Molly by Maria Thompson Daviess

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Note: This version of _The Melting of Molly_ is the American novel
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THE MELTING OF MOLLY

by

MARIA THOMPSON DAVIESS

Author of
Miss Selina Lue, The Road to Providence,
Rose of Old Harpeth, etc., etc.

Illustrated by R. M. Crosby

Indianapolis
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Publishers

1912

[Illustration: Melted]

MOLLY CARTER AND I
DEDICATE THIS BOOK
TO OUR GOOD FRIEND
CAROL KING JENNEY

LEAVES FROM THE BOOK OF MOLLY

Leaf First
THE BACHELOR'S-BUTTONS

Leaf Second
A LOVE-LETTER, LOADED

Leaf Third
MONUMENT OR TROUSSEAU?

Leaf Fourth
SCATTERED JAM

Leaf Fifth
BLUE ABSINTHE

Leaf Sixth
THE RESURRECTION RAZOO

Leaf Seventh
DASHED!

Leaf Eighth
MELTED

LEAF FIRST

THE BACHELOR'S-BUTTONS

Yes, I truly think that in all the world there is nothing so dead
as a young widow's deceased husband, and God ought to give His wisest
man-angel special charge concerning looking after her and the devil at
the same time. They both need it! I don't know how all this is going to
end and I wish my mind wasn't in a kind of tingle. However, I'll do the
best I can and not hold myself at all responsible for myself, and then
who will there be to blame?

There are a great many kinds of good-feeling in this world, from radiant
joy down to perfect bliss, but this spring I have got an attack of just
old-fashioned happiness that looks as if it might become chronic.

I am so happy that I planted my garden all crooked, my eyes upon the
clouds with the birds sailing against them, and when I became conscious
I found wicked flaunting poppies sprouted right up against the sweet
modest clover-pinks, while the whole paper of bachelor's-buttons was
sowed over everything--which I immediately began to dig right up again,
blushing furiously to myself over the trowel, and glad that I had caught
myself before they grew up to laugh in my face. However, I got that
laugh anyway, and I might just as well have left them, for Billy ran to
the gate and called Doctor John to come in and make Molly stop digging
up his buttons. Billy claims everything in this garden, and he thought
they would grow up into the kind of buttons you pop out of a gun.

"So you're digging up the bachelor-pops, Mrs. Molly?" the doctor asked
as he leaned over the gate. I went right on digging without looking up
at him. I couldn't look up because I was blushing still worse. Sometimes
I hate that man, and if he wasn't Billy's father I wouldn't neighbor
with him as I do. But somebody _has_ to look after Billy.

I believe it will be a real relief to write down how I feel about him
in his old book and I shall do it whenever I can't stand him any longer,
and if he gave the horrid, red leather thing to me to make me miserable,
he can't do it; not this spring! I wish I dared burn it up and forget
about it, but I don't! This record on the first page is enough to
_reduce_ me--to tears, and I wonder why it doesn't.

I weigh one hundred and sixty pounds, down in black and white, and it
is a tragedy! I don't believe that man at the grocery store is so very
reliable in his weights, though he had a very pleasant smile while he
was weighing me. Still I had better get some scales of my own, smiles
are so deceptive.

I am five feet three inches tall or short, whichever way one looks at
me. I thought I was taller, but I suppose I will have to believe my own
yardstick.

But as to my waist measure, I positively refuse to write that down, even
if I have promised Doctor John a dozen times over to do it, while I only
really left him to _suppose_ I would. It is bad enough to know that
your belt has to be reduced to twenty-three inches without putting down
how much it measures now in figures to insult yourself with. No, I
intend to have this for my happy spring.

Yes, I suppose it would have been lots better for my happiness if I had
kept quiet about it all, but at the time I thought I had to advise with
him over the matter. Now I'm sorry I did. That is one thing about being
a widow, you are accustomed to advising with a man, whether you want to
or not, and you can't get over the habit right away. Poor Mr. Carter
hasn't been dead much over a year and I must be missing him most
awfully, though just lately I can't remember not to forget about him a
great deal of the time. Now if he had been here--_horrors_!

Still, that letter was enough to upset anybody, and no wonder I ran
right across my garden, through Billy's hedge-hole and over into Doctor
John's office to tell him about it; but I ought not to have been
agitated enough to let him take the letter right out of my hand and read
it.

"So after ten years Al Bennett is coming back to pop his
bachelor's-buttons at you, Mrs. Molly?" he said in the deep drawling
voice he always uses when he makes fun of Billy and me and which never
fails to make us both mad. I didn't look at him directly, but I felt his
hand shake with the letter in it.

"Not ten, only _eight_! He went when I was seventeen," I answered
with dignity, wishing I dared be snappy at him; though I never am.

"And after eight years he wants to come back and find you squeezed into
a twenty-inch-waist, blue muslin rag you wore at parting? No wonder Al
didn't succeed at bank clerking, but had to make his hit at diplomacy
and the high arts. Some hit at that to be legationed at Saint James!
He's such a big gun that it is a pity he had to return to his native
heath and find even such a slight disappointment as a one-yard waist
measure around his--his--"

"Oh it's not, it's _not_ that much." I fairly gasped and I couldn't
help the tears coming into my eyes. I have never said much about it, but
nobody knows how it hurts me to be all this fat! Just writing it down in
a book mortifies me dreadfully. It's been coming on worse and worse
every year since I married. Poor Mr. Carter had a very good appetite and
I don't know why I should have felt that I had to eat so much every day
to keep him company; I wasn't always so considerate of him. Then he
didn't want me to dance any more because married women oughtn't, or ride
horseback either--no amusement left but himself and weekly
prayer-meetings, and--and--I just couldn't help the tears coming and
dripping as I thought about it all and that awful waist measure in
inches.

"Stop crying this minute, Molly," said Doctor John suddenly in the deep
voice he uses to Billy and me when we are really sick or stump-toed.
"You know I was only teasing you and I won't stand for--"

But I sobbed some more. I like him when his eyes come out from under his
bushy brows and are all tender and full of sorry for us.

"I can't help it," I gulped in my sleeve. "I did used to like Alfred
Bennett. My heart almost broke when he went away. I used to be beautiful
and slim, and now I feel as if my own fat ghost has come to haunt me all
my life. I am so ashamed! If a woman can't cry over her own dead beauty,
what can she cry over?" By this time I was really crying.

Then what happened to me was that Doctor John took me by the shoulders
and gave me one good shake and then made me look him right in the eyes
through the tears and all.

"You foolish child," he said in the deepest voice I almost ever heard
him use. "You are just a lovely, round, luscious peach, but if you will
be happier to have Al Bennett come and find you as slim as a string-bean
I can show you how to do it. Will you do just as I tell you?"

[Illustration: "Will you do just as I tell you?"]

"Yes, I will," I sniffed in a comforted voice. What woman wouldn't be
comforted by being called a "luscious peach". I looked out between my
fingers to see what more he was going to say, but he had turned to a
shelf and taken down two books.

"Now," he said in his most businesslike voice, as cool as a bucket of
water fresh from the spring, "it is no trouble at all to take off your
surplus avoirdupois at the rate of two and a half pounds a week if you
follow these directions. As I take it you are about twenty-five pounds
over your normal weight. It will take over two months to reduce you and
we will allow an extra month for further beautifying, so that when Mr.
Bennett arrives he will find the lady of his adoration in proper trim to
be adored. Yes, just be still until I copy these directions in this
little, red leather blank-book for you, and every day I want you to keep
an exact record of the conditions of which I make note. No, don't talk
while I make out these diet lists! I wish you would go across the hall
and see if you don't think we ought to get Bill a thinner set of
night-drawers. It seems to me he must be too warm in the ones he is
wearing."

When he speaks to me in that tone of voice I always do it. And I needed
Billy badly at that very moment. I took him out of his little cot by
Doctor John's big bed and sat down with him in my arms over by the
window through which the early moon came streaming. Billy is so little,
little not to have a mother to rock him all the times he needs it that I
take every opportunity to give it to him I find--when he's unconscious
and can't help himself. She died before she ever even saw him and I've
always tried to do what I could to make it up to him.

Poor Mr. Carter said when Billy cut his teeth that a neighbor's baby can
be worse than twins of your own. He didn't like children and the baby's
crying disturbed him, so many a night I walked Billy out in the garden
until daylight, while Mr. Carter and Doctor John both slept. Always his
little, warm, wilty body has comforted me for the emptiness of not
having a baby of my own. And he's very congenial, too, for he's slim and
flowery, pink and dimply, and as mannish as his father, in funny little
flashes.

"Git a stick to punch it, Molly," he was murmuring in his sleep. Then I
heard the doctor call me and I had to kiss him, put him back in his bed,
and go across the hall.

Doctor John was standing by the table with this horrid small book in his
hand and his mouth was set in a straight line and his eyes were deep
back under their brows. I hate him that way, too, and I would like to
get up so close to him that he couldn't _hit_ me or have a door
locked between us. It's strange how the thought of taking a beating from
a man can make a woman's heart jump. Mine jumped so it was hard to look
as meek as I felt best under the circumstances; but I looked it out from
under my lashes cautiously.

"There you are, Mrs. Molly," he said briskly as he handed me this book.
"Get weighed and measured and sized-up generally in the morning and
follow all the directions. Also make every record I have noted so that
I can have the proper data to help you as you go along--or rather down.
And if you will be faithful about it to me, or rather Al, I think we can
be sure of buttoning that blue muslin dress without even the aid of the
button-hook." His voice had the "if you can" note in it that always sets
me off.

"Had we better get the kiddie some thinner night-rigging?" he hastened
to ask as I was just about to explode. He knows the signs.

"Thank you, Doctor Moore! I hate the very ground you walk on and I'll
attend to those night-clothes myself to-morrow," I answered, and I
sailed out of that office and down the path toward my own house beyond
his hedge. But I carried this book tight in my hand and I made up my
mind that I would do it all if it killed me. I would show him I could be
_faithful_--to whom I would decide later on. But I hadn't read far
into this book when I committed myself to myself like that!

I don't know just how long I sat on the front steps all by myself bathed
in a perfect flood of moonlight and loneliness. It was not a bit of
comfort to hear Aunt Adeline snoring away in her room down the dark
hall. It takes the greatest congeniality to make a person's snoring a
pleasure to anybody and Aunt Adeline and I are not that way.

When poor Mr. Carter died, the next day she said: "Now, Mary, you are
entirely too young to live all your long years of widowhood alone, and
as I am in the same condition, I will rent my cottage and move right
up the street into your house to protect and console you." And she
did,--the moving and the protecting.

Mr. Henderson has been dead forty-two years. He only lived three months
after he married Aunt Adeline and her crepe veil is over a yard long
yet. Men are the dust under her feet, but she likes for Doctor John to
come over and sit on the porch with us because she can consult with him
about what Mr. Henderson really died of and talk with him about the sad
state of poor Mr. Carter's liver for a year before he died. I just go on
rocking Billy and singing hymns to him in such a way that I can't hear
the conversation. Mr. Carter's liver got on my nerves alive, and dead it
does worse. But it hurts when the doctor has to take the little
sleep-boy out of my arms to carry him home; though I like it when he
says under his breath, "Thank you, Molly."

And as I sat and thought how near he and I had been to each other in all
our troubles, I excused myself for running to him with that letter and I
acknowledged to myself that I had no right to get mad when he teased me,
for he had been kind and interested about helping me get thin by the
time Alfred came back to see me. I couldn't tell which I was blushing
all to myself about, the "luscious peach" he had called me or the
"lovely lily" Alfred had reminded me in his letter that I had been when
he left me.

Why don't people realize that a seventeen-year-old girl's heart is a
sensitive wind-flower that may be shattered by a breath? Mine shattered
when Alfred went away to find something he could do to make a living,
and Aunt Adeline gave the hard green stem to Mr. Carter when she married
me to him. Poor Mr. Carter!

No, I wasn't twenty, and this town was full of women who were aunts and
cousins and law-kin to me, and nobody did anything for me. They all said
with a sigh of relief, "It will be such a nice safe thing for you,
Molly." And they really didn't mean anything by tying up a gay, dancing,
frolicking, prancing colt of a girl with a terribly ponderous bridle.
But God didn't want to see me always trotting along slow and tired and
not caring what happened to me, even pounds and pounds of plumpness, so
he found use for Mr. Carter in some other place but this world, and I
feel that He is going to see me through whatever happens. If some of the
women in my missionary society knew how friendly I feel with God they
would put me out for contempt of court.

No, the town didn't mean anything by chastening my spirit with Mr.
Carter and they didn't consider him in the matter at all, poor man. Of
that I feel sure. Hillsboro is like that. It settled itself here in a
Tennessee valley a few hundreds of years ago and has been hatching and
clucking over its own small affairs ever since. All the houses set back
from the street with their wings spread out over their gardens, and
mothers here go on hovering even to the third and fourth generation.
Lots of times young, long-legged, frying-size boys scramble out of the
nests and go off to college and decide to grow up where their crow will
be heard by the world. Alfred was one of them.

And, too, occasionally some man comes along from the big world and
marries a plump little broiler and takes her away with him, but mostly
they stay and go to hovering life on a corner of the family estate.
That's what I did.

I was a poor, little, lost chick with frivolous tendencies and they
all clucked me over into this empty Carter nest which they considered
well-feathered for me. It gave them all a sensation when they found out
from the will just how well it was feathered. And it gave me one, too.
All that money would make me nervous if Mr. Carter hadn't made Doctor
John its guardian, though I sometimes feel that the responsibility of me
makes him treat me as if he were my step-grandfather-in-law. But all in
all, though stiff in its knees with aristocracy, Hillsboro is lovely and
loving; and couldn't inquisitiveness be called just real affection with
a kind of squint in its eye?

And there I sat on my front steps, being embraced in a perfume of
everybody's lilacs and peachblow and sweet syringa and affectionate
interest and moonlight, with a letter in my hand from the man whose two
photographs and many letters I had kept locked up in the garret for
years. Is it any wonder I tingled when he told me that he had never come
back because he couldn't have me and that now the minute he landed in
America he was going to lay his heart at my feet? I added his honors
to his prostrate heart myself and my own beat at the prospect. All the
eight years faded away and I was again back in the old garden down at
Aunt Adeline's cottage saying good-by, folded up in his arms. That's
the way my memory put the scene to me, but the word "folded" made me
remember that blue muslin dress again. I had promised to keep it and
wear it for him when he came back--and I couldn't forget that the blue
belt was just twenty-three inches and mine is--no, I _won't_ write
it. I had got that dress out of the old trunk not ten minutes after I
had read the letter and measured it.

No, nobody would blame me for running right across the garden to Doctor
John with such a real trouble as that! All of a sudden I hugged the
letter and the little book up close to my breast and laughed until the
tears ran down my cheeks.

Then before I went into the house I assembled my garden and had family
prayers with my flowers. I do that because they are all the family I've
got, and God knows that all His budding things need encouragement,
whether it is a widow or a snowball-bush. He'll give it to us!

And I'm praying again as I sit here and watch for the doctor's light to
go out. I hate to go to sleep and leave it burning, for he sits up so
late and he is so gaunt and thin and tired-looking most times. That's
what the last prayer is about, almost always,--sleep for him and no
night call!

LEAF SECOND

A LOVE-LETTER, LOADED

The very worst page in this red--red devil--I'm glad I've written it at
last--of a book is the fifth. It says:

"Breakfast--one slice of dry toast, one egg, fruit and a tablespoonful
of baked cereal, small cup of coffee, no sugar, no cream." And me with
two Jersey cows full of the richest cream in Hillsboro, Harpeth Valley,
out in my pasture!

"Dinner, one small lean chop, slice of toast, spinach, green beans and
lettuce salad. No dessert or sweet." The blue-grass in my yard is full
of fat little fryers and I wish I were a sheep if I have to eat lettuce
and spinach for grass. At least I'd have more than one chop inside me
then.

"Supper--slice of toast and an apple." Why the apple? Why supper at all?

Oh, I'm hungry, hungry until I cry in my sleep when I dream about a
muffin! I thought at first that getting out of bed before my eyes are
fairly open and turning myself into a circus actor by doing every kind
of overhand, foot, arm and leg contortion that the mind of cruel man
could invent to torture a human being with, would kill me before I had
been at it a week, but when I read on page sixteen that as soon as all
that horror was over I must jump right into the tub of cold water, I
kicked, metaphorically speaking. And I've been kicking ever since,
literally to keep from freezing.

[Illustration: She shrouds me for the agony]

But as cruel a death as freezing is, it doesn't compare to the tortures
of being melted. Judy administers it to me and her faithful heart is so
wrung with compassion that she perspires almost as much as I do. She
wrings a linen sheet out in a caldron of boiling water and shrouds me
in it for the agony--and then more and more blanket windings envelop me
until I am like the mummy of some Egyptian giantess. I have ice on the
back of my neck and my forehead, and murder for the whole world in my
heart. Once I got so discouraged at the idea of having all this hades
in this life that I mingled tears with the beads of perspiration that
rolled down my cheeks, and she snatched me out of those steaming
grave-clothes in less time than it takes to tell it, soused me in
a tub of cold water, fed me a chicken wing and a hot biscuit and the
information that I was "good-looking enough for _anybody_ to eat up
alive without all this foolishness," all in a very few seconds. Now I
have to beg her to help me and I heard her tell her nephew, who does the
gardening, that she felt like an undertaker with such goings-on. At any
rate, if it all kills me it won't be my fault if anybody has to lie in
saying that I was "beautiful in death".

But now that more than a month has passed, I really don't mind it so
much. I feel so good and strong and prancy all the time that I can't
keep from bubbling. I have to smile at myself.

Then another thing that helps is Billy and his ball. I never could
really play with him before, but now I can't help it. But an awful thing
happened about that yesterday. We were in the garden playing over by the
lilac bushes and Billy always beats me because when he runs to base he
throws himself down and slides along on the grass on his little stomach
as he sees the real players do over at the ball grounds. Then all of a
sudden, before I knew it, I just did the same thing, and we slid to the
flower pot we use as a base together, each on his own stomach. And what
did Billy do but begin right there on the grass the kind of a tussle we
always have in the big rocking-chair on the porch! Over and over we
rolled, Billy chuckling and squealing while I laughed myself all out of
breath. I'm glad I always would wear delicious petticoats, for there,
looking right over my front fence, I discovered Judge Benton Wade. I
wish I could write down how I felt, for I never had that sensation
before and I don't believe I'll ever have it again.

I have always thought that Judge Wade was really the most wonderful man
in Hillsboro, not because he is a judge so young in life that there is
only a white sprinkle in his lovely black hair that grows back off his
head like Napoleon's and Charles Wesley's, but because of his smile,
which you wait for so long that you glow all over when you get it. I
have seen him do it once or twice at his mother when he seats her in
their pew at church and once at little Mamie Johnson when she gave him a
flower through their fence as he passed by one day last week, but I
never thought I should have one all to myself. But there it was, a most
beautiful one, long and slow and distinctly mine--at least I didn't
think much of it was for Billie. I sat up and blushed as red all over as
I do when I first hit that tub of cold water.

[Illustration: I sat up and blushed red all over]

"I hope you'll forgive an intruder, Mrs. Carter, but how could a mortal
resist a peep into the garden of the gods if he spied the queen and her
faun at play?" he said in a voice as wonderful as the smile. By that
time I had reefed in my ruffles around my feet and pushed in all my
hairpins. Billy stood spread-legged as near in front of me as he could
get and said in the rudest possible tone of voice:

"Get away from my Molly, man!"

I never was so mortified in all my life and I scrambled to my feet and
came over to the fence to get between him and Billy.

"It's a lovely day, isn't it, Judge Wade?" I asked with the greatest
interest, which I didn't really feel, in the weather; but what could I
think of to say? A woman is apt to keep the image of a good many of the
grand men she sees passing around her in queer niches in her brain, and
when one steps out and speaks to her for the first time it is confusing.
Of course I have known the judge and his mother all my life, for she is
one of Aunt Adeline's best friends, but I had a feeling from the look in
his eyes that that very minute was the first time he had ever seen me.
It was lovely and I blushed some more as I put my hand up to my cheek so
I wouldn't have to look right at him.

"About the loveliest day that ever happened in Hillsboro," he said, and
there was still more of the delicious smile, "though I hadn't noticed it
so especially until--"

But I never knew what he had intended to say, for Billy suddenly swelled
up like a little turkey-cock and cut out with his switch at the judge.

"Git, man, git, and let my Molly alone!" he said, in a perfect
thundertone of voice; but I almost laughed, for it had such a sound in
it like Doctor John's at his most positive times with Billy and me.

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