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George’s Wife
by
With George–reckless, useless, loving, lying George–she had left Lumley’s with her sickness cured, as it seemed, after a long year in the West, and had begun life again. What sort of life had it been? “Kicking up her heels on the stage,” as Abel Baragar had said; but, somehow, not as it was before she went West to give her perforated lung to the healing air of the plains, and to live out-doors with the men–a man’s life. Then she had never put a curb on her tongue, or greatly on her actions, except that, though a hundred men quarrelled openly, or in their own minds, about her, no one had ever had any right to quarrel about her. With a tongue which made men gasp with laughter, with as comic a gift as ever woman had, and as equally comic a face, she had been a good-natured little tyrant in her way. She had given a kiss here and there, and had taken one, but always there had been before her mind the picture of a careworn woman who struggled to bring up her three children honestly, and without the help of charity, and, with a sigh of content and weariness, had died as Cassy made her first hit on the stage and her name became a household word. And Cassy, garish, gay, freckled, witty, and whimsical, had never forgotten those days when her mother prayed and worked her heart out to do her duty by her children. Cassy Mavor had made her following, had won her place, was the idol of “the gallery”; and yet she was “of the people,” as she had always been, until her first sickness came, and she had gone out to Lumley’s, out along the foothills of the Rockies.
What had made her fall in love with George Baragar? She could not have told, if she had been asked. He was wayward, given to drink at times, given also to card-playing and racing; but he had a way with him which few women could resist and that made men his friends; and he had a sense of humor akin to her own. In any case, one day she let him catch her up in his arms, and there was the end of it. But no, not the end, after all. It was only the beginning of real life for her. All that had gone before seemed but playing on the threshold, though it had meant hard, bitter hard, work, and temptation, and patience, and endurance of many kinds. And now George was gone forever. But George’s little boy lay there on the bed in a soft sleep, with all his life before him.
She turned from the warm window and the buoyant, inspiring scene to the bed. Stooping over, she kissed the sleeping boy with an abrupt eagerness, and made a little awkward, hungry gesture of love over him, and her face flushed hot with the passion of motherhood in her.
“All I’ve got now,” she murmured. “Nothing else left–nothing else at all.”
She heard the door open behind her, and she turned round. Aunt Kate was entering with a bowl in her hands.
“I heard you moving about, and I’ve brought you something hot to drink,” she said.
“That’s real good of you, Aunt Kate,” was the cheerful reply. “But it’s near supper-time, and I don’t need it.”
“It’s boneset tea–for your cold,” answered Aunt Kate, gently, and put it on the high dressing-table made of a wooden box and covered with muslin. “For your cold, Cassy,” she repeated.
The little woman stood still a moment gazing at the steaming bowl, lines growing suddenly around her mouth, then she looked at Aunt Kate quizzically. “Is my cold bad–so bad that I need boneset?” she asked, in a queer, constrained voice.
“It’s comforting, is boneset tea, even when there’s no cold, ‘specially when the whiskey’s good, and the boneset and camomile has steeped some days.”