Epilogue

                             EPILOGUE

     MOONSTONE again, in the year 1909.  The Metho-
dists are giving an ice-cream sociable in the grove
about the new court-house.  It is a warm summer night of
full moon.  The paper lanterns which hang among the
trees are foolish toys, only dimming, in little lurid circles,
the great softness of the lunar light that floods the blue
heavens and the high plateau.  To the east the sand hills
shine white as of old, but the empire of the sand is grad-
ually diminishing.  The grass grows thicker over the dunes
than it used to, and the streets of the town are harder and
firmer than they were twenty-five years ago.  The old in-
habitants will tell you that sandstorms are infrequent
now, that the wind blows less persistently in the spring
and plays a milder tune.  Cultivation has modified the soil
and the climate, as it modifies human life.
     The people seated about under the cottonwoods are
much smarter than the Methodists we used to know.  The
interior of the new Methodist Church looks like a theater,
with a sloping floor, and as the congregation proudly say,
"opera chairs."  The matrons who attend to serving the
refreshments to-night look younger for their years than
did the women of Mrs. Kronborg's time, and the children
all look like city children.  The little boys wear "Buster
Browns" and the little girls Russian blouses.  The coun-
try child, in made-overs and cut-downs, seems to have
vanished from the face of the earth.
     At one of the tables, with her Dutch-cut twin boys,
sits a fair-haired, dimpled matron who was once Lily
Fisher.  Her husband is president of the new bank, and
she "goes East for her summers," a practice which causes
envy and discontent among her neighbors.  The twins are
well-behaved children, biddable, meek, neat about their
clothes, and always mindful of the proprieties they have
learned at summer hotels.  While they are eating their ice-
cream and trying not to twist the spoon in their mouths,
a little shriek of laughter breaks from an adjacent table.
The twins look up.  There sits a spry little old spinster
whom they know well.  She has a long chin, a long nose,
and she is dressed like a young girl, with a pink sash and
a lace garden hat with pink rosebuds.  She is surrounded
by a crowd of boys,--loose and lanky, short and thick,--
who are joking with her roughly, but not unkindly.
     "Mamma," one of the twins comes out in a shrill
treble, "why is Tillie Kronborg always talking about a
thousand dollars?"
     The boys, hearing this question, break into a roar of
laughter, the women titter behind their paper napkins,
and even from Tillie there is a little shriek of apprecia-
tion.  The observing child's remark had made every one
suddenly realize that Tillie never stopped talking about
that particular sum of money.  In the spring, when she
went to buy early strawberries, and was told that they
were thirty cents a box, she was sure to remind the grocer
that though her name was Kronborg she didn't get a
thousand dollars a night.  In the autumn, when she went
to buy her coal for the winter, she expressed amazement
at the price quoted her, and told the dealer he must
have got her mixed up with her niece to think she could
pay such a sum.  When she was making her Christmas
presents, she never failed to ask the women who came into
her shop what you COULD make for anybody who got a
thousand dollars a night.  When the Denver papers an-
nounced that Thea Kronborg had married Frederick Otten-
burg, the head of the Brewers' Trust, Moonstone people
expected that Tillie's vain-gloriousness would take an-
other form.  But Tillie had hoped that Thea would marry
a title, and she did not boast much about Ottenburg,--
at least not until after her memorable trip to Kansas City
to hear Thea sing.
     Tillie is the last Kronborg left in Moonstone.  She lives
alone in a little house with a green yard, and keeps a fancy-
work and millinery store.  Her business methods are in-
formal, and she would never come out even at the end
of the year, if she did not receive a draft for a good round
sum from her niece at Christmas time.  The arrival of this
draft always renews the discussion as to what Thea would
do for her aunt if she really did the right thing.  Most of
the Moonstone people think Thea ought to take Tillie
to New York and keep her as a companion.  While they
are feeling sorry for Tillie because she does not live at the
Plaza, Tillie is trying not to hurt their feelings by show-
ing too plainly how much she realizes the superiority of
her position.  She tries to be modest when she complains
to the postmaster that her New York paper is more than
three days late.  It means enough, surely, on the face of
it, that she is the only person in Moonstone who takes a
New York paper or who has any reason for taking one.  A
foolish young girl, Tillie lived in the splendid sorrows of
"Wanda" and "Strathmore"; a foolish old girl, she lives
in her niece's triumphs.  As she often says, she just missed
going on the stage herself.
     That night after the sociable, as Tillie tripped home
with a crowd of noisy boys and girls, she was perhaps a
shade troubled.  The twin's question rather lingered in her
ears.  Did she, perhaps, insist too much on that thousand
dollars?  Surely, people didn't for a minute think it was
the money she cared about?  As for that, Tillie tossed her
head, she didn't care a rap.  They must understand that
this money was different.
     When the laughing little group that brought her home
had gone weaving down the sidewalk through the leafy
shadows and had disappeared, Tillie brought out a rocking
chair and sat down on her porch.  On glorious, soft summer
nights like this, when the moon is opulent and full, the
day submerged and forgotten, she loves to sit there behind
her rose-vine and let her fancy wander where it will.  If
you chanced to be passing down that Moonstone street
and saw that alert white figure rocking there behind the
screen of roses and lingering late into the night, you might
feel sorry for her, and how mistaken you would be!  Tillie
lives in a little magic world, full of secret satisfactions.
Thea Kronborg has given much noble pleasure to a world
that needs all it can get, but to no individual has she
given more than to her queer old aunt in Moonstone.  The
legend of Kronborg, the artist, fills Tillie's life; she feels
rich and exalted in it.  What delightful things happen in
her mind as she sits there rocking!  She goes back to those
early days of sand and sun, when Thea was a child and
Tillie was herself, so it seems to her, "young."  When
she used to hurry to church to hear Mr. Kronborg's won-
derful sermons, and when Thea used to stand up by the
organ of a bright Sunday morning and sing "Come, Ye
Disconsolate."  Or she thinks about that wonderful time
when the Metropolitan Opera Company sang a week's
engagement in Kansas City, and Thea sent for her and
had her stay with her at the Coates House and go to
every performance at Convention Hall.  Thea let Tillie
go through her costume trunks and try on her wigs and
jewels.  And the kindness of Mr. Ottenburg!  When Thea
dined in her own room, he went down to dinner with
Tillie, and never looked bored or absent-minded when
she chattered.  He took her to the hall the first time
Thea sang there, and sat in the box with her and helped
her through "Lohengrin."  After the first act, when Tillie
turned tearful eyes to him and burst out, "I don't care,
she always seemed grand like that, even when she was a
girl.  I expect I'm crazy, but she just seems to me full of
all them old times!"--Ottenburg was so sympathetic
and patted her hand and said, "But that's just what she
is, full of the old times, and you are a wise woman to see
it."  Yes, he said that to her.  Tillie often wondered how
she had been able to bear it when Thea came down the
stairs in the wedding robe embroidered in silver, with a
train so long it took six women to carry it.
     Tillie had lived fifty-odd years for that week, but she
got it, and no miracle was ever more miraculous than that.
When she used to be working in the fields on her father's
Minnesota farm, she couldn't help believing that she
would some day have to do with the "wonderful," though
her chances for it had then looked so slender.
     The morning after the sociable, Tillie, curled up in bed,
was roused by the rattle of the milk cart down the street.
Then a neighbor boy came down the sidewalk outside her
window, singing "Casey Jones" as if he hadn't a care in
the world.  By this time Tillie was wide awake.  The
twin's question, and the subsequent laughter, came back
with a faint twinge.  Tillie knew she was short-sighted
about facts, but this time--  Why, there were her scrap-
books, full of newspaper and magazine articles about Thea,
and half-tone cuts, snap-shots of her on land and sea, and
photographs of her in all her parts.  There, in her parlor, was
the phonograph that had come from Mr. Ottenburg last
June, on Thea's birthday; she had only to go in there and
turn it on, and let Thea speak for herself.  Tillie finished
brushing her white hair and laughed as she gave it a smart
turn and brought it into her usual French twist.  If Moon-
stone doubted, she had evidence enough: in black and
white, in figures and photographs, evidence in hair lines
on metal disks.  For one who had so often seen two and
two as making six, who had so often stretched a point,
added a touch, in the good game of trying to make the
world brighter than it is, there was positive bliss in having
such deep foundations of support.  She need never tremble
in secret lest she might sometime stretch a point in Thea's
favor.--  Oh, the comfort, to a soul too zealous, of having
at last a rose so red it could not be further painted, a lily
so truly auriferous that no amount of gilding could exceed
the fact!
     Tillie hurried from her bedroom, threw open the doors
and windows, and let the morning breeze blow through
her little house.
     In two minutes a cob fire was roaring in her kitchen
stove, in five she had set the table.  At her household work
Tillie was always bursting out with shrill snatches of song,
and as suddenly stopping, right in the middle of a phrase,
as if she had been struck dumb.  She emerged upon the
back porch with one of these bursts, and bent down to get
her butter and cream out of the ice-box.  The cat was
purring on the bench and the morning-glories were thrust-
ing their purple trumpets in through the lattice-work in a
friendly way.  They reminded Tillie that while she was
waiting for the coffee to boil she could get some flowers
for her breakfast table.  She looked out uncertainly at a
bush of sweet-briar that grew at the edge of her yard, off
across the long grass and the tomato vines.  The front
porch, to be sure, was dripping with crimson ramblers
that ought to be cut for the good of the vines; but never
the rose in the hand for Tillie!  She caught up the kitchen
shears and off she dashed through grass and drenching dew.
Snip, snip; the short-stemmed sweet-briars, salmon-pink
and golden-hearted, with their unique and inimitable woody
perfume, fell into her apron.
     After she put the eggs and toast on the table, Tillie
took last Sunday's New York paper from the rack beside
the cupboard and sat down, with it for company.  In the
Sunday paper there was always a page about singers, even
in summer, and that week the musical page began with a
sympathetic account of Madame Kronborg's first per-
formance of ISOLDE in London.  At the end of the notice,
there was a short paragraph about her having sung for the
King at Buckingham Palace and having been presented
with a jewel by His Majesty.
     Singing for the King; but Goodness! she was always
doing things like that!  Tillie tossed her head.  All through
breakfast she kept sticking her sharp nose down into the
glass of sweet-briar, with the old incredible lightness of
heart, like a child's balloon tugging at its string.  She had
always insisted, against all evidence, that life was full of
fairy tales, and it was!  She had been feeling a little down,
perhaps, and Thea had answered her, from so far.  From
a common person, now, if you were troubled, you might
get a letter.  But Thea almost never wrote letters.  She
answered every one, friends and foes alike, in one way,
her own way, her only way.  Once more Tillie has to re-
mind herself that it is all true, and is not something she has
"made up."  Like all romancers, she is a little terrified at
seeing one of her wildest conceits admitted by the hard-
headed world.  If our dream comes true, we are almost
afraid to believe it; for that is the best of all good fortune,
and nothing better can happen to any of us.
     When the people on Sylvester Street tire of Tillie's
stories, she goes over to the east part of town, where her
legends are always welcome.  The humbler people of
Moonstone still live there.  The same little houses sit
under the cottonwoods; the men smoke their pipes in the
front doorways, and the women do their washing in the
back yard.  The older women remember Thea, and how
she used to come kicking her express wagon along the side-
walk, steering by the tongue and holding Thor in her lap.
Not much happens in that part of town, and the people
have long memories.  A boy grew up on one of those
streets who went to Omaha and built up a great business,
and is now very rich.  Moonstone people always speak of
him and Thea together, as examples of Moonstone enter-
prise.  They do, however, talk oftener of Thea.  A voice has
even a wider appeal than a fortune.  It is the one gift that
all creatures would possess if they could.  Dreary Maggie
Evans, dead nearly twenty years, is still remembered be-
cause Thea sang at her funeral "after she had studied in
Chicago."
     However much they may smile at her, the old inhabi-
tants would miss Tillie.  Her stories give them something
to talk about and to conjecture about, cut off as they are
from the restless currents of the world.  The many naked
little sandbars which lie between Venice and the main-
land, in the seemingly stagnant water of the lagoons, are
made habitable and wholesome only because, every night,
a foot and a half of tide creeps in from the sea and winds
its fresh brine up through all that network of shining water-
ways.  So, into all the little settlements of quiet people,
tidings of what their boys and girls are doing in the world
bring real refreshment; bring to the old, memories, and
to the young, dreams.

                              THE END