The Treachery of Miggie Bean

By Anna Alice Chapin

ARGARET to Maggie, Maggie to Meggie, and Meggie to Miggie. This one must suppose to have been the evolution of Miggie Bean's name, as known to her employers and associates. If, indeed, the term “evolution” can be applied to a process of such steady retrogression. Margaret is a beautiful and a stately name; it is distressing to think of its having been corrupted to the level of Miggie!

Yet the law of the fitness of things somehow prevails. You could not have called the freckle-faced, straggly-haired little kitchen girl Margaret without affronting the fair ghosts of dear dead ladies who once bore the name that means a pearl. Whereas Miggie—why, of divine right Miggie was Miggie, forever and ever, amen!

Miggie Bean was an orphan, and an ugly one—a little, sawed-off, pasty runt of a creature, Mrs. Crawley called her, not at all maliciously, but with the simple wish to be accurately descriptive. Miggie was a little, sawed-off, pasty sort of a creature, besides being an unclaimed, unplaced, and unwanted orphan, and Mrs. Crawley's kitchen maid.

Of course, the term kitchen maid had simply grown out of Mrs. Crawley's sudden increase in prosperity. Before she sold the South Meadow piece of land to the railway, and then successfully invested in a company that should have failed, and only by the grace of the God that looks after children and idiots, did not, Mrs. Crawley would have called Miggie “that orphan-asylum kid that comes in to help.” With the advent of a few extra hundred dollars one morning, the family dictionary was magically altered, and Mrs. Crawley's midday meal became lunch, just as Miggie Bean became her kitchen maid.

The orphan asylum in Colbourne was a primitive country institution, which perhaps explains its singular humanity and clemency in letting Miggie live on there after she was quite old enough to be fending for herself out in the big world.

Attractive orphans are snapped up quickly, but Miggie was not an attractive orphan, and no one had wanted her. She had been trained for service, but was such a little, frail, miserable thing that the kind-hearted matron did not like to send her adrift alone, even after she had reached the grown-up, wage-earning age of seventeen. So she lived on at the asylum, and went out to work by the day for the ladies of Colbourne, doing such work as the ruddy and well-fed housewives felt incapable of doing themselves.

And Miggie was happy. She sang while she scrubbed, and smiled to herself over the extra-heavy ironing. For she had a secret—a delectable, invigorating secret calculated to put life into you if you were ever so dead-beat. Miggie Bean was in love! And any one who has tried it knows what that means as stimulant, and sedative, and nourishment, all in one. It wasn't necessary for her to feel herself beloved; the exhilaration was in loving. Herein, you perceive, Miggie Bean had the great manner; she touched the stars.

The stout Mrs. Crawley commented on it to the thin Mrs. Baggs, as they rocked and worked together in the Crawleys' warm dining room on a glowing winter afternoon. It would once have been in the kitchen—soon it would be in the front parlor—that Mrs. Crawley would receive her guests. At present, she was in an in-between stage; so she entertained them on neutral ground—the dining room.

“Miggie Bean,” said Mrs. Crawley impressively, “has a young man!”

“Mercy me!” said Mrs. Baggs, opening a mild eye, and dropping a stitch—she was a lady who knitted. “What's the world coming to, I should like to know?”

“Only seventeen!” added Mrs. Crawley, shaking her large, foolish head, and she did not know that her reproachful words had once been the text of the most immortal of all pleas in court. “Sirs, only seventeen!” But how should Mrs. Crawley have acquaintance with Capponsacchi, the soldier priest? And what had Miggie Bean in common with Pompilia, except her innocent heart?

The undiscerning women vaguely felt that innocence and touched on it carelessly, but justly.

“She means well,” said Mrs. Baggs in tolerant fashion. “I guess Miggie Bean always means well.”

“Oh, I'd trust her, as far as that goes.” Mrs. Crawley smoothed out her wool: “But then, seventeen, Mrs. Baggs, is too young to have a young man!”

“I—I wasn't but eighteen when” began mild Mrs. Baggs.

“I was twenty-eight,” interrupted Mrs. Crawley sternly, in a way that disposed of the matter. Mrs. Baggs felt crestfallen and unaccountably abashed. Perhaps it was more modest to wait until you were twenty-eight.

With an effort at recovering her dignity, she asked hurriedly who the young man was.

“It's Sam Gibbs, who works for the cider-mill people. A good fellow, but wild. At least,” corrected Mrs. Crawley, “he looks wild. And, of course, his trade is against him.”

“Well—cider is a very righteous drink,” protested Mrs. Baggs timidly.

“I have always held,” said Mrs. Crawley, who weighed two hundred, and was austere, “that it opens the way to worse things!”

In the kitchen, Miggie Bean's voice was raised in a hymn of praise:

“Ain't that a Christmas carol,” asked Mrs. Baggs softly.

Mrs, Crawley nodded.

“It's real pretty,” said the visitor.

“Yes, it is,” said the hostess. After they had listened a moment, she added: “Miggie is going to sing in the Orphan Asylum Christmas Choir Association, on the twenty-fourth. At least, she is if she gets in. She don't know yet that she can.”

“It seems like I can't realize how close Christmas is.” Little Mrs. Baggs sighed helplessly. “Every year I think that I am going to prepare for it ahead, and some way I never get to it.”

“I've got my daughter and her husband coming,” said Mrs. Crawley, “but outside of that I don't know as I'll have things much different. Except food and things. Course, I always have that right!”

And Mrs. Crawley, who prided herself on her cooking, tossed her head.

Mrs. Baggs glanced at her, flushing slightly, and then said, in a hurried, wistful sort of way:

“I—I'm chairwoman of the Church Improvement Committee this year, and it's my turn to per—to pre—to preside,” faltered Mrs. Baggs, who was unused to the word, “at the Christmas supper. They want I should do the plum pudding. I said”—she hesitated—“I said that no one in Colbourne could make plum pudding along with you, Mis' Crawley.”

She paused, and looked at the large woman eagerly,

“I guess that's right!” smiled Mrs. Crawley in a comfortable manner, as she rocked her stout shape to and fro complacently.

There was a pause, while the fire crackled on the hearth, and the sun sparkled in at the frosted window. There was a red tinge in it now, for the short December day was swinging on its downward orbit.

“Mis' Crawley,” ventured Mrs. Baggs, with a deepening spot of pink in each thin old cheek, “you don't think you could—could help me out—about that plum pudding—just in a neighborly way?”

She stuck fast in a bog of hopeless embarrassment.

“Miss-is Baggs,” said Mrs. Crawley, sternly and reprovingly, “there's neighborliness and neighborliness! My plum pudding is, as you may say, a family matter—a matter of honor. Miss-is Baggs,” proceeded Mrs. Crawley, becoming almost oratorical, “my mother—my sainted mother's reputation was in her plum pudding. I will go so far as to say that my mother was her plum pudding! I really—do—not—see—how—I—possibly—could—stretch—a — point—not even for you, Miss-is Baggs!”

Before Mrs. Baggs had any opportunity to humble herself in apology, Miggie Bean burst into the room, with a square of white linen faintly smoking in her hands.

“Oh, ma'am, if you please!" she cried tragically. “Will you just look at what I've been ironing?”

Mrs. Crawley rose in the majesty of two hundred pounds and purple cashmere.

“Miggie Bean,” said she, “you've gone and burned my best drawn-work centerpiece!”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Miggie simply, stretching the thing out in two convulsive little red hands.

I have said that Miggie was ugly; I have said that she was not attractive; I have even indorsed Mrs. Crawley's description of her as a little, sawed-off, pasty runt, and so on. And I feel that in some obscure way I have been doing Miggie an injustice. I cannot take back flatly any of these terms; yet, in spite of them, I must declare that there were things not wholly unlovable in the little orphan's appearance. She was pasty-pale, perhaps, but that sort of skin is called mâte in people who can afford to dress for it. And she was little—absurdly little—and her small features were utterly irregular, and her drab-colored hair was limp and lusterless. And yet—and yet—perhaps we went too far in using the merciless word “ugly.” Pretty, of course, she was not; but there was a wistful curve to her thin lips, and her washed-out eyes had at moments so much expression that they made people uncomfortable. And there was a heaven of candor in her look. Dull hair, freckles, thin red wrists, and a paucity of flesh and blood all over, can never make wholly unbeautiful a girl who gives forth such a radiance of divine honesty and purity as little Miggie Bean.

She stood now, looking from the burned cloth to Mrs. Crawley and back again, in a passion of regret, a fervent, disproportioned longing to make it whole again—not to escape punishment, but to right a wrong.

“You may go on with your work,” said her employer, controlling herself before Mrs. Baggs. “Of course you will not be paid anything this week. The cloth cost more than your wages, anyhow.”

Miggie Bean's white little face grew no whiter, but it sharpened under the desperate feeling that convulsed her. Hardly seeming to know what she did, she dropped the ruined centerpiece and clasped her hands. Her wide, colorless gray eyes were filled with despairing tears.

“That will do,” said Mrs. Crawley sternly. “Go back to your ironing, and see that you don't spoil anything more!”

Pulling herself together, the girl stooped and picked up the cloth and went silently back to the kitchen.

Mrs. Baggs left almost immediately afterward. Like many weak, gentle persons, she disliked the sight of suffering, and she had been made vaguely uncomfortable by being obliged to witness Miggie's evident emotion and Mrs. Crawley's righteous hardness of heart. So, when she passed the kitchen door on her way to her own grounds, the gate of which was back of the Crawley house, she obeyed an idle but kindly impulse, and stopped there to say good night.

Opening the kitchen door a crack, she peered in, and called softly:

“Miggie! Miggie Bean!”

The young girl was sitting huddled, head on arms, and arms on knees, in the middle of a white cyclone of clothes, ironed and unironed. The fire burned red in the kitchen range, and a pot of potatoes, quite unheeded, was boiling over.

Mrs. Baggs was rather shocked and shy before such manifestation of feeling. A New Englander by tradition as well as by birth, she had been trained to consider having emotions at all slightly improper, and giving in to them wholly so. But she was of less strong and fine fiber than most of her sister New Englanders, so she was able to be sorry for the uncontrolled little kitchen maid, and she ventured, very shamefacedly, to say so.

“Dear me, I'm sorry, indeed I am, Miggie Bean. Don't you think, if you sponged it off, maybe, and bleached it, and”

“No,” said Miggie dully, without raising her head. “That sort of thing don't do any good. And, anyhow, she wouldn't think it did.” She looked up suddenly. “Why! It's Mrs. Baggs! Scuse me, ma'am! I thought it was myself speaking. I've been saying that sort of thing to myself over and over till I guess I got sort of dazedlike.”

“Miggie Bean,” said Mrs. Baggs gently but reprovingly, “you know you couldn't think I was yourself—now, could you? But about the centerpiece now”

“The iron burned it through in one place,” said the girl in a final way.

Mrs. Baggs shook her head commiseratingly.

“And Mis' Crawley”—she hesitated—“Mis' Crawley will really expect you to give up all your wages?”

“I s'pose so,” said Miggie drearily. “She said so, and she never goes back on a thing, once she's heard herself say it.”

Then suddenly it seemed as if the pent-up things in her poor little stormy soul had to come out, helter-skelter, whether she wanted them to or not. She threw out her slim arms in a wild and rebellious gesture, and in the dull red light that glowed through the tiny, half-open door in the front of the range, her small face did not look ugly, but very tragic. The swiftly fading sunshine from the window glinted on the straggling hair. In her dirty clothes, and in that pose of despair, she struck the timid, neat old woman who watched her as a curiously and incomprehensibly impressive little figure. For even to the dull and uninitiate, suffering must ever have a dignity of its own.

“Oh, it ain't fair!” cried Miggie Bean hoarsely. “It's only a centerpiece to her; but it's just my whole life to me!”

She did not care whether Mrs. Baggs could sympathize or not. Her bursting heart had to be heard, and she talked on.

“I shan't be let in the Christmas choir unless I can get a dress to wear. And I was saving up! I was saving up for so long! And this week would have just made it!”

She broke into low sobs.

“And did you want to be in the Christmas choir so much, Miggie?” asked Mrs. Baggs, not understanding, but pitying her.

“Why, ma'am,” said Miggie, in utter, simple pride, “I was to sing 'When shepherds watch' as a solo, and Sam Gibbs—he was to be there—to hear me and”

She did not blush, but her voice trailed off to a hushed whisper. She was talking of a dream, a dream that was passing into the populous, exquisite, heartbreaking land of might-have-beens.

“Sam,” she went on softly, “ain't never seen me, except like this, or some such way. He—he'd never know me in a real white dress, with blue ribbons!”

Mrs. Baggs was herself primitive, and it did not occur to her that there could be devised few costumes that would be less suitable and becoming to poor little Miggie Bean than a white dress with blue ribbons. She thought it quite a proper garb for a young girl, whatever her type, and thought Miggie's disappointment very natural.

It was just as she turned to leave that her own hour of temptation overtook her—black, startling, and insidious.

I have said that Mrs. Baggs was a weak soul among that strong sisterhood who have made New England a watchword for an integrity as true, and about as comforting, as steel. Mrs. Baggs had, until now, been a good and a dutiful woman, but she had never before been tried. She had never before been chairwoman of the Church Improvement Association, and never had her need been so urgent. Some one said once that temptation was the combination of inclination with opportunity. In Mrs. Baggs, the inclination lay dormant; the opportunity she found ready to her grasp, in Miggie Bean.

The old woman's heart beat fast, as, after a furtive look from right to left, she took her fate in both hands, even as Miggie had taken the burned centerpiece half an hour ago.

“Miggie Bean,” she said in a husky burst, “you can earn ten dollars if you want to!”

The girl sprang to her feet, and stood and stared at her. Ten dollars! It sounded as impossible to her as the pot of gold to a cynic. Ten dollars would mean wages for a month. Ten dollars would mean slippers and white stockings, and a pink velvet rose for her hair, besides the white dress and blue ribbons. Ten dollars! But ten dollars, of course, were not among the things that could happen.

Then the voice of the elderly tempter—herself dallying with temptation—continued insinuatingly from the doorway:

“Get me Mis' Crawley's receipt for plum pudding, and I will give you ten dollars!”

Miggie Bean pinched herself to be sure she was not dreaming. Even when the pinches hurt, she felt uncertain of her own hearing. When she had recovered sufficiently to run to the door, there was no sign of Mrs. Baggs. Yet the words still rang and echoed in a sinister, yet beguiling, fashion through the kitchen:

“Get me Mis' Crawley's receipt for plum pudding, and I will give you ten dollars!”

She went home that night to the asylum in a daze of bewilderment, and even in her sleep the mysterious sentence of temptation sounded in her ears.

I don't think she would have yielded, if she had not chanced, the very next morning, to run into Sam Gibbs at the village store. She had gone there to get some raisins for Mrs. Crawley, who, with her help, was now in the depths of plum pudding for Christmas. And there was Sam, a big, debonair fellow, with a brown skin and a merry eye, chaffing the shopkeeper's daughter over the counter.

Why Sam Gibbs appealed to Miggie's heart is simple enough to understand. He stood for everything romantic, and gay, and attractive, and daring, and masculine—which is worth a whole row of other adjectives—in her whole pinched, bleak, starved little life. Of course, she was worth ten of him, but she could not have been expected to see that—and who would want her to? Establish a standard of worthiness, and you annihilate the very breath of romance, which is strongest at taking chances.

“Hello, little un!” called Sam cheerfully across the shop. “They say you sing the carols to beat the band!”

Miggie flushed up becomingly.

“There ain't a-going to be no band; it's a harmonium!” she said, with a shy effort at a smile, and she turned hurriedly to the shopkeeper with what she tried to make a superior and gracious air. The effect must have been marred by a torn petticoat hem dragging about her ankles, but it served to draw Sam Gibbs' attention to the fact that the ankles themselves were slim and shapely. And the color that embarrassment and excitement had driven into Miggie's cheek suggested that at times she might conceivably be not entirely plain.

At all events it was worth a tentative mortgage, and as he passed the girl waiting at the farther counter, Sam leaned close to her, and whispered half jestingly:

“If there's any dancing after the carols on Christmas Eve, save me one, won't you? Any one could tell by your pretty feet you could dance like a breeze!”

After that, of course, Miggie Bean would have committed about any crime in order to have dainty shoes and stockings for the occasion; already it was taking on the glow of gold and of rose that dazzles us only a time or two in a life.

“Yes, maybe you'd better put in some currants, too,” she heard herself saying.

In another moment she was speeding back to Mrs. Crawley with the bundle. A new light was in her eyes. I am sure that it burns in those of great criminals who are planning some daring enterprise in which they have judged the prize as well worth the risk.

All that day she worked with Mrs. Crawley, proving so efficient, so helpful, and so quick, that that excellent lady felt more than once inclined to pay her in full the wages that she had deducted because of the spoiled centerpiece. However, she did not, and Miggie Bean had, in fact, no hand held out to save her from the downward path! One odd and instructive truth which has been plumbed by pretty nearly every woman at one time or another, came home to her just about now—that a woman battling with temptation of any sort never receives any help from man, woman, Providence, chance, or circumstance. The only person who really seems to keep her in mind is the devil.

Late that evening, on her way home to the asylum after her day's work at Mrs. Crawley's, Miggie knocked at the door of Mrs. Baggs.

The various church and charitable societies were officially supposed to fuse for the Christmas festivities. Actually, the wheels within wheels revolved as fast and with as much friction as usual. Petty jealousies and rivalries clouded the clear Yuletide, till the minister prayed for patience, and the matron of the orphan asylum said that it passed belief how sisters in God could act so.

And about the most startling event in the week of jubilation was the serving, at the Christmas Eve supper of the Church Improvement Committee, of a marvelous and succulent plum pudding, made after the one special, secret, almost patented, and altogether sacred recipe of Mrs. Crawley and her sainted mother! And it was Mrs. Baggs, almost light-headed with triumph in her brief authority, who served the dish! A certain trick of flavoring, a certain mellowness of consistency—there could be no mistaking it, and even if it did not come signed from Mrs. Crawley's kitchen. Even if the eaters thereof could have put it down to a felicitous chance, Mrs. Crawley's demeanor would have settled the matter. She recognized her plum pudding! She knew that pudding like that could be made from no ordinary recipe!

Outraged and yet bewildered, she swept the room for some one upon whom her suspicion and wrath might fall. But she was helpless. If, in her insulted soul, she knew that Mrs. Baggs had stolen her recipe, she had no idea how she could have done so. And so she had to sit helplessly by and listen to people smacking their lips and praising the pudding that Mrs. Baggs had made!

Mrs. Baggs, through all her elation, was nervous. She was new to the business of being chairwoman, and when she tapped on the table to call the gathering to order, she did so with patent diffidence. After she had finally plucked up sufficient courage, she reminded them that in the town hall that evening the young people were holding a small celebration, with some carols, and a little dancing afterward.

The orphan-asylum people were joining in, and it at least seemed a common ground where all factions could meet for the nonce without hostility. The little hall was soon crowded.

Miggie Bean, in the white dress and blue ribbons, sat in the front row of the semicircle of young girls who were to sing of Noel. She was as white as her dress, and the despair that was in her heart looked out dumbly through her eyes. Her hair was drawn back, parted behind, and wound in tight braids around her head, making her look like a little medieval saint in an ecclesiastical painting. But that she did not know or care about.

“Lord!” said Sam Gibbs, staring up at her as she sat stonily upon the platform, not seeing even him. “If you wanted to forget that little girl, you couldn't!”

The carols began, and slowly, like a person in a trance, Miggie rose and began to sing her solo.

Thin and pure as a treble harp string her girl's voice floated out:

She stumbled and faltered in the words. A queer, dazed, frightened expression was dawning in her wide eyes. A little stir of wonder and apprehension began to rise and spread among the other girls grouped behind her on the platform. She tried to recover herself and go on:

The school-teacher stopped playing on the harmonium, and turned in surprise. There was a breath of waiting. Miggie Bean stood there, white—ah, far, far whiter than her dress!—swaying like a little, frail flower—or was it only a weed?—in the wind. Suddenly she lifted her clasped hands to heaven.

“Oh, please forgive me, God!” she cried in her high, thin voice. “I have been very, very wicked and dishonest, and all for the sake of a white dress with blue ribbons! But I am not wicked enough to sing a Christmas carol while this is on my soul! I could not sing a Christmas carol—for Thee”

She sank down, sobbing, just where she stood on the platform. But to every one's surprise, Sam Gibbs stalked up, and lifted her, and carried her away from the curious eyes that stared and the excited tongues that commented.

And, of course, nobody need even have suspected Mrs. Baggs in the matter, for Miggie never said a word more than that—and that, as any one will admit, was under great spiritual pressure. But Mrs. Baggs said soon afterward that she didn't feel well, and went home.

“And,” in the words of one of the Colbourne ladies, “most of us knew who had tempted Miggie Bean, and wished we hadn't eaten so much of that dishonest plum pudding!”

As for Miggie, when the mists of a very real fainting fit cleared for her, she found herself in Sam's arms, and with all her heart she wished that she might faint again. But as she could not, she said shakily, but with hasty candor:

“You didn't understand! I cheated! I gave Mrs. Crawley's receipt to another woman, and—and she paid me for it!”

“I guess I understand,” said Sam, holding her tight. “And I understand that I've been hunting around for four or five years for a girl who'd be a sport—and honest—and pretty! And I reckon, now I've found her, I'd better hang on to her!”

“But, Sam,” she gasped, “why do you think I'm a sport?”

“If you weren't, honey, you wouldn't have taken a chance like you did!”

“And, oh, Sam, I'm not—I'm not—honest!” she whispered brokenly, hiding her eyes against his shoulder. “I let myself be bribed—I”

“But you told about it!" he cried, lifting up her head. “And you told about it so it wouldn't queer her! And if that's not square”

“And—Sam”—she could hardly get this out—“as for being pretty”

She was so ashamed and sad that she nearly slipped from his arms in a heap of humility.

“Say,” he said merrily, but with a caress in the tone, “I wish you could just see yourself, in your white dress with the blue ribbons!”

And then he kissed her.