“Come,” said Trina to the dentist, “let’s
go down and look—take a last look.”
They went out of Miss Baker’s room and descended
to the floor below. On the stairs, however, they
were met by Old Grannis. In his hands he carried
a little package. Was it possible that he too
had taken advantage of their misfortunes to join in
the raid upon the suite?
“I went in,” he began, timidly, “for—for
a few moments. This”—he indicated
the little package he carried—“this
was put up. It was of no value but to you.
I—I ventured to bid it in. I thought
perhaps”—his hand went to his chin,
“that you wouldn’t mind; that—in
fact, I bought it for you—as a present.
Will you take it?” He handed the package to
Trina and hurried on. Trina tore off the wrappings.
It was the framed photograph of McTeague and his wife
in their wedding finery, the one that had been taken
immediately after the marriage. It represented
Trina sitting very erect in a rep armchair, holding
her wedding bouquet straight before her, McTeague
standing at her side, his left foot forward, one hand
upon her shoulder, and the other thrust into the breast
of his “Prince Albert” coat, in the attitude
of a statue of a Secretary of State.
“Oh, it was good of him, it was good
of him,” cried Trina, her eyes filling again.
“I had forgotten to put it away. Of course
it was not for sale.”
They went on down the stairs, and arriving at the
door of the sitting-room, opened it and looked in.
It was late in the afternoon, and there was just light
enough for the dentist and his wife to see the results
of that day of sale. Nothing was left, not even
the carpet. It was a pillage, a devastation,
the barrenness of a field after the passage of a swarm
of locusts. The room had been picked and stripped
till only the bare walls and floor remained. Here
where they had been married, where the wedding supper
had taken place, where Trina had bade farewell to
her father and mother, here where she had spent those
first few hard months of her married life, where afterward
she had grown to be happy and contented, where she
had passed the long hours of the afternoon at her
work of whittling, and where she and her husband had
spent so many evenings looking out of the window before
the lamp was lit—here in what had been
her home, nothing was left but echoes and the emptiness
of complete desolation. Only one thing remained.
On the wall between the windows, in its oval glass
frame, preserved by some unknown and fearful process,
a melancholy relic of a vanished happiness, unsold,
neglected, and forgotten, a thing that nobody wanted,
hung Trina’s wedding bouquet.
