THE NEW HOME
The sisters were certainly the oddest pair that Jane had ever
seen--these two who were to be their near neighbors while Jane and
the Powells lived in Greenville.
Lydia, the elder of the two, was as different from her poor
half-demented sister as it was possible for any one to be.
Lydia was tall, built on heroic lines with a breadth of shoulder
amazing in a woman. She had a face that matched the rest of her,
large featured, rugged, with a mouth that seldom smiled. When Lydia
Terrin did smile, Jane was reminded of a sunbeam shining for a
transient moment on a slab of jagged granite. The smile never lighted
up her features, but lingered for a moment and then vanished, leaving
one to wonder if she had really smiled at all.
Such was the woman who faced the weary travelers now over a pot of
savory beef stew.
She did not smile. Her manner was almost forbidding. But the gesture
of her long wooden spoon toward the table was unmistakable.
“Sit down,” she said. “We have been waiting for you as one pig waits
for another. I hope you will like the stew, though it is not as good
as the pot we made last week. Do you think so, Marion?”
“Mad Marion,” who had been pulling out the chairs of her guests,
bowing and smiling all the time in a truly remarkable manner, started
at the abrupt question. She looked bewildered, Jane thought, and a
little frightened.
“Certainly, my dear! I mean certainly not!” cried the poor creature.
“Oh dear, I’m not sure what I mean!”
“Don’t act so silly,” retorted sister Lydia sternly. “The trouble
with you, Marion, is that you talk too much!”
Jane had an hysterical desire to giggle. She checked the desire since
to have laughed at that moment would have been neither polite nor
kind.
As she sank into a chair and allowed the “granite sister,” as she
ever afterward called Lydia Terrin in her thoughts, fill a great
plate with the steaming savory stew, Jane felt like Alice in her
famous adventures in Wonderland.
“The poor little crazy sister could be the Mad Hatter,” she thought,
as she accepted and buttered a slice of delicious bread. “And the
other--well I don’t know who she’d be unless it was the Duchess who
had a baby that turned into a pig. Oh, dear, maybe I’m crazy too!”
However, no eccentricities of the Terrin sisters could make that meal
any other than a delicious, wonderfully satisfactory one.
“Guess I had better go to bed, if you’ll show me where I am to
sleep,” Jane said, almost as soon as the meal was over and struggling
to keep her heavy eyes open, and in a few minutes more was ushered to
a room.
It did not take her long to undress, and then she slipped in between
the caressing sheets of a bed as soft as the fleeciest cloud and
breathed a deep sigh of utter weariness.
Then came morning, with a hot sun streaming in at her windows.
Jane’s first impulse was to jump up quickly and dress. She would be
late for school!
Then came the swift realization that there would be no school this
morning. They had left Coal Run, its dirt and confusion and misery
behind them. This was Greenville, and though it might not be better
than the mining town, it might be kinder.
She winced at the memory of her departure from Coal Run--of the
children running down the road and calling after her tauntingly.
There was a stir in the room. Jane turned over quickly and saw poor
Marion bobbing and smiling in the doorway.
“Breakfast’s ready. Oh, dear, yes! Been ready for some time.”
Jane jumped up, confused and sorry. She winced at the sudden action
and felt tentatively her stiff muscles. She had forgotten the
accident of yesterday and that she must expect to be lame and sore
for some time to come.
“Oh, I’m sorry to have been so lazy,” she apologized, as the little
woman continued to bob and smile in the doorway. “What must you think
of me, coming here and sleeping so late?”
“Perfectly all right, my dear--perfectly. Tired out after yesterday.
Yes, yes! Natural! Youth must be served!”
“Marion!” cried Lydia sternly from the kitchen. “Come out here! You
talk too much!”
Poor Marion disappearing on the instant, Jane looked with wonder
about the bare little room with its comfortable bed.
Who were these queer, eccentric women who kept house all alone, who
seemed, by the furnishings of their house and the clothes they wore,
to be very poor, and yet who were so hospitable to strangers?
She pondered the question as she dressed slowly and painfully.
There were purple bruises all over her and every joint and muscle
protested as she moved.
“I’d better rub something on me or I won’t be of any use at all,” she
thought ruefully.
In a few moments she had done all she could toward making herself
presentable. Her clothes were torn from the accident of the previous
day, and though she wore a comb in her sleek bobbed hair, there was
no brush to smooth it to its usual plain neatness.
She felt uncomfortable and unlike her usual clean, neat self when she
entered the large cozy front room of the Terrin sisters.
A delicious, plentiful breakfast served from the stove by Lydia
helped to raise her spirits, and her heart warmed more than ever
toward these two hospitable people.
Mr. and Mrs. Powell had breakfasted long before, Lydia told Jane,
while Marion nodded and beamed at her from a chair across the table.
Jane could see from the window that the moving-men had returned and
were unloading the furniture. Instantly she was impatient to be
off and help Mrs. Powell with the hundred and one tasks she knew
confronted her.
She finished a cup of hot chocolate and her second egg in hurried,
grateful gulps, then pushed back her chair.
“You’ve both been awfully good,” she said, looking from Marion to her
sister. “When we get settled you must come over and have dinner with
us. I must run and help Mrs. Powell now.”
When she was gone both eccentric sisters stared after her for a
moment.
“Old-fashioned little thing,” said Lydia, as she jerked a plate from
the table and set it in the sink. “Plain but capable. I’ll bet my
life she’s capable.”
“Oh, yes, by all means, very. Surely,” murmured Marion. She was
muttering on vaguely when a stern glance from her sister sent her
into deep confusion.
“You talk too much, Marion,” said Lydia. “Come, help me with the
dishes.”
Next door at the house that had seemed so dreary the night before
Jane found everything bustle and confusion and--sunshine. As she went
from room to room Jane’s heart warmed to this sunniness, for there
was scarcely a spot in the little house that did not receive a share
of it. She wondered how she could ever have thought it dreary!
When she asked harassed, dust-grimed Mrs. Powell to set her to work,
that lady confronted her with a list of things she needed from the
general store.
“You will help me more by doing the shopping than in any other way,
Jane. Why,” with a dramatic gesture of the hand, “I haven’t a thing
to clean with, even.”
Jane smiled, for this indeed was tragedy to Mrs. Powell. She took the
list and pledged herself to secure the articles on it. One of the
moving men, a resident of Greenville, took it upon himself to direct
her to “the best store in town.”
“You go down two short blocks,” he said, indicating the direction
with the wave of a dirty, stubby forefinger. “Then you turn to your
left and go up two long blocks until you come to the foot of Rose
Hill, where all the swells live. There you’ll find Mason’s general
store and you can get everything at Mason’s from canned soup to fish
hooks.”
Jane thanked him and set out, glad to be free of the noise and
confusion for a little while and have a look at the town from which
she hoped so much.
Nor did Greenville disappoint her. It was as different from Coal
Run as night is from day. Where in Coal Run were squalor, dirt,
disorder; here was neatness, cleanliness, beauty. Greenville was a
thriving town, and showed it. Its inhabitants shared in the general
prosperity, and showed that too. The plainest little house was
freshly painted and displayed its patch of carefully tended garden.
There was a poorer section in Greenville over beyond the railroad
tracks, but Jane did not know this until some time later.
As she proceeded toward the center of town the girl’s delight grew.
Here the houses became more pretentious until, at the foot of Rose
Hill Jane could look up at handsome houses that seemed palatial to
the dazzled eyes of the girl from Coal Run.
There was a store at hand, and a sign proclaimed it as Mason’s. This
was the store, thought Jane, where one could get everything from
“canned soup to fish hooks.”
Jane suddenly remembered her torn dress, her dusty shoes, her
unbrushed hair. Mason’s was so immaculate that she hated to enter it
as she was. Still, Mrs. Powell needed those things----
She marched resolutely to the door of the store and pulled it open.
There was a gasp and a protest in a high, petulant, very pretty
feminine voice.
“Oh, how stupid! You have made me drop my package!”