BETTY COMES THROUGH
Apparently Jane was very much at ease as she gave her hand to Mr.
Browning and smiled at him. In reality she was only a frightened girl
wondering what would happen next.
But Mr. Browning was very nice, very courteous and pleasant, and
before they had been in conversation five minutes Jane felt that they
would get along together and that the change she had so dreaded was
not going to be so dreadful after all.
For the rest of that day Jane remained in almost complete charge of
the office while her old employer and new went over details of the
business together.
Mr. Garwick was very nice, often referring to her and asking her for
certain details that he knew she had right at her tongue’s end.
Jane felt that he was doing this to impress Mr. Browning with her
worth, and she appreciated and in her heart thanked him for it even
while tears of regret rose often to her eyes at thought of severing
the old connection.
The day was over at last. Mr. Garwick slapped down a huge sheaf of
papers on the desk and rose to his feet. He held out a hand to Mr.
Browning.
Jane watched them, her heart beating rapidly, knowing that the moment
of parting had come.
“Well, I’ve done all I can for you, Browning,” Mr. Garwick said, as
the two men shook hands heartily. “If there’s anything you want to
know about, you know where you can get in touch with me at a moment’s
notice. Although,” and here he turned to Jane, “I’m quite sure you
will find I am leaving you a veritable dictionary of information in
the person of Miss Cross here. Call on her for anything, Browning,
and if you’re ever disappointed in her, then my name’s not John
Garwick!”
Feeling embarrassed but very grateful to her old employer, Jane found
herself shaking hands with him and saying with a little catch behind
the words:
“Thank you for--everything, Mr. Garwick. I wish you the best luck in
the world!”
There was a pleasant response, and then the door closed behind John
Garwick and Jane was left alone with her new employer.
“Well, Miss Cross,” Mr. Browning was speaking and Jane liked the way
he included her in his sweeping gesture about the office, “we seem to
have been left in possession of the field. We’ve done about enough
work for one day, I should think. Suppose we close the office and
start fresh again to-morrow morning?”
Jane gave him a smile that said she would be perfectly willing,
and went for her hat. She put it on and went toward the door. Mr.
Browning rose and came over to her, holding out his hand.
“Mr. Garwick has given me a most excellent recommendation of you,” he
said. Jane thought how handsome he was but how tired he looked with
those deep lines about the corners of his mouth. “I am convinced that
I could not have a worthier helper than Miss Jane Cross. I hope you
will find things just as pleasant here as you did under Mr. Garwick’s
regime.”
Jane thanked him and went out. She was very thoughtful all the way
home.
“I like him--and I’m very sorry for him,” she told herself,
remembering the lines of suffering in the face of her new employer.
“What a shame that his wife and daughter can’t stand by him now! I’d
like to go to that Betty Browning and give her a piece of my mind!”
Meanwhile, the subject of Jane’s rather strenuous reflections was
living through a period in her life that seemed to the former rich
girl as bewildering and tantalizing as a dream.
Her solid world had been knocked from beneath her feet. Everything
was new, unreal. The only solid fact of her existence was her father,
and to him she clung with a desperation that soon ripened into a
beautiful affection.
“I never knew dad before,” she told herself, wondering. “He seemed
always to be there, but I just never--thought about him!”
That had been the fault of her up-bringing, though Betty did not
realize it. Brought close to the hard facts of existence, she could
see her father as an individual, not merely the holder of the
money-bags to whom one went when the allowance ran short and a new
dress seemed an absolute necessity.
Viewed as an individual, Betty found her father very interesting and,
more than anything else, lovable. He responded to her new personal
dependence upon him in a wonderful way, and Betty began to wonder
vaguely if, in losing everything she had heretofore regarded as
necessary to her very existence, she had not found something far more
precious and desirable in the new relationship between herself and
her father.
The parting with her mother was a wrench--a bad one. Betty loved
her mother despite the fact that she was bewildered by the selfish
indifference with which she treated the man who had suffered so much.
Mrs. Browning’s father had evidently known his daughter, and he had
left her the little he had to leave in the form of an annuity. It
was a meager income according to Mrs. Browning’s standards, but at
least it would not leave her a penniless dependent on her relatives,
to whom she now went for the sake of the ease and luxury of their
homes and to escape the narrow life her husband could give her in the
little cottage.
“You don’t think of dad at all, mother,” Betty protested the day
before Mrs. Browning was to leave Greenville for an indefinite stay
with her relatives. “Don’t you suppose he is having a bad time, at
all?”
“He deserves it,” Mrs. Browning snapped back at her. “He has been
criminally careless, and he deserves everything he gets! In a case
like this it’s the innocent family that suffers every time.”
“I don’t know as we have been so innocent,” said Betty slowly.
Her mother whirled about and stared at her for all the world, thought
Betty, as though she were looking at a stranger. And so she was, for
Mrs. Browning, who thought she knew her daughter so well, was looking
at this Betty for the first time.
“Not innocent! What do you mean, Elizabeth?”
Betty turned and met her mother’s cold glance steadily.
“Well, we have gone on spending money just the same, haven’t we?”
said the girl. “Even when dad said we were too extravagant and asked
us to be careful, we never tried to help him. I am only trying to
say,” she added, seeing that her mother’s stony gaze never wavered
from her, “that perhaps dad isn’t altogether to blame for--what
happened.”
“This is your father’s work,” said Mrs. Browning angrily. “He has
turned you against me!”
“Oh, never!” cried Betty. “He has never said a word!”
“Silence!” Mrs. Browning held up a white, jeweled hand--she had
refused to part with any of her jewels. “I’ll not listen to another
word. If you prefer your father to me, Elizabeth, you are free
to make your choice. Stay here with him--and may you enjoy the
experience more than I think you will!”
That was the first wrench. The second came with the actual selling
and vacating of their house.
That was hard, for pretty Betty had loved her home, and the thought
of moving into strange quarters, poor ones, filled her with terror.
She shrank from the solicitude of her friends. Some of them, to
whom the social leadership of the Brownings had always been a thorn
in the flesh, gloated almost openly. Others pretended sympathy and
patronizingly gave Betty to understand that a mere loss of fortune
need make no difference in their relations.
But it scarcely mattered which group they belonged to, for Betty was
to realize with an aching sense of loss that among all her so-called
friends there was not one--not one!--who had an actual claim to that
term! She began to realize dimly that just as she had failed to think
of her father, so she had failed, by her selfishness, to make true
and lasting friends.
She came to long only for the time when she and her father might be
alone together in whatever place he might choose for them. There
would be some privacy at least, a place where they could shut the
door against the cruel curiosity of their “friends.”
Again her father was the only solid, real, unchanging thing on her
horizon.
Despite his absorption in the winding up of his affairs and
preparation for a new start in business, he watched her closely with
those understanding eyes of his and seemed ever at her side when she
needed comfort.
There was that time after Gladys Vane had been to call and had left
Betty wincing beneath the venomous thrusts of her poisonous tongue.
Mr. Browning came in as Gladys went out. He made straight for the
library and found Betty crouched in one of the big chairs, staring
unseeingly before her.
“Never mind, Betty,” her father said and touched her cheek gently as
he sat on the arm of her chair. “The life we’re going to, you and I,
may not be as glittery as the one we’re leaving but it’s a lot more
real. You will make real friends from now on, Betty girl, friends
that are worthy of the name.”
“Well,” said Betty bravely as she cuddled her cheek against his hand,
“I’ve got one mighty good friend, already! Daddy,” she added after
a pause, “I don’t see quite how it was, but I guess it was in part
my fault. I wasn’t always nice to the girls, and if we don’t give
friendship I suppose we don’t get it--not the real kind.”
Then there was the day when they were to move into their “new
quarters” as Mr. Browning always called the cottage he had rented for
himself and Betty.
Betty had never seen it--she could not bring herself to speak of it
even to her father.
No one ever learned how she had pictured the place in her mind, nor
just what kind of life she thought she was to be called upon to
endure, now that they were poor.
Her mother had so harped upon their poverty and pictured the horrors
of it so vividly that it was not at all strange if, in trying to
picture it to herself, Betty beheld in her mind the ugly vision of
the tenements across the railroad where herded a drifting, lazy class
of occasional workers and sometimes beggars of Greenville with their
slipshod families.
However that may be, when the day of her actual parting with the old
life arrived Betty found herself in sore need of comfort.
She was standing by the window in her own sitting room, watching for
the van that was to take a few--a very few--of their belongings to
the new home, when she heard her father’s quick step in the hall.
Betty felt her father’s hands on her shoulders, turning her about so
that she must face him. There were telltale tears in her eyes, but
she smiled, hoping that he would not notice them.
He did notice them, as he noticed everything about her now. The lines
about his eyes and mouth deepened and he looked very tired, almost
old.
“The van will be here in a few minutes, Betty,” he said. “And before
it comes, I want to tell you a few things about our new home--I want
to prepare you.”
“It’s coming!” thought Betty. She braced her shoulders for the shock,
but even then did not forget to smile. How tired he looked, how
weary and discouraged. She would not make things harder for him!
“It’s very different from this; but it’s not so bad, Betty. It’s a
little cottage set well back from the street, and it has five rooms
in it that could be made into a home--if anybody cared--” His voice
broke but he went on quickly. “It has a pleasant kitchen and a
nice porch with neglected roses that might be coaxed into blooming
sometime--perhaps next spring. It isn’t so bad, Bettykin. We might be
pretty happy there----”
Looking into his pleading, tired eyes, Betty forgot herself, forgot
everything but that he was appealing to her for hope and comfort and
that she must not fail him.
“Why, then, daddy,” she said, putting her arms about him, “I’ll make
a home for you. We’ll make it together. And, daddy dear, I do love
roses!”
If Betty had wanted any reward she got it in the strength of his arms
about her and his muffled cry.
“Betty, I knew you had it in you--you good little sport!”