FRESH GLIMPSES.
It was high noon when Joyce came quickly into the office, her face pale
and set, and a strange expression in her eyes.
"Mr. Dalton," she said, without any preliminaries, "did you know that
Gus Peters has been frightfully burned with some of the molten glass,
this morning, and has no one to take care of him? His hands and arms are
so bad he is perfectly helpless, and there's no one in the house but a
stupid child that is too frightened to do anything but stare. Isn't
there a doctor here, or somebody? Ellen, you and I must attend to him,
if there isn't. He is suffering awfully!"
"That Gus Peters!" said the manager with a disgusted accent. "He always
was an awkward lout. Of course there's a doctor--why didn't he send for
him?"
"Send! Haven't I told you there was nobody to wait upon him? How could
he send, mad with pain as he is, and that child scared out of all the
wits it ever had? And no telephone, nor even an errand-boy anywhere. How
can I get the doctor? Which way shall I go? Don't you appreciate the
fact that something must be _done_!"
She was talking so fast and excitedly the man could only stand and gaze
at her, but spurred by her impatient gesture he broke out beseechingly:
"Please wait a minute, and I'll send a boy. But you needn't worry so!
These accidents are happening--that is, often happen. They get used to
them. It's because Gus is new at the business. Excuse me a moment."
He disappeared through the door into the work-room, and Joyce tramped up
and down the office as if caged, now stopping to look out of the dingy
windows, now leaning over the desk as if to examine the papers upon it,
but with a face set in such troubled lines it was obvious she saw
nothing. Ellen looked on with an unflinching expression. She was
evidently used to these moods, and did not favor them, but wisely held
her peace.
Presently Mr. Dalton returned, looking a bit anxious and grim.
"They've gone for Dr. Browne and he'll see to Gus all right. But you
look very tired. Won't you go home with me to dinner? I have 'phoned my
aunt to----"
"'Phoned? Why, I thought--I don't see----"
He smiled indulgently.
"Oh, it's an individual affair I had put up. I found it inconvenient not
to have some method of communication as we are nearly ten minutes' walk
apart."
"Ah yes, it is inconvenient--especially in cases of real need, such as
dinner, for instance. Thank you, but I think----"
Ellen, who had risen at Mr. Dalton's first word of dinner, now advanced
with alacrity.
"I hope we can go somewheres," she exclaimed with asperity, "for I'm all
one cramp setting still so long. And you know you'll have a headache if
you don't eat something, Miss Joyce; you allays do."
The latter laughed impatiently.
"Oh, my headaches! You feel them more than I do, Ellen. However--well,
yes, Mr. Dalton, thank you, we will be very glad to accompany you. Now
tell me, please, where is there some good, kind man or woman to go and
nurse that boy?"
"You mean Gus? Oh, really, Miss Lavillotte, he couldn't pay anybody if
you sent them. The neighbors will look after him. They're kind in such
cases. Let's see"--bowing his guests out of the door and locking it
behind him--"Gus keeps bachelor's hall with two or three of the other
boys, doesn't he? Oh, they'll see to him--don't you worry! There'll be a
crowd to wait on him, now it's nooning hour. They are positively happy
when there's an accident to stir them up. It breaks the monotony. This
way, please, it's a bit rougher than by the street, but cuts off half a
block. Perhaps, though, you'd rather----"
"No, no, this way's all right. Mr. Dalton," sternly, "were you ever
badly burned?"
The man turned with a sharp movement, and looked at her. "Why I--I don't
know that I ever was. Not seriously, you know."
"Well, _I_ have been."
Joyce pushed up the sleeve of her jacket and drew down her glove with a
quick motion, full of repressed intensity. He had just a glimpse of a
red scar on the white flesh when, with as sudden a motion and a rosy
flush, she dropped her arm and let the sleeve fall over her wrist, then
added more gently,
"One knows how it hurts when one has suffered oneself. I was only eight
years old, but I have never forgotten the day I tripped and fell against
a red-hot stove--and I had the tenderest and most constant care, too."
Had Joyce been looking at her companion's face she would no doubt have
been made furious by its expression. If ever a laugh struggled in a
man's eyes, trying to break bounds, it struggled now in George Dalton's
gray orbs! After an instant, which Joyce fondly imagined was given to
silent sympathy, he said gently,
"Burns are serious things, I know. Miss Lavillotte, I began stroking for
the furnaces here when I was eight years old. I think"--looking off in
an impersonal manner, as if reckoning a problem,--"that from that time
on to fourteen, at least, I was never without burns on face, hands or
arms. Probably I grew used to them."
Joyce looked up quickly. He was quite serious now, and seemed almost to
have forgotten the subject up between them. Joyce felt suddenly very
young, and she devoutly wished she had never consented to this
detestable visit with her manager. Then pride came to her aid, and she
asked deliberately, with an intrepid air,
"I doubt if people ever really get used to pain. Do you think the doctor
will be through with that boy in half an hour?"
"Possibly. Of course I don't know the extent of his injuries."
"Let us hurry then," doubling her pace. "I shall have none too much time
before the 2.39 train, and we must take that, as I have an engagement in
the city. Ellen, am I tiring you?"
The maid smiled grimly. She understood this as an overture for peace,
knowing her young mistress was never so thoughtful and conciliatory as
just after being most unreasonable and peremptory. She rightly
conjectured that the girl was already ashamed of her sharpness, and
wished to make amends in some way. Mr. Dalton's slower comprehension of
womankind was bewildered by these rapid changes. Having inwardly
decided, in spite of Ellen's favorable testimony, that here was a young
lady who had been allowed her own way more than was good for her, he was
left stranded on the shore of his own conjectures by her present tone.
He had mentally dubbed her a sort of princess, determined to have her
say in everything; now she seemed a child eager to be led by any one.
But Ellen was answering with fine sarcasm.
"I might walk faster, too, if I hadn't got 'most paralyzed on them
wooden chairs. But never mind! Keep right on--I guess I can manage to
get there, if I try hard."
Fortunately for her legs and temper, they stopped presently before a
rather ornate cottage, with several peaks and a turret, which was set
down in the midst of a square lawn that looked unnaturally green to
Joyce in comparison with the bareness all about it. Grass, except in
long scraggy tufts here and there, or in sparse blades in some odd fence
corner, was not prevalent at the Works. Joyce liked all that was trim
and beautiful, but just now this house and lawn, so new and snug and
smiling, jarred upon her like a discordant note. What business had he to
live where fresh paint and large windows and broad verandas should mock
at the poverty and squalor of all the other houses? She felt it almost
as a personal insult.
Mr. Dalton, to whom a neat home of his own was still a novelty, was a
trifle hurt by her lack of enthusiasm. He had really looked for a
girlish "Oh, how pretty!" and somewhat resented Miss Lavillotte's quiet
way of saying,
"I see you have been able to make yourself comfortable, even in this
forbidding spot, Mr. Dalton."
But he answered cheerfully,
"Oh, yes, yes. It seems good to have a home after so many years of
fifth-rate boarding houses. And the best of it is, my good aunt, who has
had a hard time breasting the world, enjoys it even more than I."
The girl did not speak at once. She was distinctly ashamed of herself.
Then she broke out quickly:
"I see. It was most good of you. I am hasty as an ill-tempered child in
my judgments! Mr. Dalton"--she stopped before the neat iron gate in the
low fence, which he was holding open for her to pass through, and
barring the way, said rapidly, "as we will have to work together in all
that is done here, I may as well say at once--I am often quick,
irascible, unkind. I want things to move at once, and when they don't it
makes me cross. It isn't because I--I have money, though--you mustn't
think it. I am not such a cad! It's just my nature, that's all. I can't
help it, and it cuts me up when I come to my senses more than it
possibly can anybody else. There! Shall we be friends and co-workers, or
not?"
She held out her small gloved hand, and as he warmly clasped it, a flush
that was so strange to his bronzed cheek it fairly colored for its own
temerity, made his face foolishly warm. He laughed out like a boy.
"Why, you are the boss, of course," he said with a ring of delight in
his voice. "I shall do exactly what you tell me to--how could I help
it?"
"No, you must help it," gravely. "I really am young and inexperienced,
as Mr. Barrington says. But these ideas are better than I--they really
are! When you come to see what I mean, and what I want to do, you will
approve, I am sure."
She was so eager for this approval that he felt positively dazed by the
situation. He could not follow such spiral flights, such swoopings and
dartings of mood. He could only look on and be ready to her hand the
instant she might alight beside him. So he only murmured, "Depend upon
me for any assistance whatever!" thinking meanwhile, with a sense of
relief, "Aunt Margaret will understand her; she's a woman."
They had barely stepped within the modern hall when a tall figure
advanced between the heavy portières at one side to meet them. Mrs.
Margaret Phelps was rather finely formed, but had no other beauty except
a heavy head of silvery white hair. Yet Joyce thought, for a homely
woman she was the best-looking one she had ever seen! There was sense
and kindness in her face, as well as a certain self-respect, which drew
out answering respect to meet it. She acknowledged her nephew's
introduction with that embarrassed stiffness common to those unused to
social forms, but the grasp of her large hand was warm and consoling,
and her voice had a hearty genuineness, as she remarked,
"My nephew, George, says you've been looking at the Works. It isn't many
young ladies would care to come so far outside of the city just to see
them. They wouldn't think it worth while."
Joyce exchanged a quick glance with Dalton and knew her identity had not
been divulged, so answered easily,
"Oh, don't you think so? It was like an enchanted land to me this
morning! It was all so far beyond me I could only look on and wonder;
but to watch a vase grow into perfect form at a breath was a real marvel
of creation."
"Well, yes, I guess it's so. I always feel that way, too, when I see an
engine. It seems such a grand thing that anybody could get the parts all
fitted together, and then dare to start it when it was done. You can
understand how folks may learn figures and poetry, and even
engineering--but to go back and make the things they have to learn
about; that beats me!"
Joyce laughed with her, while Mrs. Phelps took her wraps, then
relinquished them to Ellen, who stood by like a sentinel awaiting their
movements. She seemed to find the presence of the maid somewhat
embarrassing, and followed her laden figure into the hall, to whisper,
"Say, I've got a real nice lady sewing for me. Wouldn't you like to get
acquainted with her?"
"Don't know as I mind," returned Ellen, and followed into the next room.
During the space his aunt was absent, Dalton took up the conversation
where it had dropped.
"We always think things are hardest to do that are out of our sphere,
don't we? I suppose, now, you and Aunt Margaret could both understand
making a dress, couldn't you?"
"Oh yes, even though I could not do it," laughed Joyce.
"Well, and I can imagine building the engine, but as for the frock"--he
looked at her and made a gesture of impotence--"I should never even
attempt it, though I were to lose my head for not trying. In the first
place," glancing from the trim, smooth, tailor-made black gown of his
guest to the home-cut skirt and shirt-waist of his aunt, just entering,
and dimly discerning the difference, "I never thought of it before, but
I cannot even conceive how you get into and out of the things. I suppose
you do, for I see you women in different ones at times, but my thought
would be that they must grow upon you"--he was looking at Joyce--"as the
calyx around a blossom. It all seems merged into you, somehow. I never
felt it so before."
Mrs. Phelps laughed with hearty enjoyment.
"It's the cut of it, George! You never felt that way looking at me,
or--or Rachel Hemphill, say--did you?"
"Why no; it seems a new sensation," laughing half shamefacedly. "But it
may be just because the talk called it up. Isn't dinner ready--well, I
thought it was time."
A somewhat strident-sounding bell announced it, and the three passed
directly into the next room, furnished so conventionally there was
absolutely nothing upon which to let the eyes rest in surprise, or
pleasure. But it was painfully neat and regular, and both aunt and
nephew were secretly satisfied that it must impress even this young
heiress as a perfectly proper dining-room. And it did.
Ellen and the "nice lady," who had been sewing for Mrs. Phelps, joined
them at once, and the talk languished as each was called upon to help
the other in a wearisome round of small dishes, which it seemed to Joyce
was like the stage processions that simply go out at one side to come in
at the other. But when she tasted of these she no longer begrudged their
number. They were each deliciously palatable, having a taste so new to
her hotel-sated palate that she could almost have smacked her lips over
them in her enjoyment. She had a healthy girlish appetite and the
morning had been long. She positively wanted to pass back one or two of
the saucers for refilling, but was ashamed of her greediness. Had she
known that it would have rejoiced Mrs. Phelps for days to be thus
honored by real appreciation of the dainties she had herself prepared,
she certainly would have done so. Even Ellen forgot to sniff, and all
set to with a vigor that rather precluded conversation.
She thought about it afterwards, as she sat in the train, moving rapidly
citywards, and wondered why there had been such positive pleasure in the
mere taste of food. She had sat and minced over rich dishes day after
day, and never felt that exquisite sense of wholesomeness and
recuperation.
She turned to Ellen.
"Did you ever eat such nice things before? What made them so good,
anyhow?"
Ellen smiled with unusual relaxation.
"They was nice, wa'n't they? Well, I'll tell you what my mother used to
say, and she was the best cook in Eaton county, by all odds. Them things
made me think of her to-day. She used to say that 'twas with cooking
just like 'twas with church work, or anything else. You'd got to put
heart into it, as well as muscle. She said these hired cooks just put in
muscle and skill, and they stopped there. But when a mother was cooking
for her own fam'ly she put in them, and heart besides, and that was why
men was allays telling about their mother's cooking. That was what she
said, and I guess she come as near to it as most folks."
"I guess she did," assented Joyce. "Well, if I can put into my work the
same quality Mrs. Phelps puts into her cooking I shall make a success of
it; won't I, Ellen?"
"Don't ask me!" was the quick response, as the maid drew herself up into
the austere lines she affected. "You must remember hearts don't amount
to much till they've been hammered out by hard knocks. You'll do your
best, I presume, but what can a young thing like you understand?
However, they's one thing"----
"Well, what's that?" as Ellen paused abruptly.
"Oh nothing. I was just thinking you could make anybody do anything you
want 'em to, and that goes a good way. Well, well, I s'pose there is
_some_ advantage in being young!"