Although it was easy for a man, especially for a young marriageable
man, to obtain board in East Westland, it was not so easy for a
woman; and the facts of her youth and good looks, and presumably
marriageable estate, rendered it still more difficult. There was in
the little village a hotel, so-called, which had formerly been the
tavern. It was now the East Westland House. Once it had been the Sign
of the Horse. The old sign-board upon which a steed in flaming red,
rampant upon a crude green field against a crude blue sky, had been
painted by some local artist, all unknown to fame, and long since at
rest in the village graveyard, still remained in the hotel attic,
tilted under the dusty eaves.
The Sign of the Horse had been in former days a flourishing hostelry,
before which, twice a day, the Boston and the Alford stages had drawn
up with mighty flourishes of horns and gallant rearings of jaded
steeds. Scarcely a night but it had been crowded by travellers who
stayed overnight for the sake of the good beds and the good table and
good bar. Now there was no bar. East Westland was a strictly
temperance village, and all the liquor to be obtained was exceedingly
bad, and some declared diluted by the waters of the village pond.
There was a very small stock of rum, gin, and whiskey, and very young
and morbid California wines, kept at the village drug store, and
dispensed by Albion Bennet. Albion required a deal of red-tape before
he would sell even these doubtful beverages for strictly medicinal
purposes. He was in mortal terror of being arrested and taken to the
county-seat at Newholm for violation of the liquor law. Albion,
although a young and sturdy man not past his youth, was exceedingly
afraid of everything. He was unmarried, and boarded at the hotel.
There he was divided between fear of burglars, if he slept on the
first floor, and of fire if he slept on the second. He compromised by
sleeping on the second, with a sufficient length of stout, knotted
muslin stowed away in his trunk, to be attached to the bed-post and
reach the ground in case of a conflagration.
There was no bank in East Westland, none nearer than Alford, six
miles away, and poor Albion was at his wit's end to keep his daily
receipts with safety to them and himself. He had finally hit upon the
expedient of leaving them every night with Sidney Meeks, who was
afraid of nothing. "If anything happens to your money, Albion," said
Sidney, "I'll make it good, even if I have to sell my wine-cellar."
Albion was afraid even to keep a revolver. His state of terror was
pitiable, and the more so because he had a fear of betraying it,
which was to some extent the most cruel fear of all. Sidney Meeks was
probably the only person in East Westland who understood how it was
with him, and he kept his knowledge to himself. Sidney was astute on
a diagnosis of his fellow-men's mentalities, and he had an almost
womanly compassion even for those weaknesses of which he himself was
incapable.
"Good; I'll keep what you have in your till every night for you, and
welcome, Albion," he had said. "I understand how you feel, living in
the hotel the way you do."
"Nobody knows who is coming and going," said Albion, blinking
violently.
"Of course one doesn't, and nobody would dream of coming to my house.
Everybody knows I am as poor as Job's off ox. You might get a
revolver, but I wouldn't recommend it. You look to me as if you might
sleep too sound to make it altogether safe."
"I do sleep pretty sound," admitted Albion, although he did not quite
see the force of the other man's argument.
"Just so. Any man who sleeps very sound has no right to keep a loaded
revolver by him. He seldom, if ever, wakes up thoroughly if he hears
a noise, and he's mighty apt to blaze away at the first one he sees,
even if it's his best friend. No, it is not safe."
"I don't think it's very safe myself," said Albion, in a relieved
tone. "Miss Hart is always prowling around the house. She doesn't
sleep very well, and she's always smelling smoke or hearing burglars.
She's timid, like most women. I might shoot her if I was only half
awake and she came opposite my door."
"Exactly," said Sidney Meeks. When Albion went away he stared after
his bulky, retreating back with a puzzled expression. He shook his
head. Fear was the hardest thing in the world for him to understand.
"That great, able-bodied man must feel mighty queer," he muttered, as
he stowed away the pile of greasy bank-notes and the nickels
collected at the soda-fountain in a pile of disordered linen in a
bureau drawer. He chuckled to himself at the eagerness with which
Albion had seized upon the fancy of his shooting Miss Hart.
Lucinda Hart kept the hotel. She had succeeded to its proprietorship
when her father died. She was a middle-aged woman who had been pretty
in a tense, nervous fashion. Now the prettiness had disappeared under
the strain of her daily life. It was a hard struggle to keep the East
Westland House and make both ends meet. She had very few regular
boarders, and transients were not as numerous as they had been in the
days of the stage-coaches. Now commercial travellers and business men
went to Alford overnight instead of remaining at East Westland. Miss
Hart used the same feather-beds which had once been esteemed so
luxurious. She kept them clean, well aired, and shaken, and she would
not have a spring-bed or a hair mattress in the house. She was
conservatism itself. She could no more change and be correct to her
own understanding than the multiplication table.
"Feather-beds are good enough for anybody who stays in this hotel, I
don't care who it is," she said. She would not make an exception,
even for Miss Eliza Farrel, the assistant teacher in the high school,
although she had, with a distrust of the teacher's personality, a
great respect for her position. She was inexorable even when the
teacher proposed furnishing a spring-bed and mattress at her own
expense. "I'd be willing to accommodate, and buy them myself, but it
is a bad example," she said, firmly. "Things that were good enough
for our fathers and mothers are good enough for us. Good land! people
ain't any different from what they used to be. We haven't any
different flesh nor any different bones."
Miss Hart had a theory that many of the modern diseases might be
traced directly to the eschewing of feather-beds. "Never heard of
appendicitis in my father's time, when folks slept on good, soft
feather-beds, and got their bones and in'ards rested," she said.
Miss Hart was as timid in her way as Albion Bennet. She never got
enough control of her nervous fears to secure many hours of sound
sleep. She never was able to wholly rid herself of the conviction
that her own wakefulness and watchfulness was essential to the right
running of all the wheels of the universe, although she would have
been shocked had she fairly known her own attitude. She patrolled the
house by night, moving about the low, uneven corridors with a
flickering candle--for she was afraid to carry a kerosene lamp--like
a wandering spirit.
She was suspicious, too. She never lodged a stranger overnight but
she had grave doubts of his moral status. She imagined him a murderer
escaped from justice, and compared his face with the pictures of
criminals in the newspapers, or she was reasonably sure that he was
dishonest, although she had little to tempt him. She employed one
chambermaid and a stable-boy, and did the cooking herself. Miss Hart
was not a good cook. She used her thin, tense hands too quickly. She
was prone to over-measures of saleratus, to under-measures of sugar
and coffee. She erred both from economy and from the haste which
makes waste. Miss Eliza Farrel often turned from the scanty, poorly
cooked food which was place before her with disgust, but she never
seemed to lose an ounce of her firm, fair flesh, nor a shade of her
sweet color.
Miss Eliza Farrel was an anomaly. She was so beautiful that her
beauty detracted from her charm for both sexes. It was so perfect as
to awaken suspicion in a world where nothing is perfect from the hand
of nature. Then, too, she was manifestly, in spite of her beauty, not
in the first flush of youth, and had, it seemed, no right to such
perfection of body. Also her beauty was of a type which people
invariably associate with things which are undesirable to the rigidly
particular, and East Westland was largely inhabited by the rigidly
particular.
East Westland was not ignorant. It read of the crimes and follies of
the times, but it read of them with a distinct and complacent sense
of superiority. It was as if East Westland said: "It is desirable to
read of these things, of these doings among the vicious and the
worldly, that we may understand what _we_ are." East Westland looked
upon itself in its day and generation as a lot among the cities of
the plain.
It seemed inconceivable that East Westland people should have
recognized the fact that Miss Farrel's beauty was of a suspicious
type, but they must have had an instinctive knowledge of it. From the
moment that Miss Farrel appeared in the village, although she had the
best of references, not a woman would admit her into her house as a
boarder, and the hotel, with its feather-beds and poor table, was her
only resource. Women said of her that she was made up, that no woman
of her age ever looked as she did and had a perfectly irreproachable
moral character.
As for the men, they admired her timidly, sheepishly, and also a
trifle contemptuously. They did not admit openly the same opinion as
the women with regard to the legitimacy of her charms, but they did
maintain it secretly. It did not seem possible to many of them that a
woman could look just as Eliza Farrel did and be altogether natural.
As for her character, they also agreed with the feminine element
secretly, although they openly declared the women were jealous of
such beauty. It did not seem that such a type could be anything
except a dangerous one.
Miss Eliza Farrel was a pure blonde, as blond as a baby. There was
not a line nor blemish in her pure, fine skin. The flush on her
rounded cheeks and her full lips was like a baby's. Her dimples were
like a baby's. Her blond hair was thick and soft with a pristine
softness and thickness which is always associated with the hair of a
child. Her eyebrows were pencilled by nature, as if nature had been
art. Her smile was as fixedly radiant as a painted cherub's. Her
figure had that exuberance and slenderness at various portions which
no woman really believes in. She looked like a beautiful doll, with
an unvarying loveliness of manner and disposition under all
vicissitudes of life, but she was undoubtedly something more than a
doll.
Even the women listened dubiously and incredulously when she talked.
They had never heard a woman talk about such things in the way she
did. She had a fine education, being a graduate of one of the women's
colleges. She was an accomplished musician and a very successful
teacher. Her pupils undoubtedly progressed, although they did not
have the blind love and admiration which pupils usually have for a
beautiful teacher. To this there was one exception.
Miss Farrel always smiled, never frowned or reprimanded. It was said
that Miss Farrel had better government than Miss Florence Dean, the
other assistant. Miss Dean was plain and saturnine, and had no
difficulty in obtaining a good boarding-place, even with the mother
of a marriageable daughter, who had taken her in with far-sighted
alacrity. She dreamed of business calls concerning school matters,
which Mr. Horace Allen, the principal, might be obliged to make, and
she planned to have her daughter, who was a very pretty girl, in
evidence. But poor Miss Farrel was thrown back upon the mercies of
Miss Hart and the feather-beds and the hotel.
There were other considerations besides the feather-beds and the poor
fare which conspired to render the hotel an undesirable
boarding-place. Miss Farrel might as well have been under the
espionage of a private detective as with Miss Hart. If Miss Hart was
suspicious of dire mischief in the cases of her other boarders, she
was certain in the case of Eliza Farrel. She would not have admitted
her under her roof at all had she not been forced thereto by the
necessity for money. Miss Hart herself took care of Miss Farrel's
room sometimes. She had no hesitation whatever in looking through her
bureau drawers; indeed, she considered it a duty which she owed
herself and the character of her house. She had taken away the keys
on purpose, and had told miss Farrel, without the slightest
compunction, that they were lost. The trunks were locked, and she had
never been able to possess herself of the keys, but she felt sure
that they contained, if not entire skeletons, at least scattered
bones.
She discovered once, quite in open evidence on Miss Farrel's
wash-stand, a little porcelain box of pink-tinted salve, and she did
not hesitate about telling Hannah, her chambermaid, the daughter of a
farmer in the vicinity, and a girl who was quite in her confidence.
She called Hannah into the room and displayed the box. "This is what
she uses," she said, solemnly.
Hannah, who was young, but had a thick, colorless skin, nodded with
an inscrutable expression.
"I have always thought she used something on her face," said Miss
Hart. "You can't cheat _me_."
Hannah took up a little, ivory-backed nail-polisher which was also on
the wash-stand. "What do you suppose this is?" she asked, timidly, in
an awed whisper.
"How do I know? I never use such things myself, and I never knew
women who did before," said Miss Hart, severely. "I dare say, after
she puts the paint on, she has to use something to smooth it down
where the natural color of the skin begins. How do I know?"
Hannah laid the nail-polisher beside the box of salve. She was very
much in love with the son of the farmer who lived next to her
father's. The next Thursday afternoon was her afternoon off. She
watched her chance, and stole into Miss Farrel's room, applied with
trembling fingers a little of the nail-salve to her cheeks, then
carefully rubbed it all off with the polisher. She then went to her
own room, put on a hat and thick veil, and succeeded in getting out
of the hotel without meeting Miss Hart. She was firmly convinced that
she was painted, and that her cheeks had the lovely peach-bloom of
Miss Farrel's.
It seems sometimes as if one's own conviction concerning one's self
goes a long way towards establishing that of other people. Hannah,
that evening, when she met the young man whom she loved, felt that
she was a beauty like Miss Eliza Farrel, and before she went home he
had told her how pretty she was and asked her to marry him, and
Hannah had consented, reserving the right to work enough longer to
earn a little more money. She wished to be married in a white lace
gown like one in Miss Farrel's closet. Miss Hart had called Hannah in
to look at it one morning when Miss Farrel was at school.
"What do you suppose a school-teacher can want of a dress like this
here in East Westland?" Miss Hart had asked, severely. "She can't
wear it to meeting, or a Sunday-school picnic, or a church sociable,
or even to a wedding in this place. Look at it. It's cut low-neck."
Hannah had looked. That night she had, in the secrecy of her own
room, examined her own shoulders, and decided that although they
might not be as white as Miss Farrel's, they were presumably as well
shaped. She had resolved then and there to be married in a dress like
that. Along with her love-raptures came the fairy dream of the lace
gown. For once in her life she would be dressed like a princess.
When she told Miss Hart she was going to be married, her mistress
sniffed. "You can do just as you like, and you will do just as you
like, whether or no," she said; "but you are a poor fool. Here you
are getting good wages, and having it all to spend on yourself; and
you ain't overworked, and you'll find out you'll be overworked and
have a whole raft of young ones, and not a cent of wages, except
enough to keep soul and body together, and just enough to wear so you
won't be took up for going round indecent. I've seen enough of such
kind of work."
"Amos will make a real good husband; everybody says he's the best
match anywhere around," replied Hannah, crimson with blushes and half
crying.
Miss Hart sniffed again. "Jump into the fire if you want to," said
she. "I hope you ain't going before fall, and leave me in the lurch
in hot weather, and preserves to be put up."
Hannah said she would not think of getting married before November.
She did not say a word about the white lace gown, but that evening
the desire to look at it again waxed so strong within her that she
could not resist it. She was sitting in her own room, after lighting
the kerosene lamp in the corridor opposite Miss Farrel's room, which
was No. 20, and she was thinking hard about the lace gown, and
wondering how much it cost, when she started suddenly. As she sat
beside her window, her own lamp not yet lit, she had seen a figure
flit past in the misty moonlight, and she was sure it was Miss
Farrel. She reflected quickly that it was Thursday evening, when Miss
Hart always went to prayer-meeting. Hannah had a cold and had stayed
at home, although it was her day off. Miss Hart cherished the belief
that her voice was necessary to sustain the singing at any church
meeting. She had, in her youth, possessed a fine contralto voice. She
possessed only the remnant of one now, but she still sang in the
choir, because nobody had the strength of mind to request her to
resign. Sunday after Sunday she stood in her place and raised her
voice, which was horribly hoarse and hollow, in the sacred tunes, and
people shivered and endured. Miss Hart never missed a Sunday service,
a choir rehearsal, or a Thursday prayer-meeting, and she did not on
that Thursday evening.
Hannah went to her door and listened. She heard laughter down in the
room which had been the bar but was now the office. A cloud of
tobacco smoke floated from there through the corridor. Hannah drew it
in with a sense of delicious peace. Her lover smoked, and somehow the
odor seemed to typify to her domestic happiness and mystery. She
listened long, looking often at the clock on the wall. "She must be
gone," she thought, meaning Miss Hart. She was almost sure that the
figure which she had seen flitting under her window in the moonlight
was that of the school-teacher. Finally she could not resist the
temptation any longer. She hurried down the corridor until she
reached No. 20. She tapped and waited, then she tapped and waited
again. There was no response. Hannah tried the door. It was locked.
She took her chambermaid's key and unlocked the door, looking around
her fearfully. Then she opened the door and slid in. She locked the
door behind her. Then straight to the closet she went, and that
beautiful lace robe seemed to float out towards her. Hannah slipped
off her own gown, and in a few moments she stood before the
looking-glass, transformed.
She was so radiant, so pleased, that a flush came out on her thick
skin; her eyes gleamed blue. The lace gown fitted her very well. She
turned this way and that. After all, her neck was not bad, not as
white, perhaps, as Miss Farrel's, but quite lovely in shape. She
walked glidingly across the room, looking over her shoulder at the
trail of lace. She was unspeakably happy. She had a lover, and she
was a woman in a fine gown for the first time in her life. The gown
was not her own, but she would have one like it. She did not realize
that this gown was not hers. She was fairly radiant with the
possession of her woman's birthright, this poor farmer's daughter, in
whom the instincts of her kind were strong. She glided across the
room many times. She surveyed herself in the glass. Every time she
looked she seemed to herself more beautiful, and there was something
good and touching in this estimation of herself, for she seemed to
see herself with her lover's eyes as well as her own.
Finally she sat down in Miss Farrel's rocker; she crossed her knees
and viewed with delight the fleecy fall of lace to the floor. Then
she fell to dreaming, and her dreams were good. In that gown of
fashion she dreamed the dreams of the life to which the women of her
race were born. She dreamed of her good housewifery; she dreamed of
the butter she would make; she dreamed of her husband coming home to
meals all ready and well cooked. She dreamed, underneath the other
dreams, of children coming home. She had no realization of the time
she sat there. At last she started and turned white. She had heard a
key turn in the lock. Then Miss Farrel entered the room--Miss Eliza
Farrel, magnificent in pale gray, with a hat trimmed with roses
crowning her blond head. Hannah cowered. She tried to speak, but only
succeeded in making a sound as if she were deaf and dumb.
Then Miss Farrel spoke. There was a weary astonishment and amusement
in her tone, but nothing whatever disturbed or harsh. "Oh, is it you,
Hannah?" she said.
Hannah murmured something unintelligible.
Miss Farrel went on, sweetly: "So you thought you would try on my
lace gown, Hannah?" she said. "It fits you very well. I see your
hands are clean. I am glad of that. Now please take it off and put on
your own dress."
Hannah stood up. She was abject.
"There is nothing for you to be afraid of," said Miss Farrel. "Only
take off the gown and put on your own, or I am afraid Miss Hart--"
Miss Hart's name acted like a terrible stimulus. Hannah unfastened
the lace gown with fingers trembling with haste. She stepped out of
the shimmering circle which it made; she was in her own costume in an
incredibly short space of time, and the lace gown was in its
accustomed place in the closet. Then suddenly Miss Hart opened the
door.
"I thought I saw a light," said she. She looked from one to the
other. "It is after eleven o'clock," she said, further.
"Yes," said Miss Farrel, sweetly. "I have been working. I had to look
over some exercises. I think I am not quite well. Have you any
digitalis in the house, Miss Hart? Hannah here does not know. I was
sorry to disturb her, and she does not know. I have an irritable
heart, and digitalis helps it."
"No, I have not got any digitalis," replied Miss Hart, shortly. She
gave the hard sound to the _g_, and she looked suspiciously at both
women. However, Miss Farrel was undoubtedly pale, and Miss Hart's
face relaxed.
"Go back to your room," she said to Hannah. "You won't be fit for a
thing to-morrow." Then she said to Miss Farrel: "I don't know what
you mean by digitalis. I haven't got any, but I'll mix you up some
hot essence of peppermint, and that's the best thing I know of for
anything."
"Thank you," said Miss Farrel. She had sank into a chair, and had her
hand over her heart.
"I'll have it here in a minute," said Miss Hart. She went out, and
Hannah followed her, but not before she and Miss Eliza Farrel had
exchanged looks which meant that each had a secret of the other to
keep as a precious stolen jewel.