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THE GRAY ANGELS
by
NALBRO BARTLEY
Author of “A Woman’s Woman,”
“Paradise Auction,” etc.
[Illustration]
Boston
Small, Maynard & Company
Publishers
Copyright, 1920,
by Small, Maynard & Company
(Incorporated)
THE GRAY ANGELS
CHAPTER I
The younger generation of Birge’s Corners insisted that nothing exciting
had happened since Abigail Clergy’s love affair in 1867, and the older
generation retorted that Thurley Precore, who must have been born in
Arcadia, was bound to create excitement.
The older generation were content to have time snail over their
doorsteps. To their placid minds much had happened and was happening to
content any one of normal makeup. Take the Hotel Button—what more did any
one want than that two-story establishment with ramshackle outbuildings
and a crazy wooden fence about the whole of it? Commercial travellers
making the town annually never complained about Prince Hawkins’
hospitality or Mrs. Prince Hawkins’ cooking—never. And during one of
those comical cold spells, when twenty below zero was registered on the
thermometer, the younger generation were mighty glad to end a sleigh ride
before the Hotel Button, and have one of Mrs. Prince Hawkins’ oyster
suppers—she had been Lena Button, an only child, and her working like a
slave now ...! Also, the upstairs parlor with its flowered carpet and
tortured walnut furniture and the same square piano on which Lena Button
had learned her “Battle of Prague”—the younger generation never thought
of refusing the upstairs parlor in which to have a wind-up dance. None of
them complained about the slowness of Birge’s Corners—until the next day!
As for stores: there was Oyster Jim’s confectionery store with a balcony
overlooking Lake Birge, and here the younger generation gathered to eat
ice cream and drink cream soda. Of course, Oyster Jim’s store was not
like New York tea-rooms which some of the younger generation had visited
and drawn unkind comparisons about, but the ice cream was homemade,
and, if he did dilute the cream, the water from Lake Birge was about as
good as there was in the state; a chemist had said so. Besides, Oyster
Jim’s other specialty was canary birds, yellow-throated songsters in
every corner of the balcony, and it took a pretty smart man to keep an
ice cream store and raise canary birds, to say nothing of selling Ford
supplies to distressed tourists! Then there was Submit Curler’s general
store. She was always taking magazines to keep “up to snuff”—and as for
patterns of ginghams and calicos, there were no prettier patterns to be
had. When the younger generation said _why_ did Miss Curler insist on
selling horse whips and lanterns and year-old hard candies and marbles
and soft soap and acorn picture frames and knitted things she made in
between rings of the bell, and why didn’t she have decent silk waists
and neckties and stop calling you by your first name long after your
engagement had been announced, to say nothing of wrapping things in
newspapers and expecting you to carry them through the streets—the older
generation sniffed in answer that Submit Curler was one of God’s own,
and, although Algebra might have been the capital of a foreign country as
far as she knew, she had crooned countless teething babies to sleep to
give their mothers a rest, and helped lay out the dead and then stayed
“behind” to have a piping hot dinner ready when the mourners “came back.”
Of course the younger generation were not silenced by this. They
began a complaint about the weekly paper, a ridiculous affair running
three-year-old detective serials and month-old national happenings,
telling whose veranda was to be painted and who had bought a pair of new
earlaps! To which the older generation magnanimously remarked that, as
long as “Ali Baba” and Betsey Pilrig had their health, there would be no
need for an up-to-date daily newspaper. One did not have to wait until
news was gathered, edited and printed. Ali Baba, Abby Clergy’s coachman,
and Betsey Pilrig, who lived in the yellow house across from Thurley
Precore’s box-car wagon, kept the village informed of every happening
in such rapid-fire fashion that the need for a daily sheet was never
experienced!
Granting this—where was there any society? To which the older generation
answered, indignantly, that nowhere in the United States of America
HAD there existed such society, elegance and grandeur as at the summer
colony on Birge’s Lake, and, if those days were contemporary with Abigail
Clergy’s great sorrow, what mattered it? The aroma of past grandeur
lingers long, and even yet the stately mansions with endless turrets and
towers stood about the shores of the lake causing one to respect their
closed shutters.
To this the younger generation, although protesting that the society was
entirely a memory, had no reply. For the older generation had spoken the
truth. About the perfect little lake, an emerald in its coloring and
flanked by pungent pine woods and an amphitheater of tiny hills, some
half a century before, had been built the summer homes of the oldest of
America’s aristocracy. In those days when Birge’s Corners was but a post
office and a few stray dogs, the lake had been an oasis for the tired
rich; here families came to grow tanned and rosy, while love affairs
ripened and wedding bells were listened for and the elders sat back in
pleased approval. The rich owned the lake, so the saying went—but Daniel
Birge owned the Corners and the rich! Daniel Birge was steward to the
rich. If they desired an improvement in the way of carriage sheds or
certain grades of merchandise which were daily necessities, Daniel Birge,
founder of Birge’s Corners, saw to it that it was accomplished. The lake
had been named for his great-great-grandfather, who discovered it, and,
when the richest of the rich suggested that “Birge’s Lake” was a trifle
commonplace name for such a bit of paradise—“Fairy Lake” would be more
appropriate—they met their Waterloo. This was the only thing Daniel Birge
refused the rich—the re-naming of the little lake.
“Great-great-grandpap found it, and it’ll keep his name,” was all he said.
And because Dan Birge “had a way with him”—even as his grandson,
the present Dan Birge, had a “way with him”—the summer colony never
questioned the matter again. Birge’s Lake and Birge’s Corners were
christened for eternity.
Meanwhile, middle class inhabitants came to live at the Corners, houses
multiplied from season to season, the Hotel Button came into existence,
as did rival blacksmiths’ shops and Submit Curler’s store. Even a
travelling dentist took rooms at Betsey Pilrig’s for every Thursday, and
the Methodist and Baptist churches ran a race as to the height of their
steeples.
Time soon enough changed the ways and the likings of the rich. The old
homes came to be rented out or closed for two and three years at a time.
Some were put on the market, but no one ever bought them. Well-built
mansions they were, with twenty and thirty rooms and grounds extending
back for half an acre, stables with rooms for the coachman’s family,
private boat landings, romantic rustic arbors where tea used to be
served, and summer houses with lacey latticework where débutantes
gathered to read Tennyson and their own love letters.
Birge’s Corners built up so rapidly that the decline of Birge’s Lake
was scarcely noticed. One by one the families stopped coming to the
lake for the summer. There were newer, more luxurious or more isolated
places—their younger generation complained of the lack of thrilling
events. The “ghost village” it was truthfully called, house after house
lying idle, save for stray sparrows or squirrels who burrowed snugly in
the eaves.
“Ali Baba”—Joshua Maples in writing—was made general caretaker. One
by one the families left him in charge of the ghost mansions. He knew
just which room it was where the Confederate captain married the Boston
belle, and how many roses had been used in the decorations. He could tell
the exact spot in the Luddington house where young Luddington had shot
himself—the night before his theft of bank funds should be made public.
A stranger could not point at any of the deserted mansions but what Ali
Baba, taking off his tattered hat and scratching his white, curly head
philosophically, would summon a word picture of the past, when the curly
head had been black and the wrinkled face smooth and boyish.
“They say society has all gone to live at Newport in the summer,” Ali
Baba would summarize. “Well, mebbe they has. All I know is this—that
right here at Birge’s Lake from 1860 to 1890—for nigh thirty years, there
wasn’t no place in the land that could boast of entertaining any finer.
We’ve had three presidents come fishing—right there by that landing—and
Patti sang ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ in that big house over there—the
one with the gables. I passed the punch afterwards—yes, sir, right up to
time I was, in a new dress suit Major McAndrews bought me. I never heard
nobody sing as she did—and the wimmen said her pink satin train was six
feet long. Well, I’ll take that back—I have heard it sung as good and
mebbe better by a girl right in this village—a nightingale girl named
Thurley Precore.
“That Swiss cha-_lay_ over there was built in 1878 by Hugo Fiske—he and
his bride were going to come here summers—she died the day before the
wedding, and he come on here, as soon as she was buried, and stayed
all alone, his wedding bags and finery stacked in the hall and never
unpacked. He kept trampin’, trampin’, trampin’ through the woods and
around the lake, never speakin’ to a soul. By and by, when he had walked
it all out, he come to the livery and asked to be taken to the train. I
happened to be handy then, and so I drove him over. When I helped him
out and toted his bags, he says to me, ‘Ali Baba, tell Abby Clergy I
understand’—and he never come back again.”
Here the old man would become uncommunicative, and, when the stranger
would idly ask, “Who was Abby Clergy?”—all the answer would be was:
“His neighbor.”
Then the stranger might suggest the danger of burglars. To which Ali Baba
would answer:
“I guess you don’t know these parts—oh, we got a few burglars—robins and
chipmunks and that kind.”
If the stranger asked “Why are you called Ali Baba?” looking with
interest at his rosy old face, Ali Baba would bid him good-by without
further ado and make his way homeward, past Birge’s Corners to Birge’s
Lake to a certain red brick mansion, with every shuttered window
fastened tight, save those at the back, and the gleam of lights showing
from upper front windows. Ali Baba would find his way to the back of the
house, tiptoeing meekly inside an immaculate summer kitchen to find his
widowed sister, Hopeful Whittier, to whom he would say:
“Land sakes and Mrs. Davis, I got talkin’ again over to Oyster Jim’s—a
fellow in one of those gosh-darn leather coats—seems to me he never would
stop askin’ questions!”
Hopeful, stern and forbidding in her slate-colored calico, would answer,
“Ali Baba, do you know Miss Abby has been waiting—it is PAST four
o’clock?”
Without delay Ali Baba would rush to the barn and in magical order
arrange a shining, old-style harness on an iron gray mare, hitch the
same to an old-style, closed coupé padded with scarlet silk, shades of
past glory! On the coupé door was a monogram—A. C., entwined with plumes
and fleur-de-lis. Donning a black frock coat and silk hat, both slightly
green when the sun met them unexpectedly, Ali Baba would mount the coach
seat, and, with a grave “Come on, Melba,” to the mare, would cause her to
stalk sedately out of the barn, down the gravel path to the side porch
where the carved door would open and a peculiar little person, seemingly
very old, would step outside. She would be dressed in a long out-of-date
black coat and a round, felt hat fastened under her chin by an elastic.
Her shoes would be rough and shabby, and her gray hair betray itself as
fastened in an unbecoming “button” under her hat. As she would put one
hand on the coupé door, it would show itself to be yellowed and feeble.
She never wore gloves, but the most beautiful rings in the world sparkled
innocently on the small fingers, pigeon blood rubies, white water
diamonds, a black pearl, emeralds and sapphires, and on her thumb was a
great cameo ring held in place by a jewelled guard.
Around this small person’s neck would be a thick, old-style braided watch
chain, at the end of which dangled glassless, gold lorgnettes which she
never used. As she lifted her face to Ali Baba’s respectfully inclining
ear to say the same phrase she had said for thirty-five years—“An hour’s
drive, Ali Baba, not too fast,”—one could see that she had dark, restless
eyes and a thin, sharp face, a flexible mouth drawn into a melancholy
expression and a bulging forehead bespeaking more brains than are usual.
The coupé door would close and down would come the faded scarlet
curtains. Ali Baba, laying the whip a full eight inches above Melba’s
iron-gray back, would then effect a triumphant exit out of the driveway.
So it was that Miss Clergy, sole occupant of the ghost village, drove at
four each day of the year, rain or shine, save when the snow piled too
high to let the old-fashioned sledge proceed. “An hour’s drive, Ali Baba,
not too fast” had become a village slogan.
No one ever questioned Ali Baba concerning Miss Clergy, or commented on
the appearance of the coupé with its white-haired driver and curtained
occupant, until, in the year nineteen hundred and twelve, something
else _very_ thrilling happened in Birge’s Corners, something which made
Abigail Clergy’s love tragedy seem remote, scarcely worth remembering.
The person concerned in the event had been told the real story of Abigail
Clergy, and why Joshua Maples was called “Ali Baba,” and why Miss Clergy
drove at four, always alone and with the curtains drawn, and why the
children were afraid of her and called her witch, trying to make their
mothers admit that the Clergy house was haunted. That person was Thurley
Precore—born in Arcadia, the Corners admitted, although they did not call
it by that name. They said, “Wherever Thurley Precore managed to get
that smile and face and voice of hers and to sing more and more like an
angel when every one knew—” and so forth and so on, the deduction arrived
at being that God had let Himself realize His dream of beauty when He
created Thurley Precore—Thurley with the most worthless, indifferent
parents about whom the Corners had ever heard tell.
Thurley was twenty when the “thrilling event” happened. But her advent
into the Corners ten years before is worth recording. To the older
generation, in fact, it had been a happening of great interest, and, had
it not taken place, the really thrilling event in 1912 could never have
occurred. But younger generations never consider the law of cause and
effect, so they shrugged their shoulders in impatience when their elders
insisted on re-telling to out-of-town visitors how Thurley Precore first
“sang for her supper.”