“Gosh, you should see the tilt of his gold-banded cigar,” was Ali Baba’s
comment to Hopeful the day the engagement was announced with a special
heading, and also the fact that “Mr. Birge has begun plans for building
his permanent residence on the beautiful site overlooking the lake. It is
understood it will be named Fairview in accordance with Miss Precore’s
wishes and elaborate furnishings have been ordered from New York.”
“I’m sorry for Lorraine,” Hopeful answered, “but I bet a cookie ’Raine
goes to see Thurley and takes her an embroidered set for a present. She’s
as brave as a lion and sweet as an angel! And I bet you a mince pie
Thurley Precore isn’t going to be happy.”
“You ain’t sayin’ anything against Thurley?” demanded Ali Baba.
“Land, no, I set a sight by Thurley the same as by Lorraine, and I like
Dan as well as either of ’em. It’s just a mistake, Ali Baba, and you know
what mistakes in love do.” Her hand pointed in the direction of the upper
front rooms. “Well, wait and see. Thurley was meant always to sing for
her supper, the same as Lorraine was made to cook supper for a good man.”
“I guess Dan ain’t different from all men—made to _eat_ supper no matter
how much singin’ or cookin’ goes to gettin’ the vittles on the table,”
was Ali Baba’s emphatic summary of the situation.
* * * * *
Lorraine did call on Thurley and bring a daintily wrapped blue tissue
paper parcel containing one of her embroidered “sets” for the washstand
of any conventional, country spare room. Lorraine had remained with the
older generation in her standards of house furnishings and necessities.
The blue tissue paper matched her blue batiste frock with its crisp
ruffles and the ribbon on her hat. Lorraine had made the dress
and trimmed the hat, and it gave the impression of good taste and
praiseworthy industry. There was nothing Lorraine could or would not
attempt to do, once convinced it was her duty. She had the angelic
sweetness of really unselfish natures and the accompanying stubbornness
of which martyrs are made. She was a trifle weak, perhaps, during a
crisis, and certainly lacked Thurley’s aggression and power of argument.
But Lorraine could sustain a situation—long after Thurley was forced, by
temperament, to abandon it! Not even her estimable father dreamed that
on the day Lorraine’s mother died, the child soul of her had closed and
grownups scratched on it in vain. It was her duty, she was convinced, not
to mourn openly.
It had been her father’s duty to have Lorraine brought up, and a maiden
aunt’s duty to forego the luxury of her severe but unhampered existence
to see that Lorraine was properly raised. And it was Lorraine’s duty
to repay the bringing up and to take the place of the minister’s wife
and be the minister’s daughter at the same time, to entertain deacons
and visiting circuit riders and ladies’ aid societies alike, to clean
the best room for the missionaries and cook for them and pray for the
conversion of the heathen all in the same day, to be not too prominent as
the minister’s daughter and yet to take the necessary lead in all things
even unto making a house to house canvass to solicit her father’s back
salary or enough knives and forks to serve the entire congregation at
the baked bean supper!
Likewise, it was her duty not to think how pretty she was—that frail,
elusive sort of beauty which does not impress the first time one meets it
but which, after one has become familiar with it, fairly coaxes its way
into the heart to remain. (No one having merely “glimpsed” Thurley would
have ever forgotten her!) Because Lorraine had innocent, dove-colored
eyes and the fairest of fair hair and tilted features with dimples placed
irregularly about, she was misjudged as to her abilities. No one would
have dreamed that the girl painstakingly wrote the burden of her father’s
letters and helped to soften his harshest of sermons, particularly those
on predestination and heresy, and then turned into the kitchen to do
the work of stout-elbowed women! Nor did that comprise all of her duty.
To her fell those prosaic, uninteresting tasks such as taking old shoes
to be mended in order to avoid buying new, or re-lining her father’s
threadbare coats or rummaging endless drawers to find a recipe for walnut
catsup to satisfy some bromidic but important sister of the church.
It was her duty not to love Dan too hard and become a sentimental goose,
she told herself as night after night she wrestled with her conscience,
trying not to hate Thurley Precore as such small, dainty creatures, to
every one’s surprise, can hate. Of course Dan would marry Thurley or else
marry no one; he would build the lovely home for her and buy her endless
pretty clothes, for every one knew Thurley could not even darn stockings
skilfully—she admitted it with one of her boyish laughs! He would also
buy her a new automobile and a concert grand piano; and she would be his
loved and trusted wife, mother of his children, and when Lorraine would
come to this part of her reverie, the dimples would become quivering
dents of emotion and the orthodox prayers her father fancied were being
said would vanish completely. Of course, she would comfort herself,
Thurley would never make Dan happy—she sang too well! Even this was salt
in the wound, for was not Thurley paid soloist at her father’s church
and was not Lorraine obliged to sit Sunday after Sunday in the first
pew and listen to Thurley’s wonderful voice sing glorious anthems while
behind Lorraine was Dan Birge, present only because he could take Thurley
home?... And Lorraine had to say to him, because it was more of her duty,
“Good morning, Dan; wasn’t the solo wonderful? I think Thurley’s voice is
better all the time. Good morning, Thurley dear, we’ve just been saying
what a marvel you are—good-by. Oh, good morning, Mrs. Turner, I want to
thank you for the invitation for the quilting party—yes, I’d love to
come—oh, thank you—” and so on, her heart thumping uncontrollably fast.
After greeting the congregation, she must go into the parsonage and
cook dinner and try to eat as she listened to her father’s small talk;
she must wash the dishes and return to the church to teach the Bible
class in the three o’clock Sabbath school—while all the time she knew
Dan and Thurley were whirling about the lovely hilly country, stopping
at some shady, brook-embraced glen to eat their luncheon and make love!
And again, a cold tea at six and Lorraine must once more play scullery
maid and then go into the evening service and know Dan was behind her
waiting impatiently until Thurley’s duties were ended and they might go
back to Betsey Pilrig’s porch or parlor and with mellow moonlight as
witness—_spoon!_ That was the truth—spoon! Lorraine’s flat little chest
would heave excitedly and she would drop her eyes and force herself to
count the dots in her frock—the third summer for it—to steady herself
until she could glance up at Thurley in the choir loft and realize that
she was the gladdest, loveliest thing in two worlds, a wild rose by all
the poets’ dictionaries!
So when she climbed the hill to Betsey Pilrig’s house and Betsey went
to call Thurley, Lorraine sank into the parlor chair and gave vent to a
faint groan. If it were any other girl save Thurley, she could endure it
more easily, but Thurley was so careless of his love, she so undervalued
it! She heard Thurley humming a gay song and running down the stairs.
“You nice creature!” Thurley said carelessly, kissing her and trying to
remove her hat at the same time. “Do take it off, ’Raine, it’s such a
climb up here. There, now I can see your eyes!” Thurley did not realize
how unkind was this last. “Sit there—it’s a comfy chair—well, I know
what you’ve come to say,” she blushed properly, “but if Dan could see me
I know he’d be quite shocked, I look anything but a prospective young
matron—’fess up, ’Raine!”
Lorraine shook her head. “Dan wouldn’t care how you looked as long as you
would marry him,” she began bravely. “You know that.” It was harder than
she had steeled herself to expect. Thurley was so careless of her great
joy, she seemed a strange creature not belonging to any well-ordered town
as she sat gracefully on the arm of a sofa, her dark hair braided about
her head and the rumpled pink linen frock emphasizing the color of her
cheeks.
“Well, maybe not. I’m hoping he’ll always feel that way. I didn’t want
to announce it, but Dan wouldn’t wait any longer. Of course we’ve been
half engaged for about two years.”
“Yes, I know.” Lorraine wondered if her voice sounded metallic.
“So I said yes, and now Dan is neglecting business. He was here at
half-past eight this morning to ask if I wanted the walls tinted or
papered; and he’s gone right ahead and ordered a most extravagant
ring—two carat in platinum—really, I don’t approve for I’m so careless of
all my things I’m bound to lose it. I’d rather he didn’t start the house
either. If I were only like you, I’d be delighted with the prospect of a
pantry and a million shelves and drawers and the promise of any sort of
range or fireless cooker and all the other appliances, but I’m not even
interested.”
“You’re not? Why, Thurley, Dan will have to eat! What does interest you?”
“The garden and the color of my room and, most of all, my piano. For I’m
to have a baby grand piano of my very own—I won’t have to practise on the
Sunday school piano any more. I’m half afraid I’m marrying Dan for that
piano—don’t look shocked—I’m not, of course, only it means a great deal.”
“I can’t imagine it! But of course I haven’t your voice.” Unconsciously
Lorraine glanced out the window and across the road to where, sinking
into comfortable ruin, stood a tottering old box-car wagon, the one in
which Thurley had travelled all the way from Boulder, Colorado!
“I wish Philena were here, she’d have so loved a wedding,” Thurley said
presently, “and Granny wouldn’t be so lonesome. Did I tell you that Dan
says she’s to have his old rooms at the hotel, unless she’ll live with
us? She says she won’t, so, of course, the other way is easy and lovely
for her.”
“He’s very generous,” Lorraine sighed. She held out her parcel. “It is
just a well-wisher, as we say,” she added. “Nothing, of course, like your
other things will be, but I made it myself and perhaps you will like it
because of that.”
Lorraine had embroidered faint dreams and hopes of some day using the set
in her house—and Dan Birge’s—into the pattern. She had many such trifles
tucked away in a chest of walnut drawers.
“You’re a dear—I’m so clumsy with a needle—and it is beautiful!” Thurley
said as she opened the package. “Just fancy you doing all this! Oh,
Lorraine, I’ve told Dan, so many times, ‘You ought to marry Lorraine
instead of me—she’d make you such a good wife.’ But men don’t pay any
attention to common sense when they’re in love,” she rattled on.
“Did you, really?” Lorraine put her little hand on Thurley’s sleeve.
“Dozens of times.”
“And did—did Dan ever answer you?”
Thurley turned to look thoughtfully at her small guest. “Well,” she began
awkwardly, “he said that he just happened to love me. I suppose it’s that
way lots of times—people love certain people whether it’s best or not.
When you come to see me, this set shall be in the best room I have—truly.
And I want you to teach me lots of things you know—cooking and sewing and
how always to be even tempered. Why, I’m cross as a witch one minute and
jolly as a gypsy the next, and I do want to make him happy!” There was
an earnest catch in her voice. “He’s been so good to me—I’ve nothing to
offer him but myself.”
“That is all he wants,” Lorraine made herself answer, reaching for her
hat. “Are you going to sing any other place besides church?”
“I think so; Dan thinks not. After all, if you have some one who loves
you very much and is always willing to listen to you sing, I suppose you
ought to do as he says.”
“How can you do anything he doesn’t wish you to?” Lorraine asked
passionately. “You’d be wicked—with him loving you so hard!” Then,
ashamed of her confession, she said a confused good-by and hurried out in
time to have a ride with a passing farmer.
Thurley took the “set” to show to Betsey Pilrig. “See what ’Raine has
given your lazy Thurley,” she said penitently. “I’m beginning to feel out
of sorts with myself—I don’t know why. As if I ought to have been making
wedding clothes when she called or scalding over preserves or something
like that, instead of staying upstairs and learning a new opera aria.
Granny, aren’t you sorry you let this long-legged, noisy creature stay in
your house?” She knelt beside the old woman and clasped her arms around
Betsey’s waist.
Betsey shook her head. “No, because Philena loved you—and when Philena
died, she told me to take care of you.”
“And now I’m going to take care of _you_, and you’re never going to work.”
She rose and walked into the parlor, opening the sacred shutters wide
and seating herself at the old-time organ with its carpet-covered pedals
and apricot plush stool. She began playing chords, her blue eyes looking
across the road, beyond the old box-car wagon, as if she saw visions
of worlds still to be conquered—the worlds that the child Thurley had
pledged herself to know.
There was little in Betsey Pilrig’s house of value to Thurley, but mere
furnishings never mattered. She was oblivious to shabby carpets, and,
when she dusted the parlor furniture or set the table with nicked and
varied styles of china, she was too busy singing or thinking of Dan to
notice her actual surroundings. Nor did clothes bother Thurley—she was
happy in a white middy blouse and a serge skirt and quite as beautiful as
if she wore a Paquin creation. Besides, Thurley rebelled at taking help
from Betsey Pilrig and her only way of earning money was limited. Even
if one was the best singer and piano teacher in the township with the
commendation of having learned: first, all Kate Sills knew, which ended
with an E flat valse and “Dixie” with variations; and, second, all that a
small city organist could teach her during his summer vacation spent in
the Corners, and, last, all Thurley herself taught herself by diligent
practice and “just coming natural to her”—even so, who wanted to pay more
than twenty-five cents an hour to learn how to sing or play on the piano?
So Thurley was forced to content herself with being organist, choir
mistress and soloist in the church, with a dozen pupils to round out her
income. Whenever she begged Dan to let her clerk in his store, he always
asked her to marry him, thus blockading her desire.
With a restless gesture she closed the organ. “Ho-hum, I need Dan to make
love to me,” she ruminated. “I can’t seem to make myself take anything
seriously. I wonder why God made the Precores stop off here instead of a
city—things would have been different in a city....” A moment later she
mentally upbraided herself, “As if you weren’t the luckiest girl in the
world! You ought to get down on your knees and ask poor ’Raine to forgive
you, and Dan and Granny, too.... Go out and start a patchwork quilt this
instant and don’t let a single song be heard in this house until it is a
third finished!”
But the scolding seemed to have no effect, for, instead, she reopened the
organ and sang the opera aria she had just learned. As she finished it,
she spied Miss Clergy’s shabby coupé pausing behind the clump of maple
trees.
“Why—that’s the second time within a few days!” Thurley said delightedly.
“Now—I wonder....”
* * * * *
With the exception of paying her wages or making some childish complaint,
Abigail Clergy seldom spoke to Hopeful. It was an event to be summoned
into those always lighted, seldom aired front rooms, crowded with
keepsakes of a bygone generation, to stand before the chair of the
imperious creature in her rusty black silk and hear her upbraidings over
the fact that harmless urchins had been seen crossing the Fincherie lawn.
During the first tedious years of Miss Clergy’s self-imprisonment,
Hopeful, then younger and stronger of spirit, used to remonstrate against
the order of things, urge a new doctor, a jaunt to the seaside, even if
she saw no one. She tried to persuade Miss Clergy to wear new gowns, to
turn off the penetrating gaslights which burned day and night no matter
how bright the sun or how mellow the moon, to open the windows and let
the fresh air revive her spirits, read a daily paper and, gradually,
gently be swept back into the current of everyday living.
To none of these suggestions did Miss Clergy lend anything but a deaf
ear. Her life had become her martyrdom and she did not propose to lose a
single jot of it. With the exception of Ali Baba, who had proved himself
faithful beyond a doubt, Miss Clergy had registered an everlasting hatred
and distrust of men, it mattered not who. No clergyman dared enter
her door; her physicians were women, her lawyers acted as if they had
been sentenced to the gallows and were merely enjoying a brief stay of
execution. No man could ever command even her respect, she had told
Hopeful; no woman could have her confidence or her love. She hated all
living creatures. And as the years passed with Miss Clergy a trifle more
wrinkled of skin, whiter of hair and distorted of mind, Hopeful ceased
making efforts to change her viewpoint. Indeed, she, too, fell into a
sort of charmed, even existence, free from material want or keenness of
interest in the world without. The Clergy fortune continued to multiply.
All Miss Clergy had to do was figuratively to wave a yellowed, jewelled
hand and a barrel of gold was at her command. Yet no repairs were
permitted to be made at the Fincherie, not even a new coupé nor for Ali
Baba a new livery. And when, one by one, the old mares would die and the
purchase of another was inevitable, Miss Clergy would fly into a rage.
When, perforce, Hopeful demanded to clean the two front rooms, Miss
Clergy would scold sharply, as she moved into one of them, waiting with
added martyrdom until she could fly back into the other to complain about
some minute change in the placing of a book or the position of a chair.
The rest of the house, however, was left to Hopeful’s guardianship, and,
when she tried to persuade Miss Clergy to come downstairs and sit in the
pleasant parlors or eat in the little breakfast room, Miss Clergy would
demand,
“Do you want to find another home for yourself, Hopeful? Oh, you do not.
Then leave me in peace—at least I am mistress of my own house.”
She never spoke to Ali Baba save the daily, “An hour’s drive, Ali Baba,
not too fast,” and by the world at large she was never even seen. No
charity appeal softened her selfish, useless vigil; no cause, however
worthy, could lessen her hysterical mimicry of disease. No one was the
better for the existence of that small, sinister person with a withered
heart, since it was no longer even bruised.
And when, on the evening of the day Miss Clergy had stopped for the
second time to hear Thurley sing, she rang the bell long after Hopeful
had served her a tray supper and said almost civilly as she entered, “Sit
down, Hopeful. I want to ask you about a girl named Thurley Precore who
sings—who she is and how she earns her living and how long she has been
here,” Hopeful put her tired hand to her head, wondering if she had heard
aright.
With a tyrannical smile Miss Clergy repeated her questions.
So Hopeful found her voice after a bit and began the story of Thurley’s
singing for her supper up to the time her father died when the first snow
flew and how out of charity Betsey Pilrig had taken her into her home to
live with Philena.
“Of course Betsey didn’t have much, but what she had she divided between
Philena and Thurley, and she’s said to me that she looked on Thurley as
the boy and Philena the girl. Because Thurley is one of those that’ll get
themselves heard, if they’re born in the backwoods. There wasn’t much to
Philena but her big eyes and her crutch, and you ought to have seen the
way Thurley looked out for her and toted her on her back, pretending she
wasn’t heavy! My land, I’ve watched those children play together until I
was late with my work!”
“What did they play?” interrupted Miss Clergy.
“Missionary and play-actin’ and all such stuff, and Thurley made it up.
No matter what Thurley made up, Philena said she liked it. I never
will forget the Christmas Philena made a travellin’ chest for Thurley
out of an ol’ tea-box she got down to Submit Curler’s store! She fitted
it up inside with cretonne pockets and a lookin’ glass and wrote on
a card, ‘For Thurley when she goes to be a missionary!’ Wasn’t that
the queerest thing for a young ’un to think of? Philena was to be a
missionary, too, and Thurley was to sing the songs. Oh, Thurley can sing!
When they graduated from the high school—Philena didn’t live long after
that—Philena read a graduating essay and Thurley sang a song and there
wasn’t no applause for Philena, except what me and Betsey and Ali Baba
mustered up, but everybody stamped their feet to have Thurley come back
and sing. There was a sort of tableau, too, at the church, for Children’s
Sunday—seven children were the seven days of the week, and wasn’t
it queer that Thurley was Saturday, Philena was Sunday and Lorraine
McDowell, Monday?”
“What of it?” snapped Miss Clergy.
“It means that ‘Saturday’s child must work for a living’ and Thurley
said, ‘That’s me—Saturday.’ And ‘Sunday’s child is full of grace,’ and
certainly Philena was, and ‘Monday’s child is fair of face,’ and nobody
would ever want to see a prettier child than Lorraine was—or is—”
“Never mind her! Go on about Thurley,” Hopeful was ordered.
“It was the next month Philena died, and Betsey spent half she had in the
bank to bury her the way she thought she’d like—a lavender coffin with
quilted satin and she wore her graduating dress and a jet hair ornament
that Thurley give her and Thurley sang at the funeral and never broke
down onct! Some say Thurley Precore never loved no one, but I know she
loved Philena, and since then she stayed on at Betsey’s and earned money
singin’ and teachin’ piano and it seems as if she couldn’t put her mind
on nothin’ else ... I dunno—”
“Who’s the—boy?” There was a rasping tone in her voice. “The boy she is
engaged to marry?”
“Why, Dan Birge—”
“Birge—” memories stirred in the numbed brain.
“Grandson of the one you knew, Miss Abby. Dearie me, you’ve lost count of
years!” Hopeful shook her head.
“Will she be fool enough to marry him?” Miss Clergy insisted.
“He’ll marry no one else, I guess. Seems as if he’s always cared for her
and she’s made a man of him, too.”
“That will do, Hopeful. The omelette was like leather and don’t put
flowers on my tray again.” Miss Clergy’s dismissal was as brusque as her
greeting.
Below, Ali Baba and Hopeful exchanged opinions. After thirty some years
of seclusion Abby Clergy had begun to care to hear of some one else.
“Well, if any one else could make her care, it would be Thurley,” Ali
Baba deduced, while Hopeful paused in the wiping of the last pot to say
sagely,
“If she could, she’d have Dan Birge blown off the face of the earth, just
because he wants to marry Thurley.”
“Some wimmen takes it harder’n others,” muttered Ali Baba whose patience
with Miss Clergy was not of the same duration as his cousin Hopeful’s.
For the first time in thirty-some years Abby Clergy actually opened the
shutter of her window and let in the summer breeze. She drew a chair
close beside it and rested her thin arms on the window ledge. A flush
in the yellowed cheeks betrayed her excitement; her harsh voice was
trying to hum the aria Thurley had sung so carelessly that afternoon.
By chance it was the solo aria in the last opera Abby Clergy had seen.
She had been escorted by Sebastian Gomez the pretender, and every one
had turned opera glasses to look at this beautiful American girl who was
to marry a supposedly dashing nobleman, according to newspaper gossips.
What time and happenings had occurred since then! And Thurley, who had
stirred the last spark of life in the embers of Miss Abby’s heart, was
to marry a country bumpkin, a Birge, a storekeeper probably, a slangy,
serge-suited, whistling nuisance with an odious bulldog and a new-fangled
automobile—never! Not if the Clergy fortune could prevent it!