AUNT TRUDY COMES
"Are you going to the station, Sarah?" Sarah, stretched in luxurious
comfort on the porch rug, raised a rumpled head above her book and
frowned.
"Why should I go to the station?" she drawled.
"You know perfectly well," answered Rosemary with some impatience.
"Aunt Trudy is coming on the 4:10 and Hugh asked us to meet her."
"You go--you're the oldest," said Sarah calmly. "I want to read
about sick rabbits."
"Sarah, you know you promised mother to be good and to do the things
you thought would please her. Come on and meet Aunt Trudy--we'll all
go, you and I and Shirley," wheedled Rosemary, beginning to roll up
her knitting.
"Where's Hugh--why doesn't he go?" asked Sarah who usually exhausted
all arguments before giving in.
"Hugh's down at Dr. Jordan's and he won't be home till dinner
time," replied Rosemary. "Mother would want us to be nice to Aunt
Trudy, you know she would."
"Well, I'm going to be nice," insisted Sarah, scrambling to her feet
and hurling the book under the swing where she kept the larger part
of her dilapidated library. "I'll go to the station if I can go as I
am--I have to clean the rabbit hutch when I get back and I won't
have time to be dressing and undressing all the afternoon."
"You can't go as you are!" Rosemary surveyed her sister
appraisingly. "Your face is black and your dress has a grease
spot across the front. And you haven't any hair ribbon."
"I'll go as I am, or I won't go at all," repeated Sarah coolly.
Rosemary stabbed her long needles into her half-finished sweater and
hung her knitting bag on the back of her chair.
"Then you can stay home," she said crossly. "I'll go up and get
Shirley now and we'll go without you."
She ran upstairs, coaxed the protesting Shirley from her play of
sailing boats in the bath-tub, and was buttoning her into a clean
frock when Sarah came tramping through the hall. She occupied a
room with Shirley, while Rosemary had a room to herself connected
with the younger girls' room by a rather narrow door.
"Wait a minute and I'll go," said Sarah, jerking down her tan linen
dress from its hook in the closet.
"Is Aunt Trudy's room all ready, Winnie?" asked Rosemary, as the
three sisters stopped in the kitchen to notify that faithful
individual of their departure. "Do we look nice?"
It was impossible to look at the three faces without an answering
smile. Rosemary glowed, pink-cheeked, star-eyed, in a frock of dull
blue linen made with wide white piqué collar and cuffs. Her hair
waved and rippled and curled, despite its loose braiding, almost to
her waist. Rosemary was simply going to the station to meet the 4:10
train, but nothing was ever casual to her; she met each hour
expectantly on tip-toe and, as her mother had once observed, laughed
and wept her way around the clock. Sarah smiled broadly--going to
the station to meet Aunt Trudy had, for some inexplicable reason,
resolved itself into a joke for her. Sarah was not excited and she
represented solid common-sense from her straight Dutch-cut hair to
her square-toed sandals, for no amount of argument from Rosemary
could induce her to put on her best patent leather slippers. And
Shirley--well Winnie picked up Shirley and hugged her fervently,
which was the emotion Shirley generally inspired in all beholders.
She was a young person, all yellow curls and fluffy white skirts
and tiny perfect teeth and distracting dimples.
"Miss Wright's room is in perfect order," reported Winnie, setting
Shirley down and straightening her pink sash. "I put on the
embroidered bureau scarf and the best linen sheets and pillow
cases, just as you said, Rosemary."
"And I put a bowl of lilacs on her table this morning," said
Rosemary happily, "so I guess everything has been attended to.
Do you want us to get anything up town? We're going to the
station, Winnie."
"No, my dinner's all planned," answered Winnie with pride. "What
train's Miss Wright coming on--the 4:10?"
"Yes, and Hugh said to have Bernard Coyle bring us up to the house
with his jitney," said Rosemary. "I suppose Aunt Trudy will have
some bags and parcels. You'll be round when we get back, won't you,
Winnie? I don't know exactly what to say to her."
"Bless you, child, you'll do all right," Winnie encouraged her.
"Doctor Hugh will be home to dinner and 'tisn't as if your aunt was
a total stranger."
"But she really is a total stranger," commented Rosemary, as they
began their walk to the station. "Of course she has been here a
couple of days last summer and she spent New Year's with us; but
Mother entertained her and we only saw her now and then, mostly at
the table."
"Well, we have to make the best of it now, because Hugh says we
can't upset Mother," said Sarah. "I know she will be an awful lot of
trouble and she won't know the first thing about animals."
"Maybe she'll read all the time," offered Shirley in her soft, baby
voice. "Dora Ellis has an aunt who reads books all the time and Dora
can do just as she pleases. She told me so."
"Well, don't you listen to everything Dora Ellis tells you," said
Rosemary severely. "Mother doesn't like you to play with her and
Hugh said you were not to go across the street without asking
permission; doesn't Dora Ellis live on the other side of the
street?"
"Yes, she does, but I didn't go over in her yard, not for weeks and
weeks," explained Shirley earnestly. "She told me 'bout her aunt
last year, in kindergarten."
"All right, honey, I'm not scolding," declared Rosemary, giving her
a kiss. "There's the station clock and it says half-past four. But,
pshaw, that clock never keeps time."
It was not half-past four they found, when they consulted the clock
in the ticket office, but it was close to ten minutes past and when
the three girls stepped out on the platform the smoke of the train
was already visible far up the track.
There were several people waiting, most of them Eastshore people,
and these came up and asked about Mrs. Willis. Rosemary, assuring
them that her mother was definitely declared to be out of danger,
was fairly radiant.
"Rosemary!" a girl about her own age hailed her. "I'm so glad to see
you. Daddy told us last night your mother is better, but I didn't
like to call you up because I thought perhaps you still had the
phone muffled. Mother and I are going down to the beach to stay till
after Labor Day."
"How lovely!" cried Rosemary. "You have the nicest things happen to
you, Harriet. Are you going on this train?"
"Yes, and don't I wish you were coming!" responded Harriet warmly.
"Couldn't you come down next month, if your mother is well enough to
leave?"
"Oh, goodness, Mother has gone away, to be gone a year," said
Rosemary hurriedly. "I can't go anywhere, you see. Besides Aunt
Trudy Wright is coming on this train, and Hugh is going to be
home all summer. There's your mother beckoning--run, Harriet,
and be sure you write to me."
They kissed each other and Harriet ran back to her mother and was
lost in the anxious pushing group that surrounded the steps of the
slowly stopping train.
"Hang on to Shirley, while I try to find Aunt Trudy," directed
Rosemary, with a sudden panicky feeling that she couldn't remember
what her aunt looked like.
But, as soon as she saw her, she recognized her.
"Well, Rosemary darling, you came to meet me--that's lovely I'm
sure," cried Aunt Trudy, panting slightly from her leap off the last
step of the car, to the conductor's unconcealed amazement. "And
Mother is much better, the telegram said. As soon as I heard, I
resolved nothing should keep me from you--Oh, there's Shirley and
Sarah, the dears!"
Shirley responded affectionately to her aunt's caresses, but Sarah
stood like a wooden image and submitted to being kissed with bad
grace. Aunt Trudy was too excited to be critical.
"What do I do about my trunks?" she fluttered. "And these bags are
both heavy--I've brought you girls each a little something. Is Hugh
home? And Winnie is still with you, of course?"
Rosemary wisely did not attempt to answer all these questions and,
considering that Winnie had been in the Willis family for
twenty-eight years and Aunt Trudy had unfailingly put this question
to some member of the family at every meeting for the last
twenty-seven, this particular query might be said to be more a
comment than a question.
"We'll go up to the house in Bernard Coyle's jitney," said Rosemary,
leading the way around to the side platform. "He will take your
trunk checks, Aunt Trudy, and the express man will deliver them."
Bernard Coyle ran two of the three Eastshore jitneys and personally
conducted the least ancient of his two cars. He welcomed the
prospect of four passengers with a glad smile and swung Aunt
Trudy's bags to a safe place under the seat at a nod from Rosemary.
While they climbed in, he departed with the trunk checks and
returned in a few minutes to report that the three trunks would be
in the front hall of the Willis home within an hour.
Then he took the wheel of his wheezy little car and without another
word drove frenziedly and rackingly through the quiet streets till
the Willis house was reached. Winnie, mindful of Rosemary's plea,
came out to the curb to meet them.
"Well, Winnie, I'm glad to see you again," was Miss Wright's
greeting. "You and I are to keep house and look after these flighty
young folks, I understand."
"Yes'm," nodded Winnie. "Your room's all ready, Miss Wright--the one
you always have, next to Mrs. Willis'. And Doctor Hugh said to tell
you he'd be home at quarter of six."
Aunt Trudy Wright was a rather short, dumpy woman and inclined to be
stout and short of breath. She had iron-gray hair, near-sighted dark
eyes and very pretty, very plump small hands. She exclaimed over her
room when she saw it, said that everything was lovely and insisted
on kissing the three girls again. Sarah promptly left at this point
and was discovered by her brother when he came home, lying flat on
the porch rug and absorbed in a book which dealt, in detail, with
the health and welfare of rabbits.
"Well you look comfortable," he said good-humoredly. "Aunt Trudy
come? Who went to meet her? Where are the other girls?"
"Uh-huh," grunted Sarah, interested at that moment in a description
of a balanced diet for her pets.
Dr. Hugh laughed and went on. The house seemed strangely quiet to
him, though he could hear Winnie humming in the kitchen and
appetizing odors promised a dinner on time. In the upstairs hall,
Rosemary tip-toed to meet him, her eyes dark with mystery.
"Hello, where is everyone?" asked her brother, giving her a kiss.
"What has happened to Aunt Trudy?"
"She's getting ready for dinner," explained Rosemary. "She's been
crying in Mother's room for almost an hour and then her trunks came
and she thought she'd change her dress."
"Crying in Mother's room--what for?" demanded Doctor Hugh quickly.
"Oh, because memories were too much for her," quoted Rosemary
solemnly. "She made Shirley and me cry, too, but Sarah went down
stairs when she tried to kiss her, so she didn't hear her talk."
"I'll give Sarah credit for good sense," said Doctor Hugh grimly.
He strode down the hall to his mother's room, took the key from the
inside and locked the door and dropped the key in his pocket.
"And that's that," he announced, smiling a little at Rosemary's
puzzled face.