I
Ellen Sydney’s first garden in the Meadowburn’s new American home had
made a fair beginning. She was at work one afternoon bending over the
bed of sweet peas, hooking the baby tendrils to the wire mesh of the
frame, with an occasional pat of the soft dark earth beneath--the earth
which Bennet, the youngest of the family, had brought by the basketful
from a distance, to enrich the yellow clay that filled in the property.
School was just out and as she worked Bennet banged into the hall,
threw down his books and rushed forth again with a shout to join his
comrades up the street. They were building a “switch-back railway”
from the second story rear window of a neighbour’s house. She could
just glimpse the murderous rickety scaffolding of it through the small
leaves of the alley poplars.
Fastening up the last of the tendrils to the wire, Ellen heard Mrs.
Osprey’s shrill voice calling from quite half a block away to one
of the Osprey boys. She could not restrain a smile at the familiar
summons.
“Poor woman,” thought she, “they do worry her.” But she would no more
have thought of pitying Mrs. Osprey actually, than of feeling sorry for
Her Majesty Queen Alexandra, whom many years in Canada had taught her
to believe next to the angels themselves.
As she turned from the garden she heard a still more familiar voice and
Potter Osprey came through the gate.
“Hello, Ellen, mind my coming over?”
“Oh, no! I’ve got to go in, though. Come in the kitchen, I’m not
very busy.” She had in fact three easy hours before her, with dinner
practically prepared and a little ironing to do before she put the
dishes in the stove. Ironing was quite pleasant if you had some one to
talk to while you did it.
“Vacation’s only six weeks off now,” Potter said as they walked up to
the house. “Ain’t that great! I hate school anyway.”
“Ah, Potter, when you are doing so well at it! Milly told me about the
debates. She said you were fine in them.”
The monthly school debates were a point of pride with him, and he
betrayed a momentary embarrassment. He had quite lost himself in the
vainglory of winning two of them in succession, or of being on the
winning side both times. He had regretted that while they were in
progress, especially while he was on his feet, everybody he knew had
not been in the audience. So many people were not. The thing that he
feared in talking about them to Ellen was that he would reveal his
satisfaction. So Milly had been gossiping about them outside? That
pleased him. Milly was in the class below him, which sat in the same
room.
He recovered his composure and spoke as though of an ordinary matter.
“Pshaw, the debates ain’t really school. They’re different.... But
look, Ellen, all the lots around here are almost forests of weeds in
the summer. It’s great! You can hide in them, and everything. They get
over six feet high. And there’s woods only a mile out west there, to
swim and camp in. If you have time we can walk there some day.”
Ellen’s face brightened at the prospect.
“But it gets hot here in the summer,” he went on, “awful hot--not like
Winnipeg. You won’t like that.”
“Oh, I’ve lived in N’Orleans. It’s lots hotter there.”
“Yes, that’s so. That’s way down south, ain’t it? I always think of
you coming from Winnipeg. Bennet talks about it all the time. He’s a
Britisher all right.”
Ellen replied warmly.
“Well, he shouldn’t be, even if they were born in Canada. His father
says he’s going to stand by this country now, because it gives them a
good living and always has. He’s going to make them all citizens.”
Potter laughed. He was sitting perched up on the kitchen table, his
small feet dangling beneath it and his cap in his hand.
“I told Bennet we licked England twice and he got hot under the collar.
He’s funny. Did you like it better up north?”
“Yes, I guess I did. We used to have good times in Winnipeg. The
fellows always in the house, my! It’ll be the same here after a while.
Those two girls get a crowd coming pretty quick. Only we’ll never have
snow like in Winnipeg. I did love the snow, such sledding and skating!”
“That’s the ticket!” agreed Potter, and added with some disgust, “We
hardly had one good skate last winter--soon as it’d freeze it’d thaw!
But you should have seen the first winter we were here. Almost two
months of ice! This house wasn’t here then--hardly any in this row
were, and gee, the way the wind used to blow! It changes around here
fast. Kirk broke his arm falling through these joistses.”
Potter swung down from the table and stood in front of the ironing
board, smiling up at the tall woman, his hands in his pockets.
“Say, Ellen, got something to eat? Just anything, you know--I’ll tell
you why I want it.”
Ellen put down her iron on the metal guard and went into the pantry.
She returned with three powdered doughnuts on a plate.
“Here,” she said laughing. “You’re always eating, Potter Osprey. Your
mother told me I was spoiling your appetite for meals.”
“Thanks,” he said and went on between mouthfuls. “I’ve been smoking. I
thought something to eat would take my breath away.”
“Well, if that’s what you came here for you can go right back home. You
oughtn’t smoke--so there!”
Potter, however, did not stir; and for a time there was no sound
except the thumping of Ellen’s iron on the thickly padded board. She
was thumping harder than need be, because she was angry. She was often
angry with him. Yet his prolonged visits with her in the kitchen or
on the back stoop of a fine afternoon meant much to her. The family
already teased her, calling young Osprey “Ellen’s pet.” Then Tom
Meadowburn reminded them that “Ellen always had a pet. Remember
Wolly Judson.” This sally caused an uproar. Wolly Judson had been a
Winnipegian of sixty-eight, a town character, a tottering flirt, who
had brought the current gossip regularly to Ellen’s door.
Potter heard none of this chaffing, yet in his talks with her he
betrayed a small opinion of the Meadowburns, all except his friend
Bennet, with whom he sang in the choir. Once he told her indignantly
that she worked too hard, she was spoiling the whole family. Why didn’t
the others do more? Ellen laughed heartily. She did not believe any
such thing. It was her lot to work, and keep at it until things were
done.
Ellen was neither by birth nor legal adoption a member of the
Meadowburn household. She lived there, a fixture; and the principal
advantages did accrue to the family. They obtained a willing, strong
and tireless servant, modest and well-appearing enough to be treated
as a distant relative (and consequently not paid except when chance
generosity dictated). She had been with the Meadowburns since she was
twelve, learning by heart their various needs so that she could have
administered to them in her sleep. She was now twenty-seven, a gaunt
figure, black-eyed and above the middle height. The face would have
been attractive but for the toughened swarthiness it had acquired, and
the cheeks perceptibly sunken by the absence of jaw teeth.
The Meadowburn children had grown up under her care, the two eldest
girls being little more than babies at the time the orphan asylum
in New Orleans yielded her young and frightened body into the hands
of Mrs. Meadowburn. Ellen had found time for those fretful and
ill-tempered midgets, in addition to keeping the house spotless,
laundering for six and cooking the meals. Mrs. Meadowburn had been left
free to nurse a collection of modern ills, and to dream of her youth
as the dark beauty of a northwestern town. Since those days a morose
gloom had settled upon her handsome, Indian-like face. Ellen had rarely
known her to laugh at all. Even the smile with which she greeted her
husband’s jokes was wan and half-hearted.
It was to Ellen that Tom Meadowburn looked for the fullest appreciation
of his comic genius and his masculine importance. Few men were more
conscious of both than he, and even in those moments when the comic
mask fell away completely, there was something in the solemn air of
pompous judgment and disciplinary wisdom which to any one but his
adoring brood would have seemed most funny.
For Tom Meadowburn the world, whether of New Orleans or Winnipeg, or
the new city that had lately taken them in, was a place where he and
the wife and children were “getting on.” The Meadowburn household was,
in his mind, something very much like heaven, himself presiding. For
Ellen, as he often said, it was a refuge under his protecting arm,
wherein she need never come to harm nor suffer want. And to her credit
she believed him and worked all the harder to please him.
Physically Meadowburn was a tall stout man with a heavy, pink,
unwhiskered face, the pale eyelashes and tow hair being lighter than
his skin, and the small, quick eyes a transparent, hardly perceptible
blue. As a humourist he was not one of your torrential and generous
laughers. He was sly and dry, a wrinkle, the flicker of a smile, a
knowing arch of the eyebrows being his favourite manner of accentuating
his point. He was in the habit of twitting Ellen on the subject of
marriage.
“Now then, my girl,” he would say, “what are you keeping from us? What
have you got up your sleeve? Didn’t I hear you come in a little late
last night? Walking, eh--of course, not _alone_? We wouldn’t permit you
to walk alone.”
“Ellen went to the drugstore for some medicine for me, last night,
Tom,” interposed his wife.
“Well, well, Ellen,” he went on, “you must remember you’re perfectly
free. We wouldn’t keep you from marrying when the right man comes
along.”
“Yes, and maybe I will marry, sooner than you think! You watch out, Mr.
Meadowburn!”
The pleasure of this stock joke lay in the fact that none of the
Meadowburns believed there was danger of Ellen marrying, of any one
caring to marry her, at least, whose social position would suit her.
For she did not have kitchen-maid standards, as they knew. And she
believed there was no danger either. She felt very old....
It was into this somewhat harsh and lonely existence that Potter had
thrust his genial, boyish appearance, and by some strange affinity of
comradeship, they had taken to each other at once. He too, as she was
soon to learn, was lonely and cherished his dreams; and it comforted
her to have a champion--even so young and small a champion as he. Was
he so young and small? There were times when he frightened her with
flashes of grown-up speech. It did not always seem quite nice, quite
appropriate. For example, one evening when they were talking about
perfectly ordinary matters, he burst out:
“You’re like Christ, Ellen. If He could be on earth He wouldn’t love
Dr. Minor or any of those people in the church. He’d pick you.”
Her first thought about this was that it was deliberately bad, as bad
as his smoking and his score of other boy tricks. It was blasphemous
and wildly untrue. She sent him away in disgrace, much discomfited and
hurt. Probably this rudeness of her own was what brought her so swiftly
around to forgiveness, or it may be that she came to look kindly on
his tribute. In any event, she gave Bennet a note for him, a queer,
misspelled, dignified note....
When Potter returned she told him that he “must not think of Jesus as a
person but as God, and that was the end of it.”