Marcia’s cheeks were flushed when David came home to dinner, for at the
last she had to hurry.
As he stood in the doorway of the wide kitchen and caught the odor of the
steaming platter of green corn she was putting upon the table, David
suddenly realized that he had eaten scarcely anything for breakfast.
Also, he felt a certain comfort from the sweet steady look of wistful
sympathy in Marcia’s eyes. Did he fancy it, or was there a new look upon
her face, a more reserved bearing, less childish, more touched by sad
knowledge of life and its bitterness? It was mere fancy of course,
something he had just not noticed. He had seen so little of her before.
In the heart of the maiden there stirred a something which she did not
quite understand, something brought to life by the sight of her sister’s
daguerreotype lying at the edge of the valence, where it must have fallen
from David’s pocket without his knowledge as he lay asleep. It had seemed
to put into tangible form the solid wall of fact that hung between her and
any hope of future happiness as a wife, and for the first time she too
began to realize what she had sacrificed in thus impetuously throwing her
young life into the breach that it might be healed. But she was not
sorry,—not yet, anyway,—only frightened, and filled with dreary
forebodings.
The meal was a pleasant one, though constrained. David roused himself to
be cheerful for Marcia’s sake, as he would have done with any other
stranger, and the girl, suddenly grown sensitive, felt it, and appreciated
it, yet did not understand why it made her unhappy.
She was anxious to please him, and kept asking if the potatoes were
seasoned right and if his corn were tender, and if he wouldn’t have
another cup of coffee. Her cheeks were quite red with the effort at
matronly dignity when David was finally through his dinner and gone back
to the office, and two big tears came and sat in her eyes for a moment,
but were persuaded with a determined effort to sink back again into those
unfathomable wells that lie in the depths of a woman’s eyes. She longed to
get out of doors and run wild and free in the old south pasture for
relief. She did not know how different it all was from the first dinner of
the ordinary young married couple; so stiff and formal, with no gentle
touches, no words of love, no glances that told more than words. And yet,
child as she was, she felt it, a lack somewhere, she knew not what.
But training is a great thing. Marcia had been trained to be on the alert
for the next duty and to do it before she gave herself time for any of her
own thoughts. The dinner table was awaiting her attention, and there was
company coming.
She glanced at the tall clock in the hall and found she had scarcely an
hour before she might expect David’s aunts, for David had brought her word
that they would come and spend the afternoon and stay to tea.
She shrank from the ordeal and wished David had seen fit to stay and
introduce her. It would have been a relief to have had him for a shelter.
Somehow she knew that he would have stayed if it had been Kate, and that
thought pained her, with a quick sharpness like the sting of an insect.
She wondered if she were growing selfish, that it should hurt to find
herself of so little account. And, yet, it was to be expected, and she
must stop thinking about it. Of course, Kate was the one he had chosen and
Kate would always be the only one to him.
It did not take her long to reduce the dinner table to order and put all
things in readiness for tea time; and in doing her work Marcia’s thoughts
flew to pleasanter themes. She wondered what Dolly and Debby, the servants
at home, would say if they could see her pretty china and the nice
kitchen. They had always been fond of her, and naturally her new honors
made her wish to have her old friends see her. What would Mary Ann say?
What fun it would be to have Mary Ann there sometime. It would be almost
like the days when they had played house under the old elm on the big flat
stone, only this would be a real house with real sprigged china instead of
bits of broken things. Then she fell into a song, one they sang in school,
“Sister, thou wast mild and lovely,
Gentle as the summer breeze,
Pleasant as the air of evening
When it floats among the trees.”
But the first words set her to thinking of her own sister, and how little
the song applied to her, and she thought with a sigh how much better it
would have been, how much less bitter, if Kate had been that way and had
lain down to die and they could have laid her away in the little hilly
graveyard under the weeping willows, and felt about her as they did about
the girl for whom that song was written.
The work was done, and Marcia arrayed in one of the simplest of Kate’s
afternoon frocks, when the brass knocker sounded through the house,
startling her with its unfamiliar sound.
Breathlessly she hurried downstairs. The crucial moment had come when she
must stand to meet her new relatives alone. With her hand trembling she
opened the door, but there was only one person standing on the stoop, a
girl of about her own age, perhaps a few months younger. Her hair was red,
her face was freckled, and her blue eyes under the red lashes danced with
repressed mischief. Her dress was plain and she wore a calico sunbonnet of
chocolate color.
“Let me in quick before Grandma sees me,” she demanded unceremoniously,
entering at once before there was opportunity for invitation. “Grandma
thinks I’ve gone to the store, so she won’t expect me for a little while.
I was jest crazy to see how you looked. I’ve ben watchin’ out o’ the
window all the morning, but I couldn’t ketch a glimpse of you. When David
came out this morning I thought you’d sure be at the kitchen door to kiss
him good-bye, but you wasn’t, and I watched every chance I could get, but
I couldn’t see you till you run out in the garden fer corn. Then I saw you
good, fer I was out hangin’ up dish towels. You didn’t have a sunbonnet
on, so I could see real well. And when I saw how young you was I made up
my mind I’d get acquainted in spite of Grandma. You don’t mind my comin’
over this way without bein’ dressed up, do you? There wouldn’t be any way
to get here without Grandma seeing me, you know, if I put on my Sunday
clo’es.”
“I’m glad you came!” said Marcia impulsively, feeling a rush of something
like tears in her throat at the relief of delay from the aunts. “Come in
and sit down. Who are you, and why wouldn’t your Grandmother like you to
come?”
The strange girl laughed a mirthless laugh.
“Me? Oh, I’m Mirandy. Nobody ever calls me anything but Mirandy. My pa
left ma when I was a baby an’ never come back, an’ ma died, and I live
with Grandma Heath. An’ Grandma’s mad ’cause David didn’t marry Hannah
Heath. She wanted him to an’ she did everything she could to make him pay
’tention to Hannah, give her fine silk frocks, two of ’em, and a real pink
parasol, but David he never seemed to know the parasol was pink at all,
fer he’d never offer to hold it over Hannah even when Grandma made him
walk with her home from church ahead of us. So when it come out that David
was really going to marry, and wouldn’t take Hannah, Grandma got as mad as
could be and said we never any of us should step over his door sill. But
I’ve stepped, I have, and Grandma can’t help herself.”
“And who is Hannah Heath?” questioned the dazed young bride. It appeared
there was more than a sister to be taken into account.
“Hannah? Oh, Hannah is my cousin, Uncle Jim’s oldest daughter, and she’s
getting on toward thirty somewhere. She has whitey-yellow hair and light
blue eyes and is tall and real pretty. She held her head high fer a good
many years waitin’ fer David, and I guess she feels she made a mistake
now. I noticed she bowed real sweet to Hermon Worcester last Sunday and
let him hold her parasol all the way to Grandma’s gate. Hannah was mad as
hops when she heard that you had gold hair and blue eyes, for it did seem
hard to be beaten by a girl of the same kind? but you haven’t, have you?
Your hair is almost black and your eyes are brownie-brown. You’re years
younger than Hannah, too. My! Won’t she be astonished when she sees you!
But I don’t understand how it got around about your having gold hair. It
was a man that stopped at your father’s house once told it——”
“It was my sister!” said Marcia, and then blushed crimson to think how
near she had come to revealing the truth which must not be known.
“Your sister? Have you got a sister with gold hair?”
“Yes, he must have seen her,” said Marcia confusedly. She was not used to
evasion.
“How funny!” said Miranda. “Well, I’m glad he did, for it made Hannah so
jealous it was funny. But I guess she’ll get a set-back when she sees how
young you are. You’re not as pretty as I thought you would be, but I
believe I like you better.”
Miranda’s frank speech reminded Marcia of Mary Ann and made her feel quite
at home with her curious visitor. She did not mind being told she was not
up to the mark of beauty. From her point of view she was not nearly so
pretty as Kate, and her only fear was that her lack of beauty might reveal
the secret and bring confusion to David. But she need not have feared: no
one watching the two girls, as they sat in the large sunny room and faced
each other, but would have smiled to think the homely crude girl could
suggest that the other calm, cool bud of womanhood was not as near
perfection of beauty as a bud could be expected to come. There was always
something child-like about Marcia’s face, especially her profile,
something deep and other-world-like in her eyes, that gave her an
appearance so distinguished from other girls that the word “pretty” did
not apply, and surface observers might have passed her by when searching
for prettiness, but not so those who saw soul beauties.
But Miranda’s time was limited, and she wanted to make as much of it as
possible.
“Say, I heard you making music this morning. Won’t you do it for me? I’d
just love to hear you.”
Marcia’s face lit up with responsive enthusiasm, and she led the way to
the darkened parlor and folded back the covers of the precious piano. She
played some tender little airs she loved as she would have played them for
Mary Ann, and the two young things stood there together, children in
thought and feeling, half a generation apart in position, and neither
recognized the difference.
“My land!” said the visitor, “’f I could play like that I wouldn’t care ef
I had freckles and no father and red hair,” and looking up Marcia saw
tears in the light blue eyes, and knew she had a kindred feeling in her
heart for Miranda.
They had been talking a minute or two when the knocker suddenly sounded
through the long hall again making both girls start. Miranda boldly
tiptoed over to the front window and peeped between the green slats of the
Venetian blind to see who was at the door, while Marcia started guiltily
and quickly closed the instrument.
“It’s David’s aunts,” announced Miranda in a stage whisper hurriedly. “I
might ’a’ known they would come this afternoon. Well, I had first try at
you anyway, and I like you real well. May I come again and hear you play?
You go quick to the door, and I’ll slip into the kitchen till they get in,
and then I’ll go out the kitchen door and round the house out the little
gate so Grandma won’t see me. I must hurry for I ought to have been back
ten minutes ago.”
“But you haven’t been to the store,” said Marcia in a dismayed whisper.
“Oh, well, that don’t matter! I’ll tell her they didn’t have what she sent
me for. Good-bye. You better hurry.” So saying, she disappeared into the
kitchen; and Marcia, startled by such easy morality, stood dazed until the
knocker sounded forth again, this time a little more peremptorily, as the
elder aunt took her turn at it.
And so at last Marcia was face to face with the Misses Spafford.
They came in, each with her knitting in a black silk bag on her slim arm,
and greeted the flushed, perturbed Marcia with gentle, righteous, rigid
inspection. She felt with the first glance that she was being tried in the
fire, and that it was to be no easy ordeal through which she was to pass.
They had come determined to sift her to the depths and know at once the
worst of what their beloved nephew had brought upon himself. If they found
aught wrong with her they meant to be kindly and loving with her, but they
meant to take it out of her. This had been the unspoken understanding
between them as they wended their dignified, determined way to David’s
house that afternoon, and this was what Marcia faced as she opened the
door for them.
She gasped a little, as any girl overwhelmed thus might have done. She did
not tilt her chin in defiance as Kate would have done. The thought of
David came to support her, and she grasped for her own little part and
tried to play it creditably. She did not know whether the aunts knew of
her true identity or not, but she was not left long in doubt.
“My dear, we have long desired to know you, of whom we have heard so
much,” recited Miss Amelia, with slightly agitated mien, as she bestowed a
cool kiss of duty upon Marcia’s warm cheek. It chilled the girl, like the
breath from a funeral flower.
“Yes, it is indeed a pleasure to us to at last look upon our dear nephew’s
wife,” said Miss Hortense quite precisely, and laid the sister kiss upon
the other cheek. In spite of her there flitted through Marcia’s brain the
verse, “Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the
other also.” Then she was shocked at her own irreverence and tried to put
away a hysterical desire to laugh.
The aunts, too, were somewhat taken aback. They had not looked for so
girlish a wife. She was not at all what they had pictured. David had tried
to describe Kate to them once, and this young, sweet, disarming thing did
not in the least fit their preconceived ideas of her. What should they do?
How could they carry on a campaign planned against a certain kind of
enemy, when lo, as they came upon the field of action the supposed enemy
had taken another and more bewildering form than the one for whom they had
prepared. They were for the moment silent, gathering their thoughts, and
trying to fit their intended tactics to the present situation.
During this operation Marcia helped them to remove their bonnets and silk
capes and to lay them neatly on the parlor sofa. She gave them chairs,
suggested palm-leaf fans, and looked about, for the moment forgetting that
this was not her old home plentifully supplied with those gracious breeze
wafters.
They watched her graceful movements, those two angular old ladies, and
marvelled over her roundness and suppleness. They saw with appalled hearts
what a power youth and beauty might have over a man. Perhaps she might be
even worse than they had feared, though if you could have heard them talk
about their nephew’s coming bride to their neighbors for months
beforehand, you would have supposed they knew her to be a model in every
required direction. But their stately pride required that of them, an
outward loyalty at least. Now that loyalty was to be tried, and Marcia had
two old, narrow and well-fortified hearts to conquer ere her way would be
entirely smooth.
Well might Madam Schuyler have been proud of her pupil as alone and
unaided she faced the trying situation and mastered it in a sweet and
unassuming way.
They began their inquisition at once, so soon as they were seated, and the
preliminary sentences uttered. The gleaming knitting needles seemed to
Marcia like so many swarming, vindictive bees, menacing her peace of mind.
“You look young, child, to have the care of so large a house as this,”
said Aunt Amelia, looking at Marcia over her spectacles as if she were
expected to take the first bite out of her. “It’s a great responsibility!”
she shut her thin lips tightly and shook her head, as if she had said:
“It’s a great _impossibility_.”
“Have you ever had the care of a house?” asked Miss Hortense, going in a
little deeper. “David likes everything nice, you know, he has always been
used to it.”
There was something in the tone, and in the set of the bow on Aunt
Hortense’s purple-trimmed cap that roused the spirit in Marcia.
“I think I rather enjoy housework,” she responded coolly. This unexpected
statement somewhat mollified the aunts. They had heard to the contrary
from some one who had lived in the same town with the Schuylers. Kate’s
reputation was widely known, as that of a spoiled beauty, who did not care
to work, and would do whatever she pleased. The aunts had entertained many
forebodings from the few stray hints an old neighbor of Kate’s had dared
to utter in their hearing.
The talk drifted at once into household matters, as though that were the
first division of the examination the young bride was expected to undergo.
Marcia took early opportunity to still further mollify her visitors by her
warmest praise of the good things with which the pantry and store-closet
had been filled. The expression that came upon the two old faces was that
of receiving but what is due. If the praise had not been forthcoming they
would have marked it down against her, but it counted for very little with
them, warm as it was.
“Can you make good bread?”
The question was flung out by Aunt Hortense like a challenge, and the very
set of her nostrils gave Marcia warning. But it was in a relieved voice
that ended almost in a ripple of laugh that she answered quite assuredly:
“Oh, yes, indeed. I can make beautiful bread. I just love to make it,
too!”
“But how do you make it?” quickly questioned Aunt Amelia, like a repeating
rifle. If the first shot had not struck home, the second was likely to.
“Do you use hop yeast? Potatoes? I thought so. Don’t know how to make
salt-rising, do you? It’s just what might have been expected.”
“David has always been used to salt-rising bread,” said Aunt Hortense with
a grim set of her lips as though she were delivering a judgment. “He was
raised on it.”
“If David does not like my bread,” said Marcia with a rising color and a
nervous little laugh, “then I shall try to make some that he does like.”
There was an assurance about the “if” that did not please the oracle.
“David was raised on salt-rising bread,” said Aunt Hortense again as if
that settled it. “We can send you down a loaf or two every time we bake
until you learn how.”
“I’m sure it’s very kind of you,” said Marcia, not at all pleased, “but I
do not think that will be necessary. David has always seemed to like our
bread when he visited at home. Indeed he often praised it.”
“David would not be impolite,” said Aunt Amelia, after a suitable pause in
which Marcia felt disapprobation in the air. “It would be best for us to
send it. David’s health might suffer if he was not suitably nourished.”
Marcia’s cheeks grew redder. Bread had been one of her stepmother’s strong
points, well infused into her young pupil. Madam Schuyler had never been
able to say enough to sufficiently express her scorn of people who made
salt-rising bread.
“My stepmother made beautiful bread,” she said quite childishly; “she did
not think salt-rising was so healthy as that made from hop yeast. She
disliked the odor in the house from salt-rising bread.”
Now indeed the aunts exchanged glances of “On to the combat.” Four red
spots flamed giddily out in their four sallow cheeks, and eight shining
knitting needles suddenly became idle. The moment was too momentous to
work. It was as they feared, even the worst. For, be it known, salt-rising
bread was one of their most tender points, and for it they would fight to
the bitter end. They looked at her with four cold, forbidding, steely,
spectacled eyes, and Marcia felt that their looks said volumes: “And she
so young too! To be so out of the way!” was what they might have expressed
to one another. Marcia felt she had been unwise in uttering her honest,
indignant sentiments concerning salt-rising bread.
The pause was long and impressive, and the bride felt like a naughty
little four-year-old.
At last Aunt Hortense took up her knitting again with the air that all was
over and an unrevokable verdict was passed upon the culprit.
“People have never seemed to stay away from our house on that account,”
she said dryly. “I’m sure I hope it will not be so disagreeable that it
will affect your coming to see us sometimes with David.”
There was an iciness in her manner that seemed to suggest a long line of
offended family portraits of ancestors frowning down upon her.
Marcia’s cheeks flamed crimson and her heart fairly stopped beating.
“I beg your pardon,” she said quickly, “I did not mean to say anything
disagreeable. I am sure I shall be glad to come as often as you will let
me.” As she said it Marcia wondered if that were quite true. Would she
ever be glad to go to the home of those two severe-looking aunts? There
were three of them. Perhaps the other one would be even more withered and
severe than these two. A slight shudder passed over Marcia, and a sudden
realization of a side of married life that had never come into her
thoughts before. For a moment she longed with all the intensity of a child
for her father’s house and the shelter of his loving protection, amply
supported by her stepmother’s capable, self-sufficient, comforting
countenance. Her heart sank with the fear that she would never be able to
do justice to the position of David’s wife, and David would be
disappointed in her and sorry he had accepted her sacrifice. She roused
herself to do better, and bit her tongue to remind it that it must make no
more blunders. She praised the garden, the house and the furnishings, in
voluble, eager, girlish language until the thin lines of lips relaxed and
the drawn muscles of the aunts’ cheeks took on a less severe aspect. They
liked to be appreciated, and they certainly had taken a great deal of
pains with the house—for David’s sake—not for hers. They did not care to
have her deluded by the idea that they had done it for her sake. David was
to them a young god, and with this one supreme idea of his supremacy they
wished to impress his young wife. It was a foregone conclusion in their
minds that no mere pretty young girl was capable of appreciating David, as
could they, who had watched him from babyhood, and pampered and petted and
been severe with him by turns, until if he had not had the temper of an
angel he would surely have been spoiled.
“We did our best to make the house just as David would have wished to have
it,” said Aunt Amelia at last, a self-satisfied shadow of what answered
for a smile with her, passing over her face for a moment.
“We did not at all approve of this big house, nor indeed of David’s
setting up in a separate establishment for himself,” said Aunt Hortense,
taking up her knitting again. “We thought it utterly unnecessary and
uneconomical, when he might have brought his wife home to us, but he
seemed to think you would want a house to yourself, so we did the best we
could.”
There was a martyr-like air in Aunt Hortense’s words that made Marcia feel
herself again a criminal, albeit she knew she was suffering vicariously.
But in her heart she felt a sudden thankfulness that she was spared the
trial of living daily under the scrutiny of these two, and she blest David
for his thoughtfulness, even though it had not been meant for her. She
went into pleased ecstasies once more over the house, and its furnishings,
and ended by her pleasure over the piano.
There was grim stillness when she touched upon that subject. The aunts did
not approve of that musical instrument, that was plain. Marcia wondered if
they always paused so long before speaking when they disapproved, in order
to show their displeasure. In fact, did they always disapprove of
everything?
“You will want to be very careful of it,” said Aunt Amelia, looking at the
disputed article over her glasses, “it cost a good deal of money. It was
the most foolish thing I ever knew David to do, buying that.”
“Yes,” said Aunt Hortense, “you will not want to use it much, it might get
scratched. It has a fine polish. I’d keep it closed up only when I had
company. You ought to be very proud to have a husband who could buy a
thing like that. There’s not many has them. When I was a girl my
grandfather had a spinet, the only one for miles around, and it was taken
great care of. The case hadn’t a scratch on it.”
Marcia had started toward the piano intending to open it and play for her
new relatives, but she halted midway in the room and came back to her seat
after that speech, feeling that she must just sit and hold her hands until
it was time to get supper, while these dreadful aunts picked her to
pieces, body, soul and spirit.
It was with great relief at last that she heard David’s step and knew she
might leave the room and put the tea things upon the table.