phaeton (which had been newly washed for the occasion) just beyond the
lilac-bushes at the gate. Mrs. Conner's comely presence filled the
better part of the seat, but the eyes of all the Darters traveled at
once to the slim girl in gray covert-cloth who sat beside her. The girl
looked like hundreds of rather pretty American girls, with gray eyes and
brown hair and dimples in their cheeks. She was pretty as youth and
cheerfulness and dainty clothes are always pretty, but Emmy's gaze dwelt
on her with reverence. "That's a camera she's holding--in that box," she
said in a low tone to Jinny, "she's the girl that got the scholarship."
Emmy sighed.
Mrs. Conner had stopped the horse. She responded to Emmy's greeting by
presenting her to the girl in gray. "Miss Doris Keith; she's going to
the Chicago University. She knows Sibyl." Then she fished out a package
from the luggage heaped at their feet. "Here's the books. That your ma
on the piazza?"
As if in response, a few hollow moans floated from the rocking-chair.
"She seems in great pain," said Miss Keith, sympathetically.
Emmy's fair skin reddened painfully. "No, she--she isn't well," she
stammered.
Mrs. Conner coughed a dry, inexpressive cough.
"I do wish you would step in and see mother for a minute," Emmy begged,
as much with her eyes as with her voice. "I can hitch the horse if Miss
Keith minds--"
But Miss Keith did not mind; she was quite willing to hold the horse.
And the horse sagging his elderly head, appeared of no mind to move,
whether "held" or no.
"Well?" said Mrs. Conner, when they were out of earshot.
"Mother thinks she is threatened with pleurisy, and she is trying the
starvation cure," answered Emmy. "She hasn't eaten a bite since
yesterday. I'm ashamed to be so late about my washing, but I've been
cooking things all day, trying to tempt her--"
"Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh _dear_!" moaned the figure on the piazza.
Mrs. Conner put her arms akimbo. She looked steadfastly at the swaying
and moaning shape. Mrs. Conner was a woman who had been known to fry
fresh griddle-cakes for tramps. She drew in her breath and exhaled it
explosively, as one that has been shocked out of speech.
"I've made her postum cereal coffee and cooked her granum, and I went
out and begged dewberries from the Bigelows--she used to be fond of
them--and I don't know how many times I've made toast. She says I just
torment her."
"Won't she drink a little beef tea?"
"Oh-h! Oh-h! U-r-r-r! _Ug-h-h-h!_" shuddered the invalid.
"Didn't you know she thinks meat wicked? And milk's robbing the cow, and
eggs robbing the hen, who wants to have a family as much as we do," said
Emily, rather incorrectly.
"More'n some of us do, I guess," retorted Mrs. Conner, "and more'n folks
_ought_ to if they ain't prepared to do their duty by them when they've
got 'em." She launched a fiery glance at Mrs. Darter, who was now
groaning vehemently. "Got it all turned on this afternoon, ain't she?"
"Dr. Abbie Cruller told her that it wasn't natural to suppress
ourselves. If you feel like groaning you ought to groan--"
"And she eats sech queer stuff she's hungry most of the time," Mrs.
Conner interrupted, "so I expect she groans a lot. Say, Emmy, have you
ever had anybody come in and give your ma a good hard--_blowing up_?"
The blood rushed to Emmy's face; her eyes sank. She answered, in a
confused tone: "Aunt Lida Glenn was over yesterday. I don't know what
she said to mother, but mother--mother told me the one thing she wanted
on earth was to have me--send Albert away and have everything ended
between us, for she never was so insulted in her life as she had been by
Albert's mother."
"Albert's mother ain't Albert; though I don't blame her, Emmy, and Mrs.
Glenn is a awful nice woman. But it ain't fair to hold Albert for her
opinions, right or wrong. As I said, she ain't Albert, nor Albert ain't
her."
"So I told mother," said Emmy. "I did hate to be disrespectful to her,
but I told her so; and she answered that Mrs. Glenn said Albert thought
so too. Then when I tried to question her she was in so much pain and
groaned so I hadn't the heart to bother her. She let me put hot cloths
on her, and give her a Turkish bath over the alcohol-lamp; and I hoped
she'd let me make her some water gruel, but she wouldn't touch a
spoonful. Mrs. Conner, you don't suppose she--she will keep it up much
longer?" Emmy's eyes dilated with an unspoken fear as she lifted them to
the kind woman before her. "She said she felt herself growing weaker
this morning. I--I told her I wouldn't go to the picnic with Bert, if
she would only eat something. But she said that she couldn't eat
anything. One time--one time she went three days. I didn't let the
neighbors know; but I was 'most crazy, and poor little Jinny cried. She
isn't one to cry, either."
"No," Mrs. Conner agreed, glancing at Jinny who was chattering volubly
with the girl in the phaeton--"no, I'd say she'd be more likely to be
sassy."
"I'm afraid she was that, too," suggested Emmy, with a dim smile, "but
at last she got scared. It was some new books Bert brought, got mother
out of that time; she was so anxious to read them."
"Yes, I know your ma's a great reader. Always was. She told me she
fairly revelled in stories of high life and detective stories. She said
she'd read every one of The Duchess's books--I guess 'twas a hundred.
And she said many and many a night she'd set up in bed reading half the
night. 'It's so resting,' she says, 'to read 'bout murders and how they
are tracked down.' It took up her mind from her sorrers, she says. And
she told me she didn't know how she'd ever lived through losing your pa
but for _Sherlock Holmes_. If I was you I'd jest try to stir her up with
these books. I'll fetch 'em to her. I read the one of Ouida's and it's
real good--and, come to think of it, brimful of eating. Who knows but
it'll git her to wanting to eat herself. Why, when I think what kind of
cook she was, it don't seem possible! But now don't you worry, Emmy;
she'll come all right and she'll come all right 'bout Mrs. Glenn, good
friends as they've always been. Why, she always has liked Lida Glenn
better than all her other friends together! She'll _have_ to make up.
Don't you fret a bit." She said the words in a hearty voice, and she
strode vigorously across the grass to the piazza and presented her
package with a breezy cheer. "Here's two new books by Ouida, and one by
Bertha M. Clay, and two by Maria Corelly, Mrs. Darter; and Emmy'll be
ready to read them to you soon."
Mrs. Darter had a delicate pale face, much like Emmy's in features, but
etched with tiny wrinkles. The corners of her mouth dropped, and there
was a habitual frown of pain on her pretty forehead. She did not look
ungentle, only obstinate.
"Thank you," she murmured. Then she sighed.
Mrs. Conner opened her mouth, and shut it again, compressing the lips
with unnecessary firmness.
Mrs. Darter laid her head back on her chair. She closed her eyes. A
plaintive, sibilant noise hissed through her parted lips.
"Well, I'm real sorry you're sick," said Mrs. Connor, her voice again
full of good-nature. "I guess what you need is a little nourishing
food--"
Mrs. Darter screamed, and Mrs. Conner stood aghast. She was more aghast
to behold all the apparent symptoms of a swoon in the invalid, and would
have run for water--an act, however, prevented by the timely opening of
Mrs. Darter's eyes. "Don't say the word!" she begged, shuddering. "I
have to starve off a pleurisy. It would _kill_ me! And the books are no
good; I'm too sick to hear reading. Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!"
Mrs. Conner backed off the piazza--she said she guessed she must go--and
left Mrs. Darter moaning and rocking.
"And to tell you the truth, Miss Keith"--thus she ended a breathless
narration to her new boarder--"I went quick, for I knew I couldn't hold
in one minnit longer! And how'd it help poor Emmy to have her mother
quarrel with Lida Glenn and me the same day? There's Susy Baker making
eyes at Albert Glenn, this minnit; and if she ain't carrying Mrs. Glenn
some of her ma's blueberry cake! Right by the Darters, too; and Emmy
seeing her!"
"What is the matter with Mrs. Darter?"
"Well, old Dr. Potter says she's 'neurotic,' if you know what _that_ is.
I call it jest notions. What the doctors in my time called a hypo,
that's what she is! She's always been the greatest hand to dose. Mr.
Conner will have it she kep' old Captain Darter poor buying patent
medicines. And she run after every new cure-all going. It was
electricity one year, and 'nother year it was blue glass, and one time I
remember she had a woman come of the sort that used to call themselves
bone-doctors when I was a girl and this country wasn't much settled, but
now they're osteologists, or some sech funny name, and give out they can
rub everything on earth out of you. Mrs. Darter had _her_ for a long
spell, till she got pneumonia, and nigh died, and sickened of the
osteologist; and I give her mustard plasters, good strong ones, myself.
All this time Emmy was engaged to Albert Glenn; but the old captain was
real feeble, and Emmy wouldn't leave him to git married. I will say Mrs.
Darter was real devoted to him, though Emmy done all the night work and
spared her all she could, give up her school, and spent every cent of
the money she'd laid by school-teaching and working art embroidery for
her clothes, when she'd be married--spent every cent on her pa. Got him
a wheel chair, and if ever a man set the world by his daughter the
captain done it. He liked Albert, too. I guess if captain had lived,
sick's he was, he'd have found a way so's Emmy and Albert could git
married. But he died. Then you'd 'a' s'posed they could marry, for his
life was _well_ insured, and they got enough for the widder to be
comfortable and keep a girl. But the minnit he died poor Mrs. Darter
got nervous prostration, and she was a nervous prostrate for a year,
and they had to spend money traveling, and of course Emmy couldn't git
married. Mrs. Darter went to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and she went to a
sanitarium, and last she come home saying she was cured. But on the cars
she made the acquaintance of a woman--well, I don't want to jedge--jedge
not, and you won't git jedged, you know--and I know 'tis hard for a
woman to make a living, but I guess that woman was a crank, and a
designing one at that. But she went to Mrs. Darter's to board, and she
never paid no board, but she preached to Mrs. Darter 'bout how all the
diseases that we have come from eating wrong things; and she said we'd
got to live 'cording to nature more; and eating meat made folks fierce
like the carnivorous beasts, and things seasoned with salt was bad for
you, and jest plain farnishous foods without salt--like we was
_chickens_!--was best for us. I don't see how Mrs. Darter, who used to
cook real well and liked to have the sewing society to tea, could stand
sech sick stuff, but she did; and what's wuss, even after the fool
critter ran away and married a magnetic healer who, they do say, has
another wife, even to this day Abiel Darter believes in her and goes by
what she says. And she ain't et any fit food for so long that if she
ever does git coaxed to take a wholesome bite of beef or pie her
stummick is so weak of course she cayn't stand it. Strong folks can eat
strong vituals, and weak folks cayn't. Mrs. Glenn coaxed her in to a
boiled dinner one day, and poor Mrs. Darter nearly died of it. Now you
cayn't git her to budge from her grass and potato diet, as Conner calls
it. And as for poor Emmy, when she can git married Lord only knows!"
Miss Keith had not interrupted the story by as much as a hum of assent.
She looked up with a queer smile. "Has Mrs. Darter ever tried Christian
Science?"
"No, she ain't," snorted Mrs. Conner; "we've been spared _that_. The
Bigelow girls--they're two single ladies, real nice girls, too, who live
in that big brown house with a cupola and a hip-roof there, 'bout two
doors up--they tried to get her into that way of thinking; they're at
everybody. And they used to go over and set with her and give her
'silent treatment,' they called it, and try to think the dyspepsia out
of her; but one of 'em got a fish-bone in her throat and they had to
come to me to pull it out with a pair of tweezers. That sorter dampened
'em for a while and Mrs. Darter says, 'Why didn't you _think_ it out?'
And then Ann--she's the oldest--says they wasn't far enough advanced
yet, Mrs. Darter told 'em then they wasn't far enough advanced to doctor
_her_. And I guess they ain't been there sense."
"All the same," insisted Miss Keith, smiling, "I think Mrs. Darter needs
mental healing or Christian Science, I don't care which."
* * * * *
Emmy put her mother to bed. She gave her the soothing drops which the
vanished but still reverenced healer had left--drops which she was
almost certain owed their potency to some alias of opium. In the morning
Mrs. Darter came out of her drugged sleep with a deadly nausea that
swathed her muscles and laid her rigid in its limp, devil-fish clutch.
The roof of her mouth was like leather; her head seemed to be pounded
with hammers; she was burning with fever, and malign twitchings and
itchings tormented her to rub her nose incessantly, when the least
motion was fearsome to her. She had much more cause than ordinary to
moan, and moan she did at every breath. Jinny had rushed away to a small
chum the moment the dishes for her own breakfast had been washed; but
Emmy couldn't run. She drank a cup of coffee; she had no heart to eat.
Jinny, however had eaten the dainty little meal that Emmy had
prepared--a forlorn hope to tempt the invalid.
"Oh, my nose! my _nose_!" wailed Mrs. Darter. "Emmy, you've got to leave
off staring out of that window at the Glenns', and come and scratch my
nose! Ah-uh! Ah-u-h!"
Emmy silently sat down by the bedside. If Albert passed the yard on his
wheel, as he did every morning at half-past seven, he would not find
her. Emmy had used no one knows how many devices to always be in the
yard when Albert passed, or, at least, in sight by a window. Bert used
to say that glimpse of Emmy "was a bracer for the whole day." Thursday
night was his night to visit her, but last night he hadn't come.
"Emmy, you ain't any account at all as a scratcher!" fretted her mother.
"You scratch where it ain't itching, and you don't scratch where it
itches, and you're so mincing! Rub it _hard_! Oh-h! _why_ must I suffer
so? It's hard enough to have a ungrateful child without having your nose
itch!"
Emmy adventured a sentence long lurking in her mind, but which she never
had the courage to push out into the air: "Mother, I think, I'm sure it
is the soothing drops which make your nose itch so. There's opium--"
"There isn't a grain of opium in them," sobbed Mrs. Darter. "You know I
always hated opium or morphine or anything of the sort; and doctor told
me she wouldn't give the wicked drug. That's what Lida Glenn much as
told me; much as told me, too, that I was putting on and wasn't real
sick; and I told her--oh-h-h!--I told her--if she considered--_me_--that
sort of woman she must feel awful bad to--oh-h-h!--to have her only
child marry my daughter; and--I-thought--Oh-h! wuh-h-h! how awful sick I
am!"
"You told Mrs. Glenn?" prompted Emmy, a flame in either cheek.
"I told her that--sss! sss!--I thought the sooner that engagement was
broke the better it would be for--u-r-r-r!--all concerned--e-hee! ee-e!
ee-e-e-e! Oh my head! my head! Oh, I got to scratch my nose again. You
ain't rubbing the right place!"
"And what did Mrs. Glenn say?" asked Emmy. A ripple ran over her face,
and she swallowed before she spoke.
"She said you wouldn't give Albert up, real spiteful. Ah-rr-r! Oh, I
_am_ so sick! I said you would ruther than have your mother so
insulted--and if you don't I guess I'll give up trying to live. She was
so topping. Much as telling me it would be better for my own child if I
died. Oh dear! oh dear! oh dear! And Albert looked as cross last
night--"
"Did Albert come last night?"
"Yes, he did. You needn't jump out of the chair! I told him you wasn't
home, and you had gone out to the Collins spring. He said when would you
be home, and I said I didn't know. And he went off mad. Oh-h! oh-h-h!
Jinny says Carrie March says she saw him down-town riding on his bicycle
with Susan Baker. O-h-h-h-h! How can I talk when I'm so sick? Girls
don't know about young men. Bert wouldn't like you to see him sometimes,
be sure of that!" She paused to moan, and Emmy looked at her in a misery
of doubt. Was she telling the truth? It had come to that, since Mrs.
Darter had grown to take her soothing drops in every ailment--there was
no surety that she either saw things straight or told them straight.
"I guess I'll go make you some coffee, mother," said Emmy; "you need
it."
The girl's self-control was like tinder to the woman's fire. Mrs. Darter
flared out: "You needn't make any coffee. I won't drink it. What's more,
I won't eat one bite until you promise me to break with Bert Glenn--not
if I starve to death! If you're willing to let those Glenns insult me
and triumph over me, I ain't willing to live to see it." Her feeble
accents shrilled to a scream, as she flung out her arms with a
reminiscence of the behavior of her favorite heroines in novels. "Go,
Emmeline Darter, marry him if you dare; but you will pass to the altar
over your only mother's grave!" She had a confused sense that her syntax
had played her false and that she had not gotten the words precisely
right; but she covered any embarrassment by sinking back and moaning.
Emmy looked at her with a mounting terror in her heart. She told herself
that it was impossible that her mother could carry out such a hideous
threat; but she knew that mucilaginous obstinacy which had not a place
firm enough for a reason to get a hold. "And she won't want to eat,
either," mused Emmy, wretchedly, "for that nasty medicine has made her
awful sick. She's got a fever now; that will burn away her strength. And
if it comes to a choice between letting my mother starve and giving up
Bert, I shall have to give him up!"
Emmy sprang out of her chair. The thought was like a lash on a raw
wound.
She ran to the window; it seemed to her that she couldn't breathe; and
her mother's whimpering irritated her past patience. She knew if she
spoke that she would let the bars down for her anger, and if she were
angry her mother would be upset physically, and grow so much worse that
she would feel like a murderer. She felt the goading of that furious
petulance which torments a woman often into sacrificing herself out of
very anger. It was on her tongue to say, "I'd rather die myself than
give up Bert, and you know it; and I'll never forgive you as long as I
live, but rather than see you die before my eyes I _will_ give him up."
Neither to Emmy nor to her mother was there a doubt that any word passed
would be kept. Mrs. Darter, in the lost days of peace, before her
vagaries had corroded her affection, had said once, "Emmy never told me
a lie in her life, nor she never broke a promise she made me!"
Emmy shut her lips tight and looked out of the window. Her troubled gaze
did not note the dewy freshness of the morning on turf and tree. The
houses were brown cottages for the most part, built in the lean period
of western rural architecture when a stunted cruciform effect and a
bescrolled piazza was the model for every village. But the ugly lines of
wood were veiled by a kindly wealth of wistarias and clematis royally
flaunting, by Virginia-creeper and trumpet-vines splashed with vermilion
and yellow; the grass was velvet, there was a gay company of geraniums
prospering in every garden; and below the hills and the tree-tops lay
the lovely, dimpled hill-sides, golden with wheat or shorn to a
varnished silver like nothing so much as the hue of shining flax, and
the waving fields of corn--all under a vault of burning blue, delicate,
tender, innocent, with no sumptuous and threatening richness of cloud
betokening storm, only high in the heavens the milky white cumuli, the
"harvest clouds."
There were a thousand witcheries of light and shade, there was a radiant
lavishness of color; it was a landscape like a multitude all over the
Middle West, nevertheless a sight to make the heart beat the quicker for
sheer delight. But it might have been a stone wall for anything poor
Emmy, who loved each growing thing, saw in it this moment. To live
without Bert, perhaps to learn that Susy Baker had the love which she
would seem to have flung away--Emmy would have groaned if she had not
heard Mrs. Darter's piteous din, and thought grimly that her mother did
enough groaning for their small family!
Yet at this very instant of despair a minister of grace was lifting the
latch of the Darter gate, and Emmy was unconsciously eying her. The
minister of grace was short of stature and very plump. She had a round,
fair, freckled face, which looked the rounder for its glittering
spectacles. Her hair was a yellowish gray, but she covered it with a
small white sailor hat. She wore a neat brown and white calico frock. To
escape the dew she held her skirts high; one could see that her
preference was for black alpaca slippers and white cotton stockings. The
minister's name was Miss Ann Bigelow.
"Now _she_ comes to stir mother up worse!" thought Emmy. So blind are we
to the future. But she opened the door for Miss Ann Bigelow, and bade
her welcome, and proffered her the best rocking-chair in the parlor and
a palm-leaf fan.
Miss Bigelow's countenance was beaming like an electric light.
"I really _had_ to come!" she exclaimed so soon as she could take
breath. "Have you heard about Mrs. Conner spraining her ankle?"
"Emmy, open the door!" moaned Mrs. Darter from within--her bed-room
adjoined the parlor. Emmy opened the door, while she said: "I'm so
sorry. When? How is she?"
"Oh, she's all right now!" said Miss Bigelow. "It's wonderful--a real
miracle, I told sister. That's what I came to tell you. She sent over
for us, and there she lay, flat on the kitchen floor. I begun to treat
her in my mind the minute I saw her, for I saw she was in error. All her
word was: 'Send for a doctor; it's sprained, if it ain't broke!' I
didn't know what _to_ do. I didn't want to encourage her in error, and
yet you know we are _not_ advanced so far as sprains and broken bones,
and it is usual to summon a doctor; and I don't feel I'm advanced enough
myself to undertake serious cases; I'm too weak and timid, and I haven't
the spiritual vision. Emmy, does your mother _always_ groan that loud
way? Is she in pain? I mean, does she _think_ she is in pain?"
"Yes'm," said Emmy; "but please go on; mother is listening."
"Well, I stood there dazed, you may say; and just then in came Miss
Keith. She's a little slim thing, but _such_ eyes! They seem to look you
through and through! I'd have known she was a healer even if Mrs. Conner
hadn't told me the night before when she was over in our house. She
stood there, just simply looking at Mrs. Conner, not saying a word for a
minnit. Then she says in the _kindest_ voice--I can't tell you how soft
and kind her voice was!--she says, 'Have you the impression of great
pain, Mrs. Conner?' And Mrs. Conner--you know how--well abruptly--she
speaks, she said: '_Impression_ of pain? I only wish you had something
jabbing you like a hot iron, I guess you'd be _impressed_. Ain't
anybody going to take off my stocking? It's swelling every minnit!' Miss
Keith only looked at her, and lifted her hand for me and the girl to
keep still. I expect she was giving her silent treatment, for in a
moment or two she said: 'Well?' in such an inspiring, cheerful tone; and
Mrs. Conner said, 'Why, it's better!' surprised as could be; and I had
to clap my hands for joy. But Miss Keith told us both to go out for a
while and so we did. We waited half an hour by the clock, and that girl
was the most restless being you ever saw. I had all I could to keep her
quiet. Then the door opened--" Miss Bigelow made a wave of her plump
hands, indicating the opening of a door, and paused with hands and
voice. Mrs. Darter had ceased to groan.
"What happened?" said Emmy.
Miss Bigelow's hands met in a clap. "_Mrs. Conner came walking out with
Miss Keith, that's what happened!_" said she, in a low, solemn voice.
"On her sprained ankle?" cried Mrs. Darter.