MISS HANSFORD AND ELITHE.
Miss Hansford had had many misgivings with regard to the wisdom of
having sent for her niece. She had lived alone so long and her habits
were so fixed that she dreaded the thought of a young person singing and
whistling and banging doors and slatting her things round. She had tried
to guard against some of these habits in her letter to Roger, but there
was no knowing what a girl would do, and Lucy Potter’s girl, too. Still
she had committed herself and must make the best of it.
“I shall use her well, of course,” she said many times, and as often as
she dusted her mantel in the front room where Elithe’s picture was
standing she stopped and looked at the face and talked to it until she
almost felt that it was the real Elithe whose dark eyes met hers so
seriously. “She’s pretty to look at and no mistake, but handsome is that
handsome does, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” she said
more than once, while she busied herself with the room Elithe was to
occupy.
It was a low back room with the windows looking out upon an open space
and clumps of oak and woods beyond, with no view of the sea. A room she
seldom rented and which she at first hesitated about assigning to
Elithe.
“I shall want all the t’others for the gentry when the wedding comes
off,” she decided, and then went to work to make the back room as
attractive as possible.
A light pretty matting was laid upon the floor. The old-fashioned
bedstead, put together with ropes, and on which she had slept when a
girl in Ridgefield, was sold to a Portuguese woman, and its place
supplied by a single white bedstead with a canopy over the head. She had
seen a bed like this at the Ralston House in a child’s room, and was
imitating it as far as possible. That was brass, with hangings of point
d’esprit, while hers was iron, with hangings of dotted muslin, but the
effect was much the same. The chest of drawers which had belonged to her
mother was moved into her own room and a small white pine bureau, with
blue forget-me-nots painted on it, put in its place. The square stand
was covered with a fine white damask towel, with a Bible and Hymn Book
laid upon it. The rocker was white, the curtains at the windows were
white, the toilet articles were white, everything was white. “A White
Room,” Paul Ralston christened it, for he saw it on the day the last
touches were put to it and just before he started to join Clarice in New
York. Miss Hansford was adjusting the pillow-shams when she heard Paul
below calling to her.
“Up here in Elithe’s room. Come and see it,” she said, and Paul ran up
the narrow stairs two at a time and stood at the door, uncertain whether
he ought to cross the threshold or not.
A young girl’s sleeping apartment was a sacred place, and he hesitated a
moment until Miss Hansford bade him come in and see if it wasn’t pretty.
“I should say it was,” he replied, as he stepped into the room, bending
his tall figure to keep clear of the roof where it slanted down on the
sides. “It’s lovely, but a little low in some places. A great strapping
six-footer like me might knock his brains out some dark night on the
rafters, but Elithe is short. It will just suit her. Call it the White
Room.”
He was very enthusiastic, and in his enthusiasm hit his head two or
three times as he walked about, admiring everything, saying it lacked
nothing but flowers, and suggesting that Miss Hansford get some pond
lilies the day Elithe arrived.
“I’d do it myself,” he said, “only I’m going away and shan’t be here
when she comes. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, though. I’ll have Tom bring
over some white roses in the morning, if you will let him know when you
expect her.”
Paul’s approval was sufficient for Miss Hansford, and after he was gone
she dropped the shades over the windows and closed the room until the
morning of the day when Elithe was expected. Tom brought the white
roses, arranged by the gardener in a basket, which stood on the
dressing-table, while on the stand at the head of the bed was a bowl of
pond lilies which Miss Hansford had ordered, and which took her back to
the river and pond in Ridgefield, where they had grown in such
profusion, and where the boy Roger had gathered them for her. Roger had
been gone from her twenty years and more; other boys gathered the lilies
in Ridgefield. She was an old woman, and Roger’s girl was coming to her.
“I believe I’m glad, too,” she said, as she inhaled the odor of the
blossoms, gave an extra pat to the bed and went down to the kitchen,
wondering what she should cook for supper that would please Elithe.
“Girls like cake and custard,” she said. “I’ll have both, and use the
little custard cups with covers that were mother’s. There’s only four
left of the dozen. ’Taint likely she’ll eat more than two to-night, and
two to-morrow night. I don’t want any. Four will be enough.”
The cake was made and the custards, too, in the pretty china cups which
Miss Hansford calculated were nearer a hundred years old than twenty.
Never but once had she used them since she lived on the island, and that
on the occasion of the Presiding Elder’s stay with her. Since then they
had reposed quietly in her cupboard, with her best china. This she
brought out now for Elithe, together with her best linen and napkins and
silver. Had she been willing to acknowledge herself capable of such
weakness, she would have known that she was guilty of a good deal of
pride as she anticipated Elithe’s surprise at the grandeur which awaited
her.
The morning was long after everything was in readiness, and the
afternoon seemed interminable until she saw the boat at the wharf and
knew her clock was an hour behind time. She had seen Tom Drake drive by
in the Ralston carriage and wondered where and for whom he was going.
That he would bring Elithe to her she never dreamed and when she saw him
coming towards her cottage with a slip of a girl in the seat behind him,
she exclaimed, “I snum if I don’t believe that’s Elithe!” and hurried
out to meet her.
People who only saw Miss Hansford’s peculiar side said that if she ever
had any milk of human kindness it had long since curdled. But these were
mistaken. The treatment one received from her depended wholly upon
whether they entered the front or back door of her heart,—the kitchen or
the parlor. Fortunately for Elithe, she came to the front door and
entered the parlor. She was nervous and excited, and had borne about as
much as she could bear without breaking down in hysterics, and when she
saw her aunt coming to meet her, she ran forward with a cry like a hurt
child seeking its mother, and reaching out both hands, exclaimed, “Oh,
Auntie, I am so glad to get here, and so tired!”
She put up her lips to be kissed, and in the eyes full of tears Miss
Hansford saw a likeness to Roger, the boy she had liked so much and
loved still in spite of Lucy Potter and his choice of a religion. This
was his child, and there were tears in her own eyes as she kissed the
young girl and led her into the house.
“You are all worn out,” she said, as she removed Elithe’s hat and made
her sit down and asked if she were hungry.
With the exception of the lemonade Paul had brought her on the boat and
a dry sandwich eaten in Springfield, Elithe had taken nothing that day;
but she was not hungry. The sandwich still lay like lead in her stomach,
and the lemonade was waging warfare with it. All she wanted was a drink
of water, which her aunt brought her, and which she drank eagerly, then
leaned her head against the cushioned back of the chair, as if all life
had gone from her.
“She’s a good deal mussed and pretty dirty,” Miss Hansford thought, as
she asked: “Ain’t there something I can get you besides water?—tea, or
something? I can make a cup in a minute.”
“No, thanks,” Elithe replied. “Water is the best of anything. If I could
have a bath; I believe I am one big dust heap.”
She laughed as she said it, and her smile made her face lovely, with all
its fatigue.
“You shall have one,” Miss Hansford answered, with alacrity, thinking of
the White Room, in which a dust heap was not desirable. “It’s a kind of
a fixed-up affair,” she continued, speaking of her improvised bath tub
in a large, low closet back of Elithe’s room, “but it answers very well.
I’ll take some hot water up right away.”
Against this Elithe protested, saying she would do it herself.
“You set still, I tell you. You are tuckered out,” Miss Hansford
insisted, beginning to take the water up in pails and stopping between
times to talk to Elithe and ask about her journey.
“You come in the common car all the way and hain’t had your clothes off
since you left home! What’d you do that for? I sent money for a
sleeper,” she exclaimed, setting down her pail so suddenly that some of
the water was spilled on the floor.
“I know you sent it, and father and mother wanted me to take it, but
they needed it so much that I made them keep it. Artie must have some
stockings and Thede some shoes and mother hasn’t had a new dress in
three years,” Elithe explained.
“My land!” was all Miss Hansford replied, as she went up the stairs with
her pail, but to herself she said: “Poor as Job’s turkey, I knew they
were. No new dress in three years; that’s hard for Lucy Potter, who used
to be so fond of jewgaws. The girl’s all right, poor thing. The dirt
must be an inch thick on her. I’ll bring up another pail full and get
her a whole bar of Sweet Home soap. She’ll need it.”
When her bath was ready Elithe followed her aunt up the stairs into the
room designed for her.
“Oh, how lovely! It rests me just to look at it,” she said.
“I’m glad you like it. I thought you would. Paul called it the white
room, and had the roses sent over from their place. He suggested the
lilies, too,” Miss Hansford replied, enjoying Elithe’s appreciation of
everything, as she buried her face first in the roses and then in the
lilies, scarcely knowing which she liked the better.
Both were exquisite and both a little sweeter because Paul Ralston had
sent one and suggested the other. There was a call from below, and Miss
Hansford hurried down to find the expressman with Elithe’s trunk, which
she made him put down outside while she swept it with a broom, brushed
it with a brush, and dusted it with feathers. “Pretty well knocked to
pieces,” the man said, but Miss Hansford did not answer. She had
recognized the trunk as having been her own, which she had given to
Roger when a boy, and now it had come back to her, “battered and banged
and old just as I am,” she thought, as she unknotted the rope tied
around it and bade the man carry it to Elithe’s room. The bath, which
Elithe enjoyed so much, refreshed and invigorated her, but did not
remove the drowsiness stealing over her. It was five nights since her
head had touched a pillow, and the sight of the white bed was a
temptation she could not resist. She had slipped on a loose, white
Mother Hubbard, made from an immense linen sheet which had been sent in
a missionary box and utilized first for her mother and then for herself.
“I must lie down or I shall fall asleep standing,” she said. Then as she
remembered how much she had to be thankful for,—the safe journey, the
kindness of everybody from good Mrs. Baker and Paul Ralston to her aunt
who had received her so cordially, she went down upon her knees, and,
resting her head upon the bed, tried to pray and thought she did. “Our
Father,” she began from habit, and then the soft feel of the bed against
her tired head and the pressure of exhaustion upon her brain overcame
her and she floated off into a dreamy sense of things past and present,
the pretty room, the roses and the lilies, the delicious bath, Paul
Ralston, Artie and Thede and George and Rob and Mr. Pennington and
Heaven, which she had finally entered, losing herself at last in a heavy
sleep from which she did not waken until the clock struck six and her
aunt came up to see what had happened to her.