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TURN ABOUT ELEANOR
[Illustration: Eleanor]
Turn About Eleanor
By
ETHEL M. KELLEY
ILLUSTRATED BY
F. GRAHAM COOTES
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright 1917
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Printed in the United States of America
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
TO MY MOTHER
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I Enter Eleanor 1
II The Cooperative Parents 14
III The Experiment Begins 27
IV Peter Elucidates 40
V Eleanor Enjoys Herself in Her Own Way 48
VI Jimmie Becomes a Parent 63
VII One Descent into Bohemia 72
VIII The Ten Hutchinsons 84
IX Peter 101
X The Omniscient Focus 113
XI Gertrude Has Trouble with Her Behavior 124
XII Madam Bolling 138
XIII Brook and River 158
XIV Merry Christmas 167
XV Growing Up 181
XVI Margaret Louisa's Birthright 195
XVII A Real Kiss 203
XVIII Beulah's Problem 219
XIX Mostly Uncle Peter 234
XX The Makings of a Triple Wedding 251
XXI Eleanor Hears the News 261
XXII The Search 271
XXIII The Young Nurse 281
XXIV Christmas Again 292
XXV The Lover 304
TURN ABOUT ELEANOR
TURN ABOUT ELEANOR
CHAPTER I
ENTER ELEANOR
A child in a faded tam-o'-shanter that had once been baby blue, and a
shoddy coat of a glaring, unpropitious newness, was sitting
uncomfortably on the edge of a hansom seat, and gazing soberly out at
the traffic of Fifth Avenue.
The young man beside her, a blond, sleek, narrow-headed youth in
eye-glasses, was literally making conversation with her. That is, he
was engaged in a palpable effort to make conversation--to manufacture
out of the thin crisp air of that November morning and the random
impressions of their progress up the Avenue, something with a general
resemblance to tête-à-tête dialogue as he understood it. He was
succeeding only indifferently.
"See, Eleanor," he pointed brightly with his stick to the flower shop
they were passing, "see that building with the red roof, and all
those window boxes. Don't you think those little trees in pots outside
look like Christmas trees? Sometimes when your Aunts Beulah and
Margaret and Gertrude, whom you haven't met yet--though you are on
your way to meet them, you know--sometimes when they have been very
good, almost good enough to deserve it, I stop by that little flower
shop and buy a chaste half dozen of gardenias and their accessories,
and divide them among the three."
"Do you?" the child asked, without wistfulness. She was a good child,
David Bolling decided,--a sporting child, willing evidently to play
when it was her turn, even when she didn't understand the game at all.
It was certainly a new kind of game that she would be so soon expected
to play her part in,--a rather serious kind of game, if you chose to
look at it that way.
David himself hardly knew how to look at it. He was naturally a
conservative young man, who had been brought up by his mother to
behave as simply as possible on all occasions, and to avoid the
conspicuous as tacitly and tactfully as one avoids a new disease germ.
His native point of view, however, had been somewhat deflected by his
associations. His intimate circle consisted of a set of people who
indorsed his mother's decalogue only under protest, and with the most
stringent reservations. That is, they were young and healthy, and
somewhat overcharged with animal spirits, and their reactions were all
very intense and emphatic.
He was trying at this instant to look rather more as if he were likely
to meet one of his own friends than one of his mother's. His mother's
friends would not have understood his personal chaperonage of the
shabby little girl at his elbow. Her hair was not even properly
brushed. It looked frazzled and tangled; and at the corner of one of
her big blue eyes, streaking diagonally across the pallor in which it
was set, was a line of dirt,--a tear mark, it might have been, though
that didn't make the general effect any less untidy, David thought;
only a trifle more uncomfortably pathetic. She was a nice little girl,
that fact was becoming more and more apparent to David, but any friend
of his mother's would have wondered, and expressed him or herself as
wondering, why in the name of all sensitiveness he had not taken a
taxicab, or at least something in the nature of a closed vehicle, if
he felt himself bound to deliver in person this curious little
stranger to whatever mysterious destination she was for.
"I thought you'd like a hansom, Eleanor, better than a taxi-cab,
because you can see more. You've never been in this part of New York
before, I understand."
"No, sir."
"You came up from Colhassett last Saturday, didn't you? Mrs. O'Farrel
wrote to your grandmother to send you on to us, and you took the
Saturday night boat from Fall River."
"Yes, sir."
"Did you travel alone, Eleanor?"
"A friend of Grandpa's came up on the train with me, and left me on
the vessel. He told the colored lady and gentleman to see if I was all
right,--Mr. Porter and Mrs. Steward."
"And were you all right?" David's eyes twinkled.
"Yes, sir."
"Not sea sick, nor homesick?"
The child's fine-featured face quivered for a second, then set again
into impassive stoic lines, and left David wondering whether he had
witnessed a vibration of real emotion, or the spasmodic twitching of
the muscles that is so characteristic of the rural public school.
"I wasn't sea sick."
"Tell me about your grandparents, Eleanor." Then as she did not
respond, he repeated a little sharply, "Tell me about your
grandparents, won't you?"
The child still hesitated. David bowed to the wife of a Standard Oil
director in a passing limousine, and one of the season's prettiest
débutantes, who was walking; and because he was only twenty-four, and
his mother was very, very ambitious for him, he wondered if the tear
smudge on the face of his companion had been evident from the
sidewalk, and decided that it must have been.
"I don't know how to tell," the child said at last, "I don't know what
you want me to say."
"I don't want you to say anything in particular, just in general, you
know."
David stuck. The violet eyes were widening with misery, there was no
doubt about it. "Game, clean through," he said to himself. Aloud he
continued. "Well, you know, Eleanor.--Never say 'Well,' if you can
possibly avoid it, because it's a flagrant Americanism, and when you
travel in foreign parts you're sure to regret it,--well, you know, if
you are to be in a measure my ward--and you are, my dear, as well as
the ward of your Aunts Beulah and Margaret and Gertrude, and your
Uncles Jimmie and Peter--I ought to begin by knowing a little
something of your antecedents. That is why I suggested that you tell
me about your grandparents. I don't care what you tell me, but I think
it would be very suitable for you to tell me something. Are they
native Cape Codders? I'm a New Englander myself, you know, so you may
be perfectly frank with me."
"They're not summer folks," the child said. "They just live in
Colhassett all the year round. They live in a big white house on the
depot road, but they're so old now, they can't keep it up. If it was
painted it would be a real pretty house."
"Your grandparents are not very well off then?"
The child colored. "They've got lots of things," she said, "that
Grandfather brought home when he went to sea, but it was Uncle Amos
that sent them the money they lived on. When he died they didn't have
any."
"How long has he been dead?"
"Two years ago Christmas."
"You must have had some money since then."
"Not since Uncle Amos died, except for the rent of the barn, and the
pasture land, and a few things like that."
"You must have had money put away."
"No," the little girl answered. "We didn't. We didn't have any money,
except what came in the way I said. We sold some old-fashioned dishes,
and a little bit of cranberry bog for twenty-five dollars. We didn't
have any other money."
"But you must have had something to live on. You can't make bricks
without straw, or grow little girls up without nourishing food in
their tummies." He caught an unexpected flicker of an eyelash, and
realized for the first time that the child was acutely aware of every
word he was saying, that even his use of English was registering a
poignant impression on her consciousness. The thought strangely
embarrassed him. "We say tummies in New York, Eleanor," he explained
hastily. "It's done here. The New England stomick, however, is almost
entirely obsolete. You'll really get on better in the circles to which
you are so soon to be accustomed if you refer to it in my own simple
fashion;--but to return to our muttons, Eleanor, which is French for
getting down to cases, again, you must have had something to live on
after your uncle died. You are alive now. That would almost seem to
prove my contention."
"We didn't have any money, but what I earned."
"But--what you earned. What do you mean, Eleanor?"
The child's face turned crimson, then white again. This time there was
no mistaking the wave of sensitive emotion that swept over it.
"I worked out," she said. "I made a dollar and a half a week running
errands, and taking care of a sick lady vacations, and nights after
school. Grandma had that shock, and Grandpa's back troubled him. He
tried to get work but he couldn't. He did all he could taking care of
Grandma, and tending the garden. They hated to have me work out, but
there was nobody else to."
"A family of three can't live on a dollar and a half a week."
"Yes, sir, they can, if they manage."
"Where were your neighbors all this time, Eleanor? You don't mean to
tell me that the good, kindly people of Cape Cod would have stood by
and let a little girl like you support a family alone and unaided.
It's preposterous."
"The neighbors didn't know. They thought Uncle Amos left us something.
Lots of Cape Cod children work out. They thought that I did it because
I wanted to."
"I see," said David gravely.
The wheel of their cab became entangled in that of a smart delivery
wagon. He watched it thoughtfully. Then he took off his glasses, and
polished them.
"Through a glass darkly," he explained a little thickly. He was really
a very _young_ young man, and once below the surface of what he was
pleased to believe a very worldly and cynical manner, he had a
profound depth of tenderness and human sympathy.
Then as they jogged on through the Fifty-ninth Street end of the Park,
looking strangely seared and bereft from the first blight of the
frost, he turned to her again. This time his tone was as serious as
her own.
"Why did you stop working out, Eleanor?" he asked.
"The lady I was tending died. There wasn't nobody else who wanted me.
Mrs. O'Farrel was a relation of hers, and when she came to the
funeral, I told her that I wanted to get work in New York if I
could,--and then last week she wrote me that the best she could do was
to get me this place to be adopted, and so--I came."
"But your grandparents?" David asked, and realized almost as he spoke
that he had his finger on the spring of the tragedy.
"They had to take help from the town."
The child made a brave struggle with her tears, and David looked away
quickly. He knew something of the temper of the steel of the New
England nature; the fierce and terrible pride that is bred in the bone
of the race. He knew that the child before him had tasted of the
bitter waters of humiliation in seeing her kindred "helped" by the
town. "Going out to work," he understood, had brought the family pride
low, but taking help from the town had leveled it to the dust.
"There is, you know, a small salary that goes with this being adopted
business," he remarked casually a few seconds later. "Your Aunts
Gertrude and Beulah and Margaret, and your three stalwart uncles
aforesaid, are not the kind of people who have been brought up to
expect something for nothing. They don't expect to adopt a perfectly
good orphan without money and without price, merely for the privilege
of experimentation. No, indeed, an orphan in good standing of the best
New England extraction ought to exact for her services a salary of at
least fifteen dollars a month. I wouldn't consent to take a cent less,
Eleanor."
"Wouldn't you?" the child asked uncertainly. She sat suddenly erect,
as if an actual burden had been dropped from her shoulders. Her eyes
were not violet, David decided, he had been deceived by the depth of
their coloring; they were blue, Mediterranean blue, and her lashes
were an inch and a half long at the very least. She was not only
pretty, she was going to be beautiful some day. A strange premonition
struck David of a future in which this long-lashed, stoic baby was in
some way inextricably bound.
"How old are you?" he asked her abruptly.
"Ten years old day before yesterday."
They had been making their way through the Park; the searer, yellower
Park of late November. It looked duller and more cheerless than David
ever remembered it. The leaves rattled on the trees, and the sun went
down suddenly.
"This is Central Park," he said. "In the spring it's very beautiful
here, and all the people you know go motoring or driving in the
afternoon."
He bowed to his mother's milliner in a little French runabout. The
Frenchman stared frankly at the baby blue tam-o'-shanter and the
tangled golden head it surmounted.
"Joseph could make you a peachy tam-o'-shanter looking thing of blue
velvet; I'll bet I could draw him a picture to copy. Your Uncle David,
you know, is an artist of a sort."
For the first time since their incongruous association began the child
met his smile; her face relaxed ever so little, and the lips quivered,
but she smiled a shy, little dawning smile. There was trust in it and
confidence. David put out his hand to pat hers, but thought better of
it.
"Eleanor," he said, "my mother knows our only living Ex-president, and
the Countess of Warwick, one Vanderbilt, two Astors, and she's met Sir
Gilbert Parker, and Rudyard Kipling. She also knows many of the stars
and satellites of upper Fifth Avenue. She has, as well, family
connections of so much weight and stolidity that their very approach,
singly or in conjunction, shakes the earth underneath them.--I wish we
could meet them all, Eleanor, every blessed one of them."