I
When she was told it was a girl, Mrs. Govers sighed. "Well, I never did
have any luck, anyway; so I d' know's I'm supprised."
Later she wept feebly:
"Girls are easier to raise, I suppose; but I kind of had my heart set on
namin' him Launcelot." After another interval she rallied to a smile: "I
was prepared for the worst, though; so I picked out Ellaphine for a name
in case he was a her. It's an awful pirty name, Ellaphine is. Don't you
think so?"
"Yes, yes," said the nurse, who would have agreed to anything then.
After a time Mrs. Govers resumed: "She'll be an awful pirty girl, I
hope. Is that her makin' all that noise? Give me a glimpse of her, will
you? I got a right, I guess, to see my own baby. Oh, Goshen! Is that
how she looks?" A kind of swoon; then more meditation, followed by a
courageous philosophy: "Children always look funny at first. She'll
outgrow it, I expect. Ellaphine is such an elegant name. It ought to be
a kind of inducement to grow up to. Don't you think so?"
The nurse, who was juggling the baby as if it were red-hot, mumbled
through a mustache of safety-pins that she thought so. Mrs. Govers
echoed, "I thought so, too." After that she went to sleep.
Ellaphine, however, did not grow up elegant, to fit the name. The name
grew inelegant to fit her. During her earliest years the witty little
children called her Elephant until they tired of the ingenuity and
allowed her to lapse indolently from Ellar to El.
Mrs. Govers for some years cherished a dream that her ugly duckling
would develop into a swan and fly away with a fabulously wealthy prince.
Later she dwindled to a prayer that she might capture a man who was
"tol'able well-to-do."
The majority of ugly ducklings, however, grow up into uglier ducks, and
Mrs. Govers resigned herself to the melancholy prospect of the widowed
mother of an old maid perennial.
To the confusion of prophecy, among all the batch of girls who descended
on Carthage about the time of Ellaphine's birth--"out of the nowhere
into the here"--Ellaphine was the first to be married! And she cut out
the prettiest girl in the township--it was not such a small township,
either.
Those homely ones seem to make straight for a home the first thing.
Ellaphine carried off Eddie Pouch--the very Eddie of whom his mother
used to say, "He's little, but oh, my!" The rest of the people said,
"Oh, my, but he's little!"
Eddie's given name was Egbert. Edward was his taken name. He took it
after his mother died and he went to live at his uncle Loren's. Eddie
was sorry to change his name, but he said his mother was not responsible
at the time she pasted the label Egbert on him, and his shy soul could
not endure to be called Egg by his best friends--least of all by his
best girl.
His best girl was the township champion looker, Luella Thickins. From
the time his heart was big enough for Cupid to stick a child's-size
arrow in, Eddie idolized Luella. So did the other boys; and as Eddie was
the smallest of the lot, he was lost in the crowd. Even when Luella
noticed him it was with the atrocious contempt of little girls for
little boys they do not like.
Eddie could not give her sticks of candy or jawbreakers, for his uncle
Loren did not believe in spending money. And Eddie had no mother to go
to when the boys mistreated him and the girls ignored him. A dismal life
he led until he grew up as far as he ever grew up.
Eddie reached his twenty-second birthday and was working in Uncle
Loren's factory--one of the largest feather-duster factories in the
whole State--when he observed a sudden change in Luella's manner.
She had scared him away from paying court to her, save from a distance.
Now she took after him, with her aggressive beauty for a club and her
engaging smiles for a net. She asked him to take her to the
Sunday-school picnic, and asked him what he liked best for her to put in
for him. She informed him that she was going to cook it for herself and
everybody said she could fry chicken something grand. So he chose fried
chicken.
He was so overjoyed that it was hard for him to be as solemn about the
house as he ought to have been, in view of the fact that Uncle Loren had
been taken suddenly and violently ill. Eddie was the natural heir to the
old man's fortune.
Uncle Loren was considered close in a town where extravagance was almost
impossible, but where rigid economy was supposed to pile up tremendous
wealth. Hitherto it had pained Uncle Loren to devote a penny to anything
but the sweet uses of investment. Now it suddenly occurred to the old
miser that he had invested nothing in the securities of New Jerusalem,
Limited. He was frightened immeasurably.
In his youth he had joined the Campbellite church and had been baptized
in the town pond when there was a crust of ice over it which the pastor
had to break with a stick before he immersed Loren. Everybody said the
crust of ice had stuck to his heart ever since.
In the panic that came on him now he craftily decided to transfer all
his savings to the other shore. The factory, of course, he must leave
behind; but he drafted a hasty will presenting all his money to the
Campbellite church under conditions that he counted on to gain him a
high commercial rating in heaven.
Over his shoulder, as he wrote, a shadow waited, grinning; and the old
man had hardly folded his last testament and stuffed it into his
pillow-slip when the grisly hand was laid on his shoulders and Uncle
Loren was no longer there.