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A WOMAN NAMED SMITH
by
MARIE CONWAY OEMLER
Author of _Slippy McGee_, etc.
Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers New York
1919
[Frontispiece illustration: "Sophy," he said,
"I have found the lost key of Hynds House"]
To
ELIZABETH HEYWARD OEMLER
_Sometimes my Little Girl._
When you were yet an Awful Baby,
And bawled o' bed-time, I said "Maybe
It is not best to spank or scold her:
Suppose a fairy-tale were told her?"
And gave you then, to my undoing,
The wolf Red Riding-Hood pursuing;
Sang Mother Goose her artless rhyming;
Showed Jack the Magic Beanstalk climbing;
Three Little Pigs were so appealing,
You set up sympathetic squealing!
Then, Bitsybet, you had your mother--
_You bawled until I told another!_
The Awful Baby's gone. Here lately
You bear your little self sedately.
You've shed your rompers; you want dresses
Prinked out with frillies; fluff your tresses;
Delight your daddy, aunts, and mother;
And sisterly set straight your brother.
Your bib-and-tucker days abolished,
Your manners and your nails are polished.
One baby trait remains, thank glory!
You're still a glutton for a story.
Still, Bitsybet, you beg another:
So here's one for you from
YOUR MOTHER.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I THE SCARLET WITCH DEPARTS
II AND ARIEL MAKES MUSIC
III THE DEAR LITTLE GOD!
IV THE HYNDSES OF HYNDS HOUSE
V "THY NEIGHBOR AS THYSELF"
VI GLAMOURY
VII A BRIGHT PARTICULAR STAR
VIII PEACOCKS AND IVORY
IX THE JUDGMENT OF SPRING
X THE FOREST OF ARDEN
XI THE JINNEE INTERVENES
XII MAN PROPOSES
XIII FIRES OF YESTERDAY
XIV THE TALISMAN
XV THE HEART OF HYNDS HOUSE
XVI THE DEVILL HIS RAINBOW
XVII ON THE KNEES OF THE GODS
XVIII THE GREATEST GIFT
XIX DEEP WATERS
XX HARBOR
CHARACTERS
SOPHY: A woman named Smith.
ALICIA GAINES: Flower o' the Peach.
NICHOLAS JELNIK: Peacocks and Ivory.
DOCTOR RICHARD GEDDES: _Coeur-de-Lion._
THE AUTHOR: Himself.
THE SECRETARY: A Pleasant Person.
MISS EMMELINE PHELPS-PARSONS: of Boston, Massachusetts.
MISS MARTHA HOPKINS: "Clothed in White Samite."
JUDGE GATCHELL: The Law.
SCHMETZ AND RIEDRIECH: Workmen and Visionaries.
THE JINNEE: A Son of the Prophet.
SOPHRONISBA SCARLETT: "The Scarlett Witch."
THE HYNDSES OF HYNDS HOUSE.
PAYING GUESTS.
THE PEOPLE OF HYNDSVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA.
MARY MAGDALEN; QUEEN-OF-SHEEBA; FERNOLIA: Important Persons.
BORIS: A Russian Wolfhound.
THE BLACK FAMILY: A Witch's Cat's Kittens.
BEAUTIFUL DOG: Last but not Least.
A WOMAN NAMED SMITH
CHAPTER I
THE SCARLETT WITCH DEPARTS
If it had been humanly possible for Great-Aunt Sophronisba Scarlett
to lug her place in Hyndsville, South Carolina, along with her into
the next world, plump it squarely in the middle of the Elysian
Fields, plaster it over with "No Trespassing" signs, and then settle
herself down to a blissful eternity of serving writs upon the angels
for flying over her fences without permission, and setting the saved
by the ears in general, she would have done so and felt that heaven
was almost as desirable a place as South Carolina. But as even she
couldn't impose her will upon the next world, and there was nobody
in this one she hated less than she did me--possibly because she had
never laid eyes on me--she willed me Hynds House and what was left
of the Hynds fortune; tying this string to her bequest: I must
occupy Hynds House within six months, and I couldn't rent it, or
attempt to sell it, without forfeiture of the entire estate.
I can fancy the ancient beldam sniggering sardonically the while she
figured to herself the chagrined astonishment, the helpless wrath,
of her watchfully waiting neighbors, when they should discover that
historic Hynds House, dating from the beginning of things
Carolinian, had passed into the unpedigreed hands of a woman named
Smith. I can fancy her balefully exact perception of the attitude so
radically conservative a community must needs assume toward such an
intruder as myself, foisted upon it, so to speak, by an enemy who
never failed to turn the trick.
Because I'm not a Hynds, at all. Great Aunt Sophronisba was my aunt
not by blood but by marriage; she having, when she was no longer
what is known as a spring chicken, met my Great-Uncle Johnny
Scarlett and scandalized all Hyndsville by marrying him out of hand.
I have heard that she was insanely in love with him, and I believe
it; nothing short of an over-mastering passion could have induced
one of the haughty Hyndses to marry a person with such family
connections as his. For my father, George Smith, was a ruddy
English ship-chandler who pitched upon Boston for a home, and lived
with his family in the rooms above his shop; and my grandmother
Smith dropped her "aitches" with the cheerful ease of one to the
manner born, bless her stout old Cockney heart! I can remember her
hearing me my spelling-lesson of a night, her spectacles far down on
her old button of a nose, her white curls bobbing from under her
cap.
"What! Carn't spell 'saloon'? Listen, then, Miss: There's a hess and
a hay and a hell and two hoes and a henn! Now, then, d 'ye spell
it!"
Not that Mrs. Johnny ever accepted us. It was borne in upon the
Smiths that undesirable in-laws are outlaws. This despite the fact
that my mother's pink-and-white English face was a gentler copy of
what her uncle's had been in his youth; and that when I came along,
some years after the dear old man's death, I was named Sophronisba
at Mrs. Johnny's urgent request.
After Great-Uncle Johnny died, as if the last tie which bound her to
ordinary humanity had snapped, his widow retired into a seclusion
from which she emerged only to sue somebody. She said the world was
being turned topsyturvy by people who were allowed to misbehave to
their betters, and who needed to be taught a lesson and their proper
place; and that so long as she retained her faculties, she would do
her duty in that respect, please God!
She did her duty so well in that respect that the Hynds fortune,
which even civil war and reconstruction hadn't been able altogether
to wreck, dwindled to a mere fifteen thousand dollars; and she
wasn't on speaking terms with anybody but Judge Gatchell, her
lawyer. She would have quarreled with him, too, had she dared.
To the minister, who bearded her for her soul's sake every now and
then, she spoke in words brief and curt:
"You here again? Wanted to see me, hey? Well, you've done it. Now
get out!"
And in the meantime the years passed and my own immediate family
passed with them; but still the gaunt old woman lived on in her
gaunt old house, becoming in time a myth to me, and to Hyndsville as
well; where they referred to her, succinctly, as "the Scarlet
Witch." I heard from her directly only once, and that was the year
she sent me a red flannel petticoat for a Christmas present. After
that, as if she'd done her worst, she ignored me altogether.
My mother had wanted me to be a school-teacher, in her eyes the acme
of respectability. But as it happens, there are two things I
wouldn't be: one's a school-teacher, the other a minister's wife.
If I had to marry the average minister, I should infallibly hate all
church-goers; if I had to teach the average school-child and wrestle
with the average school-board, I should end by burning joss-sticks
to Herod.
So I disappointed my mother by becoming a typist. After her death I
secured a foothold in a New York house--I'd always wanted to live in
New York--and went up, step by step, from what may be called a
rookie in the outside office, to private secretary to the Head. And
I'd been a business woman for all of seventeen years when Great-Aunt
Sophronisba Scarlett departed at the age of ninety-eight years and
eleven months, and willed that I should take up my life in the house
where she had dropped hers.
"Oh, Sophy!" cried Alicia Gaines, the one person in the world who
didn't call me Miss Smith. "Oh, Sophy, it's like a fairy-story come
true! Think of falling heir to an old, old, old lady's old, old, old
house, in South Carolina! I hope there's a big old door with a
fan-light, and a Greeky front with white pillars, and a big old
hall, and a big old garden--"
"And an old stove that smokes and old windows that rattle and an old
roof that leaks, and maybe big, big old rats that squeak o' nights,"
I said darkly. For the first rapture of the astonishing news was
beginning to wear thin, and doubt was appearing in spots.
"Sophy Smith! Why, if such a wonderful, beautiful, unexpected thing
had happened to _me_--" Alicia's blue eyes misted. I have known her
since the day she was born, next door to us in Boston, and she is
the only person I have ever seen who can cry and look pretty while
she's doing it; also, she can cry and laugh at the same time, being
Irish. Some foolish people, who have been deceived by Alicia
Gaines's baby stare and complexion, have said she hasn't sense
enough to get in out of a shower of rain. This is, of course, a
libel. But what's the odds, when every male being in sight would
rush to her aid with an umbrella?
After her mother's death I fell heir to Alicia, who, like me, was an
only child, and without relatives. Lately, I'd gotten her into our
filing-department. She didn't belong in a business office, she whose
proper background should have been an adoring husband and the latest
thing in pink-and-white babies.
"But somebody's got to think of stoves and roofs and rats and such,
or there'd be no living in any old house," I reminded her,
practically. "My dear girl, don't you realize that this thing isn't
all beer and skittles?"
Alicia wrinkled her white forehead.
"Consider me, a hardy late-summer plant forced to uproot and
transplant myself to a soil which may not in the least agree with
me. Why, this means changing all my fixed habits, to trot off to
live in an old house that is probably haunted by the cross-grained
ghost of a lady of ninety-nine!"
"If I were a ghost, you'd be the very last person on earth I'd want
to tackle, Sophy," remarked Alicia, dimpling. "And as for that new
soil, why, you'll bloom in it! You--well, Sophy dear, up to now you
have been root-bound; you've never had a chance to grow, much less
to blossom. Now you can do both."
I who was confidential secretary to the Head, looked at the girl who
was admittedly the worst file-clerk on record; and she looked back
at me, nodding her bright head with young wisdom.
"I hope," she said, wistfully, "that there'll be all sorts of lovely
things in your house, Sophy,--old mirrors, old books, old pictures,
old furniture, old china. Lord send you'll find an attic! All my
life I've day-dreamed of finding an attic that's been shut up and
forgotten for ages and ages, and discovering all sorts of lovely
things in all sorts of hiding-places. When I think my day-dream may
come true for you, Sophy, it almost reconciles me to the pain of
parting from you; though what on earth I'm to do without you,
goodness only knows!" She was sitting on my bed, kimonoed,
slippered, and braided. And now she looked at me with a suddenly
quivering chin.
"Alicia," said I, "ever since I discovered that there's no mistake
about that lawyer's letter--that Hynds House is unaccountably, but
undoubtedly mine and I've got to live in it if I want to keep it--it
has been borne in upon me that you are just about the worst
file-clerk on earth. You're a navy-blue failure in a business
office. Business isn't your _motif_. Now, will you resign the job
you fill execrably, and accept one you can fill beyond all
praise--come South with me, share half-and-half whatever comes, and
help make that old house a happy home for us both?"
"Don't joke." Her lips went white. "Please, please, Sophy dear,
don't joke like that! I--well, I just couldn't bear it."
"I never joke," I said indignantly. "You little goose, did you
imagine for one minute that I contemplated leaving you here by
yourself, any more than I contemplate going down there by myself, if
I can help it? Stop to think for a moment, Alicia. You have been
like a little sister to me, ever since you were born. And--I'm
alone, except for you--and not in my first youth--and not
beautiful--and not gifted."
At that she hurled herself off my bed and cried upon my shoulder,
with her slim arms around my neck. Those young arms were beginning
to make me feel wistful. If things had been different--if I had been
lovely like the Scarletts, instead of looking like the Smiths--there
might have been--
Well, I don't look like the Scarletts; so there wasn't. The best I
could do was to drop a kiss on Alicia's forehead, where the bright
young hair begins to break into curls.
And that is how, neither of us having the faintest notion of what
was in store for us, Alicia Gaines and I turned our backs upon New
York and set our faces toward Hynds House.