Meantime the other Miller girl had made a second call at the house in
the lane which Reuben’s father had built. When her rat-a-tat at the
door sounded drearily as from an empty house, the girl said to herself
that it was too much. Most likely the ogress had slain her lovely
daughter and then fallen dead herself and their corpses lay stretched
upon the organ platform in the room which would never be a living-room
thereafter. But the lovely daughter came to the door. The cold, haughty
expression on her face changed to eagerness as she saw Anna and she
smiled sweetly and rather touchingly.
“O Miss Miller, I am so glad--to see you,” she said. But with the last
words enthusiasm had become dismay. She paled and looked appealingly at
Anna.
“Don’t call me Miss Miller, please. Nobody does. And--may I come in?”
asked Anna.
“I am so sorry, Miss--Anna, but mother--we don’t have company, you
know.”
“But I’m not company. And anyhow, I’ve got to come in this once for
I’ve got something for you,” Anna declared.
As the proud look returned to the older girl’s face and she started to
say something in regard to her mother, Anna drew forth from the covert
of her jacket a tiny ball of a maltese kitten with a white parting
between its baby blue eyes, a line of white waistcoat, and four white
paws, two of which had extra toes. Nothing could have been rounder or
silkier or more altogether appealing than this baby kitten with its
round, innocent eyes and its bit of pink tongue visible, and as Anna
held it out, the other girl took it ecstatically and held it close to
her face. Then she cried out impulsively to her mother and ran with it
to her. Anna followed her in, closing the door behind her.
Anna’s purpose had been deliberate. Still, it was almost unbelievable
to see Mrs. Lorraine’s grimness melt before that absurd mite of kitten.
As her daughter passed it over to her, she, too, hid her face against
its softness. Then she put it in her lap and gazed at it in a sort of
fascination, her daughter hanging over her and quite unnecessarily
calling attention to the little thing’s charms. As a matter of fact,
Mrs. Lorraine hadn’t handled--hadn’t even seen--a baby kitten of the
ordinary, harmless, necessary cat-kind since she had been a child in
a New England farmhouse and had worshipped the successive litters of
a three-coloured Tabby that had lived at one of the barns. They had
left the farm for the city before she was twelve; but though she had
had pets in the elegant home her parents had fallen heirs to and in
the magnificent residences of the millionaire she had married, they
had been the expensive, pedigreed sophisticated pets of the rich
and hadn’t appealed to her as Tabby and her kittens and the mongrel
shepherd dog of the farm had done. And not even the latter had so
appealed to her as this tiny plebeian offspring of a too prolific Tabby
mother who kept the tender-hearted Anna busy in finding homes for her
numerous kittens. Her sore heart could reach out to its innocence
without injury to her wounded pride.
“It is a love, isn’t it?” remarked Anna presently, partly to call
attention to herself and partly because she couldn’t help it. For she
was herself ‘crazy over’ the kitten, as she put it. And joining the
little group, she pointed out its double paws and the white tip of its
tail which were the only details the daughter hadn’t exclaimed over.
“I started out right after school to find a home for it. There were
three of them but the grocer at the Hollow took the yellow twins--I
suppose he’ll call ’em the Gold-Dust Twins. It looks as if I needn’t go
further. Are you willing to take him in, Mrs. Lorraine?”
“I don’t know that we ought to,” returned Mrs. Lorraine, trying to
speak stiffly. But somehow, even the thought that perhaps it would be
wrong for the family of a criminal to indulge themselves even so little
was ineffectual to stiffen her with that soft little ball in her lap.
“Mother!” cried the girl beseechingly.
“You will need a cat, you know. Every household does,” said Anna
sagely. “This one will make a fine one, too. All of Tabby’s kittens
do. Never a one has failed to give satisfaction in the households in
which I have placed them. Ma’s never had any mice in our house since
I brought the mother-cat home. I found her on a lonely road a mile or
more from any house. Just think, someone had abandoned her. It must
have been someone in Wenham that came over to drop poor Tabby, for
before there wasn’t a three-coloured cat in all Farleigh.”
“We had a tortoise-shell cat on the farm when I was a little girl,”
remarked Mrs. Lorraine quietly with a gentler look in her eyes than
Anna would have believed possible. “Alice, perhaps the kitten would
like some milk,” she added.
Alice fetched a saucer and put it on the hearth. Mrs. Lorraine placed
the kitten beside it as gently as if it had been a fragile egg shell
and the three hung over it eagerly. The kitten put his nose in so far
that he spluttered amusingly and once he dipped a paw in; but it was
too light to overturn the dish and he drank enough to prove himself of
sufficient age to be taken from his mother.
“Now he’d like a nap,” remarked Anna, picking him up. She wanted to
give him to Alice (sweet name, Alice Lorraine!) who hadn’t had a chance
at him at all; but she put him into Mrs. Lorraine’s lap and he curled
into a yet rounder ball and was asleep at once.
“Speaking of tramp cats,” Anna remarked, though as a matter of fact the
subject hadn’t come up, “you probably know that Reuben Cartright once
lived in this house?”
“Reuben Cartright--is he a musician?” asked Mrs. Lorraine.
“Dear me, no. His father was a musician, though he wasn’t noted. He was
organist at the church for a long time. He built this house, though not
with his own hands. Did you ever wonder what that platform was for?”
“I thought this was a very old house and that perhaps that was a
trundle bed,” said Alice. Anna laughed and Mrs. Lorraine had to smile.
“Mr. Cartright had the floor raised so that when he got rich he could
have a pipe organ put in,” Anna explained. “I believe the clothes-press
in the chamber above is right over the platform and the same size and
they say he planned to tear out the floor of that so that the space
would go way up to the roof. But it never came to that. His wife died
and he took to booze and that was the last of him as well as of the
pipe organ.”
“Is the son musical?” asked Mrs. Lorraine, speaking softly as if the
sleeping kitten were a baby.
“Yes’m, in a way, though he’s never had much chance. He has beautiful
hands, slim with long fingers, and his father gave him lessons up to
the time Reuben was nine and his mother died. Since then Reuben has
never had time for music. He has worked his own way, and besides--as pa
says, ever since he rescued that tramp cat from the pine tree in the
common at the Hollow, he’s been on the look out for that sort of extra
jobs. It’s a sort of private joke between me and myself, the story of
that rescue is, though I shouldn’t dare let Miss Penny know it, or pa
or Rusty, my sister. I was away from home five years--ran away to seek
my fortune and never caught up to it--and this happened in my absence.
Pa told me the story the day after I got home and then Miss Penny.
Ma told me, too, and no end of other people offered to. And to this
day, pa or Miss Penny will ask me whether I happened to hear this or
that particular and even if I say yes are likely to go on as if they
suspected I didn’t get it straight or whole. But I will say it’s a good
story and will bear repeating.”
“O Anna, won’t you please tell it to us!” cried Alice, and her mother
looked acquiescent and perhaps eager.
Anna complied. The tale had, indeed, been told many a time before in
Farleigh to the end of the Hollow; but though no narrator had ever
before employed such a jargon of slang as the other Miller girl used,
perhaps none had ever told it better nor more sympathetically. The
telling of it amused and interested Alice Lorraine, who was already
more drawn towards Anna Miller than she had been to any girl she had
known before, but it affected her mother more powerfully. Henrietta
Lorraine (‘Hetty’ was the little girl of the farm) had been for years
a cold, proud woman, a slave, unconsciously, to her husband’s vast
possessions. During the past six months, following the disgrace of her
husband and his commitment to prison, her pride had become a sort of
fierce arrogance, while her sense of injury, her bitterness towards
all the world had shut her within bars hard as iron. But now as she
sat quiet, the tension of months relaxed, with the kitten in her arms,
and listened to the tale the odd, droll, charmingly pretty, appealing
young girl rattled off so flippantly, something began to melt within
her. Nor was it merely the icy crust that had protected her crushed
feelings of late. As the kindly folk of the story rose compellingly
before her, called forth by the wand of humourous sympathy of the
yellow-haired fairy, and she saw not only Reuben Cartwright and the
forlorn cat, but Miss Penny and Mr. Langley, the fat pony and the fat
janitor who later was nearly to burn the grammar school building to
the ground,--as she saw all this and more, the woman she had been for
years was so moved that she felt almost like the woman she might and
should have been. Alice got only the story Anna told. Her mother, who
had been a country child herself and whose natural sympathy was with
country folk and ways, got a broader view and a deeper vision. She felt
something genuine and fine and sincere and worth while in this bit of
village life,--something that was attainable to others. And it came to
her that possibly Alice’s life and even her own weren’t irretrievably
ruined and wrecked. In any event, terrible as had been the storm which
had overwhelmed them, in the restful atmosphere of this place to which
they had been forced to crawl for refuge, they could at least draw long
breaths of relief, and Alice might later find more than refuge and
relief.
At the end of the story, Anna rose hastily. “I must hike or Miss Penny
will be limping round to get tea,” she said. “Poor dear! She doesn’t
drive the fat pony herself now-a-days and can’t get out of the phaeton
alone for she has rheumatism; but she is as crazy about kittens as I am
and will be as pleased to hear that this mite has a home.”
Holding out her hand a bit timidly, the girl was surprised to have Mrs.
Lorraine press it warmly.
“We are very grateful to you, Anna Miller, not only for the kitten but
for other things, for changing the current of our thoughts,” she said.
The following Sunday, Alice Lorraine appeared at church with Miss Penny
and Anna. Her suit was not new but it was more elegant than anything
worn in Farleigh. Alice was extremely pretty and had the look of one
who has, so to speak, always lain on rose leaves, and Anna felt proud
to walk up the aisle with such a distinguished-looking girl. Miss Penny
begged her to go home with them after service but Alice wouldn’t leave
her mother. She walked down to the Hollow the next afternoon, however.
She couldn’t stay for tea, but Anna gave her a piece of cake and a cup
of chocolate. As Anna walked part way home with her, she spoke of the
cake.
“I wish I could cook,” she said. “I know nothing whatever about it,
and mother knows only what she learned before she was twelve, and
cook-books are such queer things to follow. I don’t mind eating tinned
things, but it’s hard on mother, though she never says anything. And
besides,--O Anna, you wouldn’t believe it, but I hardly know my mother.
At home after I was through with nurses and governesses, she went her
way and I mine as everyone seems to do in the city. And now--I care for
her more than I ever dreamed, but I don’t seem to be able to show it or
to take care of her.”
Anna talked it over with Miss Penny that night and on Saturday morning
Alice came over and watched Anna make bread, cake and cookies. Miss
Penny was in the kitchen the greater part of the time and Alice took to
the odd, inconsecutive, warm-hearted little lady as warmly as others
had always done, so that on a second Saturday they were like three
girls together. Alice began to frequent the house at all hours. And
Miss Penny, who was one of the best housewives in the two villages
and who had taught Rusty and Anna and through them their mother, gave
the girl the best of instruction in cooking and all sorts of domestic
matters, besides amusing and entertaining her with other stories than
the tale of Reuben and the tramp cat which she gravely related to Alice
the first time the two were alone together.
“O Miss Penny, the days fly by as they never did before and I wake so
happy every morning that I am ashamed of myself!” Alice cried one
afternoon as she waited for Anna to come from the academy.
“Ashamed, Alice?”
The girl paled. “Yes, Miss Penny, because of my father. You know about
him?”
“Yes, dear, I know. At first I was sorry that people in the village
should know, but now I really think it best. After all, newcomers are
discussed just so much, and--of course there aren’t many newcomers
now-a-days--not that there ever were many. Anna’s family were the last
to move into Farleigh before you and your mother. That was when Freddy
was a baby--Freddy, you know isn’t the one who looks after my pony.
That’s Frank. He does very well, but of course Reuben taught him, and
Rusty’s brother--and of course, Anna’s--couldn’t help doing well. But I
felt as if I ought to sell both the cows. It’s a pity for Seth Miller
with all his work to have to keep the milking in mind. There’s only
the one cow--Mr. Mudge is keeping the other--and Seth thinks the world
of Reuben and knows Reuben would feel terribly to have the other cow
disposed of--I don’t mean killed of course, though that is the way they
speak of killing poor cats and kittens. And that reminds me, Alice. How
is yours?”
As Alice would have replied, a peculiar knock sounded on the door.
Alice asked if she should answer it. But Miss Penny, whose face had
lighted up, said that it was Mr. Langley, and that he would let himself
in.
“He raps in a peculiar way--it’s really a bar of music. He and Reuben’s
father always used it. He--O Mr. Langley, how good you are!”
“Good to myself, yes indeed. I am really self-indulgent when I come in
here, Miss Penny.”
“I appeal to you, Miss Lorraine,” he said as he shook hands with the
girl. “Do you consider it an act of goodness or the gratification of a
desire for refreshment to come to see Miss Penny?”
“It’s a case of receiving wholly on my part,” asserted Alice with a shy
smile for Miss Penny.
“I interrupted a conversation. Pray go on with it and allow me to
listen,” he begged.
“Dear me, Mr. Langley, I am ashamed to say that for the moment I can’t
recollect what we were discussing,” said Miss Penny in dismay.
Alice smiled, but wanly. “I was telling Miss Penny that I am really
too happy, Mr. Langley,” she said. “I am happier than I have ever been
before. As far back as I can remember, the days were always long, I got
tired of everything and was bored the greater part of the time. I cared
for nothing but my music, and I never enjoyed that as I do going about
with Anna and listening to Miss Penny and learning to make bread and
doughnuts. And--there’s poor mother at home thinking of--my father. And
I-I have to _make_ myself think of him.”
“But my dear Miss Lorraine, you are doing this in large part for your
mother. You are sitting at the feet of Miss Penny in order to learn how
to make one of the most attractive cottages ever built into a real
home for her. And while you are broadening your life with these new
influences which seem more congenial than those you have known before,
no doubt you are enriching your mother’s life as well? You tell her of
all that takes place, I dare say?”
“Everything. And she is interested and forgets--for a little. And Anna
goes in and--mother loves Anna already.”
He turned smilingly to Miss Penny. “Anna is more like you, Miss Penny,
after all, than any other of your foster children,” he said and then
went on talking to Alice.
As he rose to take leave, he told Alice he hoped her mother might meet
Miss Penny before long. At the door, he kept her a minute.
“Don’t feel guilty when you forget your father and don’t force yourself
to think of him, Miss Lorraine,” he said earnestly. “Open your whole
heart to the new life and help your mother in her much harder task of
reconciling herself to a new future. Write your father, and if he gets
the impression he should from your letters, he will conclude that your
life isn’t going to be spoiled and--why, that will surely make a great
difference to him.”
There was a blur before the girl’s eyes so that she couldn’t see the
minister’s figure at the gate. Instead of returning to the sitting-room
she stole upstairs for a few minutes of silence in Anna’s large, pretty
chamber where she was always free to go.
Entering the room, she started at sight of a figure on the bed. As she
saw that it was Anna and that her face was buried in the pillow, her
heart grew cold. What had happened. Or hadn’t anything happened? Was it
that, all the while the girl was devoted to other interests than her
own, some secret sorrow was eating at her heart?