“I’m sorry for Lorraine,” Hopeful answered, “but I bet a cookie ’Raine goes to see Thurley and takes her an embroidered set for a present. She’s as brave as a lion and sweet as an angel! And I bet you a mince pie Thurley Precore isn’t going to be happy.”
“You ain’t sayin’ anything against Thurley?” demanded Ali Baba.
“Land, no, I set a sight by Thurley the same as by Lorraine, and I like Dan as well as either of ’em. It’s just a mistake, Ali Baba, and you know what mistakes in love do.” Her hand pointed in the direction of the upper front rooms. “Well, wait and see. Thurley was meant always to sing for her supper, the same as Lorraine was made to cook supper for a good man.”
“I guess Dan ain’t different from all men—made to eat supper no matter how much singin’ or cookin’ goes to gettin’ the vittles on the table,” was Ali Baba’s emphatic summary of the situation.
Lorraine did call on Thurley and bring a daintily[64] wrapped blue tissue paper parcel containing one of her embroidered “sets” for the washstand of any conventional, country spare room. Lorraine had remained with the older generation in her standards of house furnishings and necessities.
The blue tissue paper matched her blue batiste frock with its crisp ruffles and the ribbon on her hat. Lorraine had made the dress and trimmed the hat, and it gave the impression of good taste and praiseworthy industry. There was nothing Lorraine could or would not attempt to do, once convinced it was her duty. She had the angelic sweetness of really unselfish natures and the accompanying stubbornness of which martyrs are made. She was a trifle weak, perhaps, during a crisis, and certainly lacked Thurley’s aggression and power of argument. But Lorraine could sustain a situation—long after Thurley was forced, by temperament, to abandon it! Not even her estimable father dreamed that on the day Lorraine’s mother died, the child soul of her had closed and grownups scratched on it in vain. It was her duty, she was convinced, not to mourn openly.
It had been her father’s duty to have Lorraine brought up, and a maiden aunt’s duty to forego the luxury of her severe but unhampered existence to see that Lorraine was properly raised. And it was Lorraine’s duty to repay the bringing up and to take the place of the minister’s wife and be the minister’s daughter at the same time, to entertain deacons and visiting circuit riders and ladies’ aid societies alike, to clean the best room for the missionaries and cook for them and pray for the conversion of the heathen all in the same day, to be not too prominent as the minister’s daughter and yet to take the necessary lead in all things even unto making a house to house canvass to solicit her father’s back salary or enough[65] knives and forks to serve the entire congregation at the baked bean supper!
Likewise, it was her duty not to think how pretty she was—that frail, elusive sort of beauty which does not impress the first time one meets it but which, after one has become familiar with it, fairly coaxes its way into the heart to remain. (No one having merely “glimpsed” Thurley would have ever forgotten her!) Because Lorraine had innocent, dove-colored eyes and the fairest of fair hair and tilted features with dimples placed irregularly about, she was misjudged as to her abilities. No one would have dreamed that the girl painstakingly wrote the burden of her father’s letters and helped to soften his harshest of sermons, particularly those on predestination and heresy, and then turned into the kitchen to do the work of stout-elbowed women! Nor did that comprise all of her duty. To her fell those prosaic, uninteresting tasks such as taking old shoes to be mended in order to avoid buying new, or re-lining her father’s threadbare coats or rummaging endless drawers to find a recipe for walnut catsup to satisfy some bromidic but important sister of the church.
It was her duty not to love Dan too hard and become a sentimental goose, she told herself as night after night she wrestled with her conscience, trying not to hate Thurley Precore as such small, dainty creatures, to every one’s surprise, can hate. Of course Dan would marry Thurley or else marry no one; he would build the lovely home for her and buy her endless pretty clothes, for every one knew Thurley could not even darn stockings skilfully—she admitted it with one of her boyish laughs! He would also buy her a new automobile and a concert grand piano; and she would be his loved and trusted wife, mother of his children, and when Lorraine[66] would come to this part of her reverie, the dimples would become quivering dents of emotion and the orthodox prayers her father fancied were being said would vanish completely. Of course, she would comfort herself, Thurley would never make Dan happy—she sang too well! Even this was salt in the wound, for was not Thurley paid soloist at her father’s church and was not Lorraine obliged to sit Sunday after Sunday in the first pew and listen to Thurley’s wonderful voice sing glorious anthems while behind Lorraine was Dan Birge, present only because he could take Thurley home?... And Lorraine had to say to him, because it was more of her duty, “Good morning, Dan; wasn’t the solo wonderful? I think Thurley’s voice is better all the time. Good morning, Thurley dear, we’ve just been saying what a marvel you are—good-by. Oh, good morning, Mrs. Turner, I want to thank you for the invitation for the quilting party—yes, I’d love to come—oh, thank you—” and so on, her heart thumping uncontrollably fast.
After greeting the congregation, she must go into the parsonage and cook dinner and try to eat as she listened to her father’s small talk; she must wash the dishes and return to the church to teach the Bible class in the three o’clock Sabbath school—while all the time she knew Dan and Thurley were whirling about the lovely hilly country, stopping at some shady, brook-embraced glen to eat their luncheon and make love! And again, a cold tea at six and Lorraine must once more play scullery maid and then go into the evening service and know Dan was behind her waiting impatiently until Thurley’s duties were ended and they might go back to Betsey Pilrig’s porch or parlor and with mellow moonlight as witness—spoon! That was[67] the truth—spoon! Lorraine’s flat little chest would heave excitedly and she would drop her eyes and force herself to count the dots in her frock—the third summer for it—to steady herself until she could glance up at Thurley in the choir loft and realize that she was the gladdest, loveliest thing in two worlds, a wild rose by all the poets’ dictionaries!
So when she climbed the hill to Betsey Pilrig’s house and Betsey went to call Thurley, Lorraine sank into the parlor chair and gave vent to a faint groan. If it were any other girl save Thurley, she could endure it more easily, but Thurley was so careless of his love, she so undervalued it! She heard Thurley humming a gay song and running down the stairs.
“You nice creature!” Thurley said carelessly, kissing her and trying to remove her hat at the same time. “Do take it off, ’Raine, it’s such a climb up here. There, now I can see your eyes!” Thurley did not realize how unkind was this last. “Sit there—it’s a comfy chair—well, I know what you’ve come to say,” she blushed properly, “but if Dan could see me I know he’d be quite shocked, I look anything but a prospective young matron—’fess up, ’Raine!”
Lorraine shook her head. “Dan wouldn’t care how you looked as long as you would marry him,” she began bravely. “You know that.” It was harder than she had steeled herself to expect. Thurley was so careless of her great joy, she seemed a strange creature not belonging to any well-ordered town as she sat gracefully on the arm of a sofa, her dark hair braided about her head and the rumpled pink linen frock emphasizing the color of her cheeks.
“Well, maybe not. I’m hoping he’ll always feel that[68] way. I didn’t want to announce it, but Dan wouldn’t wait any longer. Of course we’ve been half engaged for about two years.”
“Yes, I know.” Lorraine wondered if her voice sounded metallic.
“So I said yes, and now Dan is neglecting business. He was here at half-past eight this morning to ask if I wanted the walls tinted or papered; and he’s gone right ahead and ordered a most extravagant ring—two carat in platinum—really, I don’t approve for I’m so careless of all my things I’m bound to lose it. I’d rather he didn’t start the house either. If I were only like you, I’d be delighted with the prospect of a pantry and a million shelves and drawers and the promise of any sort of range or fireless cooker and all the other appliances, but I’m not even interested.”
“You’re not? Why, Thurley, Dan will have to eat! What does interest you?”
“The garden and the color of my room and, most of all, my piano. For I’m to have a baby grand piano of my very own—I won’t have to practise on the Sunday school piano any more. I’m half afraid I’m marrying Dan for that piano—don’t look shocked—I’m not, of course, only it means a great deal.”
“I can’t imagine it! But of course I haven’t your voice.” Unconsciously Lorraine glanced out the window and across the road to where, sinking into comfortable ruin, stood a tottering old box-car wagon, the one in which Thurley had travelled all the way from Boulder, Colorado!
“I wish Philena were here, she’d have so loved a wedding,” Thurley said presently, “and Granny wouldn’t be so lonesome. Did I tell you that Dan says she’s to have his old rooms at the hotel, unless she’ll live with us? She[69] says she won’t, so, of course, the other way is easy and lovely for her.”
“He’s very generous,” Lorraine sighed. She held out her parcel. “It is just a well-wisher, as we say,” she added. “Nothing, of course, like your other things will be, but I made it myself and perhaps you will like it because of that.”
Lorraine had embroidered faint dreams and hopes of some day using the set in her house—and Dan Birge’s—into the pattern. She had many such trifles tucked away in a chest of walnut drawers.
“You’re a dear—I’m so clumsy with a needle—and it is beautiful!” Thurley said as she opened the package. “Just fancy you doing all this! Oh, Lorraine, I’ve told Dan, so many times, ‘You ought to marry Lorraine instead of me—she’d make you such a good wife.’ But men don’t pay any attention to common sense when they’re in love,” she rattled on.
“Did you, really?” Lorraine put her little hand on Thurley’s sleeve.
“Dozens of times.”
“And did—did Dan ever answer you?”
Thurley turned to look thoughtfully at her small guest. “Well,” she began awkwardly, “he said that he just happened to love me. I suppose it’s that way lots of times—people love certain people whether it’s best or not. When you come to see me, this set shall be in the best room I have—truly. And I want you to teach me lots of things you know—cooking and sewing and how always to be even tempered. Why, I’m cross as a witch one minute and jolly as a gypsy the next, and I do want to make him happy!” There was an earnest catch in her voice. “He’s been so good to me—I’ve nothing to offer him but myself.”
“That is all he wants,” Lorraine made herself answer, reaching for her hat. “Are you going to sing any other place besides church?”
“I think so; Dan thinks not. After all, if you have some one who loves you very much and is always willing to listen to you sing, I suppose you ought to do as he says.”
“How can you do anything he doesn’t wish you to?” Lorraine asked passionately. “You’d be wicked—with him loving you so hard!” Then, ashamed of her confession, she said a confused good-by and hurried out in time to have a ride with a passing farmer.
Thurley took the “set” to show to Betsey Pilrig. “See what ’Raine has given your lazy Thurley,” she said penitently. “I’m beginning to feel out of sorts with myself—I don’t know why. As if I ought to have been making wedding clothes when she called or scalding over preserves or something like that, instead of staying upstairs and learning a new opera aria. Granny, aren’t you sorry you let this long-legged, noisy creature stay in your house?” She knelt beside the old woman and clasped her arms around Betsey’s waist.
Betsey shook her head. “No, because Philena loved you—and when Philena died, she told me to take care of you.”
“And now I’m going to take care of you, and you’re never going to work.”
She rose and walked into the parlor, opening the sacred shutters wide and seating herself at the old-time organ with its carpet-covered pedals and apricot plush stool. She began playing chords, her blue eyes looking across the road, beyond the old box-car wagon, as if she saw visions of worlds still to be conquered—the worlds that the child Thurley had pledged herself to know.
There was little in Betsey Pilrig’s house of value to Thurley, but mere furnishings never mattered. She was oblivious to shabby carpets, and, when she dusted the parlor furniture or set the table with nicked and varied styles of china, she was too busy singing or thinking of Dan to notice her actual surroundings. Nor did clothes bother Thurley—she was happy in a white middy blouse and a serge skirt and quite as beautiful as if she wore a Paquin creation. Besides, Thurley rebelled at taking help from Betsey Pilrig and her only way of earning money was limited. Even if one was the best singer and piano teacher in the township with the commendation of having learned: first, all Kate Sills knew, which ended with an E flat valse and “Dixie” with variations; and, second, all that a small city organist could teach her during his summer vacation spent in the Corners, and, last, all Thurley herself taught herself by diligent practice and “just coming natural to her”—even so, who wanted to pay more than twenty-five cents an hour to learn how to sing or play on the piano? So Thurley was forced to content herself with being organist, choir mistress and soloist in the church, with a dozen pupils to round out her income. Whenever she begged Dan to let her clerk in his store, he always asked her to marry him, thus blockading her desire.
With a restless gesture she closed the organ. “Ho-hum, I need Dan to make love to me,” she ruminated. “I can’t seem to make myself take anything seriously. I wonder why God made the Precores stop off here instead of a city—things would have been different in a city....” A moment later she mentally upbraided herself, “As if you weren’t the luckiest girl in the world! You ought to get down on your knees and ask poor ’Raine to forgive you, and Dan and Granny, too.... Go out and[72] start a patchwork quilt this instant and don’t let a single song be heard in this house until it is a third finished!”
But the scolding seemed to have no effect, for, instead, she reopened the organ and sang the opera aria she had just learned. As she finished it, she spied Miss Clergy’s shabby coupé pausing behind the clump of maple trees.
“Why—that’s the second time within a few days!” Thurley said delightedly. “Now—I wonder....”
With the exception of paying her wages or making some childish complaint, Abigail Clergy seldom spoke to Hopeful. It was an event to be summoned into those always lighted, seldom aired front rooms, crowded with keepsakes of a bygone generation, to stand before the chair of the imperious creature in her rusty black silk and hear her upbraidings over the fact that harmless urchins had been seen crossing the Fincherie lawn.
During the first tedious years of Miss Clergy’s self-imprisonment, Hopeful, then younger and stronger of spirit, used to remonstrate against the order of things, urge a new doctor, a jaunt to the seaside, even if she saw no one. She tried to persuade Miss Clergy to wear new gowns, to turn off the penetrating gaslights which burned day and night no matter how bright the sun or how mellow the moon, to open the windows and let the fresh air revive her spirits, read a daily paper and, gradually, gently be swept back into the current of everyday living.
To none of these suggestions did Miss Clergy lend anything but a deaf ear. Her life had become her martyrdom and she did not propose to lose a single jot of it. With the exception of Ali Baba, who had proved himself faithful beyond a doubt, Miss Clergy had registered an everlasting hatred and distrust of men, it mattered not who. No clergyman dared enter[73] her door; her physicians were women, her lawyers acted as if they had been sentenced to the gallows and were merely enjoying a brief stay of execution. No man could ever command even her respect, she had told Hopeful; no woman could have her confidence or her love. She hated all living creatures. And as the years passed with Miss Clergy a trifle more wrinkled of skin, whiter of hair and distorted of mind, Hopeful ceased making efforts to change her viewpoint. Indeed, she, too, fell into a sort of charmed, even existence, free from material want or keenness of interest in the world without. The Clergy fortune continued to multiply. All Miss Clergy had to do was figuratively to wave a yellowed, jewelled hand and a barrel of gold was at her command. Yet no repairs were permitted to be made at the Fincherie, not even a new coupé nor for Ali Baba a new livery. And when, one by one, the old mares would die and the purchase of another was inevitable, Miss Clergy would fly into a rage.
When, perforce, Hopeful demanded to clean the two front rooms, Miss Clergy would scold sharply, as she moved into one of them, waiting with added martyrdom until she could fly back into the other to complain about some minute change in the placing of a book or the position of a chair.
The rest of the house, however, was left to Hopeful’s guardianship, and, when she tried to persuade Miss Clergy to come downstairs and sit in the pleasant parlors or eat in the little breakfast room, Miss Clergy would demand,
“Do you want to find another home for yourself, Hopeful? Oh, you do not. Then leave me in peace—at least I am mistress of my own house.”
She never spoke to Ali Baba save the daily, “An hour’s[74] drive, Ali Baba, not too fast,” and by the world at large she was never even seen. No charity appeal softened her selfish, useless vigil; no cause, however worthy, could lessen her hysterical mimicry of disease. No one was the better for the existence of that small, sinister person with a withered heart, since it was no longer even bruised.
And when, on the evening of the day Miss Clergy had stopped for the second time to hear Thurley sing, she rang the bell long after Hopeful had served her a tray supper and said almost civilly as she entered, “Sit down, Hopeful. I want to ask you about a girl named Thurley Precore who sings—who she is and how she earns her living and how long she has been here,” Hopeful put her tired hand to her head, wondering if she had heard aright.
With a tyrannical smile Miss Clergy repeated her questions.
So Hopeful found her voice after a bit and began the story of Thurley’s singing for her supper up to the time her father died when the first snow flew and how out of charity Betsey Pilrig had taken her into her home to live with Philena.
“Of course Betsey didn’t have much, but what she had she divided between Philena and Thurley, and she’s said to me that she looked on Thurley as the boy and Philena the girl. Because Thurley is one of those that’ll get themselves heard, if they’re born in the backwoods. There wasn’t much to Philena but her big eyes and her crutch, and you ought to have seen the way Thurley looked out for her and toted her on her back, pretending she wasn’t heavy! My land, I’ve watched those children play together until I was late with my work!”
“What did they play?” interrupted Miss Clergy.
“Missionary and play-actin’ and all such stuff, and Thurley made it up. No matter what Thurley made up,[75] Philena said she liked it. I never will forget the Christmas Philena made a travellin’ chest for Thurley out of an ol’ tea-box she got down to Submit Curler’s store! She fitted it up inside with cretonne pockets and a lookin’ glass and wrote on a card, ‘For Thurley when she goes to be a missionary!’ Wasn’t that the queerest thing for a young ’un to think of? Philena was to be a missionary, too, and Thurley was to sing the songs. Oh, Thurley can sing! When they graduated from the high school—Philena didn’t live long after that—Philena read a graduating essay and Thurley sang a song and there wasn’t no applause for Philena, except what me and Betsey and Ali Baba mustered up, but everybody stamped their feet to have Thurley come back and sing. There was a sort of tableau, too, at the church, for Children’s Sunday—seven children were the seven days of the week, and wasn’t it queer that Thurley was Saturday, Philena was Sunday and Lorraine McDowell, Monday?”
“What of it?” snapped Miss Clergy.
“It means that ‘Saturday’s child must work for a living’ and Thurley said, ‘That’s me—Saturday.’ And ‘Sunday’s child is full of grace,’ and certainly Philena was, and ‘Monday’s child is fair of face,’ and nobody would ever want to see a prettier child than Lorraine was—or is—”
“Never mind her! Go on about Thurley,” Hopeful was ordered.
“It was the next month Philena died, and Betsey spent half she had in the bank to bury her the way she thought she’d like—a lavender coffin with quilted satin and she wore her graduating dress and a jet hair ornament that Thurley give her and Thurley sang at the funeral and never broke down onct! Some say Thurley Precore never loved no one, but I know she loved Philena, and[76] since then she stayed on at Betsey’s and earned money singin’ and teachin’ piano and it seems as if she couldn’t put her mind on nothin’ else ... I dunno—”
“Who’s the—boy?” There was a rasping tone in her voice. “The boy she is engaged to marry?”
“Why, Dan Birge—”
“Birge—” memories stirred in the numbed brain.
“Grandson of the one you knew, Miss Abby. Dearie me, you’ve lost count of years!” Hopeful shook her head.
“Will she be fool enough to marry him?” Miss Clergy insisted.
“He’ll marry no one else, I guess. Seems as if he’s always cared for her and she’s made a man of him, too.”
“That will do, Hopeful. The omelette was like leather and don’t put flowers on my tray again.” Miss Clergy’s dismissal was as brusque as her greeting.
Below, Ali Baba and Hopeful exchanged opinions. After thirty some years of seclusion Abby Clergy had begun to care to hear of some one else.
“Well, if any one else could make her care, it would be Thurley,” Ali Baba deduced, while Hopeful paused in the wiping of the last pot to say sagely,
“If she could, she’d have Dan Birge blown off the face of the earth, just because he wants to marry Thurley.”
“Some wimmen takes it harder’n others,” muttered Ali Baba whose patience with Miss Clergy was not of the same duration as his cousin Hopeful’s.
For the first time in thirty-some years Abby Clergy actually opened the shutter of her window and let in the summer breeze. She drew a chair close beside it and rested her thin arms on the window ledge. A flush in the yellowed cheeks betrayed her excitement; her harsh[77] voice was trying to hum the aria Thurley had sung so carelessly that afternoon. By chance it was the solo aria in the last opera Abby Clergy had seen. She had been escorted by Sebastian Gomez the pretender, and every one had turned opera glasses to look at this beautiful American girl who was to marry a supposedly dashing nobleman, according to newspaper gossips. What time and happenings had occurred since then! And Thurley, who had stirred the last spark of life in the embers of Miss Abby’s heart, was to marry a country bumpkin, a Birge, a storekeeper probably, a slangy, serge-suited, whistling nuisance with an odious bulldog and a new-fangled automobile—never! Not if the Clergy fortune could prevent it!