CHAPTER V
Since the coming of the Fords the house in Waverly Place had awakened. Sue’s presence had had its effect from cellar to roof. No sunbeam that ever smiled into a dungeon could have been more welcome. The gloomy old stairs zigzagging up to the top floor seemed more cheerful, and the narrow hallways it led to less dingy. Even Aunt Matilda’s cat—a scared and fat-headed old mouser who had refused half through January to leave its warm refuge under her stove in the basement—could now be seen nibbling and cleaning her paws as far up as the top carpeted step on Enoch’s floor.
There radiates from the personality of a pure young girl like Sue something strangely akin to sunshine, something indefinable, luminous, and warm, which no one yet has been quite able to describe—any more than one can define “charm”—that which touches the heart, neither can we place our finger upon that thin, wavering border line between friendship and love—a pressure of the hand, a glance of the eyes, a smile, a sudden gaze of sympathy and understanding, and we stumble headlong across the frontier into the land of adoration. Tofallin love! What nonsense! Werise, with love tingling through our veins—pounding at our temples, its precious treasure our own, safe forever, we believe, in our beating hearts.
Ah! yes indeed, it has ever been so, and it always will be. Why is it that Cupid, the god of love, has always been depicted as a frail little cherub, when the truth is he is a giant, dominating, relentless, strong as death—who swings the whole world at his beck and call. How much misery, doubt, and happiness he has conceived and fashioned to suit him since the world began (bless his little heart!) it is quite impossible to compute. Eve and Adam are unfortunately dead, or we should have it at first-hand from both of them.
Sue was not only beautiful—she was fresh, and young, and cheery, with a frank gleam in her clear blue eyes, a complexion like a rose, the sheen of gold in her fair hair—a lithe grace to her slim, active body—pearly teeth, and a kind word for every one who deserved it.
No wonder that Joe Grimsby impulsively lost his head and his heart to Sue at first sight of her. More than a week had elapsed, and although he had had from that young lady little more encouragement than his buoyant imagination supplied, he was far from disheartened. What really had occurred, was that he had met his ideal face to face on the stairs the day after the party, and she had thanked him for inviting her, rather coldly, Joe thought. Indeed it had been quite a formal little meeting after all. He had expressed his sorrow at her not being able to come, and she had expressed hers—quite as formally as a strange girl at a tea might, and he being too innately well-bred a gentleman to force matters, had accepted herproffered little hand with more added regrets, and shaken it as punctiliously as he was wont to do the hands of his various hostesses in bidding them good night. And so she went up-stairs and he went down, not, however, without a beating heart over the interview, brief and unsatisfactory as it had been, and a firm resolution to call on her mother—which he did the very next day, and received word from the Irish maid of all work who opened the door, that “Mrs. Ford begged to be excused.” The truth was that this Southern lady did not care to know the young men in the house, and as for Sue, the oversudden invitation to meet the young architects of the third floor had left more of an impression of distrust than desire.
As for Joe, Sam Atwater’s better sense and advice had only the effect it usually does in such painful cases, of fanning into a blaze Joe’s infatuation and spiriting on his stubborn determination to convince Sue Preston of its sincerity. Alas! Joe had reached that stage among young architects in love, of covering half the margins of his quarter-scale drawings with pictorial memories of Sue—sketching with his HB lead pencil her clean-cut, refined profile, detailing with infinite pains the exact curve of her lovely mouth, expressing as best he could the tenderness in her eyes, and the precise way in which she wore her hair, half hiding her small, pink ears—in fact, he got to dreaming hopelessly over her as he drew, and forgot in the second draft of the Long Island woman’s cottage important members of cornices, windows, and doors, laying in cross-sectionsand elevations in a scandalous, sloppy way, until Atwater finally had to call a halt over his shoulder with: “For Heaven’s sake, old man, cut it out,” at which Joe grinned, and with good-natured embarrassment promised to really get down to work.
He had declared to Sam Atwater in his outburst of enthusiasm at the office that Sue could not sing. He was positive of this—“She did not look like a girl who could sing”—whereas if Sue possessed one great gift, it was her splendid soprano voice. Her voice was her very life, her whole ambition, a possession far more valuable than the whole worthless lot of Ebner Ford’s business ventures combined, and wisely enough Sue realized that, whatever might happen to the always uncertain budget of the Ford family, at least with her concert work and her teaching, she could make her own living. When her stepfather’s six-house venture had failed, it was Sue who came to the rescue—with what she had earned during the two years previous, singing in the smaller towns of Connecticut, giving lessons wherever she could, mostly in Ebner Ford’s home town of Clapham, the very town in which her mother had married him ten years before to escape from impending poverty.
It may be seen, therefore, that the hard struggle the stepdaughter had gone through had left her with a far more serious knowledge and view of life than either Joe or the rest of the inmates of No. 99 Waverly Place were in the least conscious of.
Sue thoroughly understood her stepfather; briefly,she regretted his methods, and still wondered how her mother could have ever married him, poor as they were. Inwardly, too, she trembled over his wildcat schemes, none too overscrupulous at best, while his hail-fellow-well-met manner, which he assumed upon any occasion when he saw a commission for himself hanging loose about the stranger, grated upon her. Indeed she knew him thoroughly, just as he was, bombastic varnish, vagaries, common self-assurance, and all. Behind closed doors in the intimacy of his home, before her mother and herself, Ebner Ford was a different man. His respect for his stepdaughter’s wishes and better judgment was often one of ill-tempered resignation.
He dared not disagree with his wife—a short, thick-set little woman, several years his senior, addicted to side-combs, opinions of her own, and an extravagant way of boasting to others of her South Carolinian ancestry, and carefully avoiding any mention of her husband’s from central Connecticut.
Now it happened that that dear little old spinster, Miss Ann Moulton, who lived with her invalid sister on the second floor, was the first to really know Sue.
These two unmarried sisters had lived together since they were girls. They had a little property, just enough to provide for the modest apartment they were living in, and were anywhere from fifty to sixty years old. You could not possibly tell their exact age by looking at them, and, of course, they would not have told you had you asked them. They were both small, very much alike—little, gray, dried-up women. Both very refined, very gentle in their manners, gentle of voice,too. Miss Ann was the stronger of the two. She was the manager. Upon her frail, little person fell all the responsibility, their only relative being a brother who lived West, and who managed what little property they had. She had no one else to look after her affairs, and he was a lazy brother at that.
As for Miss Jane, the sister, she had always been an invalid. Her frail hands were strangely transparent when held to the light, her voice weak, her step uncertain, and her hair, like Miss Ann’s, nearly silver-white. On the street you could hardly tell the two sisters apart. They were so much alike, and dressed alike, which they had always done since they were children, and yet they were not twins. Therewasa difference, however; Miss Jane’s cheeks were sunken, and there were dark circles under her patient, gray eyes. She never let any one know she was an invalid; neither did Miss Ann mention it. It had all happened so many years ago, but it was as clear in Jane Moulton’s memory as if it had happened yesterday: Her gasping for breath, her failing strength as she fought on in the grip of an ebb-tide. His sharp cry to her to keep her head, then his strong arm about her—blackness—then the beach, and he whom she loved, who had given his life for hers, lying drowned upon it.
A small daguerreotype of him hung above her bed; one taken when he was eighteen, the year they were engaged.
The Misses Moulton’s apartment was furnished in a various and curious collection of quaint little roundtables with spindle legs, a Franklin stove burning wood, some old family portraits in oval gilt frames, and high-post bedsteads for each of the bedrooms, the sunny one being Miss Jane’s. There were big easy chairs covered with chintz in the sitting-room, and an assortment of different kinds of china, suggesting relics of several family collections; none of them matched—three teacups and saucers of one set, and four of another, some in gold and lustre. They had but one servant—Mary—an American, who came from up New York State, a motherly woman of fifty, fat, serious, and good-natured.
Sue had been giving a singing lesson as far up-town as East 46th Street, to the daughter of a wealthy alderman, who owned a brownstone, high-stooped house, grafted intact from the last political election. This house was a block above the railroad bridge on Lexington Avenue, and there being no cars running to-day, owing to a strike on the Third Avenue horse-car line, Sue had been obliged this wretched January day, with the streets swimming in slush under a fine, drizzling rain, to reach her destination on foot. After her lesson she had crossed the bridge spanning the Grand Central tracks, and found her way back to Waverly Place by way of Madison Avenue.
Stairs have a habit of forcing acquaintanceships, and making friends, a way of introducing strangers, who otherwise would not dare speak to each other, of bringing neighbors face to face, and providing themwith a firm foothold until they knew each other better. Where Joe Grimsby had failed on the stairs, Miss Ann Moulton succeeded. Miss Ann had put on her bonnet to do an errand, closed the door of her sitting-room, and stood in the dim light of the landing, buttoning a new pair of lisle-thread gloves she had purchased the day before at the big Stewart store, just as Sue, wet and tired from her lesson up-town, came up the stairs, her cloak and hat glistening with rain. As she neared the Moultons’ landing, she caught sight of the little old maid nervously struggling over the top button of her left-hand glove.
“Won’t you let me help you?” ventured Sue, as she reached the landing. “New gloves are so difficult to button.”
“Oh, please—I pray you—don’t bother,” returned Miss Ann, flushing with embarrassment, but Sue insisted, briskly laid the thin wrist in the palm of her hand, quickly extracted a hairpin from where it had nestled in her fair hair, and so deftly buttoned the new gray glove, that before Miss Ann could further protest the button was snug and safe in its buttonhole.
“Oh, thank you! Thank you so much,” stammered the little spinster. Then both glanced into each other’s eyes, and both smiled. “I’m so sorry to have troubled you,” added Miss Ann sweetly.
There was a friendly gleam in her aged gray eyes now that won Sue’s heart before the little woman before her, standing with her back to her sitting-room door, had uttered another word.
Sue laid her wet umbrella against the banisters next to Miss Ann’s dry one, and brushed the wet from her skirt.
“You are Miss Moulton, aren’t you?” she asked with a cheery smile.
“Yes, my child. How did you know? Except for Mr. Crane we know no one here at present. My sister and I live here; we have lived here nearly as long as Mr. Crane.”
“I know,” nodded Sue. “Moses told me.” There was something so gentle, frank, and sincere, especially in the word “child,” that Sue already felt they were friends. The frail, gloved hand lingered in Sue’s. “You don’t know how glad I am to meet you, Miss Moulton,” said she, pressing it firmly.
“And I to meet you, my dear. It’s such a joy to have a young girl come into this dreadful gloomy place,” sighed Miss Ann.
“Itisgloomy to-day, isn’t it?” Sue declared. “If you don’t really have to go out I wouldn’t, Miss Moulton. It’s simply dreadful out. The streets are simply swimming in slush, and it’s just that kind of a drizzling rain that soaks you through and through.” Sue hesitated. “Do you really have to go out?” she asked seriously. “Please tell me, is there anything I can do? Do let me go if there is.Mustyou go?—and without your rubbers, too! I feel like scolding you,” she laughed.
“But, but I was only going to the druggist’s,” explained Miss Ann. “My sister has been quite wretched and in bed since yesterday with a cold.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Sue. “I hope it isn’t serious.”
“Of course it’s nothing,” returned Miss Ann; “but you see, dear, she is not very strong, and I’m always a little anxious about her.”
“Now youmustlet me go,” pleaded Sue. “You’ll be drenched, Miss Moulton. I’m drenched already, so it doesn’t matter, I’m used to getting wet.”
In reply Miss Ann patted the girl’s shoulder affectionately. “I should not think of letting you go, my child. I’ll send Moses instead and, unless your dear mother is waiting for you, won’t you come in and see me? Mary will take care of your wet things. Then we can have some tea and a good chat before the wood fire.”
“Oh, how nice! Of course I’ll come. A wood fire!” Sue exclaimed, as Miss Ann opened the door of the cosey old-fashioned sitting-room. “It’s a long time since I’ve seen a real wood-fire—not since we lived in Clapham. Don’t you love them?”
“Yes, my child; all my life I have loved them. They are like old friends,” she added, as she led the young girl across her threshold, whereupon she sent Mary down for Moses, with instructions and a prescription, laid aside Sue’s wet things in the kitchen to dry, poked into a blaze the dying embers of the sitting-room fire, put on two fresh logs, ensconced Sue in a big armchair full of eider-down cushions, insisted on relieving her of her shoes and rubbers, tucked her trim stockinged feet upon a low settle before a glorioushickory blaze, and called to her sister Jane through the half-closed door of her bedroom, announcing their visitor—all as naturally as if Sue had been visiting them for years.
There was a restful, cosey atmosphere about the Misses Moulton’s apartment that appealed keenly to the young girl before the cheery fire. She could not help realizing the slovenly air and bad taste of their own belongings; that sordid collection of trash that had always accompanied them in their various movings. Some of these modern horrors had been acquired on the instalment plan, and stood out incongruously among their meagre store of family mahogany. Imitation oak and cherry made no difference to Ebner Ford as long as the drawers worked and there was room enough for his scanty wardrobe. As for her mother, despite her Southern training, she had no taste whatever. A Nile-green bow tied on a nickel-plated picture easel went far from shocking her sense of the artistic. Mrs. Ford had purchased two of them, in fact, one serving to uphold a crayon portrait of Ebner, showing the great promoter wearing his white tie, and laboring under an expression calculated to convey to the mind of the spectator absolute honesty and business acumen; and the other sustaining a gilt wicker basket, filled with dyed pampas grass, and further embellished with silvered sea-shells spelling “Welcome.”
And so Sue and the little spinster chatted on, whilethe fragrant tea brewed in the daintiest of white porcelain teapots, Miss Jane putting here and there a word in the conversation through the door ajar of her bedroom, an effort which ended in a fit of coughing, a gentle protest from her sister, silence, and a nap.
Miss Ann rose from the tea-table, softly closed the door of Miss Jane’s bedroom, and resumed:
“So you see, dear, my sister Jane and I have lived here so long that we have become attached to the old house, gloomy as it is. I don’t think I should have the courage to move again among strangers—when I think of all the people we have seen settled here,” smiled Miss Ann reminiscently, while she paused to pour a second cup of tea for Sue.
“Oh! please go on,” pleaded Sue eagerly, as she recovered her boots, now warm and dry. “Do tell me all about them,” she added as she laced them. “Don’t you love to study people? They are all so different, you know. You were speaking of Mr. Crane and his top floor when I interrupted you. Do tell me more of the history of the house; it’s simply fascinating.”
“Well, let me see. Then, there was old Mr. Peapod.”
“Peapod!” laughed Sue. “Delicious!”
“Simon Peapod. Such an eccentric, withered-up old man, who used to stutter with embarrassment, I remember, every time we met him on the stairs. Somebody in the house, Mr. Crane says, once invited him (Shy Simon we used to call him) to dinner, and he stole down-stairs, sneaked around a corner to a lamp-postbox, and mailed a regret,” chuckled Miss Ann, “although he lived on the floor above them—where the young men are now.”
“And sotheysucceeded Mr.—oh, delicious name!—Mr. Peapod?”
“No, my dear, a Miss Green succeeded Mr. Peapod.”
“I knew a Miss Anna Green, from New York, a sculptress. She used to come to Clapham to visit an aunt—a tall girl with dark hair. I wonder if it could have been she,” Sue ventured.
“No, my child. The Miss Green I speak of was an actress—dear, it isn’t a very happy history—she’s dead, poor girl.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Sue. “And did she die here, poor thing?”
“She died in Bellevue Hospital,” said Miss Ann very quietly, and for a moment the little woman ceased speaking. She did not refer to what she herself had meant to the poor girl in question; how time and time again she had stood by this poor inebriate; how she would go out at night and hunt her up in the cafés and restaurants and take her home and put her to bed; how at last she became hopeless and desperately ill, with no one to appeal to save Miss Ann, and then her death in Bellevue, and the funeral which Miss Ann arranged and paid for.
“Tell me—how long have the architects—Mr. Atwater and Mr. Grimsby, I mean—been here?” asked Sue, breaking the silence.
“Well, my dear—let me see—all of six months, I should say.”
“You won’t think it strange in my asking, will you, Miss Moulton?—but, you see, we had hardly gotten settled before they asked mother and me and Mr. Ford to a musicale in their rooms. My stepfather went, but—well, mother and I declined. It seemed so forced and sudden. Can’t you understand, Miss Moulton? I just couldn’t.”
“I dare say they meant no harm,” declared Miss Ann. Then, after a brief reflective pause: “Of course, dear, as you say, itwasa little sudden. When I was your age, my child, the young men were different than they are nowadays—as for these young fellows, they both seem to be gentlemen and of good family. At least what little I have seen of them leads me to believe so. Mr. Grimsby is always so exceedingly polite.”
“Oh! it’s easy to be polite,” returned Sue hastily. “It isn’t that, Miss Moulton. I—I don’t believe I can quite explain it to you; I don’t believe you’d understand it if I did. I’m foolish, I suppose; and then it’s so different in New York—but I just couldn’t go the other night. The next day I met Mr. Grimsby on the stairs, I told him I was sorry—I guess he understood—but the very next day he persisted in calling on mother.”
“And may I ask what was your dear mother’s impression, my dear?”
“Mother didn’t see him,” confessed Sue without turning her head, her blue eyes gazing at the fire. “Mother told Bridget to tell him she begged to beexcused,” she added, turning and flushing slightly. “Mother did not like the idea of his calling, anyway. It seemed so forced; we were hardly settled and perfect strangers, you see.”
“And your stepfather—he went, you say, my dear?”
“Yes, Mr. Ford went,” replied the young girl nervously, twining and untwining her fingers.
“And did he enjoy himself?” asked the little spinster quietly.
“Mr. Ford always enjoys himself where strangers are concerned,” returned Sue, her breath coming quick. Then with a toss of her pretty head: “My—my stepfather and I do not always agree about—well, about lots of things, Miss Moulton.” The tears were fast welling into Sue Preston’s eyes. Again she gave a brave little toss of her head, brushing the tears away with the back of her hand—her lips quivering.
Miss Ann rose quietly, went over to the young girl, put an arm tenderly about her neck, bent down and kissed her flushed cheek. Sue’s small hand crept into hers.
“There! there! you’re tired, child,” murmured the little old maid affectionately. “Your dear mother will be wondering, I fear, what has become of you.”
“I’m—I’m going now,” Sue managed to say. “You’ve been so good and kind to me,” she added tensely, her voice none too steady as she left the comfortable old chair and its eider-down cushions, and stood up straight, her hands clasped behind her, her blue eyes gazing gratefully into Miss Ann’s.
“And you’ll come again, won’t you?” ventured the little spinster, “and bring your dear mother.”
She summoned Mary for Sue’s dry things from the kitchen, and when finally she opened the sitting-room door leading out to the gloomy hallway, Sue lingered for an instant on its threshold. Then impulsively she flung her arms about the little woman’s neck, kissed her withered cheek, and flew down the stairs.