You come home—hear? If you don’t, I’ll see that you do.M. Sparhawk.
You come home—hear? If you don’t, I’ll see that you do.
M. Sparhawk.
Patience went out to the man, who still sat in the buggy. “Tell her,” she said, looking at Billy, “that I’m not going home,—not now nor at any other time. Just make her understand that I mean it.”
The man stared, but nodded and drove off.
At midnight Patience was awakened by a frantic clamour in the street. “Those dreadful Bohemians,” she thought sleepily, then sat up with thumping heart.
“They say your name,niña, no?” said Lola, whose sonorous slumbers had also been disturbed.
Patience slipped to the floor and looked through the window. The moon flooded the old town. The ruined fort on the hill had never looked more picturesque, the pines above more calm. In the hollow near the blue waters the white arms of Junipero Serra’s cross seemed extended in benediction. The old adobes were young for the hour. One might fancy Isabel Herrara walking down from the long house on the hill, herrebosofluttering in the night wind, old Pio Pico, glittering with jewels, beside her.
And in the wide street before the Custom House, surrounded by a hooting mob, the refuse of the saloons, was a cursing gesticulating woman. Her black hair was unbound, her garment torn. She flung her fists in the face of those that sought to hold her.
“Patience Sparhawk!” she shrieked. “Patience Sparhawk! Come down here to your mother. Come down here this minute. Come, I say,” and a volley of oaths followed, greeted with a loud cackling laugh by the rabble.
Patience saw Mr. Foord, clad in his dressing-gown, go forth. She flung on her clothes hastily and ran down the stair. Her mother and Mr. Foord were in the kitchen.
“Oh, she’ll come back,” Mrs. Sparhawk was saying. “I’ll see to that. How do you like a row under your windows? Well, I’ll come here every night unless she comes home. You’ll put me in the Home of the Inebriates, will you? Think she’ll like to have that said of her mother when she’s grown up? Not Patience Sparhawk. I know her weak point. She’s as proud as hell, and I’m not afraid of going to any Home of the Inebriates.”
Patience pushed open the door. “I’m going with you,” she said. “Now get out of this house as fast as you can.”
“Oh, Patience,” exclaimed Mr. Foord. His old cheeks were splashed with tears.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” said Patience, her hands clenching and quivering. “I didn’t think she’d do this, or I wouldn’t have stayed. What a return for all your kindness!”
“Patience,” said the old gentleman, “promise me that you will come to see me to-morrow. Promise, or I shall not let you go. She can do her worst.”
“Well, I’ll come.”
She ordered her mother to follow her out of the back door that they might avoid the expectant mob. Mrs. Sparhawk walked unsteadily, but received no assistance from her daughter. If she had fallen, Patience could not have forced herself to touch her. Had the woman been a reeling mass of physical corruption, a leper, a small-pox scab, the girl could not have shrunken farther from her.
They did not speak until they ascended the hill behind the town and entered the woods. Patience never recalled that night without inhaling the balsamic odour of the pines, the heavy perfume of forest lilies, without seeing the great yellow stars through the uplifted arms of the trees. It was a night for love, and its guest was hate.
No more terrible conversation ever took place between mother and daughter. After that night they never spoke again.
The next morning Patience, after breakfast, carried a pair of tongs and a newspaper up to her room. She spread the newspaper on the table, then with the tongs extracted Byron from beneath the bed and laid it on the paper. She wrapped it up and tied it securely without letting her hands come in contact with the cover. That same afternoon she carried the book to the Custom House and threw it behind a row of tall volumes in one of the cases. Long after, Mr. Foord found it there and wondered. He was not at home when she arrived. When he returned she was deep in his arm-chair, reading Gibbon’s “Rome.” He was not without tact, and determined at once to ignore the events of the previous day and night.
“What!” he exclaimed, “are you really giving poor old Gibbon a trial at last? And after all your abuse? But perhaps you won’t find him so dry, after all.”
“I wish to read what is dry,” said Patience. “I’m going to take a course in ancient history.”
“No more poetry and novels?”
“Not a line.” She spoke harshly, and compelled herself to meet Mr. Foord’s eyes. Her own were as hard and as cold as steel. All the soft dreaming light of the past two months had gone out of them. They were the eyes neither of a girl nor of a woman. They looked the eyes of a sexless intellect.
Patience had done the one thing which a girl of fifteen can do when crushed with problems; she had twitched her shoulders and flung them off. She comprehended that her intellect was her best friend, and plunged her racked head into the hard facts which required utmost concentration of mind. The sweet vague dreams of the past were turned from in loathing. If she thought of them at all it was with fierce resentment that she had become conscious of her womanhood. The stranger was thrust out of memory. She went no more to the tower. The owl hooted in his loneliness, and she drew the bed-clothes over her ears. When she walked through the woods, to and from the town, she recited Gibbon in synopsis. She spent the day in Mr. Foord’s library, returning home in time to get supper. She did her household duties mechanically, and the eyes of mother and daughter never met. The man Oscar kept out of her way.
Miss Galpin had gone to San Francisco and would return no more: she was to marry. Rosita was visiting in Santa Barbara. Manuela, now a young lady, was devoting the greater part of her time to the Hotel Del Monte, where the flower and vegetables of San Francisco gather in summer. She went up to the tanks in the morning and to the dances in the evening; and informed Patience, one day as they met on the street, that she was having a perfectly gorgeous time, and had met a man who was too lovely for words.
The long hot days and the foggy nights wore slowly away. Patience grew thinner, her face harder. Mr. Foord did his best to divert her, but his resources were limited. She peremptorily forbade him to allude to the romance of Monterey, and he took her out in his old buggy and talked of Gibbon’s “Rome.”
Once they drove through the grounds of Del Monte,—the trim artificial grounds that are such an anomaly in that valley of memories. On the long veranda of the great hotel of airy architecture people sat in the bright attire of summer. Matrons rocked and gossiped; girls talked eagerly to languid youths that sat on the railing. It was all as unreal to Patience as the fairy-land of her childhood, when she had hunted for fays and elves in the wood. She stared at the scene angrily, for the first time feeling the sting of the social bee.
“A vain frivolous life those people lead,” remarked Mr. Foord, who disapproved of The World. “A waste of time and God’s best gifts, which makes them selfish and heartless. Empty heads and hollow hearts.”
But Patience, gazing at those girls in their gay dainty attire, the like of which she had never seen before, experienced a sudden violent wish to be of them, empty head, hollow heart, and all. They looked happy and free of care. The very atmosphere of the veranda seemed full of colour and music. Above all, they were utterly different from Patience Sparhawk, blessed and enviable beings. Even the frivolity of the scene appealed to her, so sick unto death of serious things.
One day, late in September, Patience, as usual, left Monterey at half past four in order to reach home in time to cook the supper. Nature had smiled for so many successive days that she wondered if the lips so persistently set must not soon strain back and reveal the teeth. The sun, poised behind the pine woods, flooded them with yellow light. As Patience walked through the soft radiance she set her teeth and recalled the chapters of Thiers’ “French Revolution,” through which she had that day plodded. But her head felt dull. She realised with a quiver of terror that she was beginning to feel less like an intellect and more like a very helpless little girl. Once she discovered her curved arm creeping to her eyes. She flung it down and shook her head angrily. Was she like other people?
Mingling with the fragrance of the pines it seemed to her that she smelt smoke. She hoped that her woods were not on fire. She walked slowly, indisposed as ever to return home, the more so to-day as she felt herself breaking.
“I wish the sun would not grin so,” she thought. “I’ll be glad when winter comes.”
The smell of smoke grew stronger. She left the woods. A moment later she stood, white and trembling, looking down upon Carmel Valley. The Sparhawk farmhouse was a blazing mass of timbers. A volume of smoke, as straight and full as a waterspout, stood directly above it. Men were running about. Their shouts came faintly to her.
Patience pressed her hands convulsively to her eyes. She clutched her head as if to tear out the terrible hope clattering in her brain, then ran down the hill and across the valley, feeling all the while as if possessed by ten thousand devils.
“Oh, I’m bad, bad, bad!” she sobbed in terror. “I don’t, I don’t!”
As she reached the scene the roof fell in. She glanced hastily about. The men, withdrawn to a safe distance, were gathered round the man Oscar. One was binding his hands and face. As they saw Patience they turned as if to run, then stood doggedly.
“Where is she?” Patience asked.
There was an instant’s pause. The crackling of the flames grew louder, as if it would answer. Then one of the men blurted out: “Burnt up in her bed. She was drunk. We was all in the field when the fire broke out. When we got here Oscar tried to get at her room with a ladder, but it was no go. Poor old Madge.”
Patience without another word turned and ran back to the woods. She ran until she was exhausted, more horrified at herself than she had been at any of her unhappy experiences. After a time she fell among the dry pine needles, her good, as she expressed it, still trying to fight down her bad. She felt that the demon possessing her would have sung aloud had she not held it by the throat. She conjured up all the horrible details of her mother’s death and ordered her soul to pity; but her brain remarked coldly that her mother had probably felt nothing. She imagined the charred corpse, but it only offended her artistic sense.
Finally she fell asleep. The day was far gone when she awoke. She lay for a time staring at the dim arches above her, listening to the night voices she had once loved so passionately. At last she drew a deep sigh.
“I might just as well face the truth,” she said aloud. “I’m glad, and that’s the end of it. It’s wicked and I’m sorry; but what is, is, and I can’t help it. We’re not all made alike.”
Patience was once more installed in Lola’s room. Mr. Foord applied for letters of guardianship, which were granted at once. But as he had feared, she was left without a penny. He wrote to his half-sister, asking her if she would take charge of his ward. Miss Tremont replied in enthusiastic affirmation. Miss Galpin invited Patience to spend two weeks with her in San Francisco, offering to replenish the girl’s wardrobe with several of her own old frocks made over.
Those two weeks seemed to Patience the mad whirl of excitement of which she had read in novels. She had never seen a city before, and the very cable cars fascinated her. To glide up and down the hills was to her the poetry of science. The straggling city on its hundred hills, the crowded streets and gay shop windows, the theatres, the restaurants, China Town, the beautiful bay with its bare colorous hills, surprised her into admitting that life appeared to be quite well worth living after all. When she returned to Monterey she talked so fast that Mr. Foord clapped his hands to his ears, and Rosita listened with expanded eyes.
“Ay, if I could live in San Francisco!” she said, plaintively. “I acted all summer, Patita, but I got tired of the same people, and I want to go to the big theatres and see the real ones do it. I’d like to hear a great big house applauding, only I’d be so jealous of the leading lady.”
Patience was to start, immediately after Christmas, by steamer for New York. Mr. Foord spent the last days giving her much good advice. He said little of his own sorrow to part from her. Once he had been tempted to keep her for the short time that remained to him, but had put the temptation aside with the sad resignation of old age. He knew Patience’s imperative need of new impressions in these her plastic years.
The day before she left she went over to Carmel to say good-bye to Solomon. He flapped his wings with delight, although he could not see her, and nestled close to her side in a manner quite unlike his haughty habit. Patience thought he looked older and greyer, and his wings had a dejected droop. She took him in her arms with an impulse of tenderness, and this time he did not repulse her.
“Poor old Solomon,” she said, “I suppose you are lonely and forlorn in your old age, but this old tower wouldn’t be what it is without you. It’s too bad I can’t write to you as I can to my two or three other friends, and you’ll never know I haven’t forgotten you, poor old Solomon. Oh, dear! Oh, dear! I wonder if owls do suffer too. You look so wise and venerable, perhaps you are thinking that lonely old age is terrible—as I know Mr. Foord does.”
Solomon pecked at her mildly. Her gaze wandered out over the ocean. She wondered if a thousand years had passed since she had dreamed her dreams. Their very echoes came from the mountains of space.
When she went away Solomon followed her to the head of the stair. She looked upward once and saw him standing there, with drooping wings and head a little bent. The darkness of the stair gave him vision, and he fluttered his wings expectantly, as she paused and lifted her face to him. But when she did not return he walked with great dignity to his accustomed place against the wall, nor even lifted up his voice in protest.
The next morning Rosita accompanied her to the station and wept loudly as the train approached. But Patience did not cry until she stood in her stateroom with Mr. Foord.
BOOK II
Patience watched the dusty hills of San Francisco, the sparkling bay alive with sail and spar, the pink mountains of the far coast range, the brown hills opposite the grey city, willowed and gulched and bare, the forts on rock and points, until the wild lurching of the steamer over the bar directed her attention to the unhappy passengers. In a short while she had not even these to amuse her, nothing but a grey plain and empty decks. At first she felt a waif in space; but soon a delightful sense of independence stole over her, of freedom from all the ills and responsibilities of life. The land world might have collapsed upon its fiery heart, so little could it affect her while that waste of waters slid under the horizon.
The few passengers came forth restored in a day or two. A husband and wife and several children did not interest Patience; neither did the captain’s wife, in whose charge she was. A young girl with a tangle of yellow hair under a sailor hat was more inviting, but she flirted industriously with the purser and took not the slightest notice of Patience. Her invalid mother reclined languidly in a steamer chair and read the novels of E. P. Roe.
The only other passenger was an elderly gentleman who read books in white covers neatly lettered with black which fascinated Patience. She was beginning to long for books. The invalid lent her a Roe, but she returned it half unread. As the old gentleman had never addressed her, did not seem to be aware of her existence, she could hardly expect a similar courtesy from him.
She was glowering upon universal stupidity one morning when he appeared on deck with a carpet bag, from which, after comfortably establishing himself in his steamer chair, he took little white volume after little white volume. Patience’s curiosity overcame her. She went forward slowly and stood before him. He looked up sharply. His black eyes, piercing from their shaggy arches, made her twitch her head as if to fling aside some penetrative force. His very beard, silver though it was, had a fierce sidewise twist. His nose was full nostrilled and drooped scornfully. The spectacles he wore served as a sort of lens for the fire of his extraordinary eyes.
“Well?” he said gruffly.
“Please, sir,” said Patience, humbly, “will you lend me a book?”
“Book? I don’t carry children’s literature round with me.”
“I don’t read children’s literature.”
“Oh, you don’t? Well, not ‘The Chatterbox,’ I suppose; but I have nothing of Pansy’s nor yet of The Duchess.”
“I wouldn’t read them if you had,” cried Patience, angrily. “Perhaps I’ve read a good many books that you haven’t re-read so long ago yourself. I’ve read Dickens and Thackeray and Scott, and,” with a shudder, “Gibbon’s ‘Rome’ and Thiers’ ‘French Revolution.’”
“Oh, you have? Well, I beg your pardon. Sit down, and I’ll see if I can find something for a young lady of your surprising attainments.”
Patience, too pleased to resent sarcasm, applied herself to his elbow.
“Why are they all bound alike?” she asked.
“This is the Tauchnitz edition of notable English and American books. How is this?” He handed her a volume of Grace Aguilar.
“No, sir! I’ve tried her, and she’s a greater bore than Jane Austen.”
“Oh, you want a love story, I suppose?” His accentuation was fairly sardonic.
“No, I don’t,” she said with an intonation which made him turn and regard her with interest. Then once more he explored his bag.
“Will this suit you?” He held out a copy of Carlyle’s “French Revolution.”
Patience groaned. “Didn’t I tell you I’d just read Thiers’?”
“This isn’t Thiers’. Try it.” And he took no further notice of her.
Patience opened the volume, and in a few moments was absorbed. There was something in the storm and blare of the style which struck a responsive chord. She did not raise her head until dinner time. She scarcely spoke until she had finished the volume, and then only to ask for the second. For several days she felt as if the atmosphere was charged with dynamite, and jumped when any one addressed her. The owner of the Tauchnitz watched her curiously. When she had finished the second volume she told him that she did not care for anything more at present. She leaned over the railing most of the day, watching the waves. Toward sunset the gentleman called peremptorily,—
“Come here.”
Patience stood before his chair.
“Well, what do you think of it?” he demanded. “Tell me exactly what your impressions are.”
“I feel as if there was an earthquake in my skull and all sorts of pictures flying about, and exploded pieces of drums and trumpets, and kings and queens. I think Carlyle must have been made on purpose to write the French Revolution. It was—as if—there was a great picture of it made on the atmosphere, and when he was born it passed into him.”
“Upon my word,” he said, “you are a degree or two removed from the letters of bread and milk. You are a very remarkable kid. Sit down.”
Patience took the chair beside him. “He made my head ache,” she added. “I feel as if it had been hammered.”
“I don’t wonder. Older heads have felt the same way. What’s your name?”
“Patience Sparhawk.”
“Tell me all about yourself.”
“Oh, there isn’t much to tell,” and she frowned heavily.
“Don’t look so tragic—you alarm me. I’m convinced there is a great deal. Come, I want to know.”
Patience gave a few inane particulars. The old gentleman snorted. “It’s evident you’ve never been interviewed,” he said grimly. “Now, I’ll tell you who I am, and then you won’t mind talking about yourself. There’s nothing so catching as egotism. My name is James E. Field. I own one of the great newspapers of New York, of which I am also editor-in-chief. Do you know what that means? Well, if you don’t, let me tell you. It is to be a man more powerful than the President of the United States, for he can make presidents, which is something the president himself can’t do. He knows more about people’s private affairs than any of intimate relationship; he has his finger on the barometer of his readers’ brain; he can make them sensational or sober, intellectually careless or exacting; he can keep them in ignorance of all that is best worth knowing of the world’s affairs, by snubbing the great events and tendencies of the day and vitiating their brain with local crimes and scandals, or he can illumine their minds and widen their brain cells by not only enlarging upon what every intelligent person should wish to know, but by making such matter of profound interest; he can ignore science, or enlighten several hundred thousand people; he can add to the happiness of the human race by exposing abuses and hidden crime, or he can accept hush money and let the sore fester; he can lash the unrest of the lower classes, or chloroform it; he can use the sledge hammer, the rapier, and the vitriol, or give over his editorial page to windy nothings; he can demolish political bosses, or prolong their career. In short, his power is greater than Alexander’s was, for he is a general of minds instead of brute force.”
“My goodness gracious!” exclaimed Patience. “What sort of a paper have you got?”
He laughed. “Wait until you’ve lived in New York awhile and you’ll find out. Its name is the ‘Day,’ and it has made a president or two, and made one or two others wish they’d never been born. By the way, I didn’t tell you much about myself, did I? The auxiliary subject carried me away. I’m married, and have several sons and daughters, and am off for a rest—not from the family but from the ‘Day.’ I’ve been round the world. That will do for the present. Tell me all about Monterey.”
With consummate skill he extracted the history of her sixteen years. On some points she fought him so obstinately that he inferred what she would not tell. He ended by becoming profoundly interested. He was a man of enthusiasms, which sometimes wrote themselves in vitriol, at others in the milk of human kindness. His keen unerring brain, which Patience fancied flashed electric search lights, comprehended that it had stumbled upon a character waging perpetual war with the pitiless Law of Circumstance, and that the issue might serve as a plot for one of the mental dramas of the day.
“Your experience and the bad blood in you, taken in connection with your bright and essentially modern mind, will make a sort of intellectual anarchist of you,” he said. “I doubt if you take kindly to the domestic life. You will probably go in for the social problems, and ride some polemical hobby for eight or ten years, at the end of which time you will be inclined to look upon your sex as the soubrettes of history. Your enthusiasm may make you a faddist, but your common sense may aid you in the perception of several eternal truths which the women of to-day in their blind bolt have overlooked.”
A moment later he repented his generalisations, for Patience had demanded full particulars. Nevertheless, he gave her many a graphic outline of the various phases of current history, and was the most potent educational force that she had yet encountered. She preferred him to books and admired him without reserve, trotting at his heels like a small dog. His unique and virile personality, his brilliant and imperious mind, magnetised the modern essence of which she was made. There was nothing of the old-fashioned intellectual type about him. He might have induced the coining of the word “brainy,”—he certainly typed it. Although he had the white hair and the accumulated wisdom of his years, he had the eyes of youth and the fist of vigour at any age. One day when two natives looked too long upon Patience’s blondinity, as she and Mr. Field were exploring a banana grove during one of their brief excursions on shore, he cracked their skulls together as if they had been two cocoanuts.
Patience laughed as the blacks dropped sullenly behind. “How funny that they should admire me,” she said. “I’m not pretty.”
“Well, you’re white. Besides, there is one thing more fascinating than beauty, and that is a strong individuality. It radiates and magnetises.”
“Have I all that?” Patience blushed with delight.
He laughed good-naturedly. “Yes, I’ll stake a good deal that you have. You may even be pretty some day; that is, if you ever get those freckles off.”
Inherent as was her passion for nature, she enjoyed the rich beauty of the tropics the more for the companionship of a mind skilled in observation and interpretation. It was her first mental comprehension of the law of duality.
As they approached New York harbour Mr. Field said to her: “I think I’ll have to make a newspaper woman of you. When you have finished your education, don’t think of settling down to any such humdrum career as that of the school-teacher. Come to me, and I’ll put you through your paces. If I’m not more mistaken than I’ve been yet, I’ll turn out a newspaper woman that will induce a mightier blast of woman’s horn. Think you’d like it?”
“I’d like to be with you,” said Patience, on the verge of tears. “Sha’n’t I see you again till I’m eighteen?”
“No, I don’t want to see or hear from you again until you’ve kneaded that brain of yours into some sort of shape by three years of hard study. Then I’ll go to work on a good foundation. You haven’t told me if you’ll take a try at it.”
“Of course I will. Do you think I want to be a school-teacher? I should think it would be lovely to be a newspaper woman.”
“Well, it isn’t exactly lovely, but it is a good training in the art of getting along without adjectives. Now look round you and I’ll explain this harbour; and don’t you brag any more about your San Francisco harbour.”
They entered through The Narrows, between the two toy forts. A few lone sentries paced the crisp snow on the heights of Staten Island, and looked in imminent danger of tumbling down the perpendicular lawns. The little stone windows of the earthen redoubts seemed to wink confidently at each other across the water, and loomed superciliously above the forts on the water’s edge. Long Island, had the repose of a giant that had stretched his limbs in sleep, unmindful of the temporary hamlets on his swelling front. Staten Island curved and uplifted herself coquettishly under her glittering garb and crystal woods. Far away the faint line of the New Jersey shore, looking like one unbroken city on a hundred altitudes, hovered faintly under its mist. The river at its base was a silver ribbon between a mirage and a stupendous castle of seven different architectures surmounted by a golden dome—which same was New York and the dome of a newspaper. Then a faint fairy-like bridge, delicate as a cobweb, sprang lightly across another river to a city of walls with windows in them—which same was Brooklyn. Under the shadow of the arches was a baby island fortified with what appeared to be a large Dutch cheese out of which the mice had gnawed their way with much regularity. The great bay, blue as liquid sapphire, was alive with craft of every design: rowboats scuttled away from the big outgoing steamers; sails, white as the snow on the heights, bellied in the sharp wind; yellow and red ferry boats gave back long symmetrical curves of white smoke; gaunt ships with naked spars lay at rest. On Liberty Island the big girl pointed solemnly upward as if reminding the city on the waters of the many mansions in the invisible stars. Snow clouds were scudding upward from the east, but overhead there was plentiful gold and blue.
Patience gazed through Mr. Field’s glass, enraptured, and promised not to brag. As they swung toward the dock he laid his hand kindly on hers.
“Now don’t think I’m callous,” he said, “because I part from you without any apparent regret. You are going to be in good hands during the rest of your early girlhood, and I could be of no assistance to you; and I am a very busy man. Let me tell you that you have made this month a good deal shorter than it would otherwise have been; and when we meet again you won’t have to introduce yourself. There are my folks, and there goes the gang-plank. Good-bye, and God bless you.”
Patience leaned over the upper railing, looking at the expectant crowd on the wharf, wondering when the captain would remember her. She felt a strong inclination to run after Mr. Field. As he receded up the wharf, surrounded by his family, he turned and waved his hand to her.
“Why couldn’t he have been Mr. Foord’s brother or something?” she thought resentfully. “I think he might have adopted me.”
As the crowd thinned she noticed two elderly women standing a few feet from the vessel, alternately inspecting the landed passengers and the decks. One was a very tall slender and graceful woman, possessed of that subtle quality called style, despite her unfashionable attire. In her dark regular face were the remains of beauty, and although nervous and anxious, it wore the seal of gentle blood. Her large black eyes expressed a curious commingling of the spiritual and the human. She was probably sixty years old. At her side was a woman some ten years younger, of stouter and less elastic figure, with a strong dark kind intelligent face and an utter disregard of dress. She carried several bundles.
“Oh, hasn’t she come?” cried the elder woman. “Can she have died at sea? I am sure the dear Lord wouldn’t let anything happen to her. Dear sister,doyou see her?”
The other woman, who was also looking everywhere except at Patience, replied in a round cheerful voice: “No, not yet, but I feel sure she is there. The captain hasn’t had time to bring her on shore. The Lord tells me that it is all right.”
“One of those is Miss Tremont,” thought Patience, “I may as well go down. They appear to be frightfully religious, but they have nice faces.”
She ran down to the lower deck, then across the gang-plank.
“I’m Patience Sparhawk,” she said; “are you—” The older woman uttered a little cry, caught her in her arms, and kissed her. “Oh, you dear little thing!” she exclaimed, and kissed her again. “How I’ve prayed the dear Lord to bring you safely, and He has, praise His holy name. Oh, I am so glad to see you. I do love children so. We’ll be so happy together—you and I and Him—and, oh, I’m so glad to see you.”
Patience, breathless, but much gratified, kissed her warmly.
“Don’t forget me,” exclaimed the other lady. She had a singularly hearty voice and a brilliant smile. Patience turned to her dutifully, and received an emphatic kiss.
“This is my dear friend, my dear sister in the Lord, Miss Beale, Patience,” said Miss Tremont, flurriedly, “and she wanted to see you almost as much as I did.”
“Indeed I did,” said Miss Beale, breezily. “I too love little girls.”
“I’m sure you’re both very kind,” said Patience, helplessly. She hardly knew how to meet so much effusion. But something cold and old within her seemed to warm and thaw.
“You dear little thing,” continued Miss Tremont. “Are you cold? That is a very light coat you have on.”
Patience was not dressed for an eastern winter, but her young blood and curiosity kept her warm.
“Here comes the captain,” she said. “Oh, no, I’m all right. I like the cold.”
The captain, satisfying himself that his charge was in the proper hands, offered to send her trunk to Mariaville by express, and Patience, wedged closely between the two ladies, boarded a street car.
“You know,” exclaimed Miss Tremont, “I knew the Lord would bring you to me safely in spite of the perils of the ocean. Every night and every morning I prayed:DearLord, don’t let anything happen to her,—and I knew He wouldn’t.”
“Does He always do what you tell Him?” asked Patience.
“Almost everything I ask Him,—that is to say, when He thinks best. Dear Patience, if you knew how He looks out for me—and it is well He sees fit, for dear knows I have a time taking care of myself. Why, He even takes care of my purse. I’m always leaving it round, and He always sends it back to me—from counters and trains and restaurants and everywhere. And when I start in the wrong direction He always whispers in my ear in time. Why, once I had to catch a certain train to Philadelphia, where I was to preside at a convention, and I’d taken the wrong street car, and when I jumped off and took the right one, the driver said I couldn’t possibly get to the ferry in time. So I just shut my eyes and prayed; and then I told the driver that it would be all right, as I had asked the Lord to see that I got there in time. The driver laughed, and said: ‘W-a-a-l, I guess the Lord’ll go back on you this time.’ But I caught that ferry-boat.He—the Lord—made it five minutes late. And it’s always the same. He takes care of me, praised be His name.”
“You must feel as if He were your husband,” said Patience, too gravely to be suspected of irreverence.
“Why, He is. Doesn’t the Bible say—” But the car began to rattle over the badly paved streets, and the quotation was lost.
Patience looked eagerly through the windows at purlieus of indescribable ugliness; but it was New York, a city greater than San Francisco, and she found even its youthful old age picturesque. The dense throng of people in Sixth Avenue and the immense shop windows induced expressions of rapture.
“You don’t live here, do you?” she said with a sigh.
“Oh, Mariaville is much nicer than New York,” replied Miss Beale, in her enthusiastic way. “I hate a great crowded city. It baffles you so when you try to do good.”
“Still they do say that reform work is more systematised here, dear sister.”
“Forty-second Street,” shouted the conductor, and they changed cars. A few moments later they were pulling out of the Grand Central Station for Mariaville.
Miss Beale had asked the conductor to turn a seat, and Patience faced her new friends. As they left the tunnel she caught sight of a tiny bow of white ribbon each wore on her coat.
“Why do you wear that?” she asked.
“Why, we’re W. C. T. U’s,” replied Miss Beale.
“Wctus?”
“Temperance cranks,” said Miss Tremont, smiling.
“Temperance cranks?”
“Why, have you never heard of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union?” asked Miss Beale, a chill breathing over her cordial voice. “The movement has reason to feel encouraged all through the West.”
“I’ve never heard of it. They don’t have it in Monterey, and I’ve not been much in San Francisco.”
“She’s such a child,” said Miss Tremont. “How could she know of it out there? But now I know she is going to be one of our very best Y’s.”
“Y’s?” asked Patience, helplessly. She wondered if this was the “fad” Mr. Field had predicted for her, then recalled that he had alluded once to the “Temperance movement,” but could not remember his explanation, if he had made any. Doubtless she had evaded a disagreeable topic. But now that it was evidently to be a part of her new life she made no attempt to stem Miss Tremont’s enthusiasm.
“The Y’s are the young women of the Union; we are the W’s. It is our lifework, Patience, and I am sure you will become as much interested in it as we are, and be proud to wear the white ribbon. We have done so much good, and expect to do much more, with the dear Lord’s help. It is slow work, but we shall conquer in the end, for He is with us.”
“What do you do,—forbid people to sell liquor?”
Both ladies laughed. They were not without humour, and their experience had developed it. “No,” said Miss Tremont, “we don’t waste our time like that.” She gave an enthusiastic account of what the Union had accomplished. Her face glowed; her fine head was thrown back; her dark eyes sparkled. Patience thought she must have been a beautiful girl. She had a full voice with odd notes of protest and imperious demand which puzzled her young charge. One would have supposed that she was constantly imploring favours, and yet her air suggested natural hauteur, unexterminated by cultivated humility.
“I should think it was a good idea,” said Patience, with perfect sincerity.
“Oh, there’s dear Sister Watt,” cried Miss Tremont, and she rose precipitately, and crossing the aisle sat down beside a careworn anxious-eyed woman who also wore the white ribbon.
“Come over by me until Miss Tremont comes back,” said Miss Beale, with her brilliant smile. “Tell me, don’t you love her already? Oh, you have no idea how good she is. She is heart and soul in her work, and just lives for the Lord. She sometimes visits twenty poor families a week, besides her Temperance class, her sewing school, her Bible Readings, her Bible class, and all the religious societies, of which she is the most active worker. She is also the Mariaville agent for the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and trustee of the Bible Society. You should hear her pray. I have heard all the great revivalists, but I have never heard anything like Miss Tremont’s prayers. How I envy you living with her! You’ll hear her twice a day, and sometimes oftener. She has a nice house on the outskirts of Mariaville. Her father left it to her twenty years ago, and she dedicated it to the Lord at once. It is headquarters for church meetings of all sorts. She has a Bible reading one afternoon a week. Any one can go, even a servant, for Miss Tremont, like all true followers of the Lord, is humble.”
Patience reflected that she had never seen any one look less humble than Miss Beale. In spite of her old frock she conveyed with unmistakable if unconscious emphasis that she possessed wealth and full knowledge of its power.
“You look so happy,” Patience said, her curiosity regarding Miss Tremont blunted for the present. “Are you?”
“Happy? Of course I am. I’ve never known an unhappy moment in my life. When my dear parents died, I only envied them. And have I not perfect health? Is not every moment of my time occupied?—why, I only sleep six hours out of the twenty-four. And Him. Do I not work for Him, and is He not always with me?”
“They are so funny about God,” thought Patience. “She talks as if He were her beau; and Miss Tremont as if He were her old man she’d been jogging along with for forty years or so.—Do you live alone?” she asked.
“Yes—that is, I board.”
“And don’t you ever feel lonesome?”
“Never. Is not He always with me?” Her strong brown face was suddenly illuminated. “Is He not my lover? Is He not always at my side, encouraging me and whispering of His love, night and day? Why, I can almost hear His voice, feel His hand. How could I be lonesome even on a desert island with no work to do?”
Patience gasped. The extraordinary simplicity of this woman of fifty fascinated her whom life and heredity had made so complex. But she moved restlessly, and felt an impulse to thrust out her legs and arms. She had a sensation of being swamped in religion.
“I shouldn’t think you’d like boarding,” she said irrelevantly.
“I don’t like it particularly, but it gives me more time for my work. I make myself comfortable, I can tell you, for I have my own bed with two splendid mattresses,—my landlady’s are the hardest things you ever felt,—and all my own furniture and knick-knacks. And I have my own tub, and every morning even in dead of winter, I take a cold bath. And I don’t wear corsets—”
“Mariaville,” called the conductor.
“Oh, here we are,” cried Miss Tremont. She made a wild dive for her umbrella and bag, seized Patience by the hand, and rushed up the aisle, followed leisurely by Miss Beale.
The snow was falling heavily. Patience had watched it drift and swirl over the Hudson, and should have liked to give it her undivided attention.
As they left the station they were greeted by a chorus of shrieks: “Have a sleigh? Have a sleigh?”
“What do you think, sister?” asked Miss Tremont, dubiously. “Do you think Patience can walk two miles in this snow? I don’t like to spend money on luxuries that I should give to the Lord.”
“Perhaps the sleigh man needs it,” said Patience, who had no desire to walk two miles in a driving storm.
“We’d better have a sleigh,” said Miss Beale, decidedly. “We will each pay half.”
“But why should you pay half,” said Miss Tremont, in her protesting voice, “when there are three of us?”
“I will pay for myself,” said Patience. “Mr. Foord gave me a twenty dollar gold piece, and I haven’t spent it.”
“Oh, dear child!” exclaimed Miss Tremont. “As if I’d let you.”
“Come, get in,” said Miss Beale; “we’ll be snowed under, here.”
And a few minutes later Patience, on the front seat, was enjoying her first sleigh-ride. She slid down under the fur robe, and winking the snow stars from her lashes, looked out eagerly upon Mariaville. The town rose from the Hudson in a succession of irregular precipitous terraces. The trees were skeletons, the houses old, but the effect was very picturesque; and the dancing crystals, the faint music of bells from far and near, the wide steep streets, delighted a mind magnetic for novelty.
They left Miss Beale before a pretty house, standing in a frozen garden, then climbed to the top of a hill, slid away to the edge of the town, and drew rein before an old-fashioned white one-winged house, which stood well back in a neglected yard behind walnut-trees and hemlocks. Beyond, closing the town, were the stark woods. Opposite was a prim little grove in which the snow stars were dancing.
“Here we are,” said Miss Tremont, climbing out. “Welcome home, Patience dear.” She paid the man, and hurried down the path. The door was opened by an elderly square-faced woman, who looked sharply at Patience, then smiled graciously.
“Patience, this is Ellen. She takes good care of me. Come in. Come in.”
The narrow hall ran through the main building, and was unfurnished but for a table and the stair. Miss Tremont led the way into a large double room of comfortable temperature, although no fire was visible. Bright red curtains covered the windows, a neat black carpet sprinkled with flowers the floor. The chairs were stiffly arranged, but upholstered cheerfully, the tables and mantels crowded with an odd assortment of cheap and handsome ornaments. The papered walls were a mosaic of family portraits. In the back parlour were a bookcase, a piano piled high with hymn-books, and a dozen or so queer little pulpit chairs. A door opened from the front parlour into a faded but hospitable dining-room.
Patience for the first time in her life experienced the enfolding of the home atmosphere, an experience denied to many for ever and ever. She turned impulsively, and throwing her arms about Miss Tremont, kissed and hugged her.
“Somehow I feel all made over,” she said apologetically, and getting very red. “But it is so nice—and you are so nice—and oh, it is all so different!”
And Miss Tremont, enraptured, first wished that this forlorn homely little waif was her very own, then vowed that neither should ever remember that she was not, and half carried her up to the bedroom prepared for her, a white fresh little room overlooking the shelving town.
The next afternoon a sewing woman came and cut down an old-fashioned but handsome fur-lined cloak of Miss Tremont’s to Patience’s diminutive needs. When Miss Tremont returned home, after a hard day’s work, she brought with her a hood, a pair of woollen gloves, and a pair of arctics; and Patience felt that she could weather a New York winter.
But Patience gave little attention to her clothes. When she was not watching the snow she was studying the steady stream of people who called at all hours, and invariably talked “church” and “temperance.” The atmosphere was so charged with religion that she was haunted by an uneasy prescience of a violent explosion during which Miss Tremont and her friends would sail upward, leaving her among the débris.
Her coat finished, she went in town with Miss Tremont to Temperance Hall. The snow had ceased to fall. The sun rode solitary on a cold blue sky, the ground was white and hard. The bare trees glittered in their crystal garb, icicles jewelled the eaves of the houses. The telegraph wires, studded with pendent spheres, looked like a vast diamond necklace of many strings which only Nature was mighty enough to wear. The hills were snowdrifts. The Hudson, far below, moved sluggishly under great blocks of ice. The Palisades were black and white. Miss Tremont and Patience walked rapidly, their frozen breath waving before them in fantastic shapes. It was all very delightful to Patience, who thrust her hands into her deep pockets and would have scorned to ride. At times she danced; new blood, charged with electricity, seemed shooting through her veins. Miss Tremont’s older teeth clattered occasionally. She bent forward slightly, her brow contracted over eyes which seemed ever seeking something, her long legs carrying her swiftly and with surprising grace. Patience had solved the enigma of her voice after hearing her pray, and she supposed that her eyes were on loyal watch for the miseries of the world.
After a time they descended an almost perpendicular hill to the business part of the town. Beyond a few level streets the ground rose again, wooded and thickly built upon. On the left was another hill, which, Miss Tremont informed her, was Hog Heights, the quarter of the poor.
The streets in the valley twisted and doubled like the curves of an angry python. In the centre was a square which might have been called Rome, since all ways led to it.
Temperance Hall, a building of Christian-like humility, stood on a back street flanked by many low-browed shops. On the first floor were the parlour, reading-room, and refectory, on the second a large hall, on the third bedrooms. The hall was already half full of boys and girls, kept in order by the matron, Mrs. Blair, a middle-aged woman with the expression of one who stands no nonsense.
“Now, Patience,” said Miss Tremont, “you listen attentively, and next time you can take Mrs. Blair’s place.”
The occasion was the weekly assemblage of the Loyal Legion children, who were being educated in the ways of temperance. Miss Tremont opened with the Lord’s Prayer, which she invested with all its meaning; then the children sang from a temperance hymn-book, and the lesson began. Miss Tremont read a series of questions appurtenant to the inevitable results of unholy indulgence, to which Mrs. Blair read the answers, which in turn were repeated by the children. Then they sang “Down with King Alcohol,” a minister came in and made a dramatic address, and the children, some of whom were attentive and some extremely naughty, filed out.
“I only come on alternate Fridays,” said Miss Tremont, as they went downstairs; “Sister Beale takes the other. Come and see our reading-room. These are our boarders,” indicating several prim old maids that sat in the front room by the window.
In the dining-room a half dozen tramps were imbibing free soup. The reading-room was empty.
Before a week had passed Patience was so busy that her old life slept as heavily as a bear in winter. She passed her difficult examinations and entered the High School, selecting the three years course, which included French, German, mathematics, the sciences, literature, and rhetoric.
The recesses and evenings were spent in study, the afternoons in assisting Miss Tremont; occasionally she snatched an hour to write to her friends in California. Besides the temperance work, she had a class in the church sewing school, kept the books of various societies, and occasionally visited the poor on Hog Heights. The work did not interest her, but she was glad to satisfactorily repay Miss Tremont’s hospitality. But had she wished to protest she would have realised its uselessness: she was carried with the tide. It might be said that Miss Tremont was the tide. Her enthusiasm had no reflex action, and tore through obstacles like a mill-race. When night came she was so weary that more than once Patience offered to put her to bed; but the offer was declined with a curious mixture of religious fervour and hauteur. Miss Tremont had none of the ordinary vanity of woman, but she resented the imputation that she could not work for the Lord as ardently at sixty as she had at forty.
When she prayed Patience listened with bated breath. A torrent of eloquence boiled from her lips. All the shortcomings and needs of unregenerate Mariaville, individual and collective, were laid down with a vehement precision which could leave the Lord little doubt of His obligations. The Temperance Cause was rehearsed with a passion which would have thrilled the devil. Sounding through all was a wholly unselfconscious note of command, as when one pleads with the pocket of an intimate friend for some worthy cause.
Patience saw so many disreputable people at this time that her mother’s pre-eminence was extinguished. They had a habit of commanding the hospitalities of Miss Tremont’s barn, sure of two meals and a night’s lodging. Miss Tremont insisted upon their attendance at evening prayers, and Patience assumed the task of persuading them to clean up. Her methods were less gentle than Miss Tremont’s: when they refused to wash she turned the hose on them.
Projected suddenly into the dry bracing cold of an eastern winter she quickly became robust. Before spring had come, her back was straight and a faint colour was in her rounding cheeks. If there had been time to think about it, or any one to tell her, she would have discovered that she was growing pretty. But at this time, despite the distant advances of the High School boys, Patience found no leisure for vanity. Sometimes she paused long enough to wonder if she had any individuality left; if environment was not stronger than heredity after all; if immediate impressions could not ever efface those of the past, no matter how deeply the latter may have been etched into the plastic mind. But she was quite conscious that she was happy, despite the vague restlessness and longings of youth. She loved Miss Tremont with all the sudden expansion of a long repressed temperament endowed with a tragic capacity for passionate affection. In Monterey the iron mould of reserve into which circumstance had forced her nature, had cramped and warped what love she had felt for Mr. Foord and Rosita; but in this novel atmosphere, where love enfolded her, where everybody respected her, and knew nothing of her past, where there was not a word nor an occurrence to remind her of the ugly experiences of her young life, she quickly became a normal being, living, belatedly, along the large and generous lines of her nature.
She had no friends of her own age with whom to discuss the problems dear to the heart of developing woman. The girls at the High School rarely talked during recess, and she left hurriedly the moment the scholars were dismissed for the day. The “Y’s” she persistently refused to join, as well as the young people’s societies of Miss Tremont’s church.
“I’ll be your helper in everything,” she said to her perplexed guardian; “but those girls bore me, and, you know, I really haven’t time for them.”
And Miss Tremont, despite the fact that Patience gave no sign of spiritual thaw, was the most doting of old maid parents. After the first few weeks she ceased to dig in Patience’s soul for the stunted seeds of Christianity, finding that she only irritated her, and trusting to the daily sprinkling of habit and example to promote their ultimate growth.
With summer came a cessation of school, Loyal Legion, and sewing school duties; but the Poor took no vacation and gave none. Nevertheless, Patience had far more leisure, and borrowed many books from the town library. She read much of Hugo and Balzac and Goethe, and in the new intellectual delight forgot herself more completely than in her work.
Moreover, the town was very beautiful in summer, and she spent many hours rambling along the shadowy streets whose venerable trees shut the sunlight from the narrow side ways. The gardens too were full of trees; and the town from a distance looked like a densely wooded hillside, a riot of green, out of which housetops showed like eggs in a nest. Over some of the steep old streets the maples met, growing denser and denser down in the perspective, until closed by the flash of water.
The woods on the slope of the Hudson were thick with great trees dropping a leafy curtain before the brilliant river, and full of isolated nooks where a girl could read and dream, unsuspected of the chance pedestrian.
After one long drowsy afternoon by a brook in a hollow of the woods, Patience returned home to find a carriage standing before the door. It was a turnout of extreme elegance. The grey horses were thoroughbreds; a coachman in livery sat on the box; a footman stood on the sidewalk. She looked in wonder. Miss Tremont had no time for the fine people of Mariaville, and they had ceased to call on her long since. Moreover, Patience knew every carriage in the town, and this was not of them.
She went rapidly into the house, youthfully eager for a new experience. Miss Tremont was seated on the sofa in the front parlour, holding the hand of a tall handsomely gowned woman. Patience thought, as she stood for a moment unobserved, that she had never seen so cold a face. It was the face of a woman of fifty, oval and almost regular. The mouth was a straight line. The clear pale eyes looked like the reflection of the blue atmosphere on icicles. The skin was as smooth as a girl’s, the brown hair parted and waved, the tall figure slender and superbly carried. She was smiling and patting Miss Tremont’s hand, but there was little light in her eyes.
As Patience entered, she turned her head and regarded her without surprise; she had evidently heard of her. Miss Tremont’s face illumined, and she held out her hand.
“This is Patience,” she said triumphantly. “I haven’t told you half about the dear child. Patience, this is my cousin, Mrs. Gardiner Peele.”
Mrs. Gardiner Peele bent her head patronisingly, and Patience hated her violently.
“I am glad you have a companion,” said the lady, coldly. “But how is it you haven’t the white ribbon on her?”
Miss Tremont blushed. “Oh, I can’t control Patience in all things,” she said, in half angry deprecation. “She just won’t wear the ribbon.”
Mrs. Peele smiled upon Patience for the first time. It was a wintry light, but it bespoke approval. “I wish she could make you take it off,” she said to her relative. “That dreadful, dreadfulbadge. How can you wear it?—you—”
“Now, cousin,” said Miss Tremont, laughing good-naturedly, “we won’t go over all that again. You know I’m a hopeless crank. All I can do is to pray for you.”
“Thank you. I don’t doubt I need it, although I attend church quite as regularly as you could wish.”
“I know you are good,” said Miss Tremont, with enthusiasm, “and of course I don’t expect everybody to be as interested in Temperance as I am. But I do wish you loved the world less and the Lord more.”
Mrs. Peele gave a low, well modulated laugh. “Now, Harriet, I want you to be worldly for a few minutes. I have brought you back two new gowns from Paris, and I want you, when you come to visit me next week, to wear them. I have had them trimmed with white ribbon bows so that no one will notice one more or less—”
“I’m not ashamed of my white ribbon,” flashed out Miss Tremont, then relented. “You dear good Honora. Yes, I’ll wear them if they’re not too fashionable.”
“Oh, I studied your style. And let me tell you, Harriet Tremont, that fashionable gowns are what you should be wearing. It does provoke me so to see you—”
But Miss Tremont leaned over and kissed her short. “Now what’s the use of talking to an old crank like me? I’m a humble servant of my dear Lord, and I couldn’t be anything else if I had a million. But you dear thing, I’m so glad to see you once more. You do look so well. Tell me all about the children.”
Patience, quite forgotten, listened to the conversation with deep interest. There was a vague promise of variety in this new advent. As she watched the woman, who seemed to have brought with her something of the atmosphere of all that splendid existence of which she had longingly read, she was stirred with a certain dissatisfaction: some dormant chord was struck—as on the day she drove by Del Monte. When Mrs. Peele arose to go, she thought that not Balzac himself had ever looked upon a more elegant woman. Even Patience’s untrained eye recognised that those long simple folds, those so quiet textures, were of French woof and make. And the woman’s carriage was like unto that of the fictional queen. She nodded carelessly to Patience, and swept out. When Miss Tremont returned after watching her guest drive away, Patience pounced upon her.
“Whois she?” she demanded. “Andwhydidn’t you tell me you had such a swell for a cousin?”
“Did I never tell you?” asked Miss Tremont, wonderingly. “Why, I was sure I had often talked of Honora. But I’m so busy I suppose I forgot.”
She sat down and fanned herself, smiling. “Honora Tremont is my first cousin. We used to be great friends until she married a rich man and became so dreadfully fashionable. The Lord be praised, she has always loved me; but she lives a great deal abroad, and spends her winters, when she is here, in New York. They have a beautiful place on the Hudson, Peele Manor, that has been in the family for nearly three hundred years. Mr. Peele is an eminent lawyer. I don’t know him very well. He doesn’t talk much; I suppose he has to talk so much in Court. I’ve not seen the children for a year. I always thought them pretty badly spoiled, particularly Beverly. May isn’t very bright. But I always liked Hal—short for Harriet, after me—better than any of them. She is about nineteen now. May is eighteen and Beverly twenty-four.
“Then there is Honora, cousin Honora’s sister Mary’s child, and the tallest woman I ever saw. Her parents died when she was a little thing and left her without a dollar. Honora took her, and has treated her like her own children. Sometimes I think she is very much under her influence. I don’t know why, but I never liked her. She is Beverly’s age. Oh!” she burst out, “just think! I have got to go to Peele Manor for a week. I promised. I couldn’t help it. And oh, I do dread it. They are all so different, and they don’t sympathise with my work. Much as I love them I’m always glad to get away. Wasn’t it kind and good of her to bring me two dresses from Paris?”
Patience shrewdly interpreted the prompting of Mrs. Peele’s generosity, but made no comment.
Miss Tremont drew a great sigh: “My temperance work—my poor—what will they do without me? Maria Twist gets so mad when I don’t read the Bible to her twice a week. Patience, you will have to stay in Temperance Hall. I shouldn’t like to think of you here alone. I do wish Honora had asked you too—”
“I wouldn’t go for worlds. When do you think your dresses will come? I do so want to see a real Paris dress.”
“She said they’d come to-morrow. Oh, to think of wearing stiff tight things. Well, if they are uncomfortable or too stylish I just won’t wear them, that’s all.”
“You just will, auntie dear. You’ll not look any less fine than those people, or I’ll not go near Hog Heights.”
Miss Tremont kissed her, grateful for the fondness displayed. “Well, well, we’ll see,” she said.
But the next day, when the two handsome black gowns lay on the bed of the spare room, she shook her head with flashing eyes.
“I won’t wear those things,” she cried. “Why, they were made for a society woman, not for an humble follower of the Lord. I should be miserable in them.”
Patience, who had been hovering over the gowns,—one of silk grenadine trimmed with long loops of black and white ribbon, the other of satin with a soft knot of white ribbon on the shoulder and another at the back of the high collar,—came forward and firmly divested Miss Tremont of her alpaca. She lifted the heavy satin gown with reverent hands and slipped it over Miss Tremont’s head, then hooked it with deft fingers.
“There!” she exclaimed. “You look like a swell at last. Just what you ought to look like.”
Miss Tremont glanced at the mirror with a brief spasm of youthful vanity. The rich fashionable gown became her long slender figure, her unconscious pride of carriage, far better than did her old alpaca and merino frocks. But she shook her head immediately, her eyes flashing under a quick frown.
“The idea of perching a white bow like a butterfly on my shoulder and another at the back of my neck, as if I had a scar. It’s an insult to the white ribbon. And this collar would choke me. I can’t breathe. Take it off! Take it off!”
“Not until I have admired you some more. You look just grand. If the collar is too high, I’ll send for Mrs. Best, and we’ll cut it off and sew some soft black stuff in the neck—although I just hate to. Auntie dear, don’t you think you could stand it?”
Miss Tremont shook her head with decision. “I couldn’t. It hurts my old throat. And how could I ever bend my head to get at my soup? And these bows make me feel actually cross. If the dress can be made comfortable I’ll wear it, for I’ve no right to disgrace Honora, nor would I hurt her feelings by scorning her gowns; but I’ll not stand any such mockery as these flaunting white things.”
Patience exchanged the satin for the grenadine gown. This met with more tolerance at first, as the throat was finished with soft folds, and the white ribbon was less demonstrative.
“It floats so,” said Patience, ecstatically. “Oh, auntie, youarea beauty.”
“I a beauty with my ugly scowling old face? But this thing is like a ball dress, Patience—this thin stuff! I prefer the satin.”
“You will wear this on the hot evenings. All thin things are not made for the ball-room. You needn’t look at yourself like that. I only wish I’d ever be half as pretty. Auntie, why didn’t you ever marry?”
Miss Tremont’s face worked after all the years. Memories could not die in so uniform a nature.
“My youth was very sad,” she said, turning away abruptly. “I only talk about it with the dear Lord.” And Patience asked no more questions.