CHAPTER XV.MISS HANSFORD AND ELITHE.
Miss Hansford had had many misgivings with regard to the wisdom of having sent for her niece. She had lived alone so long and her habits were so fixed that she dreaded the thought of a young person singing and whistling and banging doors and slatting her things round. She had tried to guard against some of these habits in her letter to Roger, but there was no knowing what a girl would do, and Lucy Potter’s girl, too. Still she had committed herself and must make the best of it.
“I shall use her well, of course,” she said many times, and as often as she dusted her mantel in the front room where Elithe’s picture was standing she stopped and looked at the face and talked to it until she almost felt that it was the real Elithe whose dark eyes met hers so seriously. “She’s pretty to look at and no mistake, but handsome is that handsome does, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” she said more than once, while she busied herself with the room Elithe was to occupy.
It was a low back room with the windows looking out upon an open space and clumps of oak and woods beyond, with no view of the sea. A room she seldom rented and which she at first hesitated about assigning to Elithe.
“I shall want all the t’others for the gentry when the wedding comes off,” she decided, and then went to work to make the back room as attractive as possible.
A light pretty matting was laid upon the floor. Theold-fashioned bedstead, put together with ropes, and on which she had slept when a girl in Ridgefield, was sold to a Portuguese woman, and its place supplied by a single white bedstead with a canopy over the head. She had seen a bed like this at the Ralston House in a child’s room, and was imitating it as far as possible. That was brass, with hangings of point d’esprit, while hers was iron, with hangings of dotted muslin, but the effect was much the same. The chest of drawers which had belonged to her mother was moved into her own room and a small white pine bureau, with blue forget-me-nots painted on it, put in its place. The square stand was covered with a fine white damask towel, with a Bible and Hymn Book laid upon it. The rocker was white, the curtains at the windows were white, the toilet articles were white, everything was white. “A White Room,” Paul Ralston christened it, for he saw it on the day the last touches were put to it and just before he started to join Clarice in New York. Miss Hansford was adjusting the pillow-shams when she heard Paul below calling to her.
“Up here in Elithe’s room. Come and see it,” she said, and Paul ran up the narrow stairs two at a time and stood at the door, uncertain whether he ought to cross the threshold or not.
A young girl’s sleeping apartment was a sacred place, and he hesitated a moment until Miss Hansford bade him come in and see if it wasn’t pretty.
“I should say it was,” he replied, as he stepped into the room, bending his tall figure to keep clear of the roof where it slanted down on the sides. “It’s lovely, but a little low in some places. A great strapping six-footer like me might knock his brains out some dark night on the rafters,but Elithe is short. It will just suit her. Call it the White Room.”
He was very enthusiastic, and in his enthusiasm hit his head two or three times as he walked about, admiring everything, saying it lacked nothing but flowers, and suggesting that Miss Hansford get some pond lilies the day Elithe arrived.
“I’d do it myself,” he said, “only I’m going away and shan’t be here when she comes. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, though. I’ll have Tom bring over some white roses in the morning, if you will let him know when you expect her.”
Paul’s approval was sufficient for Miss Hansford, and after he was gone she dropped the shades over the windows and closed the room until the morning of the day when Elithe was expected. Tom brought the white roses, arranged by the gardener in a basket, which stood on the dressing-table, while on the stand at the head of the bed was a bowl of pond lilies which Miss Hansford had ordered, and which took her back to the river and pond in Ridgefield, where they had grown in such profusion, and where the boy Roger had gathered them for her. Roger had been gone from her twenty years and more; other boys gathered the lilies in Ridgefield. She was an old woman, and Roger’s girl was coming to her.
“I believe I’m glad, too,” she said, as she inhaled the odor of the blossoms, gave an extra pat to the bed and went down to the kitchen, wondering what she should cook for supper that would please Elithe. “Girls like cake and custard,” she said. “I’ll have both, and use the little custard cups with covers that were mother’s. There’s only four left of the dozen. ’Taint likely she’ll eat more than two to-night,and two to-morrow night. I don’t want any. Four will be enough.”
The cake was made and the custards, too, in the pretty china cups which Miss Hansford calculated were nearer a hundred years old than twenty. Never but once had she used them since she lived on the island, and that on the occasion of the Presiding Elder’s stay with her. Since then they had reposed quietly in her cupboard, with her best china. This she brought out now for Elithe, together with her best linen and napkins and silver. Had she been willing to acknowledge herself capable of such weakness, she would have known that she was guilty of a good deal of pride as she anticipated Elithe’s surprise at the grandeur which awaited her.
The morning was long after everything was in readiness, and the afternoon seemed interminable until she saw the boat at the wharf and knew her clock was an hour behind time. She had seen Tom Drake drive by in the Ralston carriage and wondered where and for whom he was going. That he would bring Elithe to her she never dreamed and when she saw him coming towards her cottage with a slip of a girl in the seat behind him, she exclaimed, “I snum if I don’t believe that’s Elithe!” and hurried out to meet her.
People who only saw Miss Hansford’s peculiar side said that if she ever had any milk of human kindness it had long since curdled. But these were mistaken. The treatment one received from her depended wholly upon whether they entered the front or back door of her heart,—the kitchen or the parlor. Fortunately for Elithe, she came to the front door and entered the parlor. She was nervous and excited, and had borne about as much as she could bear without breaking down in hysterics, and when she sawher aunt coming to meet her, she ran forward with a cry like a hurt child seeking its mother, and reaching out both hands, exclaimed, “Oh, Auntie, I am so glad to get here, and so tired!”
She put up her lips to be kissed, and in the eyes full of tears Miss Hansford saw a likeness to Roger, the boy she had liked so much and loved still in spite of Lucy Potter and his choice of a religion. This was his child, and there were tears in her own eyes as she kissed the young girl and led her into the house.
“You are all worn out,” she said, as she removed Elithe’s hat and made her sit down and asked if she were hungry.
With the exception of the lemonade Paul had brought her on the boat and a dry sandwich eaten in Springfield, Elithe had taken nothing that day; but she was not hungry. The sandwich still lay like lead in her stomach, and the lemonade was waging warfare with it. All she wanted was a drink of water, which her aunt brought her, and which she drank eagerly, then leaned her head against the cushioned back of the chair, as if all life had gone from her.
“She’s a good deal mussed and pretty dirty,” Miss Hansford thought, as she asked: “Ain’t there something I can get you besides water?—tea, or something? I can make a cup in a minute.”
“No, thanks,” Elithe replied. “Water is the best of anything. If I could have a bath; I believe I am one big dust heap.”
She laughed as she said it, and her smile made her face lovely, with all its fatigue.
“You shall have one,” Miss Hansford answered, with alacrity, thinking of the White Room, in which a dust heap was not desirable. “It’s a kind of a fixed-up affair,” she continued, speaking of her improvised bath tub in a large,low closet back of Elithe’s room, “but it answers very well. I’ll take some hot water up right away.”
Against this Elithe protested, saying she would do it herself.
“You set still, I tell you. You are tuckered out,” Miss Hansford insisted, beginning to take the water up in pails and stopping between times to talk to Elithe and ask about her journey.
“You come in the common car all the way and hain’t had your clothes off since you left home! What’d you do that for? I sent money for a sleeper,” she exclaimed, setting down her pail so suddenly that some of the water was spilled on the floor.
“I know you sent it, and father and mother wanted me to take it, but they needed it so much that I made them keep it. Artie must have some stockings and Thede some shoes and mother hasn’t had a new dress in three years,” Elithe explained.
“My land!” was all Miss Hansford replied, as she went up the stairs with her pail, but to herself she said: “Poor as Job’s turkey, I knew they were. No new dress in three years; that’s hard for Lucy Potter, who used to be so fond of jewgaws. The girl’s all right, poor thing. The dirt must be an inch thick on her. I’ll bring up another pail full and get her a whole bar of Sweet Home soap. She’ll need it.”
When her bath was ready Elithe followed her aunt up the stairs into the room designed for her.
“Oh, how lovely! It rests me just to look at it,” she said.
“I’m glad you like it. I thought you would. Paul called it the white room, and had the roses sent over from their place. He suggested the lilies, too,” Miss Hansfordreplied, enjoying Elithe’s appreciation of everything, as she buried her face first in the roses and then in the lilies, scarcely knowing which she liked the better.
Both were exquisite and both a little sweeter because Paul Ralston had sent one and suggested the other. There was a call from below, and Miss Hansford hurried down to find the expressman with Elithe’s trunk, which she made him put down outside while she swept it with a broom, brushed it with a brush, and dusted it with feathers. “Pretty well knocked to pieces,” the man said, but Miss Hansford did not answer. She had recognized the trunk as having been her own, which she had given to Roger when a boy, and now it had come back to her, “battered and banged and old just as I am,” she thought, as she unknotted the rope tied around it and bade the man carry it to Elithe’s room. The bath, which Elithe enjoyed so much, refreshed and invigorated her, but did not remove the drowsiness stealing over her. It was five nights since her head had touched a pillow, and the sight of the white bed was a temptation she could not resist. She had slipped on a loose, white Mother Hubbard, made from an immense linen sheet which had been sent in a missionary box and utilized first for her mother and then for herself.
“I must lie down or I shall fall asleep standing,” she said. Then as she remembered how much she had to be thankful for,—the safe journey, the kindness of everybody from good Mrs. Baker and Paul Ralston to her aunt who had received her so cordially, she went down upon her knees, and, resting her head upon the bed, tried to pray and thought she did. “Our Father,” she began from habit, and then the soft feel of the bed against her tired head and the pressure of exhaustion upon her brain overcame her and she floated off into a dreamy sense of thingspast and present, the pretty room, the roses and the lilies, the delicious bath, Paul Ralston, Artie and Thede and George and Rob and Mr. Pennington and Heaven, which she had finally entered, losing herself at last in a heavy sleep from which she did not waken until the clock struck six and her aunt came up to see what had happened to her.