Naked as from the earth we came,And crept to life at first,We to the earth return again,And mingle with our dust.
Naked as from the earth we came,And crept to life at first,We to the earth return again,And mingle with our dust.
Naked as from the earth we came,
And crept to life at first,
We to the earth return again,
And mingle with our dust.
“I love a graveyard,” she said pensively. “I like to sing in one.”
“Sing for me now.” Dan was anxious to comply with her slightest wish.
“This is a queer one to sing, up here,” she answered, beginning,
The ship goes sailing down the bay,Good-by, my lover good-by—
The ship goes sailing down the bay,Good-by, my lover good-by—
The ship goes sailing down the bay,
Good-by, my lover good-by—
Dan was not thinking of the song; he was thinking of Thurley as his bespoken wife and of his and Thurley’s life together. Singing was to be a minor thing which should take place while babies were rocked to sleep or perhaps on Easter Sunday for the special anthem. Dan had no idea of allowing her to remain a paid soloist—but it would do to tell her so later!
“Bravo,” he said as she finished. “Shall we go along?” tucking her arm under his with a masterful air.
They trudged down the pathway to the road. Some children were picking the last berries from the dusty bushes; when they caught sight of Thurley, they ran towards her, saying,
“Miss Clergy heard you sing. Her carriage just went on. She had Ali Baba stop so’s she could hear. She stuck her head out the window and asked him your name and Dan’s name and he told her, and then she stuck her head in and he drove on.”
“There’s an old woman who ought to be ashamed to act like she has for years and years,” Dan began.
But Thurley did not answer. Presently she said, “So—I had an audience even in a graveyard. Dan, do you know Miss Clergy never asks questions about any one? She must have liked my voice!”
“She’ll never get the chance to hear it again! I’ll race you to that first oak—”
Thurley shook her head. “Wait, Dan, I feel queer inside ... as if something might come of it, I don’t know just what.”
“Are you going to let a crazy old woman’s listening to you sing stop our getting to the newspaper office in time to announce our engagement?”
“Dan, do you realize that we are both ‘Corners’ people and they never do get along? A house or a store on the corner always attracts the most attention and gets the most notice paid to it and that is why your father’s people founded these Corners and you have to be a Corners person—people just naturally pay you attention or you know why ... and I’m a Corners person, too.”
“I said I was not going to listen to your nonsense. I’ll kiss you right in sight of this farmer’s team,” he warned. “You’re going to belong to me and that is all that matters.”
“Gosh, you should see the tilt of his gold-banded cigar,” was Ali Baba’s comment to Hopeful the day the engagement was announced with a special heading, and also the fact that “Mr. Birge has begun plans for building his permanent residence on the beautiful site overlooking the lake. It is understood it will be named Fairview in accordance with Miss Precore’s wishes and elaborate furnishings have been ordered from New York.”
“I’m sorry for Lorraine,” Hopeful answered, “but I bet a cookie ’Raine goes to see Thurley and takes her an embroidered set for a present. She’s as brave as a lion and sweet as an angel! And I bet you a mince pie Thurley Precore isn’t going to be happy.”
“You ain’t sayin’ anything against Thurley?” demanded Ali Baba.
“Land, no, I set a sight by Thurley the same as by Lorraine, and I like Dan as well as either of ’em. It’s just a mistake, Ali Baba, and you know what mistakes in love do.” Her hand pointed in the direction of the upper front rooms. “Well, wait and see. Thurley was meant always to sing for her supper, the same as Lorraine was made to cook supper for a good man.”
“I guess Dan ain’t different from all men—made toeatsupper no matter how much singin’ or cookin’ goes to gettin’ the vittles on the table,” was Ali Baba’s emphatic summary of the situation.
Lorraine did call on Thurley and bring a daintilywrapped blue tissue paper parcel containing one of her embroidered “sets” for the washstand of any conventional, country spare room. Lorraine had remained with the older generation in her standards of house furnishings and necessities.
The blue tissue paper matched her blue batiste frock with its crisp ruffles and the ribbon on her hat. Lorraine had made the dress and trimmed the hat, and it gave the impression of good taste and praiseworthy industry. There was nothing Lorraine could or would not attempt to do, once convinced it was her duty. She had the angelic sweetness of really unselfish natures and the accompanying stubbornness of which martyrs are made. She was a trifle weak, perhaps, during a crisis, and certainly lacked Thurley’s aggression and power of argument. But Lorraine could sustain a situation—long after Thurley was forced, by temperament, to abandon it! Not even her estimable father dreamed that on the day Lorraine’s mother died, the child soul of her had closed and grownups scratched on it in vain. It was her duty, she was convinced, not to mourn openly.
It had been her father’s duty to have Lorraine brought up, and a maiden aunt’s duty to forego the luxury of her severe but unhampered existence to see that Lorraine was properly raised. And it was Lorraine’s duty to repay the bringing up and to take the place of the minister’s wife and be the minister’s daughter at the same time, to entertain deacons and visiting circuit riders and ladies’ aid societies alike, to clean the best room for the missionaries and cook for them and pray for the conversion of the heathen all in the same day, to be not too prominent as the minister’s daughter and yet to take the necessary lead in all things even unto making a house to house canvass to solicit her father’s back salary or enoughknives and forks to serve the entire congregation at the baked bean supper!
Likewise, it was her duty not to think how pretty she was—that frail, elusive sort of beauty which does not impress the first time one meets it but which, after one has become familiar with it, fairly coaxes its way into the heart to remain. (No one having merely “glimpsed” Thurley would have ever forgotten her!) Because Lorraine had innocent, dove-colored eyes and the fairest of fair hair and tilted features with dimples placed irregularly about, she was misjudged as to her abilities. No one would have dreamed that the girl painstakingly wrote the burden of her father’s letters and helped to soften his harshest of sermons, particularly those on predestination and heresy, and then turned into the kitchen to do the work of stout-elbowed women! Nor did that comprise all of her duty. To her fell those prosaic, uninteresting tasks such as taking old shoes to be mended in order to avoid buying new, or re-lining her father’s threadbare coats or rummaging endless drawers to find a recipe for walnut catsup to satisfy some bromidic but important sister of the church.
It was her duty not to love Dan too hard and become a sentimental goose, she told herself as night after night she wrestled with her conscience, trying not to hate Thurley Precore as such small, dainty creatures, to every one’s surprise, can hate. Of course Dan would marry Thurley or else marry no one; he would build the lovely home for her and buy her endless pretty clothes, for every one knew Thurley could not even darn stockings skilfully—she admitted it with one of her boyish laughs! He would also buy her a new automobile and a concert grand piano; and she would be his loved and trusted wife, mother of his children, and when Lorrainewould come to this part of her reverie, the dimples would become quivering dents of emotion and the orthodox prayers her father fancied were being said would vanish completely. Of course, she would comfort herself, Thurley would never make Dan happy—she sang too well! Even this was salt in the wound, for was not Thurley paid soloist at her father’s church and was not Lorraine obliged to sit Sunday after Sunday in the first pew and listen to Thurley’s wonderful voice sing glorious anthems while behind Lorraine was Dan Birge, present only because he could take Thurley home?... And Lorraine had to say to him, because it was more of her duty, “Good morning, Dan; wasn’t the solo wonderful? I think Thurley’s voice is better all the time. Good morning, Thurley dear, we’ve just been saying what a marvel you are—good-by. Oh, good morning, Mrs. Turner, I want to thank you for the invitation for the quilting party—yes, I’d love to come—oh, thank you—” and so on, her heart thumping uncontrollably fast.
After greeting the congregation, she must go into the parsonage and cook dinner and try to eat as she listened to her father’s small talk; she must wash the dishes and return to the church to teach the Bible class in the three o’clock Sabbath school—while all the time she knew Dan and Thurley were whirling about the lovely hilly country, stopping at some shady, brook-embraced glen to eat their luncheon and make love! And again, a cold tea at six and Lorraine must once more play scullery maid and then go into the evening service and know Dan was behind her waiting impatiently until Thurley’s duties were ended and they might go back to Betsey Pilrig’s porch or parlor and with mellow moonlight as witness—spoon!That wasthe truth—spoon! Lorraine’s flat little chest would heave excitedly and she would drop her eyes and force herself to count the dots in her frock—the third summer for it—to steady herself until she could glance up at Thurley in the choir loft and realize that she was the gladdest, loveliest thing in two worlds, a wild rose by all the poets’ dictionaries!
So when she climbed the hill to Betsey Pilrig’s house and Betsey went to call Thurley, Lorraine sank into the parlor chair and gave vent to a faint groan. If it were any other girl save Thurley, she could endure it more easily, but Thurley was so careless of his love, she so undervalued it! She heard Thurley humming a gay song and running down the stairs.
“You nice creature!” Thurley said carelessly, kissing her and trying to remove her hat at the same time. “Do take it off, ’Raine, it’s such a climb up here. There, now I can see your eyes!” Thurley did not realize how unkind was this last. “Sit there—it’s a comfy chair—well, I know what you’ve come to say,” she blushed properly, “but if Dan could see me I know he’d be quite shocked, I look anything but a prospective young matron—’fess up, ’Raine!”
Lorraine shook her head. “Dan wouldn’t care how you looked as long as you would marry him,” she began bravely. “You know that.” It was harder than she had steeled herself to expect. Thurley was so careless of her great joy, she seemed a strange creature not belonging to any well-ordered town as she sat gracefully on the arm of a sofa, her dark hair braided about her head and the rumpled pink linen frock emphasizing the color of her cheeks.
“Well, maybe not. I’m hoping he’ll always feel thatway. I didn’t want to announce it, but Dan wouldn’t wait any longer. Of course we’ve been half engaged for about two years.”
“Yes, I know.” Lorraine wondered if her voice sounded metallic.
“So I said yes, and now Dan is neglecting business. He was here at half-past eight this morning to ask if I wanted the walls tinted or papered; and he’s gone right ahead and ordered a most extravagant ring—two carat in platinum—really, I don’t approve for I’m so careless of all my things I’m bound to lose it. I’d rather he didn’t start the house either. If I were only like you, I’d be delighted with the prospect of a pantry and a million shelves and drawers and the promise of any sort of range or fireless cooker and all the other appliances, but I’m not even interested.”
“You’re not? Why, Thurley, Dan will have to eat! What does interest you?”
“The garden and the color of my room and, most of all, my piano. For I’m to have a baby grand piano of my very own—I won’t have to practise on the Sunday school piano any more. I’m half afraid I’m marrying Dan for that piano—don’t look shocked—I’m not, of course, only it means a great deal.”
“I can’t imagine it! But of course I haven’t your voice.” Unconsciously Lorraine glanced out the window and across the road to where, sinking into comfortable ruin, stood a tottering old box-car wagon, the one in which Thurley had travelled all the way from Boulder, Colorado!
“I wish Philena were here, she’d have so loved a wedding,” Thurley said presently, “and Granny wouldn’t be so lonesome. Did I tell you that Dan says she’s to have his old rooms at the hotel, unless she’ll live with us? Shesays she won’t, so, of course, the other way is easy and lovely for her.”
“He’s very generous,” Lorraine sighed. She held out her parcel. “It is just a well-wisher, as we say,” she added. “Nothing, of course, like your other things will be, but I made it myself and perhaps you will like it because of that.”
Lorraine had embroidered faint dreams and hopes of some day using the set in her house—and Dan Birge’s—into the pattern. She had many such trifles tucked away in a chest of walnut drawers.
“You’re a dear—I’m so clumsy with a needle—and it is beautiful!” Thurley said as she opened the package. “Just fancy you doing all this! Oh, Lorraine, I’ve told Dan, so many times, ‘You ought to marry Lorraine instead of me—she’d make you such a good wife.’ But men don’t pay any attention to common sense when they’re in love,” she rattled on.
“Did you, really?” Lorraine put her little hand on Thurley’s sleeve.
“Dozens of times.”
“And did—did Dan ever answer you?”
Thurley turned to look thoughtfully at her small guest. “Well,” she began awkwardly, “he said that he just happened to love me. I suppose it’s that way lots of times—people love certain people whether it’s best or not. When you come to see me, this set shall be in the best room I have—truly. And I want you to teach me lots of things you know—cooking and sewing and how always to be even tempered. Why, I’m cross as a witch one minute and jolly as a gypsy the next, and I do want to make him happy!” There was an earnest catch in her voice. “He’s been so good to me—I’ve nothing to offer him but myself.”
“That is all he wants,” Lorraine made herself answer, reaching for her hat. “Are you going to sing any other place besides church?”
“I think so; Dan thinks not. After all, if you have some one who loves you very much and is always willing to listen to you sing, I suppose you ought to do as he says.”
“How can you do anything he doesn’t wish you to?” Lorraine asked passionately. “You’d be wicked—with him loving you so hard!” Then, ashamed of her confession, she said a confused good-by and hurried out in time to have a ride with a passing farmer.
Thurley took the “set” to show to Betsey Pilrig. “See what ’Raine has given your lazy Thurley,” she said penitently. “I’m beginning to feel out of sorts with myself—I don’t know why. As if I ought to have been making wedding clothes when she called or scalding over preserves or something like that, instead of staying upstairs and learning a new opera aria. Granny, aren’t you sorry you let this long-legged, noisy creature stay in your house?” She knelt beside the old woman and clasped her arms around Betsey’s waist.
Betsey shook her head. “No, because Philena loved you—and when Philena died, she told me to take care of you.”
“And now I’m going to take care ofyou, and you’re never going to work.”
She rose and walked into the parlor, opening the sacred shutters wide and seating herself at the old-time organ with its carpet-covered pedals and apricot plush stool. She began playing chords, her blue eyes looking across the road, beyond the old box-car wagon, as if she saw visions of worlds still to be conquered—the worlds that the child Thurley had pledged herself to know.
There was little in Betsey Pilrig’s house of value to Thurley, but mere furnishings never mattered. She was oblivious to shabby carpets, and, when she dusted the parlor furniture or set the table with nicked and varied styles of china, she was too busy singing or thinking of Dan to notice her actual surroundings. Nor did clothes bother Thurley—she was happy in a white middy blouse and a serge skirt and quite as beautiful as if she wore a Paquin creation. Besides, Thurley rebelled at taking help from Betsey Pilrig and her only way of earning money was limited. Even if one was the best singer and piano teacher in the township with the commendation of having learned: first, all Kate Sills knew, which ended with an E flat valse and “Dixie” with variations; and, second, all that a small city organist could teach her during his summer vacation spent in the Corners, and, last, all Thurley herself taught herself by diligent practice and “just coming natural to her”—even so, who wanted to pay more than twenty-five cents an hour to learn how to sing or play on the piano? So Thurley was forced to content herself with being organist, choir mistress and soloist in the church, with a dozen pupils to round out her income. Whenever she begged Dan to let her clerk in his store, he always asked her to marry him, thus blockading her desire.
With a restless gesture she closed the organ. “Ho-hum, I need Dan to make love to me,” she ruminated. “I can’t seem to make myself take anything seriously. I wonder why God made the Precores stop off here instead of a city—things would have been different in a city....” A moment later she mentally upbraided herself, “As if you weren’t the luckiest girl in the world! You ought to get down on your knees and ask poor ’Raine to forgive you, and Dan and Granny, too.... Go out andstart a patchwork quilt this instant and don’t let a single song be heard in this house until it is a third finished!”
But the scolding seemed to have no effect, for, instead, she reopened the organ and sang the opera aria she had just learned. As she finished it, she spied Miss Clergy’s shabby coupé pausing behind the clump of maple trees.
“Why—that’s the second time within a few days!” Thurley said delightedly. “Now—I wonder....”
With the exception of paying her wages or making some childish complaint, Abigail Clergy seldom spoke to Hopeful. It was an event to be summoned into those always lighted, seldom aired front rooms, crowded with keepsakes of a bygone generation, to stand before the chair of the imperious creature in her rusty black silk and hear her upbraidings over the fact that harmless urchins had been seen crossing the Fincherie lawn.
During the first tedious years of Miss Clergy’s self-imprisonment, Hopeful, then younger and stronger of spirit, used to remonstrate against the order of things, urge a new doctor, a jaunt to the seaside, even if she saw no one. She tried to persuade Miss Clergy to wear new gowns, to turn off the penetrating gaslights which burned day and night no matter how bright the sun or how mellow the moon, to open the windows and let the fresh air revive her spirits, read a daily paper and, gradually, gently be swept back into the current of everyday living.
To none of these suggestions did Miss Clergy lend anything but a deaf ear. Her life had become her martyrdom and she did not propose to lose a single jot of it. With the exception of Ali Baba, who had proved himself faithful beyond a doubt, Miss Clergy had registered an everlasting hatred and distrust of men, it mattered not who. No clergyman dared enterher door; her physicians were women, her lawyers acted as if they had been sentenced to the gallows and were merely enjoying a brief stay of execution. No man could ever command even her respect, she had told Hopeful; no woman could have her confidence or her love. She hated all living creatures. And as the years passed with Miss Clergy a trifle more wrinkled of skin, whiter of hair and distorted of mind, Hopeful ceased making efforts to change her viewpoint. Indeed, she, too, fell into a sort of charmed, even existence, free from material want or keenness of interest in the world without. The Clergy fortune continued to multiply. All Miss Clergy had to do was figuratively to wave a yellowed, jewelled hand and a barrel of gold was at her command. Yet no repairs were permitted to be made at the Fincherie, not even a new coupé nor for Ali Baba a new livery. And when, one by one, the old mares would die and the purchase of another was inevitable, Miss Clergy would fly into a rage.
When, perforce, Hopeful demanded to clean the two front rooms, Miss Clergy would scold sharply, as she moved into one of them, waiting with added martyrdom until she could fly back into the other to complain about some minute change in the placing of a book or the position of a chair.
The rest of the house, however, was left to Hopeful’s guardianship, and, when she tried to persuade Miss Clergy to come downstairs and sit in the pleasant parlors or eat in the little breakfast room, Miss Clergy would demand,
“Do you want to find another home for yourself, Hopeful? Oh, you do not. Then leave me in peace—at least I am mistress of my own house.”
She never spoke to Ali Baba save the daily, “An hour’sdrive, Ali Baba, not too fast,” and by the world at large she was never even seen. No charity appeal softened her selfish, useless vigil; no cause, however worthy, could lessen her hysterical mimicry of disease. No one was the better for the existence of that small, sinister person with a withered heart, since it was no longer even bruised.
And when, on the evening of the day Miss Clergy had stopped for the second time to hear Thurley sing, she rang the bell long after Hopeful had served her a tray supper and said almost civilly as she entered, “Sit down, Hopeful. I want to ask you about a girl named Thurley Precore who sings—who she is and how she earns her living and how long she has been here,” Hopeful put her tired hand to her head, wondering if she had heard aright.
With a tyrannical smile Miss Clergy repeated her questions.
So Hopeful found her voice after a bit and began the story of Thurley’s singing for her supper up to the time her father died when the first snow flew and how out of charity Betsey Pilrig had taken her into her home to live with Philena.
“Of course Betsey didn’t have much, but what she had she divided between Philena and Thurley, and she’s said to me that she looked on Thurley as the boy and Philena the girl. Because Thurley is one of those that’ll get themselves heard, if they’re born in the backwoods. There wasn’t much to Philena but her big eyes and her crutch, and you ought to have seen the way Thurley looked out for her and toted her on her back, pretending she wasn’t heavy! My land, I’ve watched those children play together until I was late with my work!”
“What did they play?” interrupted Miss Clergy.
“Missionary and play-actin’ and all such stuff, and Thurley made it up. No matter what Thurley made up,Philena said she liked it. I never will forget the Christmas Philena made a travellin’ chest for Thurley out of an ol’ tea-box she got down to Submit Curler’s store! She fitted it up inside with cretonne pockets and a lookin’ glass and wrote on a card, ‘For Thurley when she goes to be a missionary!’ Wasn’t that the queerest thing for a young ’un to think of? Philena was to be a missionary, too, and Thurley was to sing the songs. Oh, Thurley can sing! When they graduated from the high school—Philena didn’t live long after that—Philena read a graduating essay and Thurley sang a song and there wasn’t no applause for Philena, except what me and Betsey and Ali Baba mustered up, but everybody stamped their feet to have Thurley come back and sing. There was a sort of tableau, too, at the church, for Children’s Sunday—seven children were the seven days of the week, and wasn’t it queer that Thurley was Saturday, Philena was Sunday and Lorraine McDowell, Monday?”
“What of it?” snapped Miss Clergy.
“It means that ‘Saturday’s child must work for a living’ and Thurley said, ‘That’s me—Saturday.’ And ‘Sunday’s child is full of grace,’ and certainly Philena was, and ‘Monday’s child is fair of face,’ and nobody would ever want to see a prettier child than Lorraine was—or is—”
“Never mind her! Go on about Thurley,” Hopeful was ordered.
“It was the next month Philena died, and Betsey spent half she had in the bank to bury her the way she thought she’d like—a lavender coffin with quilted satin and she wore her graduating dress and a jet hair ornament that Thurley give her and Thurley sang at the funeral and never broke down onct! Some say Thurley Precore never loved no one, but I know she loved Philena, andsince then she stayed on at Betsey’s and earned money singin’ and teachin’ piano and it seems as if she couldn’t put her mind on nothin’ else ... I dunno—”
“Who’s the—boy?” There was a rasping tone in her voice. “The boy she is engaged to marry?”
“Why, Dan Birge—”
“Birge—” memories stirred in the numbed brain.
“Grandson of the one you knew, Miss Abby. Dearie me, you’ve lost count of years!” Hopeful shook her head.
“Will she be fool enough to marry him?” Miss Clergy insisted.
“He’ll marry no one else, I guess. Seems as if he’s always cared for her and she’s made a man of him, too.”
“That will do, Hopeful. The omelette was like leather and don’t put flowers on my tray again.” Miss Clergy’s dismissal was as brusque as her greeting.
Below, Ali Baba and Hopeful exchanged opinions. After thirty some years of seclusion Abby Clergy had begun to care to hear of some one else.
“Well, if any one else could make her care, it would be Thurley,” Ali Baba deduced, while Hopeful paused in the wiping of the last pot to say sagely,
“If she could, she’d have Dan Birge blown off the face of the earth, just because he wants to marry Thurley.”
“Some wimmen takes it harder’n others,” muttered Ali Baba whose patience with Miss Clergy was not of the same duration as his cousin Hopeful’s.
For the first time in thirty-some years Abby Clergy actually opened the shutter of her window and let in the summer breeze. She drew a chair close beside it and rested her thin arms on the window ledge. A flush in the yellowed cheeks betrayed her excitement; her harshvoice was trying to hum the aria Thurley had sung so carelessly that afternoon. By chance it was the solo aria in the last opera Abby Clergy had seen. She had been escorted by Sebastian Gomez the pretender, and every one had turned opera glasses to look at this beautiful American girl who was to marry a supposedly dashing nobleman, according to newspaper gossips. What time and happenings had occurred since then! And Thurley, who had stirred the last spark of life in the embers of Miss Abby’s heart, was to marry a country bumpkin, a Birge, a storekeeper probably, a slangy, serge-suited, whistling nuisance with an odious bulldog and a new-fangled automobile—never! Not if the Clergy fortune could prevent it!
Busied with her “penance” of quilting, the next day, Thurley was summoned by a peremptory rap at the side door. It was Ali Baba, his shabby silk hat laid across his heart after the fashion of pictures of cavaliers which he had chanced to see in old-time novels.
“I’ve an invitation from the queen,” he said with a bit of dry humor. “After she heard you sing, she wants to tell you how you please her. Don’t refuse or we’ll all be beheaded in the tower! Thurley dear, I’m a silly old man—what I mean is that Abigail Clergy wants you to drive with her. She won’t harm you—she’s as sane as you or I—only she heard you sing and she liked it. For land’s sake and Mrs. Davis, don’t refuse! We’d lose the one chance of maybe makin’ her be her own self again. Never mind a hat; just go out to the coupé and drive about with her. Let her talk to you!” The hand which held the silk hat trembled from excitement.
To have lived with a haunted creature for over thirty years and suddenly have that haunted creature express a normal desire was nothing less than terrifying to the two aged servitors.
“Me? Drive with Abby Clergy? Ali Baba, sure it’s not a joke? Come? Of course I will,” and with no more thought for her “penance,” Thurley danced out of the house, down the flagstone walk and with an abrupt, determined hand opened the door of the curtained coupé.
Trembling with excitement herself, Miss Clergy managed to extend her hand. “I wanted to tell you something,Thurley Precore,” she began. “Ali Baba—an hour’s drive—not too fast!” this a discreet hint to Ali Baba that eavesdropping was not to be tolerated, and, as Melba stalked down the road, injured to the last buckle of her shining harness at the extra weight thrust upon her, Thurley turned an unaffectedly delighted face to Miss Clergy and said,
“What in the world is it? You’ve no idea how larky it is to drive with you—I’ve made up stories about you ever since I found my way into your house years ago—the side way—and you ran after me,” her clear, musical laugh seemed to clear the atmosphere of excited unrest.
“So it was you! Strange ... never mind myself—tell me, have you always sung like this?”
“Of course! I can’t help it any more than to breathe.”
“You have no relatives—no one nearer than Betsey Pilrig?”
Thurley admitted sorrowfully that she had not.
“Nor money?”
“Not a penny! But I’m the happiest pauper alive.”
“I hear you are to marry,” Miss Clergy’s voice broke as she said the words, “the Birge boy? My dear, I’m not so old as I seem, but I had a great sorrow when I was younger than you and it changed everything. I’ve never chosen to explain to the world, since I was not dependent on it, and if I preferred to live alone and brood, it was my right. But this much do I know, and because you are young and have a God-given talent, I shall tell you. You are a fool—as great a fool in your way as I was in mine to trust the man who cheated me—to marry a country boy and try to be content. You’ll be running off with the first goodlooking stranger that comes your way ... ah, but I know, times never havechanged women’s hearts. They eloped years ago by a team of fast horses, and now they do it by the aid of an automobile, and in a little while they’ll be eloping in a flying machine. You see, I’m not so queer as people say, I’ve kept up a bit! Birges have bad tempers. I knew the grandfather, and they are Englishmen regarding their wives. You can sing and you are young and spirited; you should go away to New York and have teachers and the chance to become great. I am not telling you this to break your engagement, but from your eyes I see that singing is as dear to you as Daniel Birge or you would have stopped me when I first mentioned his name. Is that not so?”
“Quite,” said Thurley simply.
“Then remember this! Should some disagreement come between you two, I could not say what,” she shrugged her black shoulders and waved the withered hands with their flashing rings, “say, if you wanted to sing and he tried to prevent you from so doing—as all beasts of men try to cheat women of the things dearest to them,” her teeth made a grinding, unpleasant noise, “if you should be brave enough and big enough, as I think you would be, to tell this boy to go his way and you with your voice would go yours, come to me, Thurley! I may be odd, but I am very rich, and your singing has made me realize I’m a lonesome old woman. I’d like nothing better, my child, than to take you to New York to make you the success God intended. Don’t thank me. It is not goodness of heart—not half so much as revenge. If you came with Dan Birge’s child in your arms and told me he was out of work and you needed aid, I’m afraid I would have a deaf ear. But I want to cheat some man of the woman he loves, to turn the tables. This boy loves you in his over-colored,peasant way. It would break his heart, as nearly as any man’s heart can be broken, to have you leave him. It would sting his pride and scratch his vanity—”
“But Dan is true blue, Miss Clergy! I couldn’t hurt him to please any one.”
“No, but if he forbade your singing—as he will—and you were lucky enough to find it out before you married him instead of afterwards—what then? Would you meekly lock your piano and follow him into the kitchen? What then? Speak up, my girl! Remember, I am not trying to cause trouble. I ask you only for the promise. Should you have an argument with your—your lover, come to me; do not weaken! I am rich—and lonesome—and your voice has made me know I want to love some one again—just before I die. I’ll let you out here, my dear. You can scamper back. Don’t forget, will you, Thurley?”
She pressed the tube for Ali Baba to halt. Thurley, bewildered, impressed, angered, yet amused, all in one, knew that yellowed lips brushed her fresh cheek, and, when she looked up to say good-by, there were tears in Abby Clergy’s restless eyes!
Fate sometimes pursues people, even if they are not willing to be pursued. Certainly it was fate pursued Thurley Precore. As she came to Betsey Pilrig’s gate tingling with excitement, inclined to laugh and then to protest against the abuse of Dan, and, finally, to cry a little like a true woman, she glanced in the letter-box to find an offer from Rufus Westcott, manager of the South Wales county fair. He asked if Thurley would sing during fair week at five dollars a night, and to let him know as soon as possible.
Betsey Pilrig wondered why Thurley stayed so long at the gate reading her letter. But only Thurley knew!Miss Clergy had spoken barely in time. An hour before and Thurley would have said to Dan,
“Please let me. You can take me home every night—I want to—there’s no harm and it’s such a lark—please,” and would have ended in being coaxed out of her desire.
But she marched into the dining-room, and, sitting at the table, opened a writing pad and picked up a pencil. Fate did not even let her wait for ink! She accepted Mr. Westcott’s offer with pleasure and would send him her programme of songs inside of two days.
Signing her name, she glanced up to see Betsey Pilrig standing in the doorway.
“Thurley, you look up to mischief! Where have you been?”
Thurley sealed the envelope with an emphatic little thump, “I can’t tell you until I’ve told Dan.”
“I guess as long as you tell Dan first, I can wait,” Betsey answered.
But had she witnessed the telling she would not have complacently made beaten biscuit, wondering if Dan was coming home for supper with Thurley.
For Thurley, racing impatiently back from the post office to keep her daily tryst with Dan, had come upon him returning from the cemetery.
“You’re an hour late,” he complained.
She started to explain and then something kept “ticking” these words into her head like an insistent clock, “I am rich and lonesome and your voice has made me know I want to love some one again.” So all she answered was,
“Must I account to you for every moment?” flinging herself down by the road and playing with Zaza.
Although he felt he ought to tower down at her inconventional, jealous rage, Dan seated himself meekly beside her. “Why, I didn’t mean it that way! Only you’re never late and I worried. I was afraid you were hurt. You are going to be my wife and I’ve the right to ask questions. What’s wrong, dear? Your eyes are like stars and your cheeks as pink as your dress! You look as if you’d found some one you liked better than you do me,” he could not refrain from adding. “Do you know I’m terribly envious of any one you like at all? I’d like to lock away all your smiles for myself.”
“Silly,” reproached Thurley, as she trailed a stick in front of Zaza. “As if I couldn’t have personal errands. I don’t go asking you where you are every minute in the day—”
“I’d rather you did than to seem not to care.” He tried to put his arm around her, but she drew away.
“Don’t! It’s terribly childish to make love at every fence corner. Let’s be dignified—not boy and girl style! I don’t like it any more.”
“You used to,” he objected.
“Oh, no, it was just the young of me that liked excitement. There isn’t any excitement at the Corners unless the gods happen to favor one. I’ve been thinking for a long time I should not have been so lazy as I am, staying at Granny’s and hardly earning my ‘keep.’”
“Have you been reading more silly books?”
“Dan, suppose we quarreled! Well, just suppose we did—and Miss Clergy, the funny old lady at the Fincherie, took it into her head that she wanted to give me a chance to learn how to sing and talk and dance and all the things that are just crying inside of me to be learned! Oh, Dan, dear, don’t look like that! I’m just supposing. And suppose I decided to let her take me to New York—and our engagement was broken, would you care soterribly?” The latent maternal in Thurley was asking the question; it lacked the usual ruse of the vapid coquette.
He looked as if he scarcely comprehended what she had said. Then he answered, “Don’t suppose that way. Something inside me would justdie.”
Thurley’s handsome eyebrows drew together in a straight line. “Dan,” she added a moment later, “I’ve promised Rufus Westcott, the county fair manager, to sing at the South Wales fair every night. Do you mind?”
“Never!” he cried, standing up. “So that’s what has caused this talk? I’ll not let my future wife sing at a county fair with painted dancers and half-drunken fakirs! What do you think I am?”
“I’m not your wife yet,” she retorted, angry youth rising to face angry youth, and tender love quite helpless between them! “I’ve written and promised—I just posted the letter.”
“You didn’t even ask me!” he accused.
“Why should I ask you?”
“Because I love you! I’d ask you about anything I was going to do, you know that. How much did he offer you? I’ll double it, if you say no.”
She shook her head. “If you gave me five hundred dollars, I’d not be bribed. It isn’t the money. It’s the joy of singing to people—but you can’t understand.”
“You belong to me and you shall not do it!” The Birge temper was gaining control of the good-natured, generous boy. “Do you hear me?”
“I belong to whom I choose! Don’t look at me like that! Do you think I’ll marry a man so narrow-minded that he refuses me the chance to sing in respectable fashion? Better women than I have done so.” The Precoretemper was matching the Birge temper without hesitation.
“I won’t give my consent,” Dan said in a dangerous tone. “If you sing at that fair, by God—I—I won’t marry you!” Then his face went white as soon as he had spoken. “Oh, no, of course I,” he began piteously, “Thurley—listen—don’t do it, will you—”
Thurley’s eyes were closed for a moment. She saw in tempting panorama the old coupé with Miss Clergy saying good-by and adding, “I am rich and lonesome and—”
She opened them to look with impersonal scorn at Dan Birge. In that brief interlude he became a presuming, ill-tempered, small-town man who would drive her into becoming an equally ill-tempered, small-town woman—she would have none of it!
“Very well,” she answered, drawing off the seal ring which she was wearing until the solitaire was ready, “you’ve said it—not I. Good-by and I hope you’ll be happy.”
She turned and walked in the opposite direction. At first Dan started to follow; then he threw back his head with the same insolent toss as Thurley’s, and, squaring off his shoulders, walked in the direction of the hotel. Of course their engagement wasnotbroken; that was too absurd even to fancy. But Thurley must know, first as well as last, that when she married Dan his wishes were to count. Lovely, wilful Thurley-girl, what a wonderful time of it they would have making up! Of course nothing wouldreallyinterfere with the September wedding—impish and unwelcome thought. It was just that Thurley must see he was in the right, and, when she sang, it would be in her husband’s house—the twenty-thousand-dollar house with the statue of a deer in thefront and a pergola and steam heat! He would go up to see Thurley that same night and they would begin all new again and he would write Westcott on a typewriter and on the store official paper and explain that Miss Precore could not keep her engagement. His Thurley singing at a county fair—never!
Then the second thrilling event happened! Like all thrilling events it happened with magical speed. First, it was carefully reported by Ali Baba and Hopeful that Thurley Precore had unceremoniously arrived at The Fincherie and demanded to see and speak with Miss Clergy. If some one had meekly sent in a note, it would have been called presumption itself. But to demand to speak with Miss Clergy and to gain one’s point as well was nothing short of marvellous!
For Thurley had been admitted and had rushed up the winding stairs like the “younger generation who come knocking at the door.” She had entered the mysterious front room and remained there, while Hopeful and Ali Baba remained below in a state of fearful curiosity.
Whatever the conversation was it was of interest to Miss Clergy. An hour later Miss Clergy saw her guest to the door and then called Hopeful and said that she was taking Thurley Precore to New York by the morning train. She wished to have a trunk—this with a slight quaver in her voice—packed with the best of what she had; she would buy a new wardrobe as soon as she reached the city. She wished no questions asked nor did she wish Hopeful to answer any questions until they had boarded the train. Hopeful was to have her cousin Betsey Pilrig come to live at the Fincherie, because Thurley Precore wished to have her provided for—hervoice softened at Thurley’s name—and they were liable to be away for a long time.
Gasping, twisting her apron, dizzy with trying to comprehend new order of things, Hopeful had insisted, “But what am I to say after—after you have boarded the train?”
“Say Miss Clergy has taken Thurley Precore to New York to have her study for grand opera,” Miss Clergy said, after a moment’s deliberation. “And the engagement with Dan Birge is broken for all time.”
Meanwhile, at Betsey Pilrig’s house, Thurley was kneeling before the gentle old lady and telling in her rapt, dramatic fashion,
“I’m going, Granny. I found out all in a moment that I didn’t love Dan as I should. Of course it hurts a little, but they say it is good to have a love affair terminating badly, if you’re to sing in opera. Anyway, I’m going. You are to stay at the Fincherie and be taken care of forever and ever, and, as soon as I’m famous, I’ll pay Miss Clergy back for all her kindness and we’ll have a lovely, white house, you and I, where I’ll come for vacations. It’s so different from singing in church, isn’t it?” She laughed the innocent laugh of pure joy. “Oh, I’m not afraid I’ll not make good. Something tells me I shall—the same as the day I told Philena that cripples could be conquerors—remember? And, Granny, it is really better for Dan, and, if he comes here to-night to see me, say I’ve gone to bed and I’m too tired to be called ... no, no, I’m sure of myself! Granny dear, don’t let the old box-car fall to pieces, I want it as a souvenir. When I build my beautiful house, it shall stay close beside it. It was my home, you know!” The scarlet lips quivered for an instant.
“But are you happy, Thurley, giving up a good man’slove, going with that woman to New York?” The gentle, narrow mind could not comprehend this whirlwind of events, strange and astonishing.
“I’m happier than I’ve been in years! There must be gypsy in me. I’m happy at the thought of travelling again! The old days, even the hungry, cold ones in the box-car wagon, were happier than the days of being fed and warmed but made to sit in school and sew my stint afternoons. Don’t you see, Granny dear, I’m different; and when a person finds that out for sure and some wonderful thing happens to them like Miss Clergy’s hearing me sing that it’s the right thing to go on and follow the trail? Tell Dan—no, I’ll write him, bless his old heart, he didn’t know I halfway wanted to refuse to marry him,” Thurley sobered as if momentarily contrite.
Betsey Pilrig looked at her with lack of comprehension. “Maybe you’re right—maybe you’re wrong. I’ve no power to keep you. What did she say when she offered to take you away?”
“So many things! I could travel abroad, and, if I worked very hard and the right person trained me, she thought I would be famous and she is to be my godmother as it were. The only condition was not to marry for twenty years—that was easy to promise. For I’ll never love any one but Dan, and all of me didn’t love him. So I gave my pledge. She would not have taken me unless I did. She’s bitter, Granny, because of her own affair. She likes to think of cheating a man of me—poor dear! Why, I didn’t mind the promising.”
“I don’t like the condition,” Betsey said, gravely. “You’re young and you don’t know all that is in your heart any more than the world knows of your voice. That wasn’t fair of her!”
But Thurley in a state of ecstasy refused to listen. She fell to packing, and, when Dan came an hour later, Betsey was forced to send him away with the unsatisfactory message that Thurley was busy—she would see him later.
After which Betsey Pilrig watched the light of his roadster twinkle into nothingness. Moonlight called her attention to the box-car wagon. She visualized the long-legged, ragged child Thurley who had sung for her supper—and got it—at the Hotel Button, and the worthless parents. Then she saw Philena limping eagerly about in Thurley’s train as they played missionaries; she saw Thurley in her white dress on Children’s Day when she was made to speak the part of Saturday and declared joyously that she did not care, she really wanted to work for her living. She saw a taller, lovelier Thurley singing at Philena’s funeral. Then she saw Dan and Thurley in the first flush of courtship, with Thurley all blushes and happy songs and four or five engagements a day, while Dan’s business ran itself ... well, that was at an end. In her simple fashion Betsey realized the girl Thurley would never return nor would Dan Birge remain a light-hearted, whistling boy. As for Abby Clergy, some folks might call it generous on her part to take Thurley to the city, but Betsey called it using youth as a crutch and a revenge and she wondered what Miss Abby’s parents would have said if they had known.
“It’s late, Granny love! Tell me—did he mind?” Turning, she found Thurley waiting to say good night to her.
She came and peeked over Betsey’s shoulder at the old wagon. “Good-by, funny home,” she kissed her finger tips to it. “I sha’n’t forget you—not even ifI drive into the Corners the next time in a limousine with a footman.”
After Miss Clergy and Thurley had left the Corners, Hopeful and Ali Baba took the day off to get out an extra of their own as to what had happened.
“ ... dressed in a black silk forty-year old she was and a hat to match and all her rings on her fingers and the same hobnail boots,” Ali Baba informed Corners loungers, “but as chirp as if she’d never gone to ruin for over thirty years about an Eyetalian barber—poor Miss Abby! And I bet my hat, she’ll have new clothes and be as up to snuff as they make ’em when she gets to New York.... Thurley? Oh, her own self with a pink dress and a white shade hat and Miss Abby sayin’ to her, ‘We’ll only be shabby a little while longer. It isn’t goin’ to take us long to learn new ways.’ Thurley’s eyes was as blue as the sea and she kept starin’ out beyond everybody and goodness only knows what she was thinkin’ ... anyhow, they’re gone! We’ve orders to close the house and blest if she didn’t have our cousin Betsey Pilrig come to live with us—as good a thing as Miss Abby has done in over thirty years—for it will take the heart from Betsey to lose Thurley, too! When Dan Birge knows that Abby Clergy has stole his girl and she isn’t goin’ to marry him no more’n a terrier’ll leave a badger hole, I guess for the first time in history a Birge will be so sore he’ll have to ride in a rubber-tired cab!” Conscious of being the courier of a thrilling event, Ali Baba nonchalantly borrowed tobacco and strolled on to spread the glad tidings.
Even a mystery or a haunted lady becomes a bore after a certain time. It is like a jolly week-end guest who, without invitation, spends the entire season in one’sonly and best pink room. So had Miss Clergy become a nonentity to the town—“a pity,” the older people said, “a pill” retorted the younger.
Which explained somewhat the shock it gave the town when news of her flight to New York with Thurley was announced. “How could that poor soul ever get up and get?” the town asked itself. The truth of the rapidity was that because she had been dormant for so many years—and had endless money—any activity would either be of microscopic importance or stupendous haste; there could be no middle, sane course of action. With Thurley Precore as the incentive, the former course was out of the question. It was like the sleeping princess upon rousing—she lost no time in finding out the state of mind towards him who kissed and wakened her. So Miss Clergy could not leave town fast enough to please herself. She trembled lest Dan Birge, through customary masculine knavery, trick Thurley into marriage and cheat her newly-throbbing heart of its long-awaited revenge.
Three weeks later, when the town was still agog, saying they guessed even “the crabs were laughing with their claws” at the thought of a Birge being handed the mitten, two pillars of the church vowed that Dan Birge had proposed to Lorraine McDowell and been accepted; that he had spoken to her father about the wedding. So he could not have cared so much or else he was marrying Lorraine out of spite. Lorraine would be, at any event, mistress of the twenty-thousand-dollar house and would wear both the solitaire and the wedding band Dan had planned to give Thurley Precore.
The news rivalled the amazement over Miss Clergy’s recovery. The town began to “lot” on whether or not Thurley, with all her notions of being a fine singer, would not be sorry some day.
“He should have married Thurley to meet his equal,” Ali Baba declared. “’Raine has as much chance with him as a paper-shell almond against a hickory nut! Yes, we got a letter from Thurley—she said they was well—that was about all!”
But the town never knew quite all about Dan’s sudden engagement to Lorraine nor Lorraine’s acceptance of Thurley’s suitor. They never knew that Dan, white-faced and with a strange, red light in his eyes, had come to Lorraine to plead with her that she marry him.
To Dan’s despairing anger of youth, Lorraine yielded because of her own despairing love. “I know you love Thurley,” she said, when he scarcely embraced her. “You want to show her some one loves you enough to marry you ... and you knew I always cared. Dan, will you learn to care afterwards? I’ll be the best wife I can! I’ll do everything you want me to do!” She wondered why he winced at the words.
He was thinking of Thurley’s wild rose, defiant, adorable self. It had all happened so quickly that he wondered if it were not some hideous, unfair nightmare from which he would soon waken—and meet Thurley!
But as he looked at her gentle face he knew it was reality; that for over three weeks Thurley had been away from the Corners, Abigail Clergy’s fortune at her disposal to prove that she could sing and the whole world would listen.
Only that hastily scribbled note was left him—he wondered some days when he was trying to attend to business and not act conscious of the glances of his clerks and customers, whether he might not burst out saying the words,