THE OTHER MILLER GIRLCHAPTER I
THE OTHER MILLER GIRL
ON a pleasant Saturday afternoon of the latter part of the September following the awarding of the Wadsworth prize, Mr. Langley received three distinct shocks. The first was occasioned by hearing Miss Penny referred to as an old lady, and the second, which was almost simultaneous, by learning that Anna Miller was commonly known as the ‘other Miller girl.’ The third, which was more subtle, was also more personal and might have wrought real havoc but for the slip of a yellow-haired girl who was characterised thus negatively. Her discovery of this third shock to Mr. Langley and the action she took led to such consequences that if it were the fashion now-a-days to invoke the muse, this history must needs begin by bidding the goddess sing of the uncommon sense of the other Miller girl.
The church at Farleigh was a really beautiful building. It was only an old-fashioned New England meeting-house, but its proportions were perfect for its style and its pillared portico was almost as appropriate to its structure and environment as the chastemarble columns of Greece to their more artistic and romantic setting. It stood on an height truncated by natural forces to form a plateau and was surrounded by broad lawns shaded by great English elms and a single oak-tree.
The greensward was as rich and velvety as if the season had been midsummer and the foliage of the trees as luxuriant and almost as bright, on this Saturday afternoon of the third week of September when the minister sauntered slowly up the broad walk leading to the porch. For the summer had been wet: more than one week had disproved the old saying that there will always be one fair day in the six to dry the parson’s shirt. It had been favourable for grass and trees and uncultivated vegetation but too rainy for crops. The September sunshine was, however, making amends; and as he glanced at the picturesque regularity of the fenced and walled fields of a farm across the river, Mr. Langley said to himself that the harvest would be bountiful after all if the frosts held off a bare fortnight.
The choir had been rehearsing for the morrow and the women members were lingering in the porch to chat. The minister had just noticed that Miss Garland, a member who had been away on a visit in the West for three months or more, had returned, when he heard her ask who was staying with old Miss Penny this winter. It gave him a start to hear Miss Penny called old, though she hadn’t been a young woman when he had come to the two villages straightfrom theological school, and if he had stopped to reckon the years he must have realised that she was well beyond three score and ten. But he did not stop, for Miss Harriman’s reply gave him another start.
“The other Miller girl,” she said in her high, strong voice which fortunately lost its nasal twang when she sang. “Rusty has gone to college, you know, even though she didn’t get the Wadsworth prize. But this girl goes to the academy and it seems to me that Miss Penny ought to have more help than she can give her outside of school hours, for she has rheumatism so bad now that she’s almost a cripple.”
Glancing up, the speaker saw that the minister was upon them and smilingly apprised him of the obvious fact that Miss Garland had got back. He shook hands with Miss Garland and with the other three, questioned the former about her summer and declared that he should call upon her next week for a fuller account. Then he turned to Miss Merriman.
“What was that I overheard you saying, Miss Merriman?” he asked with his slow smile. “Did I hear you speak ofthe otherMiller girl? And does that mean Anna?”
“Yes, Mr. Langley, Anna Miller. But that is what everybody in the South Hollow, and for that matter, in Farleigh, too, I guess, calls her. But she was away so long that people forgot there was such a person—such as knew of the family at all—and anyhow, she seems so different from Rusty. Of course she’s pretty,—she looks for all the world like a doll,—andeverybody says she’s good-natured to a fault. And there’s something droll about her. And yet——”
The expression of Mr. Langley’s face made her pause.
“Do you know, Miss Merriman,” he said whimsically but at the same time rather wistfully, “at this moment it seems to me that to be supremely good-natured and somewhat droll is a triumph in itself.”
He smiled and sighed.
“Nevertheless, life in the two villages will seem different without Rusty,” he owned. “It will be quieter, but doubtless far less exciting.”
He went into the church to fetch a book, then overtook Miss Garland and walked with her as far as the post office. And as they went, he asked her why she thought of Miss Penny as old; and they occupied the time recollecting dates and computing the passing of the years. And both felt older at parting, and one of them strangely depressed.
Just as Miss Penny had long realised that people called her an old lady so Anna Miller was quite aware that she was known as the ‘other Miller girl.’ But the younger resented the fact as little as the older. Anna adored her sister, looked up to her in many ways, and never dreamed of disputing or questioning her title as virtual head of the family. The girl knew, too, that she was pretty and in doll-fashion, though she didn’t herself consider doll-fashion bad. If the question had come up, she would have acknowledged promptly, too, that she was good-humored, andshe couldn’t help realising that people thought her droll. Nevertheless, vain as she undoubtedly was, Anna Miller did not attach undue weight to any of these qualities, and otherwise would have been likely to rate her own powers lower than anyone else would have done. Enjoying life thoroughly, and perhaps more consciously than is usual at her years, she was quite content to be the ‘other Miller girl’ and to endeavor to stop any portion she might of the gap left in hearts and households by Rusty’s absence.
But the girl was herself quite unconscious and others quite unaware of her most valuable characteristic. Young as she was, Anna Miller had one quality seldom gained before middle age, and rare even then,—a truly humourous outlook upon the world. The girl viewed life and her fellow human beings almost in the detached manner of a philosopher, yet warmly and sympathetically withal. She enjoyed oddities and idiosyncrasies which annoyed or vexed others and made allowance for larger faults with a singularly mature tolerance. She was one of the few who habitually demand less than they are willing to proffer,—simply and naturally and quite without any sense of superiority.
Experience had made Anna Miller prematurely middle-aged in her grasp of reality,—experience acting upon that endowment of good nature which everyone granted her. Running away as a child from the dreary, shiftless household that had been her home, for five years the girl had supported herself in thegreat city to which she had fled, to the extent of keeping soul and body together, successively as errand girl to a dressmaker, as bundle and cash-girl, and finally as sales-girl in a department store. But all the while something within her—perhaps the adventurous instinct that had hurtled her forth—had responded to the clarion which is within the din of every struggle. She had known the extremes of heat and cold, of loneliness and hunger, but she had made light of them. She had clung to her shred of vanity, masquerading on an empty stomach, and cheering long hours in her cramped, dreary hall-bedroom arranging her tangle of pale yellow hair in various fashions before her tiny cracked mirror, trying on scraps of finery, and coquetting with the reflection which was always picturesque no matter how absurdly arrayed. She had ‘bluffed’ her way through the lean, meagre years, her shockingly slangy expression being a veritable gospel of cheer to her fellow clerks and lodgers, and the snatches of ugly popular songs on her lips, real melody which echoed in her own heart as well as in theirs. And she had ‘won out’ triumphantly with her natural sweetness of disposition not only unimpaired but strengthened and enriched, with a keenness of mind which is one of the ends of education, and with that curiously mature and humourous outlook instead of the bitterness which might have been expected.
On the day following that on which Mr. Langley had first heard her referred to as the other Miller girl,Anna was in her usual place in Miss Penny’s pew at the opening of the Sunday morning service. She was rather preoccupied by her new suit. Rusty had had to have a new one when she went to college, and she had insisted upon Anna’s having one at the same time. Rusty’s was brown, the peculiar russet shade that matched her hair exactly and was peculiarly Rusty’s, loose in the jacket, and plain. Anna’s was green, more elaborate than Rusty’s and not in nearly so good taste, as Anna knew well. But it was exceedingly smart and very becoming and the girl was, as she declared, ‘crazy over it.’ Clever with her fingers, she had made a green velvet hat to match the suit, a three-cornered affair which did not fall far short of being utterly absurd, but which, set jauntily upon her riotous yellow hair, certainly made her little doll-face bewitching.
Anna had a very sweet voice and had been asked to join the choir, and during the anthem, she fixed her long-lashed blue eyes seriously upon the women members, studying, not their voices nor their manner of using their vocal organs, but their attitude and demeanour. As she saw herself in fancy standing behind the low railing in her new green suit and ‘nifty’ hat, she wondered if it wouldn’t be an exceedingly pleasant change for the congregation to have a younger person to gaze upon and one who had more regard for the current fashions. And dear me! Every blooming member of the present choir had hair of the same colour, something between brown and drab. Annasaid to herself that when she should stand up among them to sing, if her long yellow braid with the curl at the end did not of its own accord flop over her shoulder, she would flop it,—it stood out so picturesquely against the green. Here in the pew, of course, it was just as well to let it hang down her back, for Miss Penny sat very near the pulpit.
So near, indeed, that she was directly in front of Mr. Langley,—which reflection induced another that when she should sit with the choir, Mr. Langley couldn’t see her at all. That seemed a pity, and yet—Anna wondered if he saw her now,—saw her, that is, not as a soul but as a young girl in a new suit, with yellow hair shining like pale gold against it. He might possibly notice the latter, for his beloved little Ella May, who had died before the Millers had come to Farleigh, had had long golden curls.
Suddenly the girl recalled her roving gaze. Mr. Langley was preaching, and Anna hadn’t even heard the text! It was right down mean, she said to herself, when anyone worked as hard as he did to write such beautiful sermons for people not to listen to every single word. He didn’t write absolutely new sermons, indeed, he had so many on hand after preaching here for years and years and years; but they were new to the greater part of the congregation and practically so to all of them, for he worked over them, added new matter and quoted from new poems whose authors had been at school or in their cradles whenthe sermons were first composed. Moreover they were quite fresh to Anna.
Though her mental equipment was haphazard, Anna Miller had a certain power of concentration. To-day, however, she had no sooner fixed her eyes resolutely upon the minister than her thoughts began to wander again. For it came to the girl suddenly and startlingly that Mr. Langley was changed—yes, greatly changed. He looked tired, but it was worse than that: he looked as if he had lost something. There seemed no longer to be anyspringinessabout him. He was like a jack-in-the-box that has been so mishandled that when you open the lid he doesn’t jump out at you but only flaps feebly. Mr. Langley was too young to have his springs go flat. He had only a few grey hairs. He was tall and slim and straight and graceful and really much handsomer than that floor-walker at Martin and Mason’s that had been so stuck on himself.
Glancing hurriedly back over his life as she knew it by hearsay, Anna felt it to have been unusually placid and untroubled. Of course it had been a terrible grief to him losing his little girl, that golden-haired little Ella May who had gone about through the two villages scattering sunshine. But that had happened years ago and he had seemed happy and young until now. Then it came to her that this was, perhaps, Ella May’s birthday. Perhaps he had it all to go through again every year as the day came round?
Early in the afternoon, Anna appeared suddenly inthe parlour, which was seldom used excepting on Sunday, briskly polishing a goblet with a cross-barred dish towel.
“O Miss Penny, tell me, when did Ella May die?” she asked. “Was it the twenty-second day of September?”
“O no, Anna, she died on the twenty-eighth day of December,” Miss Penny returned promptly and in some surprise. And although the storms of more than a score of winters had yellowed the tiny marble lamb upon the little grave in the cemetery on the hillside where the minister’s baby had been laid, probably every adult person in the parish could have given the date as readily.
Anna returned to the kitchen. Passing the mirror, she paused and gazed at her own image. She shook her head ruefully. Even with her festive blouse and smart skirt covered by her checked gingham overall, she was a picture, and after all, her hair looked as pale golden against this dull ground. Hastily gathering an handful of wet silver, she returned to the parlour.
“She had golden curls, didn’t she, Miss Penny—little Ella May?” she asked.
“Long, golden ringlets and deep blue eyes,” asseverated Miss Penny in the tone she used only in speaking of the dead.
“Well, was her birthday in September?”
“Why Anna Miller! She was born on Christmas-day—O my dear child, it must have been twenty-fiveyears ago this next Christmas day, for I was fifty myself at the time and I am seventy-five now. That was the year I had my plum-coloured moreen—you remember the under side of the cushion in grandma’s old chair up in Reuben’s room? Sarah Pettingill made it, and I wore it to the Christmas tree for the first time and word came while we were there that Mr. Langley had the finest gift in the world—a little daughter. Some of the ladies wanted him to call her Christmas and he said he’d like to have her named Carol, but she was called for his wife after all. Her maiden name was May.”
Mrs. Langley was so little a personality in the mind of the girl that it seemed incongruous in her to have had a maiden name. As she would have asked a careless question in regard to her, however, she looked up to see Miss Penny’s face drawn with dismay.
“Dear me, I know I am old, but I didn’t think I was losing my memory,” Miss Penny cried. “It comes to me all of a sudden that I wore that plum-coloured dress to the child’s funeral. I remember distinctly my mother’s telling me that plum-colour was next door to purple and that purple was light mourning and quite suitable for a young person’s funeral.”
“But you could have worn it to both,” declared Anna. “You keep your clothes so well that it probably looked new for the funeral.”
“But Anna, my aunt Penny died the February after that dress was made and mother and I coloured itblack for the funeral. And she died twenty-five years ago the tenth of February.”
“Then it couldn’t be the Christmas that Ella May was born that you had it, but the one before her death. I’m glad it wasn’t, for I don’t like her to be so old.”
“But if the little thing wasn’t born that year, I’m sure I don’t know when shewasborn,” remarked Miss Penny plaintively.
“We’ll have to find out,” said Anna cheerfully. “Anyhow, I’m glad it wasn’t the twenty-second of September. I got to thinking of it at church and it sort of—got on my nerves.”
Returning to her work, she couldn’t get Mr. Langley and the mysterious, lamentable alteration in him off her mind. Ella May might have nothing to do with it—and then again she might. In any event, the first thing to be done was to learn the age of the child at the time of her death. She was just wondering whether she had time to go over to the cemetery that afternoon, when Miss Penny called her. Going into the parlour, she found Mrs. Phelps, their next-door neighbour.
“O Anna, what do you think?” cried Miss Penny in great excitement. “Mrs. Phelps says that Ella May Langley was only three days old when she died. She can prove it!”