CHAPTER VI
MEANTIME the other Miller girl had made a second call at the house in the lane which Reuben’s father had built. When her rat-a-tat at the door sounded drearily as from an empty house, the girl said to herself that it was too much. Most likely the ogress had slain her lovely daughter and then fallen dead herself and their corpses lay stretched upon the organ platform in the room which would never be a living-room thereafter. But the lovely daughter came to the door. The cold, haughty expression on her face changed to eagerness as she saw Anna and she smiled sweetly and rather touchingly.
“O Miss Miller, I am so glad—to see you,” she said. But with the last words enthusiasm had become dismay. She paled and looked appealingly at Anna.
“Don’t call me Miss Miller, please. Nobody does. And—may I come in?” asked Anna.
“I am so sorry, Miss—Anna, but mother—we don’t have company, you know.”
“But I’m not company. And anyhow, I’ve got to come in this once for I’ve got something for you,” Anna declared.
As the proud look returned to the older girl’s face and she started to say something in regard to hermother, Anna drew forth from the covert of her jacket a tiny ball of a maltese kitten with a white parting between its baby blue eyes, a line of white waistcoat, and four white paws, two of which had extra toes. Nothing could have been rounder or silkier or more altogether appealing than this baby kitten with its round, innocent eyes and its bit of pink tongue visible, and as Anna held it out, the other girl took it ecstatically and held it close to her face. Then she cried out impulsively to her mother and ran with it to her. Anna followed her in, closing the door behind her.
Anna’s purpose had been deliberate. Still, it was almost unbelievable to see Mrs. Lorraine’s grimness melt before that absurd mite of kitten. As her daughter passed it over to her, she, too, hid her face against its softness. Then she put it in her lap and gazed at it in a sort of fascination, her daughter hanging over her and quite unnecessarily calling attention to the little thing’s charms. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Lorraine hadn’t handled—hadn’t even seen—a baby kitten of the ordinary, harmless, necessary cat-kind since she had been a child in a New England farmhouse and had worshipped the successive litters of a three-coloured Tabby that had lived at one of the barns. They had left the farm for the city before she was twelve; but though she had had pets in the elegant home her parents had fallen heirs to and in the magnificent residences of the millionaire she had married, they had been the expensive, pedigreed sophisticatedpets of the rich and hadn’t appealed to her as Tabby and her kittens and the mongrel shepherd dog of the farm had done. And not even the latter had so appealed to her as this tiny plebeian offspring of a too prolific Tabby mother who kept the tender-hearted Anna busy in finding homes for her numerous kittens. Her sore heart could reach out to its innocence without injury to her wounded pride.
“It is a love, isn’t it?” remarked Anna presently, partly to call attention to herself and partly because she couldn’t help it. For she was herself ‘crazy over’ the kitten, as she put it. And joining the little group, she pointed out its double paws and the white tip of its tail which were the only details the daughter hadn’t exclaimed over.
“I started out right after school to find a home for it. There were three of them but the grocer at the Hollow took the yellow twins—I suppose he’ll call ’em the Gold-Dust Twins. It looks as if I needn’t go further. Are you willing to take him in, Mrs. Lorraine?”
“I don’t know that we ought to,” returned Mrs. Lorraine, trying to speak stiffly. But somehow, even the thought that perhaps it would be wrong for the family of a criminal to indulge themselves even so little was ineffectual to stiffen her with that soft little ball in her lap.
“Mother!” cried the girl beseechingly.
“You will need a cat, you know. Every household does,” said Anna sagely. “This one will make afine one, too. All of Tabby’s kittens do. Never a one has failed to give satisfaction in the households in which I have placed them. Ma’s never had any mice in our house since I brought the mother-cat home. I found her on a lonely road a mile or more from any house. Just think, someone had abandoned her. It must have been someone in Wenham that came over to drop poor Tabby, for before there wasn’t a three-coloured cat in all Farleigh.”
“We had a tortoise-shell cat on the farm when I was a little girl,” remarked Mrs. Lorraine quietly with a gentler look in her eyes than Anna would have believed possible. “Alice, perhaps the kitten would like some milk,” she added.
Alice fetched a saucer and put it on the hearth. Mrs. Lorraine placed the kitten beside it as gently as if it had been a fragile egg shell and the three hung over it eagerly. The kitten put his nose in so far that he spluttered amusingly and once he dipped a paw in; but it was too light to overturn the dish and he drank enough to prove himself of sufficient age to be taken from his mother.
“Now he’d like a nap,” remarked Anna, picking him up. She wanted to give him to Alice (sweet name, Alice Lorraine!) who hadn’t had a chance at him at all; but she put him into Mrs. Lorraine’s lap and he curled into a yet rounder ball and was asleep at once.
“Speaking of tramp cats,” Anna remarked, though as a matter of fact the subject hadn’t come up, “youprobably know that Reuben Cartright once lived in this house?”
“Reuben Cartright—is he a musician?” asked Mrs. Lorraine.
“Dear me, no. His father was a musician, though he wasn’t noted. He was organist at the church for a long time. He built this house, though not with his own hands. Did you ever wonder what that platform was for?”
“I thought this was a very old house and that perhaps that was a trundle bed,” said Alice. Anna laughed and Mrs. Lorraine had to smile.
“Mr. Cartright had the floor raised so that when he got rich he could have a pipe organ put in,” Anna explained. “I believe the clothes-press in the chamber above is right over the platform and the same size and they say he planned to tear out the floor of that so that the space would go way up to the roof. But it never came to that. His wife died and he took to booze and that was the last of him as well as of the pipe organ.”
“Is the son musical?” asked Mrs. Lorraine, speaking softly as if the sleeping kitten were a baby.
“Yes’m, in a way, though he’s never had much chance. He has beautiful hands, slim with long fingers, and his father gave him lessons up to the time Reuben was nine and his mother died. Since then Reuben has never had time for music. He has worked his own way, and besides—as pa says, ever since he rescued that tramp cat from the pine tree inthe common at the Hollow, he’s been on the look out for that sort of extra jobs. It’s a sort of private joke between me and myself, the story of that rescue is, though I shouldn’t dare let Miss Penny know it, or pa or Rusty, my sister. I was away from home five years—ran away to seek my fortune and never caught up to it—and this happened in my absence. Pa told me the story the day after I got home and then Miss Penny. Ma told me, too, and no end of other people offered to. And to this day, pa or Miss Penny will ask me whether I happened to hear this or that particular and even if I say yes are likely to go on as if they suspected I didn’t get it straight or whole. But I will say it’s a good story and will bear repeating.”
“O Anna, won’t you please tell it to us!” cried Alice, and her mother looked acquiescent and perhaps eager.
Anna complied. The tale had, indeed, been told many a time before in Farleigh to the end of the Hollow; but though no narrator had ever before employed such a jargon of slang as the other Miller girl used, perhaps none had ever told it better nor more sympathetically. The telling of it amused and interested Alice Lorraine, who was already more drawn towards Anna Miller than she had been to any girl she had known before, but it affected her mother more powerfully. Henrietta Lorraine (‘Hetty’ was the little girl of the farm) had been for years a cold, proud woman, a slave, unconsciously, to her husband’svast possessions. During the past six months, following the disgrace of her husband and his commitment to prison, her pride had become a sort of fierce arrogance, while her sense of injury, her bitterness towards all the world had shut her within bars hard as iron. But now as she sat quiet, the tension of months relaxed, with the kitten in her arms, and listened to the tale the odd, droll, charmingly pretty, appealing young girl rattled off so flippantly, something began to melt within her. Nor was it merely the icy crust that had protected her crushed feelings of late. As the kindly folk of the story rose compellingly before her, called forth by the wand of humourous sympathy of the yellow-haired fairy, and she saw not only Reuben Cartwright and the forlorn cat, but Miss Penny and Mr. Langley, the fat pony and the fat janitor who later was nearly to burn the grammar school building to the ground,—as she saw all this and more, the woman she had been for years was so moved that she felt almost like the woman she might and should have been. Alice got only the story Anna told. Her mother, who had been a country child herself and whose natural sympathy was with country folk and ways, got a broader view and a deeper vision. She felt something genuine and fine and sincere and worth while in this bit of village life,—something that was attainable to others. And it came to her that possibly Alice’s life and even her own weren’t irretrievably ruined and wrecked. In any event, terrible as had been the storm which had overwhelmedthem, in the restful atmosphere of this place to which they had been forced to crawl for refuge, they could at least draw long breaths of relief, and Alice might later find more than refuge and relief.
At the end of the story, Anna rose hastily. “I must hike or Miss Penny will be limping round to get tea,” she said. “Poor dear! She doesn’t drive the fat pony herself now-a-days and can’t get out of the phaeton alone for she has rheumatism; but she is as crazy about kittens as I am and will be as pleased to hear that this mite has a home.”
Holding out her hand a bit timidly, the girl was surprised to have Mrs. Lorraine press it warmly.
“We are very grateful to you, Anna Miller, not only for the kitten but for other things, for changing the current of our thoughts,” she said.
The following Sunday, Alice Lorraine appeared at church with Miss Penny and Anna. Her suit was not new but it was more elegant than anything worn in Farleigh. Alice was extremely pretty and had the look of one who has, so to speak, always lain on rose leaves, and Anna felt proud to walk up the aisle with such a distinguished-looking girl. Miss Penny begged her to go home with them after service but Alice wouldn’t leave her mother. She walked down to the Hollow the next afternoon, however.
She couldn’t stay for tea, but Anna gave her a piece of cake and a cup of chocolate. As Anna walked part way home with her, she spoke of the cake.
“I wish I could cook,” she said. “I know nothingwhatever about it, and mother knows only what she learned before she was twelve, and cook-books are such queer things to follow. I don’t mind eating tinned things, but it’s hard on mother, though she never says anything. And besides,—O Anna, you wouldn’t believe it, but I hardly know my mother. At home after I was through with nurses and governesses, she went her way and I mine as everyone seems to do in the city. And now—I care for her more than I ever dreamed, but I don’t seem to be able to show it or to take care of her.”
Anna talked it over with Miss Penny that night and on Saturday morning Alice came over and watched Anna make bread, cake and cookies. Miss Penny was in the kitchen the greater part of the time and Alice took to the odd, inconsecutive, warm-hearted little lady as warmly as others had always done, so that on a second Saturday they were like three girls together. Alice began to frequent the house at all hours. And Miss Penny, who was one of the best housewives in the two villages and who had taught Rusty and Anna and through them their mother, gave the girl the best of instruction in cooking and all sorts of domestic matters, besides amusing and entertaining her with other stories than the tale of Reuben and the tramp cat which she gravely related to Alice the first time the two were alone together.
“O Miss Penny, the days fly by as they never did before and I wake so happy every morning that I amashamed of myself!” Alice cried one afternoon as she waited for Anna to come from the academy.
“Ashamed, Alice?”
The girl paled. “Yes, Miss Penny, because of my father. You know about him?”
“Yes, dear, I know. At first I was sorry that people in the village should know, but now I really think it best. After all, newcomers are discussed just so much, and—of course there aren’t many newcomers now-a-days—not that there ever were many. Anna’s family were the last to move into Farleigh before you and your mother. That was when Freddy was a baby—Freddy, you know isn’t the one who looks after my pony. That’s Frank. He does very well, but of course Reuben taught him, and Rusty’s brother—and of course, Anna’s—couldn’t help doing well. But I felt as if I ought to sell both the cows. It’s a pity for Seth Miller with all his work to have to keep the milking in mind. There’s only the one cow—Mr. Mudge is keeping the other—and Seth thinks the world of Reuben and knows Reuben would feel terribly to have the other cow disposed of—I don’t mean killed of course, though that is the way they speak of killing poor cats and kittens. And that reminds me, Alice. How is yours?”
As Alice would have replied, a peculiar knock sounded on the door. Alice asked if she should answer it. But Miss Penny, whose face had lighted up, said that it was Mr. Langley, and that he would let himself in.
“He raps in a peculiar way—it’s really a bar of music. He and Reuben’s father always used it. He—O Mr. Langley, how good you are!”
“Good to myself, yes indeed. I am really self-indulgent when I come in here, Miss Penny.”
“I appeal to you, Miss Lorraine,” he said as he shook hands with the girl. “Do you consider it an act of goodness or the gratification of a desire for refreshment to come to see Miss Penny?”
“It’s a case of receiving wholly on my part,” asserted Alice with a shy smile for Miss Penny.
“I interrupted a conversation. Pray go on with it and allow me to listen,” he begged.
“Dear me, Mr. Langley, I am ashamed to say that for the moment I can’t recollect what we were discussing,” said Miss Penny in dismay.
Alice smiled, but wanly. “I was telling Miss Penny that I am really too happy, Mr. Langley,” she said. “I am happier than I have ever been before. As far back as I can remember, the days were always long, I got tired of everything and was bored the greater part of the time. I cared for nothing but my music, and I never enjoyed that as I do going about with Anna and listening to Miss Penny and learning to make bread and doughnuts. And—there’s poor mother at home thinking of—my father. And I-I have tomakemyself think of him.”
“But my dear Miss Lorraine, you are doing this in large part for your mother. You are sitting at the feet of Miss Penny in order to learn how to makeone of the most attractive cottages ever built into a real home for her. And while you are broadening your life with these new influences which seem more congenial than those you have known before, no doubt you are enriching your mother’s life as well? You tell her of all that takes place, I dare say?”
“Everything. And she is interested and forgets—for a little. And Anna goes in and—mother loves Anna already.”
He turned smilingly to Miss Penny. “Anna is more like you, Miss Penny, after all, than any other of your foster children,” he said and then went on talking to Alice.
As he rose to take leave, he told Alice he hoped her mother might meet Miss Penny before long. At the door, he kept her a minute.
“Don’t feel guilty when you forget your father and don’t force yourself to think of him, Miss Lorraine,” he said earnestly. “Open your whole heart to the new life and help your mother in her much harder task of reconciling herself to a new future. Write your father, and if he gets the impression he should from your letters, he will conclude that your life isn’t going to be spoiled and—why, that will surely make a great difference to him.”
There was a blur before the girl’s eyes so that she couldn’t see the minister’s figure at the gate. Instead of returning to the sitting-room she stole upstairs for a few minutes of silence in Anna’s large, pretty chamber where she was always free to go.
Entering the room, she started at sight of a figure on the bed. As she saw that it was Anna and that her face was buried in the pillow, her heart grew cold. What had happened. Or hadn’t anything happened? Was it that, all the while the girl was devoted to other interests than her own, some secret sorrow was eating at her heart?