Читать книгу Miss Bishop - Bess Streeter Aldrich - Страница 11

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Mrs. Bishop kept wiping her eyes and sighing. When Ella had stared at the little pink and fragrant epistle for a long moment, her mother asked helplessly: “Oh, Ella, what ... do you ... what shall we do?”

“Do?” Ella was suddenly all briskness and decision. “There’s just one thing to do. Send her some money and tell her to come on.”

“Oh, Ella ... with you going to get married. You’re such ... you’re a good girl. First, you have me ... on your hands ... your newly married life ... and now little Amy.”

Ella’s eyes wavered away from her mother’s. “I was just thinking, Mother, now that it’s turned out this way—Amy coming—maybe you and she could live here together. Delbert and I could get rooms—down town, in the building above Judge Peters’ office. She’d look after you, you know, and I would be so close to come if I were needed.”

That old childish look of fright came into her mother’s moist eyes. “To leave Mamma, Ella? To leave me behind ... when ... I might ... at best I may have only a year or two more ...”

It moved Ella as it always did. Impatient she might feel, but one sight of that little delicate figure shrinking into its shroud of fear, and Ella was always on her knees, her strong young arms around it.

“Don’t think about it any more, Mother. I’ll manage you both somehow.”

When she told Delbert about Amy’s coming, he was not overly enthusiastic.

“Not that I should be the one to object, Ella dear,—your own house—and I just moving in. I can’t quite swallow my pride yet about that. Some day, don’t you forget, I’m going to be the one to furnish you with a new home. It will have colored fan-shaped lights over all the doors and windows,—and a black marble fireplace and this new walnut grill-work between all the rooms.”

It pleased Ella. She loved that ambitious side of him,—those plans he always made for their future. It would be nice to have some one upon whom to lean. In all her twenty-two years she had never known the time when she could shift responsibility,—do anything but stand erect on her own two feet.

He caught her to him now, his flushed face against her own cool one, his kisses hot on her lips. “To think I’m to live with you ... in the same house ... the same room ...”

“Delbert!” She drew back, a little shy as always. Never yet had she felt entirely responsive to those warm impulsive caresses. Just now he chided her for it. “You’re an iceberg, Ella. You don’t love me.”

“Oh, yes, yes, Delbert,—I do! How I love you. You don’t know! But ... give me ... time. Let me....” She could not finish.

How could she tell him that love was such a fine thing, so exquisite, that she wanted to hold it in her heart awhile as one gloats over a pearl—or glories in the beauty of a rose—before wearing it? Sometimes—she wondered vaguely—if Delbert could quite understand that love was something infinitely more lovely, something far more delicate than the mere physical. Then in sheer anger at her disloyalty she would put the thought from her.

There was just time to get the third bedroom upstairs ready for the young cousin before her arrival. Mrs. Bishop’s room was on the first floor, and there had never been any reason to furnish the third one upstairs which had been used as a storeroom.

But now Ella went back to the cleaning with only a few nights after school and one Saturday left in which to finish. She put the hat-boxes and her father’s army equipment down in the cellar, papered and painted and hung up fresh curtains, and took her own best bedroom chair into the cousin’s room.

As she worked, her interest in preparing for the guest overcame her resentment at that which had seemed at first like intrusion. “Poor little thing,” she thought,—“left an orphan,—my own little cousin Amy ... and I not willing to share a roof with her.”

Irene’s charade party was to be on Friday night, and it was just possible that Amy would get to Oak River in time to attend it, Ella thought, and decided it would be a nice way to initiate her into local society.

It turned out that it happened just that way. Amy was getting in on the four o’clock train from the east on Friday. Ella left school early. Delbert came and hitched up Polly and they were at the station long before the steam whistle sounded down the road. The train was a half-hour late—there had been cows on the track and the trainmen had been compelled to get out and extricate one from a trestle, the conductor said when he swung down from the coach. He appeared to show quite a solicitous attitude toward the girl as she came down the car steps. Evidently they had become rather good friends on the ride out.

Amy was lovely, Ella admitted that to herself. She was small-boned, softly rounded, the delicate pink of her flesh the texture of a baby’s. Her wide eyes, too, were child-like in their blue candor. She wore a little gray dolman trimmed with baby blue, and a little stiff gray hat with blue cornflowers on it. It gave her the appearance of a soft little turtle dove, with a blue ruff. And she was fragrant with the scent of her letter—something that reminded Ella vaguely of the cloying sweetness of waxy-white mayflowers.

Also she was a helpless sort of little thing, Ella could see. She was not sure of anything,—her baggage, her checks, her way about. Delbert looked after everything for her and she thanked him so prettily that he flushed with pleasure.

“She makes me think of a kitten,” he told Ella afterward, “a fluffy little kitten.”

What was it Delbert had once said about kittens? Oh, yes, she remembered,—they were all right to flirt with—She put the thought quickly from her mind.

After supper, Delbert came for the girls and the three walked through the soft April night to the charade party at Irene Van Ness’s home. The big house was bright from top to bottom,—hanging lamps with glass pendants and side lamps in brackets on the walls gave forth their limit of light. The heavy walnut furniture, the dark chenille portières, the thick-flowered Brussels carpet, and the Nottingham lace curtains, all looked rich in the night lights. Silver gleamed on the sideboard, and one caught whiffs of chicken and oysters when the kitchen door swung back. It was rumored that Mr. Van Ness had even ordered Sam Peters to send to Florida for a box of oranges.

Irene had on a new rich plum-colored satin—square cut in the front, from which her neck rose scrawnily, her dull complexion challenged by the purplish shade of the dress.

When Ella came downstairs with Amy, she was plainly aware of the admiring whispers that went around. Amy did look lovely—“bewitching” Chester Peters said before every one, so that Irene flushed a little. She wore pink silk, her plump form squeezed into the hour-glass shape which was the mode of the day, the low-cut front revealing the milky whiteness of her flesh. Her hair was a high mass of yellow curls through which a black ribbon was drawn, the one touch of mourning for her recent loss. Her wide blue eyes stared at the new-found friends with babyish candor. She had the merest suggestion of an impediment in her speech which certain of the young bloods there seemed to find quite entrancing, as they formed a little circle around her almost immediately.

At the end of the evening of charades and singing around the piano, a few dancing games, and the consumption of much rich food, there was no little rivalry over seeing Amy home. Chet Peters high-handedly won her promise, but when he was waiting at the foot of the stairs for her, Delbert tried to put him off with a curt: “No, you don’t. I brought her and I’ll see to her myself.” Chet, however, won his point and carried Amy off into the warm spring moonlight.

When they left, Ella could see that Irene was making an ineffectual attempt to keep back the tears.

In the days that followed, the whole crowd knew that Chet Peters was quite mad about Amy Saunders. It worried Ella to the depths, to a great measure spoiled the days which should have been so happy. Irene was her best friend and was now too hurt to come to see her. It all made an upsetting state of affairs.

“Oh, why did she have to come just now?” Ella sometimes said to her mother.

But her mother was vague, uncertain what to say, could only look to Ella for decisions on the subject.

And Amy? Sometimes she went with him as coolly as any woman of the world and sometimes she clung to Delbert and Ella as though she were a child and afraid of Chet’s ardent wooing. Ella could not read the girl clearly. Was she too young and innocent to know her own mind? Did she honestly dislike Chester? Or was she assuming a virtue when she had it not?

“I like him,” she said one day to them both, her blue eyes wide and soft and child-like. And added with engaging candor, “But I like Delbert better.” And to Ella, with a half-sad little smile: “You’re the one I envy.”

She said it so prettily that Delbert flushed with pleasure.

Ella scarcely knew what to say. Among all the girls of her acquaintance in her four school years,—among all the girls in the classes of her two teaching years,—she had not known one quite like Amy. She was so sweet, so guileless,—and yet,—This time, instead of vague Mrs. Bishop, it was Ella, herself, who could not finish a sentence.