Читать книгу Miss Bishop - Bess Streeter Aldrich - Страница 9

Table of Contents

In that second year of Ella’s teaching, Chester Peters, having finished his school work, was at home and in the law office with his father. Judge Peters took occasion to tell any one who would listen what a brilliant chap Chester was and how he would make of the law a thing of truth and beauty. He never said much about Sam, eggs and flour and salt mackerel evidently not conforming to his ideas of either beauty or truth. Irene Van Ness had a new fur coat, sealskin with mink trimming, a long row of dangling tails around the shoulders and hips, and a mink cap to match. People thought surely Chester would marry her now that he was settling down, and Irene fully shared the desire.

Ella felt sorry for her, could not conceive of a half-hearted romance like that,—was soon to know more about one.

It was a cold Friday night in November. It had snowed all day and now the whiteness of the drifts lay over college and campus, town and prairie. There was a concert in the college auditorium given by the new glee club,—the Euterpeans, they modestly called themselves,—the proceeds to go to the library fund. But at the supper hour, Ella had given up going. “To have a sore throat any night is bad enough,” she said irritably to her mother, “but to have it on Friday night with a concert on is a disgrace. This is the first thing I’ve ever missed.”

But she would not listen to her mother’s timid statement about giving up the concert too. “The Peterses will come for you as they expected, so you go just the same. I’ll help you get ready.”

Mrs. Bishop was only in her forties, but to have been forty-six in the eighties was to have been an old woman. She wore a heavy black wool dress, a thick black cape with jet-bead passementerie trimming, a black velvet bonnet with a flat crêpe bow on top and wide crêpe ties under her chin.

Judge and Mrs. Peters came for her, the high-stepping blacks tossing their manes and jangling their sleigh-bells vigorously the few moments they were forced to stand at the horse-block.

After they had gone, Ella took some medicine, gargled with salt and water, rubbed goose-grease and turpentine on her throat and pinned a wide piece of red flannel around that offended part of her anatomy.

For a little while she read in her bedroom by the warmth of the sheet-iron drum, then deciding childishly to make some maple candy, she descended to the kitchen. When she had carried the pan of melted maple sugar back upstairs, she opened her bedroom window to get a plate of snow upon which to drop spoonsful of the hot concoction. It was a favorite confection of the times—these hardened balls of maple candy. The cold wind blew in and the carbon street lights flickered. There was no snow within reaching distance and so while Reason told her that she was doing a foolish thing, Desire caused her to throw a crocheted shawl around her shoulders and step out onto the roof.

As she turned to go in, the window slipped down with a noisy crashing sound. She was at the glass in a moment attempting to raise it, but it would not budge.

At first she worked frantically at the sash, and then when she realized the seriousness of the situation, with more dogged deliberation.

The cold was penetrating and she drew the shawl tightly about her and tied it in a knot in order to work with the stubborn window. When it still would not yield, she thought of summoning some near neighbor. But there were no lights at either house.

She walked gingerly to the very edge of the slippery roof and considered jumping. “Yes, and break my ankles,” she thought, “and then faint away from the pain and be covered with snow when Mother comes home. She’d think I was the woodpile.” She grinned nervously and shivered.

So this was the way they all felt, was it—Babes in the Woods—Princes in the Tower—and she on the kitchen roof?

Something clammy lighted on her nose. It was beginning to snow again. She let out a lusty and prolonged “Hoo-hoo-oo.” No answer came from any source on the deserted street but a mocking echo. She began to shiver again and a cough strangled in her throat.

She hurried back to the window and beat with her fists but the glass would not yield. If she had only left on her sturdy shoes instead of wearing the soft woolen homemade slippers, she could have sent one flying through the pane.

But even as she grew desperate with genuine fright she could hear some one coming up the street, crunching along over the snow-packed sidewalk. As he passed under the carbon street-lamp she could see that he carried a valise.

“Hoo-hoo,” she called loudly, “will you please stop a moment?”

The man slowed immediately, and when she called again, he came across the street and then through the snowdrifts of the yard, stepping along with high striding walk. “What is it?” he asked. “What’s wanted?”

Ella could not recognize him in the semidarkness, and decided that he was a visiting stranger, but in her desperation would have accosted President Arthur himself.

“I’m terribly sorry to bother you—and highly ashamed of my predicament—but I’m trapped out here on the roof for doing such a silly thing as stepping out here to get a pan of snow. The window slipped down behind me. I’ve tried to break the glass—I thought glass was supposed to be fragile—and I’m certainly not a weakling—but I can’t even crack it.”

The young chap laughed and put down on the steps the valise he had been holding all the time. By the faint glimmer of the street-lamp he looked big and substantial.

“Where can I get a ladder?”

“There’s one in the barn, just inside the door on the wall to your right.”

He strode off to the barn and Ella could see the flare of a match against the darkness and hear Polly snort and rise to her feet. When he returned, he was holding the ladder balanced across his shoulder. With no word he placed it in a snowdrift by the kitchen wall and held it firmly.

“Come on,” he called. “But be careful.”

When she was half-way down, one of the slimsy cloth slippers dropped.

“See here,” he said suddenly, “you can’t walk in this deep snow. I’m going to carry you around to that porch.”

“Oh, no—thank you. I’ll manage.” She felt shy, ashamed of her loose, flapping wrapper now that she was part way down and near the strange young man. “Besides, I have goose-grease and turpentine on my throat,—and it’s smelly....”

At that he threw back his head and laughed good-naturedly, and for answer picked her off the ladder with no comment and rounded the corner of the kitchen where he set her on her feet in the porch between the cistern-pump and a washtub. For that short distance, she had not been able to see his face distinctly. There had been only time for a fleeting impression of his big cold overcoat and his muscular strength,—and a certain queer sense of liking his personality. She wondered vaguely with swift questioning if it were true—that one radiated personality like that—so that another could tell—even about a stranger—and in the dark—

“Thank you so much for your trouble.”

“It was a good thing I happened along or you might have had a sorry time. Even yet, you’d better go take a sweat,” he advised solemnly.

“And quinine and white pine and tar and molasses and onions and sulphur.” Her voice cracked a little. And they both laughed.

“Now that the rescue is accomplished, can you tell me hurriedly where Judge Peters lives?”

Ella pointed out the big brick house where the iron deer stood on frozen guard in the snowdrifts.

“I see. Chet has been my roommate—and I’m here to go in the law office with him and his father.”

“Oh, how nice,” Ella said almost before she realized. Nice for whom, Ella? It gave her a warm friendly feeling toward the young man.

“Well,” he held out his hand, “Delbert Thompson is the name of the gallant fireman.”

“Ella Bishop,” she gave him her own cold one, responding cordially: “I teach in the college here—Midwestern.”

“You?” He was incredulous. “I thought you were a little girl—with your hair in a thick braid down your back that way.”

“No.” And she sang slightly:

“The heavenward jog

Of the pedagogue

Is the only life for me.”

They both laughed—it seemed very easy to laugh with the pleasant young man—and then he was gone, crunching along the snow paths with his valise. And Ella went into the house quite distinctly aglow with a peculiar new sensation.

When Mrs. Bishop came, Ella told her all about the funny experience, and Mrs. Bishop was terribly upset,—the exposure to the cold and the trusting of her girl to the clutches of an utter stranger that way. But try as she might in her little fluttered and frightened way, she could not seem to arouse her daughter to the enormity of the danger in which she had been. Indeed, when that daughter was dropping to sleep later, all swathed up in a fat pork poultice after a mustard foot bath, she was thinking she wished she could have seen the young man’s face. “I could see how tall he was ... and his broad shoulders,” she thought, “but try as I would, I couldn’t quite see his face.” And then, suddenly, the familiarity of the words were so startling that all drowsiness left her. For a long time she lay staring into the darkness of the night, thinking of the rest of the prophecy she had made to Sam: “But some way I feel sure, Sam, that I will know him right away when I first see him.”

When finally she was dropping off, she dreamed of weaving a tapestry on the kitchen roof, but she was so cold that she must weave in the center of the picture a great deal of red firelight—and—a little cottage—and children—