Читать книгу Under the Law - Edwina Stanton Babcock - Страница 6

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OTHER LAWS

Two years of college had done little to affect Sard Bogart's life. True, those two years she had trodden the athletic-social paths of the American academic experience gaily, then the death of her mother called her home. Her father's appeal made on the stark, lonely night after the funeral had created circumstances she had met four-square. From that time on, Sard, with youthful heroism, had seen her life cut out for her. She was to run the home and "keep things bright" for her father.

There was also the Judge's sister, Miss Aurelia, of the age always in conjecture, and of a curious beauty that made poetry of an otherwise ineffective personality. Miss Aurelia's small head was covered with swathes of vital auburn hair, her delicate skin had porcelain pinks and whites, and her soft eyes and slim frame were of a curious suggestive quality that only needed force and will to make her a vibrant, seductive human creature. But this force and will were lacking. Miss Aurelia had been reared altogether on the "ladylike" plan. So while there was no look of wear and tear on her, no wrinkles on her face, no gray in her hair, and while her teeth were even, with the effect of crowding her pursy mouth, yet all these signs and colors of her spoke of untried, untested things; there was an eternal insecurity in her rabbity chin, her soft apologetic voice, the tentatives of her conversational method.

It was said in the village that Miss Aurelia "presided" over her brother's house, and that Sard "ran" it. However, there was no friction between the two. Sard accepted Miss Aurelia with the same devotion that she tended her mother's giant fuchsia, an unnecessary trellised crime of thousands of purple and red flowers, and refrained from sending away the chromos that her father loved.

"The—er—telephone, my dear," Miss Aurelia came softly up to Sard's tower room, "sorry to call you but the—er—person—long distance—don't you ever find it confusing?—I—they—she—the operator."

"Did you get the name?" asked Sard. "Is it Minga Gerould?"

Miss Aurelia wondered if it was, paused, hesitated, then, "Your curtains certainly do need freshening. I never noticed it before. Yes, I think it may be Minga. She—it—sounded husky, long distance, perhaps, I—they seldom speak distinctly; the—er—operator was extraordinarily uncivil,"—Miss Reely pursed her rabbity mouth, "She—I——"

"Thanks, Aunt Reely, yes, the curtains do need laundering." Sard was out of the room and down the stairs, the receiver at her ear. "Minga! you rascal! Well, I am glad! Why didn't you write me, you little trimmer—— No, ma'am, I did not—did you? Was it nice? No, but I saw Cynthia and Gertrude, they're back, bobbed hair and golf-sticks, bloom of youth is their line this year. What are you laughing at? No—is he?—to Cora Bland? Wasn't that like Cora—she's going to finish? I wish I were—why? Oh, that'll keep! Well, Cora is a good all 'round sport, don't you think? She'll make Alpha, you see if she doesn't—— What? Oh, Minga, don't ring off! That's so, of course you have to pack; all right then—see you to-night—so glad you are coming, don't forget to sit on the right-hand side of the train coming up, the river's wonderful as you come over the hill. Bye-bye."

Sard, smiling, hung up the receiver. Not until this, the first visit of a college pal since her mother's death, had she felt her hunger for real companionship. Now as she had done the first day she had left off her simple mourning, she looked up at the portrait of her mother hanging in the hall. She kissed her hand to that curly, ear-ringed little lady. "Dear little dead Mother," said Sard tenderly. "Dear little dead Mother!" Instinctively she thought about the mothers of the other girls of the town. Mrs. Bradon, Cynthia's mother, fat, stupid and conventional. Gertrude's mother, a hard practical woman with ambitions, the other mothers as Sard knew them seemed too girlish, crude, trivial, beside the little soft, curly, ear-ringed lady that Sard had only just begun to look at with woman eyes. "Would we have gotten on, Mother dear, would we?" whispered Sard, wistfully. "The other girls don't with their mothers."

Often Sard had been troubled by the guilty feeling that had her mother lived—well, there might not have been so much comradeship between them. Sard, clad in her crisp, clean linen, with white low-cut shoes and the plain little pin at her trim collar, remembered with a sense of tender wonder all her mother's little fripperies and gewgaws, the chains, the laces, and little sets of jewelry and pins and dewdabs—how quickly two years of camp and college had taught one of how small account were these things!

It needed tenderness and humor, even that of a very young girl, to get any real human life into a home like the Bogart home. It had a stodgy gloom of its own, a solemn, gloomy importance like the Judge's step, his way of entering a room. The hall was dark, the wainscoting was dark, the ceilings were gummy with queer medallions and heavy, gemmy Georgian ornaments. Of late years there had been extra electric lights put in the hall and a fireplace added to the living-room. These things gave a little cheer, as did the brass candlesticks with the soft tawny or mellow colored candles of Sard's own choosing. There was distinguished silver in the dining-room and rows of heavenly blue and pink willow plates in the cupboards, just as there were graceful pieces of Majolica that burned their hot color into the dull respectability of the living and tea rooms, but these didn't help much. Sard often shook her head over it all. She would turn away from her mother's portrait to that of her father when a young man. The then unbearded face had a cold kind of virtue and strength, the uncovered mouth was prim and uncompromising. Could it be that Sard's home had somehow taken its color from that prim mouth, those hard gooseberry colored eyes? The girl went slowly to a mirror over the large fireplace in the living-room. She pushed into the sunlight a vase full of daffodils, the better to see her own face.

"Funny! Where did you come from?" she asked the girl in the mirror, then softly, as if it were almost shameful to ask this question, "What are your laws?"

The dark brown eyes looked wistfully at Sard; the forehead, a little high but square and harmonious, was swept with a wave of golden brown hair that crisped with vitality. The face seemed not interesting to the girl who questioned it. "If I had more of Mother I could do things with Father," she thought; "if I had little curls and earrings that shook, and dimples and queer little pudgy, patting hands. These do things to men—and women, too. I've seen it happen."

Sard thought of girls she knew, girls grown up with the new law, girls who finished at college, graduated into doctors, lawyers, landscape gardeners, statisticians, economists. She looked at her own hands, long, thin, strong in the wrists, broadened and browned from tennis, boating and golf and driving of machines. Sard, however, did not see in the mirror the thing that held the mystery of her life, the gift that would bring all that was rightfully hers to her. Do people ever think of this one gift of personality—for instance, the mouth that your pirate uncle sent down to you, that brought you the husband whom you had to leave to save your children; there is the shrug of your shoulders that came from your father's side—they did that, those people back of your father, and thus were able to throw off whole loads of care; that curved little finger goes with the sensitiveness of your mother's family. You will be hurt and raw from things all your life with that finger! Yes, but you will be also exultant, drunken, wild with the quintessence of beauty, of the mystery and wonder that is all through the dull, daily grind. Sard's unique gift was the poise of her head. Here was an imperious quality like that of a princess, here a curve of chin and backset of the shoulders which was at the same time elastic and defiant and challenging. A girl like this, of indomitable pride, curious nerve, wonders at some of the insults she receives from the thing this pride and nerve bring to life in others; also she is sometimes touched and wondering to find how others believe in and trust her.

Oh! our ancestors!—brave, struggling, dreaming, pathetic ancestors! How you struggled, how you prayed and agonized, or were wild and wanton to send your strange gifts down to us! Here's to you, Ancestors, all of you! May we send you the best and bravest of you on and as far as we can, we will do the best we can with your gifts!