Читать книгу The Carter Girls of Carter House - Emma Speed Sampson - Страница 6

Table of Contents

When Mrs. Carter returned from her luncheon party, all of her daughters, except Nan, tired from their various labors of the day, were seated in the library.

“I wish Nan would hurry up and come downstairs so we can tell her how well the shop looks since the partitions have been taken down,” said Helen, diving into her coat pocket for her ever present vanity box as she heard steps in the hallway.

“She got a letter, and in a terrible state of excitement dashed upstairs to read it. I suppose it is from Billy Sutton asking her to come up to V. M. I. for Thanksgiving,” hazarded Douglas.

Then Mrs. Carter entered the room, her arms full of the boxes with the wraps in them that had arrived from the shop a few minutes before she herself had come.

“Darlings,” she began smilingly, “I have been shopping, and look what I bought you!” Douglas and Helen cast distressed looks towards each other at the word shopping.

“We will have to take it back, whatever it is,” Helen whispered to Douglas, and her sister nodded in reply.

“The gold one is for Douglas and the old rose for you, Helen,” Mrs. Carter explained, holding up to view the two exquisite cloaks. And then before they had had time to catch their breaths from this one shock, their mother gathered her moleskin coat about her, which had escaped the girls’ notice in the twilit library, and pirouetting on her little patent leathered toes, exclaimed, “And see the wonderful bargain I got for myself! Only nine hundred and fifty dollars, and it is worth all of a thousand if it is worth a cent!”

“Ossa piled on Pelion,” thought Nan, who had come in unobserved and stood in the doorway. She hastily stuffed a long white envelope into the pocket of her suit and went over to put an arm around Douglas, who was as yet unable to say a word.

Helen had quietly left her chair, silently relieved her mother of the two beautiful evening wraps, and was intent upon putting them back unwrinkled in their boxes.

“Nan dear,” she said, “I think you would just have time to take these back to the store before it closes. I am sure if they are returned the day of purchase that we will have no trouble in having them credited to our account. The nine hundred and fifty dollar bargain of Mother’s we will of course be forced to keep as she has worn it. No doubt by hard work we girls can get it paid for in a few months. I would not ask you to do this, Nan, but Doug and I have been down at the shop all afternoon working like dogs and we are too tired to move.”

Helen took Douglas by the hand and together they left the room, ignoring Mrs. Carter.

“Nan, Nan!” fluttered Mrs. Carter. “What have I done? I thought the girls would be so pleased, and they never even said thank you, but bundled up those lovely things and swept out of the room like I was the dirt under their feet!”

“I am sure I can’t blame them but for one thing,” said Nan, and taking her mother gently by the shoulders, she forced her down on the Chesterfield, “and that is for not giving you the straight from the shoulder talking-to you deserve. Now I am going to do it.”

Nan brought a chair and placed it opposite her mother. “Of course, it is contrary to all rules of family etiquette for the children to lecture the parents, but you have shirked your responsibility so long that you have lost automatically, in my mind, any claim to the respect or the reverence that is usually attached to the station of parenthood.”

Seeing her mother hold up a ringed hand with a pretty affected gesture of defence, Nan continued sternly, in spite of the wild desire she had to laugh at the unusual situation and her own ridiculous, pedagogic diction. “No! I am not going to spare you one whit. I am going to tell you what you should have been told long ago. You have been like the Old Man of the Sea on our backs ever since Daddy’s illness began. You not only have not been a help to us but you have actually been a hindrance. I could find it in my heart to condone with you if you were feeble-minded, but I regret to say that you have at least the average intelligence; therefore it cannot be that you have not the wit to grasp the situation. You are simply a luxurious soul and crave physical and mental comfort to such an exaggerated degree that you are willing to maintain it at the expense of everyone else’s. You know you play an excellent game of bridge, and I have heard you discuss the latest novel with very good understanding. Therefore I can only think that it is your lack of feeling rather than your lack of sense that has caused you to behave in the thoroughly selfish way you have in these last years. Now, I am going to leave you here to think it over. I suppose you got the coat at Levinsky’s, as it is the most expensive place in town.”

Nan assured herself that this was the case by a hasty look at the label, and gathering up the boxes Helen had asked her to return, she left the house and a very subdued, crumpled little mother.

“Whew!” Nan said to herself as she hurried down the street, a big box under each arm. “I am glad that is over. I don’t like the role of a lecturer at all. ’Specially not when it is my cute little mother I am lecturing. But she certainly needed it. Unless I am very much mistaken, she likes to be admired so much that she will start to work and deserve some praise. Poor little thing, she thought she was bluffing us all the time; now she knows she wasn’t, she will have to start off on a new tack.”

“Hey, Nan,” cried a brisk voice, and Jeffrey Tucker, the twins’ ridiculously young father, ran back after the girl who had brushed past him without speaking, so absorbed was she in her silent soliloquy.

“Why, I didn’t see you at all,” Nan apologized, shaking his hand cordially.

“Here, let me take one of those boxes for you to wherever you are going,” Zebedee commanded, taking one of them from under her arm. “I am just out for a walk to keep my beautiful figure in trim, and if you don’t mind, I’ll just go with you.”

“I would love to have you come, but—” Nan hesitated then, as she remembered that she had once before taken the gay young parent of her friends into her confidence about the difficulty they were all having trying to convince their mother that they could not afford to have the unwilling Douglas make her debut, and that he had miraculously persuaded Mrs. Carter to give up this plan of hers.

“But, what?” said Mr. Tucker looking at her keenly.

“But nothing,” and slipping her free arm through his, Nan gently pulled him with her.

Nan explained why she was taking the boxes downtown, and then told her companion about the mole coat her mother had bought, and even about the lecture she had read to her mother,—at which they both laughed.

“Now I want to show you something,” she said, and pulled out the letter she had stuffed into her pocket on her entrance into the library at the dramatic moment. She opened it and in the late twilight read the following:

Miss Annette Carter,

Richmond, Virginia.

My dear Miss Carter:

It is with great pleasure that we inform you of your victory in our short story contest for the thousand-dollar prize, check for which please find enclosed.

Your story ‘The Wonderful Wallet’ will appear in our next issue of —— Magazine.

We would consider it a favor for you to let us have first reading of any manuscript you may have on hand.

Yours truly, Contest Editor, —— Magazine.

“Nan, I am so proud of you, I can hardly stand it,” Zebedee said, openly wiping his eyes as it was a well-known fact that the Tuckers easily gave way to tears under stress of great emotion. “What did your family say?”

“They don’t know it. I had just gotten the letter and had taken it downstairs to read to them, when I butt in on all this mess about the fur coat and these beautiful, silly wraps. I thought I wouldn’t say anything about it till I had payed for Mother’s coat at Levinsky’s. Douglas and Helen wouldn’t let me do it if they knew, so I thought I would do it and then tell about it when it was too late to prevent me,” Nan explained, putting the letter and the opportune check once more into her coat pocket.

“You certainly are one peach of a kid, Nan!” said Zebedee. “We’ll have to take my harum scarums and Page Allison and your sisters and any males we can find and go out to the club for dinner and a dance to celebrate for you. I’ll phone out to them to reserve us a table for twenty while you are returning these wraps,” and Zebedee began to prance involuntarily at the prospect of the fun he knew would be forthcoming.

“I accept for us all and will guarantee to have the others break any engagements they may have.” Nan smiled at him happily.

“I did not know you wrote things, Nan,” said Zebedee, who was a newspaper man and tremendously interested in things literary.

“I don’t think anybody else did, either. My family always thought when they saw me ‘slinging the ink and pushing the pen along’ that I was writing to the rather numerous people I correspond with. I just let them think that, as it saved explanation, and somehow you don’t mind rejection slips from magazines if you are the only person who knows about them. This story was sent back from two magazines before it was fortunate enough to win this prize. It was about Gwen and her father’s wallet,—you remember about that up at camp, don’t you? Of course I had a good deal about the mountain customs and some rather amusing stuff about Josephus and Josh in it. I imagine its chief merit lay in its simplicity.”

“Humor is as a rule salable and from the fact that Josh and Josephus had a place in it I can well imagine that it was amusing,” Zebedee said, beaming down upon his little friend.

Nan had no trouble in returning the wraps, and Mr. Tucker, meanwhile, was able to arrange for the party at the club that night.

“We just will be able to make it to Levinsky’s before it closes. It is five minutes to six now,” Nan said breathlessly as they hurried along.

“Well then, we are perfectly safe, if I know the race. Levinsky wouldn’t risk losing a sale by closing a minute too soon even if the possible sale was nothing but a hook and eye.”

In a very few minutes Nan had endorsed her check and put it into the eager hands of the smiling, suave Levinsky, and she and Zebedee were on their way home in a jitney.

“If that magazine had sent me that money tied up in little bags of fifty centses and quarters I could never have given it up so cheerfully,” observed Nan rather whimsically. As it is, I just feel like I had made fifty dollars.”

And Nan patted affectionately the five ten-dollar bills Levinsky had given her as the change from her thousand-dollar check.