Читать книгу Turn About Eleanor - Ethel M. Kelley - Страница 4

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A child in a faded tam-o’-shanter that had once been baby blue, and a shoddy coat of a glaring, unpropitious newness, was sitting uncomfortably on the edge of a hansom seat, and gazing soberly out at the traffic of Fifth Avenue.

The young man beside her, a blond, sleek, narrow-headed youth in eye-glasses, was literally making conversation with her. That is, he was engaged in a palpable effort to make conversation—to manufacture out of the thin crisp air of that November morning and the random impressions of their progress up the Avenue, something with a general resemblance to tête-à-tête dialogue as he understood it. He was succeeding only indifferently.

“See, Eleanor,” he pointed brightly with his stick to the flower shop they were passing, “see 2 that building with the red roof, and all those window boxes. Don’t you think those little trees in pots outside look like Christmas trees? Sometimes when your Aunts Beulah and Margaret and Gertrude, whom you haven’t met yet—though you are on your way to meet them, you know—sometimes when they have been very good, almost good enough to deserve it, I stop by that little flower shop and buy a chaste half dozen of gardenias and their accessories, and divide them among the three.”

“Do you?” the child asked, without wistfulness. She was a good child, David Bolling decided,—a sporting child, willing evidently to play when it was her turn, even when she didn’t understand the game at all. It was certainly a new kind of game that she would be so soon expected to play her part in,—a rather serious kind of game, if you chose to look at it that way.

David himself hardly knew how to look at it. He was naturally a conservative young man, who had been brought up by his mother to behave as simply as possible on all occasions, and to avoid the conspicuous as tacitly and tactfully as one avoids a new disease germ. His native point of 3 view, however, had been somewhat deflected by his associations. His intimate circle consisted of a set of people who indorsed his mother’s decalogue only under protest, and with the most stringent reservations. That is, they were young and healthy, and somewhat overcharged with animal spirits, and their reactions were all very intense and emphatic.

He was trying at this instant to look rather more as if he were likely to meet one of his own friends than one of his mother’s. His mother’s friends would not have understood his personal chaperonage of the shabby little girl at his elbow. Her hair was not even properly brushed. It looked frazzled and tangled; and at the corner of one of her big blue eyes, streaking diagonally across the pallor in which it was set, was a line of dirt,—a tear mark, it might have been, though that didn’t make the general effect any less untidy, David thought; only a trifle more uncomfortably pathetic. She was a nice little girl, that fact was becoming more and more apparent to David, but any friend of his mother’s would have wondered, and expressed him or herself as wondering, why in the name of all sensitiveness he had not taken a taxicab, 4 or at least something in the nature of a closed vehicle, if he felt himself bound to deliver in person this curious little stranger to whatever mysterious destination she was for.

“I thought you’d like a hansom, Eleanor, better than a taxi-cab, because you can see more. You’ve never been in this part of New York before, I understand.”

“No, sir.”

“You came up from Colhassett last Saturday, didn’t you? Mrs. O’Farrel wrote to your grandmother to send you on to us, and you took the Saturday night boat from Fall River.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you travel alone, Eleanor?”

“A friend of Grandpa’s came up on the train with me, and left me on the vessel. He told the colored lady and gentleman to see if I was all right,—Mr. Porter and Mrs. Steward.”

“And were you all right?” David’s eyes twinkled.

“Yes, sir.”

“Not sea sick, nor homesick?”

The child’s fine-featured face quivered for a second, then set again into impassive stoic lines, and left David wondering whether he had witnessed 5 a vibration of real emotion, or the spasmodic twitching of the muscles that is so characteristic of the rural public school.

“I wasn’t sea sick.”

“Tell me about your grandparents, Eleanor.” Then as she did not respond, he repeated a little sharply, “Tell me about your grandparents, won’t you?”

The child still hesitated. David bowed to the wife of a Standard Oil director in a passing limousine, and one of the season’s prettiest débutantes, who was walking; and because he was only twenty-four, and his mother was very, very ambitious for him, he wondered if the tear smudge on the face of his companion had been evident from the sidewalk, and decided that it must have been.

“I don’t know how to tell,” the child said at last, “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I don’t want you to say anything in particular, just in general, you know.”

David stuck. The violet eyes were widening with misery, there was no doubt about it. “Game, clean through,” he said to himself. Aloud he continued. “Well, you know, Eleanor.—Never say ‘Well,’ if you can possibly avoid it, because it’s a flagrant 6 Americanism, and when you travel in foreign parts you’re sure to regret it,—well, you know, if you are to be in a measure my ward—and you are, my dear, as well as the ward of your Aunts Beulah and Margaret and Gertrude, and your Uncles Jimmie and Peter—I ought to begin by knowing a little something of your antecedents. That is why I suggested that you tell me about your grandparents. I don’t care what you tell me, but I think it would be very suitable for you to tell me something. Are they native Cape Codders? I’m a New Englander myself, you know, so you may be perfectly frank with me.”

“They’re not summer folks,” the child said. “They just live in Colhassett all the year round. They live in a big white house on the depot road, but they’re so old now, they can’t keep it up. If it was painted it would be a real pretty house.”

“Your grandparents are not very well off then?”

The child colored. “They’ve got lots of things,” she said, “that Grandfather brought home when he went to sea, but it was Uncle Amos that sent them the money they lived on. When he died they didn’t have any.”

“How long has he been dead?”

“Two years ago Christmas.” 7

“You must have had some money since then.”

“Not since Uncle Amos died, except for the rent of the barn, and the pasture land, and a few things like that.”

“You must have had money put away.”

“No,” the little girl answered. “We didn’t. We didn’t have any money, except what came in the way I said. We sold some old-fashioned dishes, and a little bit of cranberry bog for twenty-five dollars. We didn’t have any other money.”

“But you must have had something to live on. You can’t make bricks without straw, or grow little girls up without nourishing food in their tummies.” He caught an unexpected flicker of an eyelash, and realized for the first time that the child was acutely aware of every word he was saying, that even his use of English was registering a poignant impression on her consciousness. The thought strangely embarrassed him. “We say tummies in New York, Eleanor,” he explained hastily. “It’s done here. The New England stomick, however, is almost entirely obsolete. You’ll really get on better in the circles to which you are so soon to be accustomed if you refer to it in my own simple fashion;—but to return to our muttons, Eleanor, which is French for 8 getting down to cases, again, you must have had something to live on after your uncle died. You are alive now. That would almost seem to prove my contention.”

“We didn’t have any money, but what I earned.”

“But—what you earned. What do you mean, Eleanor?”

The child’s face turned crimson, then white again. This time there was no mistaking the wave of sensitive emotion that swept over it.

“I worked out,” she said. “I made a dollar and a half a week running errands, and taking care of a sick lady vacations, and nights after school. Grandma had that shock, and Grandpa’s back troubled him. He tried to get work but he couldn’t. He did all he could taking care of Grandma, and tending the garden. They hated to have me work out, but there was nobody else to.”

“A family of three can’t live on a dollar and a half a week.”

“Yes, sir, they can, if they manage.”

“Where were your neighbors all this time, Eleanor? You don’t mean to tell me that the good, kindly people of Cape Cod would have stood by and 9 let a little girl like you support a family alone and unaided. It’s preposterous.”

“The neighbors didn’t know. They thought Uncle Amos left us something. Lots of Cape Cod children work out. They thought that I did it because I wanted to.”

“I see,” said David gravely.

The wheel of their cab became entangled in that of a smart delivery wagon. He watched it thoughtfully. Then he took off his glasses, and polished them.

“Through a glass darkly,” he explained a little thickly. He was really a very young young man, and once below the surface of what he was pleased to believe a very worldly and cynical manner, he had a profound depth of tenderness and human sympathy.

Then as they jogged on through the Fifty-ninth Street end of the Park, looking strangely seared and bereft from the first blight of the frost, he turned to her again. This time his tone was as serious as her own.

“Why did you stop working out, Eleanor?” he asked. 10

“The lady I was tending died. There wasn’t nobody else who wanted me. Mrs. O’Farrel was a relation of hers, and when she came to the funeral, I told her that I wanted to get work in New York if I could,—and then last week she wrote me that the best she could do was to get me this place to be adopted, and so—I came.”

“But your grandparents?” David asked, and realized almost as he spoke that he had his finger on the spring of the tragedy.

“They had to take help from the town.”

The child made a brave struggle with her tears, and David looked away quickly. He knew something of the temper of the steel of the New England nature; the fierce and terrible pride that is bred in the bone of the race. He knew that the child before him had tasted of the bitter waters of humiliation in seeing her kindred “helped” by the town. “Going out to work,” he understood, had brought the family pride low, but taking help from the town had leveled it to the dust.

“There is, you know, a small salary that goes with this being adopted business,” he remarked casually a few seconds later. “Your Aunts Gertrude and Beulah and Margaret, and your three stalwart uncles 11 aforesaid, are not the kind of people who have been brought up to expect something for nothing. They don’t expect to adopt a perfectly good orphan without money and without price, merely for the privilege of experimentation. No, indeed, an orphan in good standing of the best New England extraction ought to exact for her services a salary of at least fifteen dollars a month. I wouldn’t consent to take a cent less, Eleanor.”

“Wouldn’t you?” the child asked uncertainly. She sat suddenly erect, as if an actual burden had been dropped from her shoulders. Her eyes were not violet, David decided, he had been deceived by the depth of their coloring; they were blue, Mediterranean blue, and her lashes were an inch and a half long at the very least. She was not only pretty, she was going to be beautiful some day. A strange premonition struck David of a future in which this long-lashed, stoic baby was in some way inextricably bound.

“How old are you?” he asked her abruptly.

“Ten years old day before yesterday.”

They had been making their way through the Park; the searer, yellower Park of late November. It looked duller and more cheerless than David ever 12 remembered it. The leaves rattled on the trees, and the sun went down suddenly.

“This is Central Park,” he said. “In the spring it’s very beautiful here, and all the people you know go motoring or driving in the afternoon.”

He bowed to his mother’s milliner in a little French runabout. The Frenchman stared frankly at the baby blue tam-o’-shanter and the tangled golden head it surmounted.

“Joseph could make you a peachy tam-o’-shanter looking thing of blue velvet; I’ll bet I could draw him a picture to copy. Your Uncle David, you know, is an artist of a sort.”

For the first time since their incongruous association began the child met his smile; her face relaxed ever so little, and the lips quivered, but she smiled a shy, little dawning smile. There was trust in it and confidence. David put out his hand to pat hers, but thought better of it.

“Eleanor,” he said, “my mother knows our only living Ex-president, and the Countess of Warwick, one Vanderbilt, two Astors, and she’s met Sir Gilbert Parker, and Rudyard Kipling. She also knows many of the stars and satellites of upper Fifth Avenue. She has, as well, family connections of so 13 much weight and stolidity that their very approach, singly or in conjunction, shakes the earth underneath them.—I wish we could meet them all, Eleanor, every blessed one of them.”

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