Читать книгу Found Treasure (Musaicum Romance Classics) - Grace Livingston Hill - Страница 4

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Effie had cried perhaps half an hour. Hers was too vehement a nature to do things by halves, and her weeping was so violent that she was thoroughly exhausted. Then she lay still and began to think things over. Why was it that those girls disliked her and she seemed to be so unwelcome everywhere? For now that she thought of it, she saw there were quite a number of people in the world who did not care to have her around. Her mother loved her, she felt sure, but somehow her mother always sighed when she came into the room. Why was that? Was she not wanted in the world? She could not help it, she supposed, or could she? What the girls had said about some things was quite true, though she had never felt before they were things that mattered to others. If she wanted to bite her fingernails, what business was it of theirs? She never troubled their fingernails. She had a right to do with her own as she pleased, so long as she let other people’s alone. But here, it seemed, these personal habits of hers did trouble other people, and she must not expect to be wanted if she could not make herself pleasant. She looked at her stumpy fingers through her tear-dimmed eyes. They certainly did not look pretty. But it had never occurred to her that biting them had anything to do with that.

The girls had said she made them nervous. She hardly understood why, but if it was so, why, of course, it was. The question was, could she stop doing it? And if she could, and should, would that make any difference in the feelings of those girls for her? But then, she did not intend to try to please those girls! No, indeed! They were not worth pleasing. But there were people in the world to whom she would like to seem lovely—her mother, for instance, and perhaps Flora Garner, for she had been nice and sweet about asking to have her invited to the ride. Everybody said Flora Garner was sweet. She had that reputation wherever she was known. It was a great thing to have people feel that way about you and say nice things. And then her poor, swollen cheeks burned again at the thought of the hateful things that had been said about her. But would it be worthwhile to try to make things better, so that people might think well of her? A fierce desire to get on her bicycle and fly away into the gathering shades of the dusky night that was drawing on seized her. It was suppertime, but she wanted no supper. She would go, and she jerked herself up from the bed, caught her hat, and without waiting to wash the tearstains from her face, dashed downstairs. It was like her. Effie always did everything without thinking. As she went out the door, she heard her mother sigh and say to her baby brother, “Oh baby, baby, if you would only just sit still on the floor for ten minutes longer till I finish this seam. My back aches so that I cannot hold you and sew any longer.”

Effie went straight on out the door, feeling sorry for her mother, having a dim sense that the baby was unreasonable, and life hard, anyway. But it never occurred to her that she had anything to do with it until she was flying along the south road fully a mile from home, and the fresh breeze fanning her face had somewhat cooled the tempest in her heart. She was beginning to feel more like herself and trying to decide if there was any way in which she might change that would affect the feelings of others toward her. There was Mother, for instance, again—yes, Mother, sitting in the gathering shadows at this moment, stealing the last rays of light to sew the dark garment that she expected to wear on the morrow to pay her last tribute to a dear old school friend who was done with this life. Mother’s little excursions and holidays, somehow, were almost always set apart for last sad rites and duties of neighborly kindness. It was strange about Mother, how she never seemed to have any good times for her own. Effie never thought of it before. How nice it would be if Mother was on a bicycle, flying along by her side! But Mother on a bicycle! How funny it would be! She couldn’t learn to ride in the first place, she was so timid. And then how could she get time? She was at this minute doing two things at once, and that baby was very hard to take care of. It was hard that Mother couldn’t even get her dress done without being hindered. Well! There was something. Why had she not thought of that before?

She turned her bicycle so suddenly that a little dog that was trotting along in the road, thinking he knew just where Effie was going, almost got his tail cut off.

Back she flew faster than she had come, and bursting in the door, threw her hat on a chair and grabbed the baby from the floor at his mother’s feet, where he was vainly endeavoring to pull himself up to a standing posture by her skirt. Mrs. Martin gave a nervous jump as Effie entered, and another anxious “Oh, take care, Effie!” as the baby was tossed into the air. But Effie, intent on doing good for once in her life, was doing it as she did everything else: with a vengeance, and she went on tossing the baby higher and higher, regardless of her mother’s protests. Each crow of the baby made Effie more eager to amuse him. She whirled around the room with him in her arms, tumbling over a chair occasionally, but not minding that in the least. She danced along to the middle of the room under the gas fixture, and just as her mother rose hastily and dropped her sewing, saying, “Effie, I insist—” she tossed the excited baby high into the air and brought the curly head sharp against the chandelier. Then the fun ceased. The baby screamed, and the mother rushed and caught him to her breast, and with reproachful looks at the penitent Effie, sent for hot water and Pond’s Extract. The others coming in gathered around the darling of the house and hesitated not to reproach Effie for her part in the mischief until her anger flamed forth. Seeing that the baby had recovered and was apparently not seriously injured, she rushed from the room to her own in another torrent of weeping. This time she knelt before the open window and watched the lights through her tears, as they peeped out here and there over the village, and felt bitter toward them and toward everything. Why should she be the one always to blame for everything that happened? Here she had given up her ride when she was having a good time, and had come home to help Mother and was greeted only with an exclamation of fear, and then this had happened—a thing that might have happened if he had been with any of the others, she thought. She was scolded for what she had intended should be a relief and a help to Mother, and that was all the good she had done. Much progress she had made in her own reformation! She would not be likely to go on in it very far if this was the result of her first trial, and her heart grew hard and bitter again.

By and by, the dinner bell rang and she went sulkily down, took her place, and ate in silence until Eleanor, full of her afternoon, put another sting in the already very sad heart of her sister. It appeared that she had gone to the committee meeting at the Garner’s, probably after her sister had left the hedge.

“Mamma,” she said, with the haughtiness of her lately acquired young ladyhood, “I do wish you would reprove Effie. She is forever making herself obnoxious. I found out that she had been poking around trying to get in with our crowd. She’s nothing but a child!”

“It’s an awful pity you and Eff have to live in the same town with each other, Nell, she gives you so much trouble,” put in Johnnie, the outspoken younger brother.

“Johnnie, you’re very saucy, and that isn’t smart at all,” responded Eleanor, flattening her eyelids down in a way she had that she fancied was very reproving to her brother.

“Mamma, I wish you would tell Effie that you won’t allow her, under any circumstances, to go with us next week on our ride. She is getting very troublesome. I——”

But Eleanor was interrupted by Effie, whose black eyes flashed fire and tears as she rose from the table, her dinner only half finished.

“It isn’t in the least necessary for you to ask Mamma to do any such thing. I wouldn’t go if you dragged me! I know exactly every word those precious girls of yours have said about me this afternoon, and they are a mean, selfish lot, who care nothing about anything but clothes! I only hope you’ll enjoy the company of those who speak that way about your sister. I should not, not even if they had been talking about you. But you may rest easy about me; I won’t trouble you anymore. I’ve been made to understand most thoroughly that nobody in this world wants me. I’m sure I can’t tell what I was made for, anyway.” And with a voice that trembled with her utter humiliation and defeat, she stalked from the room, her lifted chin and haughty manner barely lasting till the dining-room door shut her from the family gaze, when she burst into uncontrolled tears and rushed upstairs for the third time that day to her own little room.

“Why, what does she mean, Eleanor?” asked the pained voice of the father, laying down the evening paper, behind which he had been somewhat shielded from the avalanche of talk around him. “What have you done to the child? Why hasn’t she as much right to go riding as the rest of you? I thought that was why we bought the seven-passenger car, so there would be plenty of room for anybody that wanted to go?”

“You don’t understand,” said Eleanor with reddening cheeks, and she attempted to explain to her father the fine distinctions of age and class in the society in which she moved. But somehow her father could not be made to understand, and the end of it was that Eleanor was told that if her sister was not welcomed on the ride, then she could not go. Rebellious and angrier than ever at Effie, she declared she would stay at home then. So it came about that the Martin household was not in a happy frame of mind that evening at the close of their evening meal. And the two sisters lay down to rest with hard thoughts of each other.

Effie, as she turned her light out, knelt a moment beside her window to look at the stars and murmur the form of prayer that had been so much a part of her bringing up that she scarcely realized what it all meant. “Help me to be good,” was one of the oft-repeated sentences, and Effie no longer felt it necessary for her thoughts to stay by to see that these words were spoken to the One above who was supposed to be her guard and guide. She fancied herself, on the whole, rather good as goodness in girls went. Now, to-night, as she finished her petition, which was rather a repetition, she looked up to the stars she loved and thought of a scrap of poetry she had picked up in her reading, which she was not well-enough taught to know was wonderful. It ran thus:

All that I know

Of a certain star

Is, it can throw

(Like the angled spar)

Now a dart of red,

Now a dart of blue;

Till my friends have said

They would fain see too,

My star that dartles the red and the blue!

Then it stops like a bird; like a flower hangs furled:

They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.

What matter to me if their star is a world?

Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.

Poor little, lonely, disagreeable Effie wished as she looked out into the night that she could be like that star and be able to dartle red and blue for someone, so that others might hear of it and want to see her and know her. How nice that would be! That star language evidently meant people, and it meant there was someone, somewhere who could see beauties in some star that everybody could not see. She wondered if ever anybody would think they saw anything good like dartles of red and blue in her, and would feel that they didn’t care after that whether other people’s worlds were great or not, so long as they had her red and blue dartles.

But how silly such thoughts were. If those hateful girls who had talked about her that afternoon had known she had thoughts like this, how they would have screeched with laughter! Her cheeks burned hotly in the darkness at the very thought, and she arose and slammed the window down, warm night though it was, and went to bed feeling utterly miserable. How was it possible for her ever to be different? She could not. She had tried that afternoon and failed most miserably, and she was not one who was likely to try again in the same direction.

Was there anywhere else to turn? Oh, if she but had some wise and good helper who would tell what was the matter, and if she must go on being hated all her life as she had begun.

Then the thought of what the girls had said about her clothes came and drowned all other thoughts, and she drifted off to sleep, planning how she would fix up an old dress that should be the envy of all the town.

Poor child, she was only a little girl yet at heart and was just waking up to the fact that she was growing up and a great deal more would be expected of her.

Perhaps her guardian angel standing by, remembering that she was dear to her heavenly Father, and knowing for a surety there was light coming to her darkened pathway, brushed the tears in pity from her young face, for she dreamed that a soft hand touched her forehead and cooled and comforted her.

But downstairs, Effie’s father and mother were having a serious conference about her.

“I’m sure I don’t know what to do with her,” her anxious mother was saying. “She grows more heartless and careless every day. to-day she nearly killed the baby with her impetuosity, and when I tried to stop her before she hit his head against the chandelier, she simply ignored my commands. I wonder if it would do any good to send her away to school. I never believed much in finishing schools, but Effie really needs something to tone her down. She goes rushing through life, without any idea of manners or any thought of others. I’m sure I don’t see how we came to have a child like that!”

“I am afraid nobody understands her,” said her father, with troubled brows. “She seems to me so much like my own little sister Euphemia for whom she is named, and she was a wild little loving thing like Effie, but she would fly up into flinders if people were unjust to her——”

“Nobody has been unjust to Effie,” said her mother coldly. “Everybody would love her if she would be less selfish and rude. I have tried to tell her but she doesn’t even seem to hear me. And Sam, she isn’t in the least like your sister Euphemia. She was mild and gentle and lovely, as I remember her. We should have named Effie Joan of Arc or some outlandish masculine name, for she never will be anything but a disgrace to your sister’s name, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, don’t say that Hester,” said the father in a pained voice. “I’m sure our little Euphemia will grow up some day and understand. If you would just try to talk with her a little about——”

“Talk to her!” said her mother wearily. “I’ve talked and talked and it rolls right off from her. She goes tearing in one door and out the other on her own affairs, and never minds whether I have a headache or whether the baby is asleep or whether there are dishes to be washed on the maid’s day out! She seems a hopeless cause!”

“Now, now, Mother. You mustn’t talk that way about our little girl. I sometimes think perhaps the other children put upon her. Eleanor, now, is a bit overbearing since she has grown up, and she wants to have the whole right to the car. That really isn’t just to Euphemia. The child has as good a right to go on that ride as she.”

“Not if the other girls don’t want her,” said the mother. “They feel themselves older, you know——”

“But they’re not much older, are they? Eleanor is only two years older than Euphemia. That ought not to be such a great difference. And those Garner girls, why the youngest one was born two days later than Euphemia, for I remember congratulating her father on her birth. There is something wrong somewhere. Why don’t they want Euphemia? Aren’t her clothes right?”

“Why, yes—” said her mother hesitantly, a new trouble gathering in her eyes. “She is as well dressed for her age as need be. She has never complained. She doesn’t care much for dress. She always preferred getting out and away to play ball or hockey or skate, no matter what she had on.”

“Well, perhaps that’s it,” said the pitying father. “Perhaps she needs something a little more fancy, Mother. We haven’t realized that she was growing up, too, and needed things. She ought to be dressed right, of course. I know you’ve been trying to economize so we could get the car, but things are beginning to look up at the office a little, and I think pretty soon we’ll have things a little easier. You get Euphemia what she wants, Mother. I can’t bear to have her look the way she did to-night. It isn’t right for a child.”

“But she really has never expressed a desire for new clothes,” said her mother thoughtfully. “All she wants is to get off on that bicycle of hers. I’m afraid she’ll never grow up.”

“There are worse faults than that, Mother, worse faults. I believe it might be worse to grow up too soon.”

“Yes,” sighed the mother. “I’m afraid Eleanor has done that. She seems really hard on her sister sometimes, although I think it’s just because she’s so sensitive about what the other girls think. Eleanor is a good girl.”

“Well she is all wrong in this matter. She really has no right to cut her sister out of going on a ride.”

“Now Father, I’m not so sure,” said the mother. “You know Eleanor didn’t get it up. The girls invited her, and they didn’t ask Effie.”

“Well they should have! They asked for the car, didn’t they?”

“Well, but that didn’t make it necessary for them to ask all of the children, and Effie has never been in that crowd.”

“Well, if she wants to go now I think she has a right!” declared the father.

“No, not unless she has made herself welcome. I’m afraid it is Effie’s own fault that she is not invited.”

“Well, Mother, you look into the matter and see if there can’t be something done for Euphemia. I can’t have my sister’s namesake turning out a failure in life, and that’s what she’ll be if something isn’t done for her. I’m afraid I will never forget her face when she said she didn’t know what she was born for anyway, and that she had found out there wasn’t any place in the world where she was wanted. That’s a pretty serious thing for a girl to get into her head, I think.”

“It isn’t likely that she really meant all that,” said her mother. “She was just angry. She’ll likely have forgotten it all by to-morrow. I never heard her say anything like that before. She usually doesn’t care in the least what people think about her. She is utterly independent and goes her own way, no matter what anybody says. She is more like a boy than a girl.”

“I can’t think that, Mother,” said Effie’s father, shaking his head. “There was a real depth to her tones. You look into it and see if you can’t get at the inwardness of this thing. Somebody must have done something pretty ugly to her to make her look as she did at the dinner table to-night.”

But the next morning Effie came swinging downstairs, whistling in loud piercing tones and waking the baby, who had had a bad night with two teeth he was cutting and had just dropped off to sleep. Both Father and Mother looked at her with stern eyes and sharp reproofs. Indeed, to the newly awakened Effie their words were so unjust and cutting that she slammed out of the back door without her breakfast and, jumping on her bicycle, rode off into the country and spent a furious two hours pedaling away and thinking hard thoughts of her parents, her sisters, all the girls in town, and her world in general, finally working off the surplus fury and coasting back down the hills toward home another way around, whistling to keep up her courage. No one should know how hard she was hit and how much she cared that no one loved her. Let them all be hateful to her if they would. She could stand it, and she would see if she could not beat them all in spite of everything. Maybe if she got her dress fixed up they would think more of her. Now that she thought about it, everybody was always loving and nice to Nell when she had a new dress on. Nell could get anything out of her father when she was dressed up. Dress must make a great difference in this world. She had always scorned it as among the necessary bothers of living. Now she began to see that it might be a desirable accessory. At least she would try it.

She rode into the yard with grim determination upon her face, skirted the driveway, and entered by way of the kitchen. She secured a few crackers, an orange, and some cake and stole up the back stairs to her room, where she set herself to examine her wardrobe and see what could be done with it.