Читать книгу In a Little Town - Hughes Rupert - Страница 6

When she was told it was a girl, Mrs. Govers sighed. "Well, I never did have any luck, anyway; so I d' know's I'm supprised."

Later she wept feebly:

"Girls are easier to raise, I suppose; but I kind of had my heart set on namin' him Launcelot." After another interval she rallied to a smile: "I was prepared for the worst, though; so I picked out Ellaphine for a name in case he was a her. It's an awful pirty name, Ellaphine is. Don't you think so?"

"Yes, yes," said the nurse, who would have agreed to anything then.

After a time Mrs. Govers resumed: "She'll be an awful pirty girl, I hope. Is that her makin' all that noise? Give me a glimpse of her, will you? I got a right, I guess, to see my own baby. Oh, Goshen! Is that how she looks?" A kind of swoon; then more meditation, followed by a courageous philosophy: "Children always look funny at first. She'll outgrow it, I expect. Ellaphine is such an elegant name. It ought to be a kind of inducement to grow up to. Don't you think so?"

The nurse, who was juggling the baby as if it were red-hot, mumbled through a mustache of safety-pins that she thought so. Mrs. Govers echoed, "I thought so, too." After that she went to sleep.

Ellaphine, however, did not grow up elegant, to fit the name. The name grew inelegant to fit her. During her earliest years the witty little children called her Elephant until they tired of the ingenuity and allowed her to lapse indolently from Ellar to El.

Mrs. Govers for some years cherished a dream that her ugly duckling would develop into a swan and fly away with a fabulously wealthy prince. Later she dwindled to a prayer that she might capture a man who was "tol'able well-to-do."

The majority of ugly ducklings, however, grow up into uglier ducks, and Mrs. Govers resigned herself to the melancholy prospect of the widowed mother of an old maid perennial.

To the confusion of prophecy, among all the batch of girls who descended on Carthage about the time of Ellaphine's birth—"out of the nowhere into the here"—Ellaphine was the first to be married! And she cut out the prettiest girl in the township—it was not such a small township, either.

Those homely ones seem to make straight for a home the first thing. Ellaphine carried off Eddie Pouch—the very Eddie of whom his mother used to say, "He's little, but oh, my!" The rest of the people said, "Oh, my, but he's little!"

Eddie's given name was Egbert. Edward was his taken name. He took it after his mother died and he went to live at his uncle Loren's. Eddie was sorry to change his name, but he said his mother was not responsible at the time she pasted the label Egbert on him, and his shy soul could not endure to be called Egg by his best friends—least of all by his best girl.

His best girl was the township champion looker, Luella Thickins. From the time his heart was big enough for Cupid to stick a child's-size arrow in, Eddie idolized Luella. So did the other boys; and as Eddie was the smallest of the lot, he was lost in the crowd. Even when Luella noticed him it was with the atrocious contempt of little girls for little boys they do not like.

Eddie could not give her sticks of candy or jawbreakers, for his uncle Loren did not believe in spending money. And Eddie had no mother to go to when the boys mistreated him and the girls ignored him. A dismal life he led until he grew up as far as he ever grew up.

Eddie reached his twenty-second birthday and was working in Uncle Loren's factory—one of the largest feather-duster factories in the whole State—when he observed a sudden change in Luella's manner.

She had scared him away from paying court to her, save from a distance. Now she took after him, with her aggressive beauty for a club and her engaging smiles for a net. She asked him to take her to the Sunday-school picnic, and asked him what he liked best for her to put in for him. She informed him that she was going to cook it for herself and everybody said she could fry chicken something grand. So he chose fried chicken.

He was so overjoyed that it was hard for him to be as solemn about the house as he ought to have been, in view of the fact that Uncle Loren had been taken suddenly and violently ill. Eddie was the natural heir to the old man's fortune.

Uncle Loren was considered close in a town where extravagance was almost impossible, but where rigid economy was supposed to pile up tremendous wealth. Hitherto it had pained Uncle Loren to devote a penny to anything but the sweet uses of investment. Now it suddenly occurred to the old miser that he had invested nothing in the securities of New Jerusalem, Limited. He was frightened immeasurably.

In his youth he had joined the Campbellite church and had been baptized in the town pond when there was a crust of ice over it which the pastor had to break with a stick before he immersed Loren. Everybody said the crust of ice had stuck to his heart ever since.

In the panic that came on him now he craftily decided to transfer all his savings to the other shore. The factory, of course, he must leave behind; but he drafted a hasty will presenting all his money to the Campbellite church under conditions that he counted on to gain him a high commercial rating in heaven.

Over his shoulder, as he wrote, a shadow waited, grinning; and the old man had hardly folded his last testament and stuffed it into his pillow-slip when the grisly hand was laid on his shoulders and Uncle Loren was no longer there.