Читать книгу Saturday's Child - Kathleen Thompson Norris - Страница 5

It was like many of their evenings, like three hundred evenings a year. The room grew warm, the gas-lights crept higher and higher, flared noisily, and were lowered. Mary Lou unfastened her collar, Susan rumpled her hair. The conversation, always returning to the red king and the black four-spot, ranged idly here and there. Susan observed that she must write some letters, and meant to take a hot bath and go early to bed. But she sat on and on; the cards, by the smallest percentage of amusement, still held them.

At ten o'clock Mrs. Lancaster and Virginia came in, bright-eyed and chilly, eager to talk of the lecture. Mrs. Lancaster loosened her coat, laid aside the miserable little strip of fur she always wore about her throat, and hung her bonnet, with its dangling widow's veil, over the back of her deep chair. She drew Susan down to sit on her knee. "All the baby auntie's got," she said. Georgie presently came downstairs, her caller, "that fresh kid I met at Sallie's," had gone, and she was good-natured again. Mary Lou produced the forgotten bag of candy; they all munched it and talked. The old ladies had gone upstairs long ago.

All conversations led Mrs. Lancaster into the past, the girls could almost have reconstructed those long-ago, prosperous years, from hearing her tell of them.

"--Papa fairly glared at the man," she was saying presently, won to an old memory by the chance meeting of an old friend to-night, "I can see his face this day! I said, 'Why, papa, I'd JUST as soon have these rooms!' But, no. Papa had paid for the best, and he was going to have the best--"

"That was Papa!" laughed his daughters.

"That was Papa!" his widow smiled and sighed. "Well. The first thing I knew, there was the proprietor,--you may imagine! Papa says, 'Will you kindly tell me why I have to bring my wife, a delicate, refined Southern woman--'"

"And he said beautiful, too, Ma!"

Mrs. Lancaster laughed mildly.

"Poor papa! He was so proud of my looks! 'Will you tell me,' he says, 'why I have to put my wife into rooms like these?' 'Sir,' the landlord says, 'I have only one better suite--'"

"Bridal suite, he said, Ma!"

"Yes, he did. The regular bridal suite. I wasn't a bride then, that was after poor George was born, but I had a very high color, and I always dressed very elegantly. And I had a good figure, your father's two hands could meet around my waist. Anyway, then Papa--dear me, how it all comes back!--Papa says, fairly shouting, 'Well, why can't I have that suite?' 'Oh, sir,' the landlord says, 'a Mr. George Lancaster has engaged that for his wife, and they say that he's a man who WILL get what he pays for--'" Another mild laugh interrupted the narrative.

"Didn't you nearly DIE, Ma?"

"Well, my dear! If you could have seen the man's face when Papa--and how well he did this sort of thing, deary me!--whips out a card--"

They all laughed merrily. Then Mrs. Lancaster sighed.

"Poor Papa, I don't know what he would have done if he could have seen us to-day," she said. "It's just as well we couldn't see ahead, after all!"

"Gee, but I'd like to see what's coming," Susan said thoughtfully.

"Bed is coming next!" Mary Lou said, putting her arm about the girl. Upstairs they all filed sleepily, lowering the hall gases as they went. Susan yawningly kissed her aunt and Virginia good-night, on the second floor, where they had a dark and rather colorless room together. She and the other girls went on up to the third-story room, where they spent nearly another hour in dilatory undressing. Susan hesitated again over the thought of a hot bath, decided against it, decided against even the usual brushing of her hair to-night, and sprang into bed to lie flat on her tired back, watching Mary Lou make up Georgie's bed with dislocating yawns, and Georgie, wincing as she put her hair into tight "kids." Susan slept in a small space bounded by the foot of the bed, the head of the bed, the wall, and her cousin's large person, and, as Mary Lou generally made the bed in the morning by flapping the covers back without removing them, they were apt to feel and smell unaired, and to be rumpled and loose at the foot. Susan could not turn over in the night without arousing Mary Lou, who would mutter a terrified "What is it--what is it?" for the next ten minutes. Years before, Susan, a timid, country-bred child, had awakened many a time in the night, frightened by the strange city noises, or the fire-bells, and had lain, with her mouth dry, and her little heart thundering, through lessening agonies of fright. But she never liked to awake Mary Lou. Now she was used to the city, and used to the lumpy, ill-made bed as well; indeed Susan often complained that she fell asleep too fast, that she wanted to lie awake and think.

But to-night she lay awake for a long time. Susan was at twenty-one no more than a sweet and sunny child, after all. She had accepted a rather cheerless destiny with all the extraordinary philosophy and patience of a child, thankful for small pleasures, enduring small discomforts gaily. No situation was too hopeless for Susan's laughter, and no prospect too dark for her bright dreams. Now, to-night for the first time, the tiny spark of a definite ambition was added to this natural endowment. She would study the work of the office systematically, she would be promoted, she would be head girl some day, some day very soon, and obliged, as head girl, to come in and out of Mr. Peter Coleman's office constantly. And by the dignity and gravity of her manner, and her personal neatness, and her entire indifference to his charms--always neat little cuffs and collars basted in her tailor-made suit--always in her place on the stroke of half-past eight--

Susan began to get sleepy. She turned over cautiously, and bunched her pillow comfortably under one cheek. Hazy thoughts wheeled through her tired brain. Thorny--the man on the dummy--the black king--