Читать книгу Bessie's Fortune - Mary Jane Holmes - Страница 22

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The carriage which took Hannah home also took Miss McPherson to the door of her dwelling, a large, old-fashioned New England house, with a wide hall through the center, and a square room on either side; one the drawing-room or parlor in which the massive furniture had not been changed during the twenty years and more that Miss Betsey had lived there; the other the living room where the lady sat, and ate, and received her friends and where now a bright fire was burning in the Franklin stove, and the kettle was singing upon the hob, while a little round Swiss table was standing on the Persian rug before the fire, and on it the delicate cup and saucer, and sugar bowl, and creamer, which Miss McPherson had herself bought at Sevres years ago, when the life she looked forward to was very different from what had actually come to her. Possibly the memory of the day when she walked through those brilliant rooms at Sevres, and bought her costly wares, softened a little her somewhat harsh, uncompromising nature, for there was a very womanly expression on her usually severe face as she sipped her favorite oolong, and gazed dreamily into the fire, where she seemed to see again the sweet face of the child who had talked to her on the shores of Cardigan Bay, and whose innocent prattle had by turns amused, and interested, and enraged her. And, as she gazed she thought:

"Yes, Grey was right. Why didn't I take the little thing in my arms and bring her home with me? To think of her being hungry, when there is enough wasted in this house every day to feed her! And why did I so far forget myself as to talk as I did to-day—I, who am usually so silent with regard to my affairs! Why need I have told them that Archie's wife was a trollop. I suppose the venom is still rankling in me for the name she called me, 'Old Sour Krout!'" and Miss Betsey smiled grimly as she remembered all, the child upon the terrace had said to her that summer morning three years ago, "She is truthful, at all events," she continued, "and I like that, and wish I had her here. She would be a comfort to me, now that I am old, and the house has no young life in it, except my cats. There's the bedroom at the end of the hall, opening from my room. She could have that, and I should be so happy fitting it up for her. I'd trim it with blue, and have hangings at the bed, and—"

Here she stopped, seized with a sudden inspiration, and summoning the housemaid, Flora, to her, she said:

"Remove the tea things and bring my writing-desk."

Flora obeyed, and her mistress was soon deep in the construction of a letter to Archibald McPherson, to whom she made the proposition that he should bring his daughter Betsey to her, or if he did not care to cross the ocean himself, that he place her under the charge of some reliable person who was coming to America and who would see her safely to Allington, or, that failing, she did not know but she would come herself for the child, so anxious was she to have her.