Читать книгу Little Lost Sister - Virginia Brooks - Страница 7

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The distance from the Millville button factory to the corner of Main and Pine streets in Millville itself is, if you take the short cut through Nutting’s Grove, as all sensible Millvillians do, a five minutes’ walk. If the reader, touring Millville in search of the beginnings of this story, will make that journey in his imagination he will find himself standing on the rough board walk in front of John Price’s general store.

From her eminence on the top of one of Mr. John Price’s high stools Patience Welcome glanced up from the ledger over which she was toiling, put the blunt end of her pen into her mouth and looked out into the street drenched in sunshine. A half dozen farmers’ horses, moored to the hitching rack in front of the store, threshed restlessly with their tails at enthusiastic banqueting flies, newborn into a world that seemed to be filled with juicy horses.

The scene did not interest Patience. Her glance went on across the street where an overdressed young man, just alighted from an automobile, stood surveying his surroundings. His eyes met hers. He removed his hat with an elaborate bow. The girl, a little piqued and a little amused, reached over very quietly and drew down the window curtain. Then she resumed operations on the ledger with the sharp end of the pen.

Patience Welcome, like her sister, was dark of hair and eyes. Her hair, too, had the quality of forming into tendrils about her cheeks which glowed with a happy, if not a robust, healthfulness. But there the resemblance ended. The two girls were widely different personalities. Elsie, the younger, was impetuous by nature, imaginative, and easily swept off her mental balance by her emotions. She was ambitious, too, and Millville did not please her. Patience, no less imaginative, perhaps, possessed a stronger hold upon herself. She admired her daring sister, but she was sensible of the dangers of such daring and did not imitate her. She possessed the great gift of contentedness. It colored all her thoughts, created pleasant places for her in what, to Elsie, seemed a desolate life; it made Millville not only a bearable but even a happy place to live in. Millville understood Patience and loved her; Elsie, being less understandable, was less popular.

It had been a busy day in John Price’s store and Patience was entering in her books items from a pile of bills on the desk before her. It was five minutes after her usual leaving time, but the girl accepted extra duty with a cheerfulness that was part of her nature.

In the midst of her work there was a bustle at the back of the store. John Price, local merchant prince and owner of this establishment, had returned from the yard at the rear of the store where he had been superintending the storing of goods, arrived on the late afternoon train. He was a wiry little old man of sixty, abrupt, nervous, irritable and given to sharpness of speech which, he was profoundly convinced, hid from outside perception a heart given to unbusinesslike tenderness. He busied himself noisily about the shelves for a few minutes, then suddenly stuck his head through the door of the little office in which Patience was working.

“What,” he said, “you here? Get out. Go home.”

“I’ll be through in a few minutes,” rejoined Patience, without taking her eyes from her figures.

“Tush,” said Mr. Price. “What are you trying to do, give me a bad name with my trade? People will think I’m a slave driver. Get out.”

“In just a minute,” smiled Patience.

“Go home, I say,” almost shouted Price. He took off his alpaca coat and hung it on a nail. Then he stepped up suddenly behind Patience, took the pen deliberately from her hand and pushed her off the stool.

“Must I throw you out?” he demanded. “Must I? Must I, eh?”

He pointed towards the door.

“All right, Mr. Price,” said Patience submissively, gathering up her bills and thrusting them into a drawer.

“Hurry,” said Price. “You’ll be late for your supper.”

“No, I won’t,” returned Patience, putting on her jacket and hat. “This is wash day at our house. Supper is always late on wash day.”

“Wash day, eh? Then you ought to be home helping your mother.”

“Elsie will help mother,” replied Patience quietly.

“Are you sure about that?” demanded Mr. Price.

“Of course, I’m sure, Mr. Price,” said Patience, hurt.

“Well,” said Mr. Price, “I’m not so sure. But don’t stand here arguing. I haven’t any time to argue with a snip of a girl like you. Get out. Go home!”

Patience, still a little hurt by her employer’s expressed doubt about her sister, started for the front door. Looking out, she saw the overdressed young man with the automobile still standing across the street. He saw her, too, and waved his cigarette. Patience turned back into the store.

“Girl,” demanded Mr. Price, his patience now seemingly exhausted, “where in the devil are you going?”

“Out the back way, if you please, Mr. Price.”

Mr. Price got up deliberately from the stool which he had occupied as soon as Patience had vacated it and looked out of the front door.

“The young whelp,” he said, apostrophizing the overdressed youth with the cigarette. Then to Patience: “Dodging him, eh? Now don’t blush, girl. I don’t blame him for looking at you. You’re worth looking at. But you show mighty good sense in keeping away from him.”

“Why, Mr. Price, I—” Patience stammered.

“O, that’s all right, dodge him, keep him guessing. One of those freshies from the city, eh? Well, there’s mighty little good in ’em. Give your ma my best regards. Tell her she’s got a fine daughter. Good night.”

Patience left the store by the rear door and started briskly for her home. She had gone but a block when she heard a wagon rumbling behind her and a voice called out:

“ ’Lo, there, Patience, late, ain’t you?”

It was Harvey Spencer, ambitious “all round” clerk, hostler, collector for Millville’s leading grocer. He drove a roan colt which went rather skittishly. There was an older man in the wagon with him. Harvey drew up the colt beside Patience with a vociferous “Whoa.”

“Yes,” replied Patience, “I’m a little late. Lots of business these days, Harvey?”

“You bet,” he retorted, “Millville is flourishing. We’ll soon have a real city here. Oh, Miss Welcome, let me make you acquainted with my friend, Mr. Michael Grogan of Chicago.”

Patience accepted the introduction with flushed reserve.

“I’m right glad to know you,” stated Mr. Grogan, removing his hat gallantly and wiping a perspiring brow with his handkerchief. “But let me tell you I don’t think much of your friend, Harvey Spencer. Sure, I’ve been riding with him for two hours and you’re the first pleasant object he’s shown me. And such a ride! It’s a certainty that this young fellow knows every bump and thank-ye-ma’am in the village and he’s taken me full speed over all of them. I feel like I’d been churned. But I’ll forgive him all that now—now that he’s shown me you.”

There was a sincerity in Mr. Grogan’s raillery that swept away Patience’s reserve. Besides, he was over fifty.

“Sure,” she said, slyly imitating Mr. Grogan’s brogue, “you’ve been kissing the blarney stone, Mr. Grogan.”

“Will ye listen to that now?” said Grogan enthusiastically, as he started to clamber off the wagon.

“Sit still, Mr. Grogan,” said Harvey, laughing.

“But didn’t you hear her, man alive? Sure, she’s Irish—”

“No, I’m not,” put in Patience, “but I’ve heard of the blarney stone.”

“Look at that, now,” said Grogan, returning to his seat with an air of keen disappointment. “And I was just longin’ to see someone from the Ould Sod. I thought—”

“How do you like riding with Harvey?” inquired Patience, changing the subject.

“Well,” said Grogan plaintively, “if I were twenty years younger maybe it would be good exercise, but with my years, Miss, ’tis just plain exhausting.”

Here Harvey started the roan colt off again. “See you later,” he called back to Patience, “I’m stopping at your house.”

“So that’s Tom Welcome’s daughter, is it?” said Grogan as they got out of hearing.

“That’s one of them,” said Harvey, “but you ought to see the other.”

“The old man now,” went on Grogan, “is a good deal of a lush.”

“The girls can’t help what their father is,” retorted Harvey, bridling.

“I know, I know,” went on Mr. Grogan. “Such things happen in the best of families.”

“No, and you can’t blame Tom Welcome much, either,” went on Harvey. “He was drove to drink. He invented an electrical machine that would have made a fortune for him and some one stole it from him. It wasn’t the loss of the money that sent him to the devil, either. He’d spent a lifetime on his machine and just when he was getting it patented, some smart thief in Chicago takes it away from him. That’s what I call tough luck.”

“They’re hard up, you say?” pursued Grogan.

Harvey, unconscious that he had said nothing of the sort, admitted that the Welcomes were in financial straits. “Their mother has to take in washing,” he said, “and both the girls work. It’s too bad, for they ought to be getting an education.”

The roan colt came to an abrupt stop. They were in front of a small cottage. Grogan surveyed the place for a moment and then turned to his jehu. “And what might you be stopping here for?” he inquired.

Harvey paused with one foot on the step of the wagon and looked up at Grogan gravely.

“This is Tom Welcome’s cottage,” he said.