Beauty for Ashes (6 page)

“No!” said her father again earnestly. “No! But if they did, little girl, you’re better off to live out your days alone than marry a man who would be as disloyal to you as Stan has been. It isn’t as if there were any question about it, you know. I had that looked into”—he spoke with a voice of deep sadness—“and it was all true and more than the paper stated!”

A little sound broke from her white lips, but she made no comment.

“That is why,” went on her father, “I am hoping you will not grieve too deeply over all this. The young man was not worthy of it. He was not thinking of you, his promised bride, when he went up there to see that girl. He was pleasing himself.”

Then after an instant he went on again, reluctantly, haltingly, almost shyly. “And you must not think too hardly of your mother either, Glory. She was brought up in a most careful, sheltered way. She really knows little of the evil in the world, and what little she has heard, she has chosen to ignore or not to believe. She has taken up the fashionable way of excusing and condoning the faults of young men and calling them follies rather than sins. Also your mother was not brought up in a religious way as I was, and that makes some difference. I have sometimes thought that she looks down on me as being rather old-fashioned for holding the views that I do—” He paused, thoughtfully, sadly.

“Father, I think I’m old-fashioned, too, in my thinking,” said the girl at last. “And do you know, I think Mother would be too if it were only the fashion now to be old-fashioned again.”

Then they both laughed, and a tender feeling of sympathy crept into their voices.

Soon after that they came upon a little white farmhouse tucked away under elm trees, winking a friendly light from its windows and showing a sign inviting travelers to stop all night.

“How would you like to stay here tonight?” asked her father. “Or would you rather go on to a good hotel? There’s a small city only about ten miles farther on.” He got out his map and measured the distance with his eye.

“Oh, let’s stay here!” said Gloria. “It looks quiet here, and we might meet someone we knew if we went on to the city.”

So they went in and found pleasant quarters for the night, and to her surprise Gloria fell asleep almost as soon as her head touched the pillow.

The next day they went on working north and east, through wooded mountains with narrow dirt roads, deep and dim and silent, where traffic was limited for miles to one farm wagon drawn by an old plow horse, and one ancient flivver. Up and up they climbed till the air grew clearer and colder and the sunshine crisper and lovelier. Gloria began to be interested in all the scenery, a mountain brook rushing musically over great boulders, rambling stone walls that shut in sheep and cows, a glimpse of the sea in the distance, a far city rising picturesquely among the budding spring trees. But they skirted the cities and did not go through them.

And at last Maine.

About the middle of the afternoon, Gloria looked up and asked, “Where are we going, Dad?” It seemed to be the first time the thought had occurred to her.

“Home!” said her father.

“Home?” said Gloria, a kind of consternation coming into her eyes and a cloud darkening the brightness of her face from which the gloom had been slowly disappearing ever since they had started.

“To my home,” said her father, “where I lived when I was a child!”

“Oh, how wonderful!” said the girl. “I would love that. Have you been back? Are you sure it is there yet?”

“Yes, several times,” said the father gravely. “Once I almost took you and Vanna, but your mother had other plans.”

“Oh, I wish you had,” said Gloria. “Will it be like the little cottage in the woods where we had lunch yesterday?”

“No,” said the man thoughtfully, “it is larger. But the little house where I was born is still standing, down in the meadow. It was used for the hired man and his family after we built the big farmhouse nearer to the road, but they are both standing. Ten years ago I put them in good repair. An old friend of Mother’s, Mrs. Weatherby, lives there with her daughter and son-in-law, and another son and his family live in the cottage, but it is all much the same as when I was a child. We are coming to it now. That is the little village in the distance.”

Gloria looked up, and a white spire showed among the trees. White houses nestled here and there amid spacious distances. And all around, mellow ground lay plowed and ready in various stages for the planting. Some were already beginning to show green in symmetrical rows. Out from the wooded road it did not seem so late. The sky was luminous with a fleck of crimson in the west, and there was still a small rim of the red sun left above the horizon. It cast a glow over the fields and made them look like rare merchandise spread out for customers to view. A single star flashed out as they looked, and a light or two from the village, as they neared it, winked at them. Gloria held her breath and watched the little settlement approach, like a picture of the past, her father’s past! It seemed wonderful to her.

They had come to the outermost sentinel of the village houses now, white with green blinds and tall plumy pines standing guard. On the right was a cottage quite colonial and tiny. There were lights in some windows of almost every house, though it still did not seem dark in the street.

There were pleasant odors of coffee and frying ham, and something sweet and spicy like gingerbread just out of the oven. The man drew a deep breath and closed his eyes.

The picture-book village opened up, house after house.

“That was where my grandmother lived!” said the man, pointing to a small, neat house with two wings and a marvelous front door. “She and Grandfather used to sit there on the porch afternoons in the summertime and talk, Grandmother with her knitting. And after Grandfather was gone, Grandmother would sit there and look off at the sunset alone.”

“I wish I could have known them!” said Gloria wistfully. “They died before I was born, didn’t they? I never heard anything about them.”

“Your mother never knew them,” said the father evasively. “She didn’t like the country and she—never—came up here!”

“How much she has missed!” said the daughter, drinking in the quiet farm village scenes.

A cow mooed mournfully at the pasture gate near a big red barn, tinkling the bell around her neck, and off in the pasture there sounded the bleat of a very young lamb and the
baa-aa-a
of its mother answering. There were birds twittering in the elms that arched the street, though they must have been chilly, for the elms were only just in bud yet.

The glow of the sun was gone, but the night had flung a banner in the east, and a jeweled glow of stars rent the sky, shining like a halo above the white spire at the end of the village street.

“This is the house!” said the man in a voice that sounded almost breathless with eagerness, as if he had suddenly become young again was expecting to meet the loved ones who had been gone long years now.

I
t was a lovely old house, spacious and comfortable, white like all the other houses around—the
whitest
white, Gloria thought, that she had ever seen. It was set about with tall pines, whose dark tassels whispered to each fanlight over the door and a wide veranda. The road rambled near to the house in a friendly way, giving no idea of publicity as the highways at home did, but as if it were only a beaten path from neighbor to neighbor. The house was lit both upstairs and down, and a welcoming path of light streamed out into the road from the wide-open front door. Through one window Gloria caught a glimpse of flames flickering in a spacious fireplace. It seemed like arriving in a new world as they drew up to the front door and stopped. And then almost instantly a sweet old lady came out the door, as if she had been watching for them to come, and a younger man came around one end of the long front veranda and down the path toward the car.

“Well, you got here on time!” was his greeting in a pleased tone. “Emily said we mustn’t count on it. She said you’d probably be late, driving up for the first time. But I said you’d make it—I was sure!”

“Yes, we made it!” said Gloria’s father with satisfaction, flinging open the car door. “This is my daughter Gloria, John. Glory, this is Mr. John Hastings.”

Gloria found her hand being shaken by a strong, rough, hearty one and found her heart warming to this stranger. Keen eyes, a pleasant smile, a genial welcome, and nondescript clothes, scrupulously clean and neat, but not at all the right thing for a gentleman to wear at this hour of day—style, material, cut, all wrong, quite out-of-date according to the standards she knew— yet strangely she did not think of this at the time.

“And here comes my wife!” he said with a nice ring to his voice as if he were proud of her.

Gloria saw a trim, youngish woman in a plain dark blue dress with a ruffled white apron tied around her waist as if she had just come from the kitchen. She had beautiful hair, a good deal of it, with a natural wave away from her face, and done in a heavy knot at the back of her head, a bit carelessly as if she had not spent much time or thought on it, and yet there was something lovely and attractive about the effect. Here was another person Gloria couldn’t quite place in her scheme of things. She wouldn’t fit into a fashionable picture at all, and yet she had both beauty and dignity. Gloria liked her at once.

But it was the little old lady, Mrs. Weatherby, standing at the top step of the veranda, who took her heart by storm, the one her father had called a friend of his mother’s. She was small and frail, her soft gray hair smoothly parted in the middle but with a natural willful wave here and there that made it a little like a halo of silver. She wore a simple gray cotton dress without form or comeliness after the manner of long ago, a long white apron, and a little shoulder shawl of gray plaid. She put her hands on Gloria’s shoulders, looked for an instant into her beautiful face, and then drew her into her arms.

“Oh, my dear!” she said softly. “You look as your grandmother used to look when we were girls together!”

And then Gloria felt somehow that she had got home.

There was stewed chicken for supper on little biscuits, with plenty of gravy. There were mashed potatoes and little white onions smothered in cream dressing and succotash the like of which Gloria had never tasted before, even though it was made from canned corn and beans, but it was a triumph of home canning. There was quivering currant jelly, homegrown celery and pickles, and for dessert a baked Indian pudding, crisp and brown and full of fat raisins.

Up in the big square front room assigned to her, Gloria looked around her. Her father had the other front room across the hall. The bed in her room was a four-poster of beautiful old mahogany, rarely kept, and polished by loving hands through the years.

“This was your grandmother’s room,” said the sweet old lady who had come up to show her around, “and that was her canopy bed. It used to have chintz curtains. It was considered a very fine piece of workmanship. That was her chair by the window, that big rocker. The cushion covers are the same she had when she was living. Many times I ran in and found her sitting there by the window darning stockings or turning the collar on a shirt or putting in a new riband. She was a wonderful one with her needle, little fine stitches, the same on an old shirt as on a cambric handkerchief. She did beautiful embroidery, too, when she had time, but there were five children, and this was a big house, and what with the washing and churning, there wasn’t much time for embroidery.”

“Oh! Did she do it
all?
Didn’t she have any servants?” asked Gloria, wide-eyed.

“Servants?” said the old lady. “Where would she get servants? Sometimes at threshing time or harvest when there were a lot of extra farmhands to feed, she would have in a neighbor farmer’s daughter to help for a few days, but mostly she was proud and thrifty and did it all herself!”

“Oh!” said Gloria in a small voice, trying to conceive of such circumstances, and failing.

Lying between the sheets that smelled of lavender, she tried to visualize that grandmother that she had never known, her father’s mother, young and proud and thrifty, doing all that work and living away from the world! She felt a faint vague wish that she might somehow begin over again with things clean and fine and real, things worth doing, and make her life something that could be remembered.

The soft footsteps around the house ceased; the glimmer of the hall light beneath the crack of the door went out. There were only the quiet stars like tall tapers turned low to make the big room luminous, and they were half veiled by the dark pine plumes.

The pines were whispering softly at intervals when a little breeze stirred them, but there were great silences between. Gloria thought she had never heard it so still before anywhere. It seemed as if one might hear even the tread of a passing cloud, it was so very quiet, and there seemed to be so much space everywhere and such a nearness to the sky.

She stole out of her bed to kneel by the casement and look out. There were only a few dim shapes that might be houses around somewhat scattered. There were lights in one or two windows. Could that be a mountain off there against the sky, like a soft gray smudge blotting out the starry part and darkening down into the stretch of what must be meadow across the road? She knelt there a long time looking up into the night and listening to the silence. It fascinated her. The world seemed so wide and home so far away. She drew a deep breath and was glad she did not have to think about what she had left behind in the last few days. She was too tired and it was all too dreadful. She shuddered and felt a chill in the spring night air. This north country was colder than the one she had left behind, but it was quiet, oh so quiet! One didn’t have to think here. If one dared to think, perhaps one’s thoughts would be heard in this stillness as if they were a voice shouting.

She slipped back gratefully into the linen sheets, laid her head on the fragrant pillow, and sank into the sweetest sleep she had known for months.

In the morning when she awoke, there were roosters crowing, hens clucking of the eggs they had laid, a lamb bleating, and now and then a cow’s low moo. And yet that great silence was all around like a background for these sweet, strange sounds. She opened her eyes and could not tell for a moment where she was nor what had happened until she heard her father talking to John Hastings outside below her window about the spring planting and the possibilities of the south meadow yield of hay.