THE HONOR GIRL (7 page)

The young men tidied up the supper-table, put away the food, and washed the dishes, for the most part in silence. But when they found the pumpkin pies set up on the dresser shelf to cool, they looked at each other; and a great question was in their eyes.

“Say, you don’t suppose Elsie could have done it.” Jack voiced the thought at last.

“No chance!” said Eugene contemptuously. “She’s too much of a find lady. I don’t suppose she ever sees the inside of a kitchen. How could she make a pumpkin pie? Besides, she wouldn’t lift one of her dainty fingers for us. We’re only poor relations. The last time I saw her she was all dolled up like a plush horse. She probably spends all her time out of school learning how to bob her hair a new way. And what would she do it for?”

Sure enough. That was a puzzle. Jack had been fond of Elsie but he couldn’t answer that.

“Well, who
could
have, then?” he said at last after he had wiped the three cups and set them on the shelf.

“Search me! I give up. It does seem uncanny.”

“Rebecca couldn’t do it. She never cooked like that.”

“Not on your life she couldn’t unless she’s met with a change of heart and hand.”

“Well, how do you explain it?” insisted Jack.

“I don’t explain it,” said Eugene. “Just take it as it is. Think it just happened.”

“I wish it would happen again!” sighed Jack, turning thoughtful toward the door and looking into the pleasant dining room, his eyes resting on the flowers in the middle of the table.

“Flowers, too! Gee! It’s queer!” he pondered.

“What you going to do tonight, Jack? Going to the movies?”

“I was,” said Jack uninterestedly, “but I don’t know that I will tonight. It’s so pleasant here I’d like to enjoy it while it lasts. It won’t take long for it to get back the way it was. Been into that hall? I haven’t seen that closet door shut for two years. And somebody’s mended the staircase pillar. I say, old boy, why didn’t we ever think to do that?”

“H’m! Don’t know. Didn’t seem worth while, I guess, there was so much else the matter. Say, it looks nice, don’t it? I s’pose we might fix up a little now and then ourselves but I never have time. I’ve got a date tonight. Ought to be gone by now. What time is it?”

He looked at his watch.

“
Good-night
, kid, did you know it was almost nine o’clock? No use going now. Well, I wouldn’t have believed it was so late. We must have been almost two hours eating our supper. Some banquet, eh?”

“Yes, some banquet!” echoed the younger brother. “Well, why don’t we have some music?” He strolled toward the long-neglected piano, and opened it. Sitting down, he began to play a modern popular piece and to chant in a deep, not unmusical bass, some unintelligible words, whose main object seemed to be to crowd into the rhythm with remarkable speed.

The father dozed in his chair; awoke, looked around again with tears in his eyes; dozed again dreaming of his dead wife; and the boys sang on for some time.

At last Jack closed the piano and got up. He couldn’t play much but chords, but he bluffed the rest, and really managed to get quite a bit of pleasure out of it.

“Gee!” he said wistfully, yawning and looking at his watch. “Gee! I wish we had a sister or something in the house! Now I s’pose we’ve got to crawl up to that old hole and get some sleep. I’ve a notion to lie here on the floor tonight. I get a nightmare up in my room sometimes just thinking how it looks.”

“Don’t turn on the light,” suggested his brother; “then you can’t see.”

“H’m! You don’t know what you’re talking about. I couldn’t find the bed without a light; the floor’s knee-deep with junk. Well, so long! I’m going to hit the hay. All this excitement’s bad for a working man.”

Jack slowly, reluctantly ascended the stairs, putting his hand affectionately on the old bannister. The top quivered under his grasp, toppled an instant, and fell crashing to the floor.

As if he had hurt a child, the boy hastened back, picked it up, examined the difficulty, hunted up the hammer which he remembered to have seen on the pantry shelf, and drove the nails securely into place again. Then he went upstairs without more ado.

E
ugene took the evening paper from his coat pocket, and settled down to read a few minutes, but it was not quiet overhead. Jack’s footsteps had paused for a moment on the upper landing with that queer, indefinable breathlessness that both boys felt when they first entered the house that evening, and then started excitedly from room to room on the second floor. The noisy footsteps pounded up the third-story stairs, and there was a moment’s quiet, a long moment during which Eugene began to read the athletic scores of the day. Suddenly Jack’s feet were heard again clattering down the stairs.

“Say, Gene! Come up here!” he shouted excitedly before he had reached the second-story landing. There was something in his tone that brought his brother up three steps at a time.

It was to the bathroom shining in its purity that Jack first led his brother. The tub white as enamel could be, the faucets bright, the soap dish immaculate, the floor so clean the pattern of the old linoleum could be seen again, and the towel-racks literally overflowing with white, luxurious towels!

It was at those towels that the brothers gazed longest, reaching out to feel them, unfolding one to see its length and breadth. They had so long used little, inadequate affairs of doubtful character that a bath had become an unpleasant necessity rather than a pleasure.

“Some class!” murmured Eugene rapturously. “I believe I’ll take a bath! Say, I’d like to know who the fairy is that has touched this house with her magic wand while we were away.”

“Just wait till you see!” exclaimed Jack, gripping his brother’s shoulder and whirling him about face.

Eugene stood in his own room doorway, and looked about dazed. The clean white bed, the dainty bureau-scarf, the cleared-up appearance, was almost unbelievable. Something softening came over his face, which was inclined to be cynical.

“Goodnight!” he said at last softly. “I guess I’ll go to bed. But I’ll have to take a bath before I get into that bed. I wonder if I’ve got any clean pajamas. Say, Jack, did that laundry come? I wonder.”

But Jack kept a firm grip on his shoulder, and marched him on to see the rest of the house.

“Third story, too?” asked Gene, surprised as Jack pushed him toward the stairs after a glimpse of his father’s room. “Well, there must have been a fairy god-mother along, too, to get all this done in one day. I think it would take several wands working double time to accomplish so much. It looked like a pretty hopeless dump to me when I left here this morning. I was thinking as I left the house that I’d like to touch a match to it and burn the whole thing up and begin again. It certainly was a mess!”

“Some mess! Especially my dump!” assented Jack as he threw his own door wide open and waved his brother inside.

“Some change I should say!”

Gene’s eyes traveled all about, and halted at his mother’s picture on the bureau. He went over and stood before it, looking long and earnestly. Then he spoke, and his voice was husky and unnatural.

“Things would’a been different if she’d lived, kid,” he said half embarrassedly.

“Sure!” agreed Jack in a faint, shy tone, turning his back and looking out the window.

“Do you remember what a wonderful woman she was, kid?”

“Sure, I do!” came the voice from the window with a little tremble to it.

The older brother sighed, and turned to go downstairs. “Gee! ’twould be great if she could come back! Things like this all the time! And she’d be here every night when we came home!” he said, unexpectedly voicing the wistfulness that was in both their minds.

“Wouldn’t it, though?” Jack sauntered down behind his brother as though he could not quite give up the subject, but neither spoke of it again. Gene pushed Elsie’s door open, and glanced in.

“Nothing doing in there! Fairy godmother doesn’t approve of her!” declared Jack flippantly.

Gene brought it shut with a bang, and sighed heavily. The room they had by common consent tried to keep as it had been for the sake of the sister to whom it belonged—for the sake of having some shrine in the house—looked bare and desolate beside the other rooms now. He wanted to shut it away in its dust and emptiness and forget it.

“Wake Dad up and bring him up here!” he commanded. “I’m going to light the hot-water back, and have a bath!”

What with the excitement and the splashing and the search for clean laundry it was late, after all, before the brothers were ready for those clean white beds that drew them so invitingly.

Just as Jack was about to go up to his room at last, they were both drawn by some strange power toward their father’s open door to see what had become of him. They found him asleep on his knees before the bed, with their mother’s old wrapper hugged close in his arms and traces of tears on his face.

Tenderly, with unaccustomed hands and words that sounded strangely on their young lips, they roused him and made him go to bed. They crept awe-stricken into their own beautifully clean beds, and lay down, handling the covers carefully as though these might be harmed with rougher touch. And then they lay with crowding thoughts upon their hearts. They had not been so stirred since their mother died. They felt her presence had somehow come back again to bless them. It may be that the thankfulness of their hearts as they put their heads upon those clean pillows, and sighed contentedly, was something akin to prayer.

The whole thing was mysterious, so wholly un-explainable by any of the common surroundings and circumstances of their lives, that they could not settle on an explanation; and there was nothing else but Providence to lay it to. They had never thought much about Providence. They had scarcely thought they believed in higher powers anymore. It wasn’t exactly the thing to do in the world in which they moved.

There was not an aunt in the whole connection who would have done this for the house and them, no, not even for the sweet morsel of giving them a rebuke. There was not a devoted old servant; for Rebecca had been the only servant they had had for years, and Rebecca never had a knack of making things look tidy, nor could she cook like that.

Besides, there were those wonderful soft blankets, the new white spreads, the sheets, the towels. Who,
who
would spend money for such things for them? They turned back the spread in the dark, and touched lightly the soft wool of the blanket, to make sure it was still there. They passed wondering hands again over the smoothness of the sheets. Would the mystery ever be explained? Would they perhaps find it was some practical joke? Or, worse still, a terrible mistake? Some one had got the wrong house and done all this? How could it be? Yet there was no other reasonable explanation.

The older man, moaning in his room, was talking to his dead wife; telling her how he had treated her, how dear and wise she had been to him, and how he had rewarded her with sorrow. He pleaded with her to come back once more, just to touch him and say she forgave.

The boys, listening in the darkness and the stillness of the house, found their own lashes wet in spite of themselves. It seemed to them that their mother had just died; yet she was there in the front room with their father, receiving her due from him at last. It half reconciled them to their father to hear him make this late restitution. It stirred their souls to the depths, and somehow brought up things that they themselves had done which would have distressed their mother. In that still hour in those comfortable beds some things they had been contemplating for themselves fell away from them, and a cleaner, truer purpose half rose in their hearts for the future.

And at last they fell into a clean, untroubled sleep, with a sense as of a hand tenderly comforting them.

W
hen Elsie got into the trolley at her father’s corner and sank down into a seat, she was suddenly overcome with an unutterable weariness. She did not remember ever to have been so tired before. Her limbs trembled, and even her fingers trembled as she tried to take her fare out of her purse. It seemed as though her heart was on a gallop and she could not keep up with it. She wanted to cry out to it to stop and let her get her breath, and she wanted to throw herself down on the seat and weep. It was hard to keep the tears back, and she knew her lips must be visibly trembling. She could not understand this sudden collapse.

She put her purse into her bag and leaned her head against the window, closing her eyes and trying to get steady control of herself. Those last few minutes, slipping out of the house like a thief, running away from her brothers and her own father, watching her father go uncertainly up the walk, had been too much for her. She had been keyed up all day for this climax, and now that it was over and she was speeding away from the scene of her activities, her mind could not stop.

It suddenly began to seem wrong for her to be going away. Her place was back there in that miserable house, trying to make it pleasant for those to whom she had been given when she came into the world. Those three desolate men, for whom she had been laboring all day as a sort of amusement for herself, had a claim upon her that no other three people in the whole world had. She had never thought of it in that way before. She had not even thought of it while she had been trying to make the house habitable for them. She had only looked upon it as a charitable incident in her full and happy life. Now it suddenly took on proportions that overwhelmed her, and she was physically too tired to reason or to combat them. The tears came into her eyes, with torrents threatening. In vain she dabbed at the edges of her lashes to remove a sudden glistening; in vain she pressed her upper lip with her finger; in vain she opened her eyes and sat up straight, winking fast to remind herself that people were about her and she must not cry. Two tears welled up and rolled flashing down her cheeks before she could think, and she turned her head sharply toward the window to hide them and got out her handkerchief to wipe them away. She stared hard out of the window, and kept her eyes wide to prevent more tears; and, as she looked into the window-glass, she became aware of a face behind her, oddly, hauntingly familiar which gave one keen, sympathetic glance and turned away as if he would not watch what he could clearly see she wished to hide.