The Prodigal Girl (18 page)

“Of course we could have it here,” said Eleanor hesitantly. There was a long pause. Chester looked a little startled. At last he said:

“I suppose we could.”

He rose and went over to the old bookcase that ran from floor to ceiling on both sides of a corner of the room and selected a large, old, worn book. He came slowly back, turning the pages.

“Here’s the old family record,” he said.” ‘Emily, born April 7th, 1880; Clinton, born November 10th, 1885; Esther’—that’s the little sister that died when she was only a month old. My! How this carries me back! There, Eleanor, you read something to us!”

He laid the old Bible down in Eleanor’s lap and retreated to his chair, sitting down with his hand shading his eyes. The children watched him curiously, embarrassedly. This was not the father they knew, who joked and kidded them, and bought them grand presents, and humored them, and went off to business most of the time. This was somebody they would have to get acquainted with all over again.

Eleanor opened the book hesitantly, studied the record for a moment, then turned the pages aimlessly.

“Where was it you said your father read the night before Emily went away?” she asked fumbling among the pages.

“The ninety-first psalm.”

Eleanor found the place and read:

“He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust. Surely he shall deliver thee—”

The words sounded strangely to the children as they sat wondering, shy, wishing it was time to go to bed. Yet the words fitted the strange setting of the quaint old room, lovely with furnishings of the past, flicker of firelight, candle glow, and the wild, dark storm clashing at the windowpanes.

A sudden gust shook the kitchen door and set it banging, and John tiptoed to shut it, glad of the relief from sitting still so long, wishing he might find a mouse in the pantry, or a strange dog in the kitchen to break the monotony.

When he came back his mother’s voice was still reading:

“There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.”

It seemed comforting to the twins. They stopped wriggling and began to listen. Somehow the storm did not seem so powerful after those words. Only Betty was not listening. Betty was pulling a hair out of the old horsehair sofa. She felt out of place.

When Eleanor’s voice ceased and she closed the book, Chester sat for a moment and then took his hand down from his face.

“Well,” he said, looking about on them with a look that was almost shy. “Well, I suppose we should pray next.”

He waited a moment and no one spoke. Then he rose and knelt beside his chair, and Eleanor, too, knelt, swiftly, as if she was accustomed. The children looked around startled, hardly knowing what to do. Jane followed her mother’s example first, then Doris, half giggling, got down upon her knees and covering her face with her hands peeped through her fat fingers. John slid off his chair tentatively, to one knee. Finally Chris, his eyes suddenly raised to a swift survey as if he had but just realized what was going on, got himself casually to his knees.

And now only Betty was left, curled up on her sofa staring at them all with hostile eyes. What did they all want to do that for? Were they all gone nutty together? It was the storm that had got them. Well, no wonder, but she would not go crazy, too!

She sat bolt upright while her father seemed to wait for her, or was he hesitating for words? It was a strange, unpleasant experience. It was almost as if she were alone facing God who stood out there in the middle of the room somewhere and looked at her. Not harshly, only gently, as if she was doing something impolite to Him.

Then suddenly Betty, too, seemed to melt down into her sofa, head on the arm, body reclined, one knee half on the floor, a sort of a compromise between kneeling and sitting, her eyes shut to keep out the feeling of God out there in the room watching her sitting up and declining to yield to family worship.

It was a new thing for Chester Thornton to have to search for words. He was the one of all others who was always being called upon for an impromptu speech, in his business club, at banquets, or on social occasions in the church. Yes, and he was a standby to be called upon to pray at meetings of presbytery, or session, or on the few occasions of late when he had found it convenient to present himself at the midweek prayer service. As the church janitor aptly put it: “Mr. Thornton certainly can compose a handsome prayer!” And it was the general opinion of the whole church.

Yet, there was Chester Thornton upon his knees in the old home of his childhood, surrounded by sacred and precious memories and only his wife and children present. Every word that he had ever known seemed stricken from his vocabulary.

But at last the habit of later years came upon him as he struggled and sought for words, and he opened his mouth and let habit guide it:

“Oh, Lord, we thank Thee that we are permitted to meet here tonight—”

What was he saying? That was the way he usually prayed at prayer meeting after a longer absence than usual! He paused and hesitated—tried to get back to the beginning again—“Oh Lord”—and he an elder in the church! What would his children think of him? How was he to get out of this? What was it he was struggling after, that he had come up here to find? Why had he actually walked into this worship? Why, because he was longing to get for his children what his father and mother had given to him in his childhood, something clean and fine and strong that would anchor them—

“Oh—Lord—
Father
!” with a desperate ring to his voice. “Show us all what to do! Amen!”

There was a moment’s tense silence, and then they all rose, awkwardly, in the garish candlelight, blinking because their eyes had been closed, and there had been near tears behind their lashes.

Only Eleanor had an exalted look upon her face.

Betty had stolen away silently, while a log in the fireplace fell down in a shower of sparks and made a soft, lush sound of parting ashes. Stolen up the stairs so quietly and swiftly that no one noticed her going. She might not have been there at all that evening for all they were aware of her.

Upstairs she was undressing, swiftly, silently, in the dark; creeping into bed, that she might not seem to have been present at that strange solemn ceremony downstairs, so disturbing, so somehow humiliating. She could not bear to think of her father kneeling there silent, ill at ease, in that ridiculous posture, humbling himself before an unseen Being that was not there! Of course it was all tradition, this God business. Nobody believed in it anymore. Why did her father want to make himself ridiculous with such performances! Just because it was the fashion to have what they were pleased to call family prayers when he was a kid!

Betty crept under the blankets shivering and pulled them up over her head with a dry sob, swallowed instantly. She pressed her fingers hard upon her eyeballs, trying to shut out the memory of her father kneeling there in the firelight with the flicker of a candle wavering back and forth in weird shadows across his head and face. But the more she tried to hide from the memory the clearer it became, until the thought of that One, whom she thought of as God, standing across the room and looking at her, became intolerable. Then she flung back the sheets and said aloud to herself:

“I
won’t
let this get me! I’ll go nuts, too, if I do!”

When they all came up to bed Betty was apparently fast asleep. Sometime in the night the wind ceased, and the snow stopped sifting down. The stars came out, cold and white and still.

When morning dawned there was dazzling brightness over the earth, a new created world, white as the first soul God made.

When Betty awoke she heard Jane singing like a blackbird down in the kitchen. The glare of the sun through the snow-clogged glass blinded her so that at first she could not open her eyes. There seemed to be something electric in the air, something joyous and different. In spite of her firm resolve not to yield to it, not to let anything make her enjoy what this terrible exile had to present in place of the joys she had lost, she found herself hurrying eagerly to get dressed, rushing down the stairs to see what it was all about, healthily hungry and ready for bacon and eggs and toast. Yes, even ready for despised oatmeal or anything that was to be had.

The boys went out with their father immediately after the meal was finished, and Jane was not far behind, in one of the old despised sweaters and some strange woolen leggings, her feet in galoshes and her hands in an old pair of socks she had found in a knitting bag in the living room. Betty took a broom and followed.

It was very exciting.

Father and the boys had only cleared about a foot from the door yet, and she had to wait until there was room for her to work also. It was most amazing, this great white wall that shut out all sight of the outer world, high as the door, even higher in places, hardly room to get the handle of the shovel out.

Father seemed to know just how to slide the great snow shovel in to take out a mountain of the white feathers and fling it far out of the way, over where the wind had blown a place almost down to the ground. Chris was smaller, not so tall nor stout as Father, yet he was managing pretty well, too. And soon Chester got Jane and John to work going toward the back while he and Chris worked toward the front. At last there was a path out into an open place where there were no drifts and where the snow was only about a foot deep, blown hard and dry and crusty, and they could all come out and stand.

Eleanor put on her fur coat and came, too. And there they got their first view of the new white world. They stood in awe and silence and looked, their eyes almost blinded by the glare of the snow. Out across the wide sweep of snow-clad meadow, sloping gently away and down, where gaunt birches waded knee deep, and sometimes almost neck deep, in plumy whiteness, and where heavy laden evergreens dipped lacey dark fingers into the foam. They looked to endless other hills of whiteness just like theirs, hill beyond hill, rising to shadowy mountains, snowcapped and furred with heavy hanging hemlocks.

It is safe to say that none of them save Chester had ever looked on such an awe-inspiring, breathtaking scene before, and they stood and gazed, without even the wish to speak, so beauty startled were they with the sight. They looked till eyes went blind with the glory of it and bodies shivered with the clear cold. Yet when they went in they had to come straight out again, as if it would be gone before they could get back. Such wonder! Such daunting beauty! Such spotlessness! So much of it in such vast reaches! Even Chris could hardly keep on working.

“Good night! If some people could see that! If they just could! Why, good night! We might advertise and charge admittance! Oh, boy! Wouldn’t we get rich quick! Nothing poisonous about that, is there, Betty?”

But Betty had gone inside. It was too great! She could not bear it. She felt as if she had been snatched away from the regular commonplace world of reality to which she belonged and set down in a spirit world where she was all out of harmony, and it was choking her. She went in and went upstairs and made all the beds! She actually did, virtuously, without being told, absenting herself from the great world show downstairs. Not even trying to look through the impenetrable tracing on the windowpanes.

Till suddenly, reaching her mother’s room in her round, she came full upon the display of lacey frostwork lit up by the full blaze of the winter’s sun. She had to stop and exclaim in ecstasy.

Such elfin blades, with fairy towers, and fern work, such carvings and fretwork, and little flower faces peering at her here and there from unexpected dells of asphodels—what was that phrase—yes, “celestial asphodels.” All the poetry she had ever read came rushing round her asking to be expressed in words for this lovely sight.

One window was thrown up to air the room, and she seemed to be atop of the world as she advanced to close it and saw the vast whiteness from a new angle. She caught her breath with the beauty, the almost fearsome beauty of it all, caught hold of the window frame to steady herself from the feeling that she was going to fall down the world.

And as she looked, there below her lay a little house half-hidden beneath the slope of the hill, a little house with a low-hanging roof, a tall chimney wide and generous, and soft, lazy smoke like a plume penciling itself against the sky in a little curly smudge.

That must be the house where Aunt Letty lived so long ago and almost froze to death in a snowstorm like this! And here was she, a young girl, too, alive and warm and vivid, and not hurt at all by the storm. What would it have been to have lived so long ago and be old-fashioned? Wear strange clothes and long hair, teach a country school, build fires, be Victorian, and have a family worship every night. Oh heck! Just think of it!

Betty put the window down with a slam and switched the bed into shape, tucking the old patchwork quilt in viciously, not stopping to regard the delicate stitches of Great-Grandmother Thornton’s sampler, exquisite and microscopically small.

Head up and chest out she stalked into Chris’s room at the back of the house, feeling very virtuous that she was making beds without request. Here, too, she found the window wide and the sun streaming in. The view was entrancing, for there below her, down a sharp incline of whiteness, lay a great smooth table of white, almost round in circumference and fringed by close, crowded trees. Across it, windblown and smooth as metal, flashed a broad space of silver like a great mirror giving back the sunlight in a flood of blinding light.

Chapter 14

I
t was some minutes before Betty’s eyes could stand the brightness enough to figure out what it could be, so startling it was, there amid the quiet white hills. A white valley like all the rest, fringed by snow-decked trees, except for that flash of silver! It seemed mysterious, uncanny, as if the earth had somehow manifested a new phenomenon.