The Prodigal Girl (22 page)

“No, dear, it’s all done now,” said Eleanor gently, “but you may set the table if you will. Then everything will be ready for supper, and we won’t be in such a rush when they all come in.”

So Betty set the table, listlessly, bored, leaving off half the things that make a smooth and quiet meal, and went back to her book with a conscience at ease. After all, was she not a dutiful daughter, even though she was planning to run away with a man of whom her parents disapproved! But then one must live one’s own life!

Betty came reluctantly at the third call, in the midst of the most exciting chapter of all, to eat the delicious meal that her mother had prepared. She ate rapidly with enjoyment and was about to excuse herself and go back to her book when her father halted her.

“Sit down, Betty!” he said. His tone was kind but firm. There was a new note in it, which Betty in her preoccupation failed to notice.

“No way, Chester,” she said with an impudent laugh. “I’m right in the thrill of my book, and I can’t wait another minute.”

She had not called him Chester since they came to the farm, and somehow with the use of the disrespectful term her old bravado returned. It would not be long now before she was free from this kind of submission. She tilted her chin impertinently and turned away from the table.

“I said,
‘Sit down,’
Betty!” And now there was something unmistakable in his voice, though it was quiet and self-controlled.

Betty flashed at him a defiant look as she took another step toward her book, and then suddenly, she did not quite know why, she came back and sat down, her face overclouded by a sudden sullen anger.

But Chester paid no attention to her attitude. He continued to look at her steadily, with that quality of searching justice in his eyes that made her uncomfortable in spite of her anger. It seemed an age that he looked at her so, until she wished to drop her eyes from that steady glance, but could not do so.

“Betty, while you are in my house—”

Betty gave him a sudden, quick startled look. Why did he say, “While you are in my house,” as if he knew? Could he possibly have found out? Had he followed her down in the village without her knowledge?

“While you are in my house,” went on the steady voice, “you will not call me by that name anymore. What began in jest has ceased to be amusing and has become disrespect. It is part of the disrespect of the age. It is what we came here to get away from. It was perhaps partly our fault that you were allowed to fall into such habits. But it will not be our fault if you continue in them. Your mother and I are determined to undo as far as possible what has been done while we had our eyes shut. Now, I hope that is thoroughly understood—”

His eyes went around the table and searched each young face with a meaningful glance. There was something about his expression that showed he was not to be trifled with.

“This is something that applies to you all,” he added, “a principle that must be observed. We want no more flippant remarks and no more refusals to do what you are told to do.”

Chris turned red and began to put more butter on a piece of bread, though he had seemed to have quite finished his supper. Jane folded her napkin in tiny plaits and pretended not to have heard him, but it was plain that each recalled some recent offense and understood what he meant.

“Excuse me, Mums,” said Chris, hurriedly stuffing the last bit of bread and butter into his mouth. “I wantta get in that wood. It might snow again tonight, and we’d need it.”

“There is apple pie,” said Eleanor, looking troubled and rising quickly. “And cottage cheese the milkman brought. You like that!”

She started toward the kitchen.

“Wait!” said Chester in that arresting tone. “Sit down, Eleanor, please. There is something else I want to say first. It is time you children began to help your mother and to keep her from waiting on you all the time. It is time the work of the house was divided among you and not all left for your mother to do. I came in here a few minutes ago and found your mother sitting down with a dizzy head, as white as could be, and all in a tremble from cooking all the afternoon. She is scarcely able to sit up at the table now, and yet you have all let her wait on you hand and foot, and you were going to let her continue to do so. Eleanor, can’t someone else get that pie? You sit still. Betty, get the pie!”

“For Pete’s sake, aren’t we ever going to have a maid again?” said Betty impudently.

“Perhaps not,” said Chester coolly. “Betty, get the pie!”

“Well, if we weren’t in such a poisonous dump you might get some kind of a job somewhere and
get
a maid!” said Betty furiously and flounced out to the kitchen.

Eleanor cast a reproachful look at her as she went. Betty felt fiercely glad as she picked up the pie and came back, glad that they had given her reason to rebel. Life seemed once more all wrong, and the only way to right it was to accept Dudley Weston’s rescue. She gave her conscience a slap and told it to be quiet, and she carried the pie in and put it down in front of her mother with a thump.

“You may bring the pie to me,” said Chester, noticing how tired Eleanor was looking.

Betty slammed the pie in front of her father.

“I thought children of respectable families were supposed to be sent to school,” she said as she slumped into her chair again.

“Perhaps we are not a respectable family,” said Chester, eyeing the pie. “I have had strong suspicions during the last week that we were not. Jane, will you get me a knife and some plates?”

“Well, aren’t we going to school anymore?” asked John eagerly as if he personally would be quite willing to dispense with that conventionality.

“Certainly,” said Chester evenly. “There are several different kinds of schools. I felt that a change would be most beneficial at this time. You are about to engage in a course in domestic science and agriculture.”

“Agriculture?” asked Chris contemptuously. “At this time of year?”

“At this time of year,” said Chester. “Woodcutting and carrying has a large part in the winter work of the farmer. In the interim it will not hurt you boys to get a little touch of domestic science along with your sisters. To that end, we are all going to wash the dishes tonight and put them away. Tomorrow I am expecting a man to put in our telephone, and after that I shall be busy most of the mornings and afternoons, but after five o’clock I shall expect to do my part toward the running of this house with the rest of you, and I shall expect each one of you to do your share without complaint. I believe your mother has some plan for division of labor, and she will tell you about it tomorrow. But I want you to understand there is to be no shirking. I brought you up here partly to give you an understanding of some of the hardships of the world of which you have so far seen very little, and they can only be understood by experience. Therefore we are going to have experience.”

“Great cats!” said Chris.

“I abhor housework!” said Betty wrathfully. “I don’t see any sense in people with brains having to do it, either.”

“Were you under the impression that you had brains?” asked her father half amusedly.

Betty flushed angrily and swallowed her last bite of pie before answering. Then she arose haughtily, gathering up her dishes with the air of a degraded princess:

“Well, if this sort of thing is going on,” she said as she opened the kitchen door with her piles of dishes, “I for one shall leave!”

“Indeed!” said her father calmly. “Just where would you go?”

“There are plenty of places I can go!” she tossed her head mysteriously. “Lots of girls are leaving home today, getting jobs and things like that. I don’t blame them either if this is the sort of parents they have to endure!”

With that Betty went out and shut the door behind her. A moment later they heard her stamping noisily up the narrow back stairway.

Chester opened the door into the hall, and his voice met her as she reached the door of her own room:

“Betty, you may come down at once. Your part of the evening’s work is not done.”

Betty came down, her eyes stormy. Silently she went about doing what she was told to do, and doing no more. Silently until she was dismissed she remained, and when the lamp in the kitchen was put out she rushed up to her room and had it out with herself, telling herself that she was glad she had sent word to Dudley. Such antique oppression was not to be tolerated. Then she cried a little, angry tears of self-pity, to think that her proud family had come to such straits as this. But it was not for the sake of the family she cried, but for her own. She was full of self-pity. And she began to think harsh thoughts against her previously indulgent father. What could have come over him to act this way, after all his years of kindness? He surely must be losing his mind!

But Chester Thornton was not losing his mind, heavy though his heart might be. As he worked away at the great banks of snow that hindered their moving about and down to the road as they would, his thoughts were busy trying to discover where the fault lay that his children who had apparently started out so well in life had run amok of all the modern trash and eagerly embraced it. Perhaps he was trying to blame someone else, for what he was slowly coming to see had been at least partly his own fault.

His full enlightenment came the evening he found his mother’s old Bible, with a few faded words from her own trembling hand written on the flyleaf.

To my children
,

I leave this old Book as the best heritage I can give. Study it carefully, and you will find the way to peace and righteousness and happiness as I have done. If there is ever anything wrong with your lives, come back to this book as if it were a mirror, and it will clearly show you what is the matter. And when you are lost in the world, it will guide you home
.

Mother

The tears rolled unexpectedly down Chester’s cheeks when he read that. His mother’s message across the years, like a voice from the grave showing him what to do! As if he had put to her the very questions that had been troubling him and she had handed him this book as an answer!

He read until far into the night. Read until Eleanor came down in robe and slippers with a worried look upon her face and asked what was the matter.

The strange part of it was that the first page he had opened to had been the story of Eli’s two sons who were misbehaving and the curse that God told Samuel to bring upon Eli.

He had begun to read the story because it had been one that his mother often read to him and his brothers when they were little children, sitting on their low stools about their mother’s knee on Sunday afternoon. The child Samuel! How well he remembered what charm it had for him at five years old! But the story itself had grown vague and its meaning utterly obscured. The part that Eli and his two profligate sons played in it began to appear like writing that has been done in invisible ink and brought near the fire. Eli stood out as a picture of himself: Eli, who meant to be a good man, but who had been too indulgent with his children! His heart burned within him as he read, and ever he could hear the sweet voice of his mother through the words. No, it was not as it had seemed at first, a miracle, that the worn old book should have fallen open at the third chapter of first Samuel. Often and often had it lain open there upon her knee while they listened entranced to the story.

And now as he read the once familiar sentence against the old easygoing father-priest the words stabbed themselves into his heart, and it was as if his own name were substituted for Eli’s, and his own neglect became a sin, heinous as Eli’s.

In that day I will perform against Eli all things which I have spoken concerning his house: when I begin, I will also make an end. For I have told him that I will judge his house for ever for the iniquity which he knoweth; because his sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not. And therefore I have sworn unto the house of Eli, that the iniquity of Eli’s house shall not be purged with sacrifice nor offering for ever
.

Over and over he read the awful words of the Lord God, and as they forced their way into his soul he seemed to be being judged of the Lord Himself, for the iniquity in his own household.

Back to the years of the babyhood of his little children he was carried, when he stood beside the pink and blue laced and beribboned cribs and watched the tiny buds of life unfold in beauty with such high hopes of what their lovely lives would be. All his own faults and follies were to be carefully erased from them, all guards and helps put about them to direct them into perfection. Perfect they had come from God, and perfect they should grow up to show what perfection in men and women could be. No children had ever been so fair and sweet and promising as his.

How hard he had worked during the years to make the home a fitting background for their youth, to pile up money with which to lavish upon them all the best that the world could give. Early had he sought out the best institutions of learning and carefully arranged that their initial education should be such as to prepare them for the requirements of the great universities that he had chosen. Never had they asked for anything that other children had, but he had given it if he could, and if he could not he generally managed soon to make it possible. He had ever been their comrade, playing with them when he could, taking time as often as possible for extended holidays, or at least sending them and their mother on holidays. He had chosen the best church in town, that is, the church where the best people, the really cultured, educated, refined people went. He had insisted that they be identified with its activities, although now he recalled that Betty’s sole effort in that line had been the playing of the star part in a great religious pageant where she had posed as some indefinite, angelic, personified principle looking more than angelic, and receiving enough praise to turn any girl’s head. Jane, too, had done a little childish act, a feather dance, between parts. After all, had that sort of thing helped them heavenward? Yet, too, he remembered now a carnival held in the public hall of Briardale, for the benefit of the new church community hall that they were trying to build. Betty had entered into the drive for raising funds enthusiastically. She had presided over a fountain of lemonade dressed in some outlandish garb of a heathen goddess. He remembered she had been barefoot, and that he had protested, but the committee had carried the day, saying she wouldn’t look the part if she wore shoes. Oh, his children had always looked the part in whatever they had done, even church work. But what had been the matter?