The Prodigal Girl (25 page)

The still, clear cold came down as Chester had predicted it would, and the lake became a glassy sea, spreading like silver in the sun. Then the days were all too short for the wonderful skating, and they went down after supper once or twice, father and mother and all, and it was fun to watch the parents glide away together like two young people, Eleanor, after the first wild clutch and flounder getting her girlish poise and sailing off with fair rhythm.

It was great fun, the whole family skating together! It seemed as if time had given them a reprieve and they were all children together. There were times, hours together, when Betty forgot her contempt of the country, and her plans to get out of it, and enjoyed everything wholeheartedly.

Christmas would fall on Tuesday this year.

It was the Thursday before Christmas that they went out to get the tree, Betty with the rest, and Eleanor along on the bobsled to help pick it out.

The air was clear and keenly cold, but the dryness made it most exhilarating. The white-clad mountains with their fringe of evergreens looked like vast Christmas cards in the distance, and even Betty felt a new kind of Christmas excitement in the air. There had been days when she wept and mourned for her class plays and her dances and her giddy little friends, but she was fast becoming interested in the new vast world to which she had been transplanted. If it had not been for Dudley and what he would think of her, and the howl that would arise from those of her friends to whom he had undoubtedly by this time confided their plans, she would have been glad to forget him and enter heartily into the holiday.

But a troubled mind is not a mind at rest, and Betty was ready at the slightest inconvenience to burst into contempt or fury and pour her scorn on her family.

It was an afternoon to remember. The tramping over the crisp crust of the snow to find the particular tree that would just fit into the place in the big sitting room where Father remembered the tree always used to stand; the glitter on the snow as they stood around while Father and Chris took turns cutting down the tree; the resinous smell of the chips as they flew from the axe; the plumy sweep of the spruce boughs as the tree finally toppled and bowed its lovely tip slowly, almost with a sweep of pride to the ground. All those things were imprinted on Betty’s mind, and something like a plaintive song in her heart kept going over and over,
You’re going away! You’re not going to be here to see this tree all decked out with paper ornaments and popcorn and cheap homemade stuff!
and something hurt at the thought.

“Sob stuff!” said Betty to herself, turning sharply on her heel and walking away from the rest, determined not to think about it. She had her life to live! They had no right to hold her here in this poisonous dump!

Mother opened a basket of lunch she had brought along, and they all ate raisin gingerbread as they rigged the tree on the sled. Then all hands took hold to pull it home, everybody but Eleanor who walked smiling beside the tree and looked as young as any of them. Once Betty turned around and caught a glimpse of her mother’s face looking so pleased and full of delight, and it came to her suddenly as a new thought that Mums must have been a very pretty girl indeed! Would she look mature and serious all the time after she had been married for a while? Well, perhaps, but she doubted it. She didn’t intend to work as hard as Mums had done. She would lie in the lap of luxury.

They carried the tree home with much shouting and laughter and made a ceremony of getting it set up. There was a great bundle of hemlock branches Chris had cut and lashed to the tree with a piece of rope, and Betty took pleasure in decorating the room with these, putting them over pictures and windows and on the mantel.

Dan Woolley from the next farm brought in the mail just as they were sitting down to a belated supper. There was a letter for Betty.

She hid it in her pocket and did not open it until she had a chance to run upstairs while the others were lingering at the table, excusing herself to go after her apron.

It was from Dudley. She had recognized it, though he had evidently tried to disguise his handwriting. It was brief and to the point:

Old girl
,

O. K. You’ve said it! Suits me! We’ll paint the town red! Sam and Gyp have renigged. Too much pull for Gwen’s shindig! But I know another kid in New York and he can get a girl easy enough. Don’t you be late. We might want to take in Gwen’s ourselves later. We better get tied in New York if you think that’s necessary. If you keep me waiting I’m off you for life
.

Dud

It wasn’t exactly the kind of letter a bride would expect to receive from her lover two nights before she expected to be married, but it stirred Betty with a strange excitement. Perhaps there was beneath it all in her heart a trace of unrest and disappointment at the lack of something, call it romance if you like—Betty termed it “thrill”—something that the world for generations has taught its children to expect of love and courtship. But Betty reflected as she stuffed the precious letter into her pocket that this was a frank and progressive age, and she was a modern girl. There was no mushy stuff nowadays, everything was matter of fact. She had prided herself on attaining that attitude for the past two years, and this was no time to retract. She was going out into the world on her own, and she must be firm and carry the thing through gallantly.

She came flying downstairs, with her eyes feverishly bright and her cheeks aglow, and offered to do the dishes all by herself. Chester looked up with a pleased smile.

“It agrees with our Betty up here,” he said happily. “Look at her cheeks, Eleanor. She doesn’t need any rouge or lipstick now. That was the way nature meant to have the cheeks painted.”

Betty caught her breath and hurried into the kitchen with a pile of plates. Something in her father’s tender glance made her suddenly vaguely afraid, a wild homesick throb of fear, or was it only that she was so excited? But she mustn’t let things get her this way. She had to carry this thing out right, and she mustn’t let Dud see she had wavered.

They all insisted on helping with the dishes, however. They would not leave her alone a minute. And afterward they went into the sitting room and sat around the fire, with the lamp in the hall so that they sat only in the firelight with the soft glow over the crisp, resinous spines of the great, beautiful tree, the sweet piney smell mingling with the fragrance of wood smoke. Betty was stabbed with a sudden throb of the dearness of her family that she never had suspected before. She realized that she would never forget that moment.

They sang Christmas carols for half an hour, and then suddenly Chester stood up and said:

“I think we’ll have to thank our heavenly Father tonight!” His voice was almost wistful as he looked around in the firelight and smiled, and before Betty realized they were all kneeling again with the shadows playing over them while Chester brought them each to the Father’s notice in words that were matchless for tenderness and pleading. It seemed to Betty that she could not stand it. For there was God standing out there in the room again, looking at her, and there was her father telling God all about her in such tones as if he could see Him. See a God who was not! Poor old-fashioned Chester! And she was planning to steal out of the house tomorrow toward morning when they were all asleep and run away to be married! It was awful! If she had only known her father would do that strange, absurd thing again, she would have slipped off before they sang, said she was sleepy or something.

She stole a quick glance around to see if there was a way open to the stairs, that even now she might disappear. She saw her father, with the glow of flickering light on his graying hair and over his tired face, her father in that humble attitude, and she shrank from it. If only she had not looked! For she knew again that this was something she would never forget, and she did not wish to remember it. It was something that paralyzed the spirit that was driving her on into life, something that disarmed her and made her weak and humble, something that would reach out clinging hands and try to keep her from going.

The day had been full of eager plans and mysterious secrets. Mrs. Woolley had sent down a can of mincemeat. She said it was made after Mr. Thornton’s mother’s own recipe, and no mince pies could beat old Mrs. Thornton’s.

Betty and Jane had made molasses taffy and had great fun pulling it and cutting it into neat shapes and arranging it on waxed paper. Mrs. Woolley sent down some cranberry jelly; and the turkey, a great twenty pounder, was from a nearby farm, also sent as a love gift in memory of the departed grandmother who had been a blessing to the whole neighborhood. The house had been full of good spicy smells, and laughter from morning to night, and Betty had worked harder than any of them, her conscience driving her most mercilessly.

“For I won’t be here long to help,” she said to herself a hundred times.

Why, Betty is waking up, the dear child!
thought Eleanor, and Chester’s pleased smile was constantly upon her, making Betty almost writhe as she met it, for she kept hearing in contrast her father’s stern voice as it had sounded that night he took her away from Dudley Weston. And now another day would bring that hard look back to his face.

But he will forgive me all right when it’s all over
, promised her heart cheerfully whenever she faltered; and she had filled the hours so full that there was no more time to think.

All this went over in Betty’s mind while her father prayed, and when she rose from her knees she hurried up to her room, not daring to stay around the fire and talk any longer. She had yet her little gifts to tie up. The quaint old china doll in its modern, up-to-date green silk was already reposing in a box for Doris. She was leaving her string of coral beads, which she had had on the day she left Briardale, for Jane. Jane loved them, and she could think of nothing else. She had bungled a necktie out of an old piece of silk for Johnny, hemstitched a handkerchief each for Eleanor, Chester, and Chris out of a piece of fine linen from the attic, and embroidered initials on them. It was all she knew to make.

After they were all tied and labeled she looked at them unhappily and reflected that if Dud brought money enough along she would buy some really nice things for them in New York and send them up after she was gone.

There remained yet a note to write. Young girl elopers always wrote notes to their angry parents. The only trouble was hers were not angry just now, and she had been having a really wonderful time for the last two or three days. Still, she had a duty to herself. She had her life to live.

So she bolstered up her failing courage.

There was a pleasant bustle in the air next morning when she awoke, and it seemed unreal that she was planning to go away. The very smells in the house made her tingle with excitement. Wood smoke stealing deliciously up through the cracks around the old stovepipe. Scent of pine tree, fragrant from its recent living in the great out-of-doors; odor of hemlock mingled with other faint suggestions of sage, onion, thyme, and sweet marjoram; pickles and cloves and spice. It wasn’t at all the time to leave home: Christmas! Christmas belonged to home and Mother and Father and the children. But of course, she was going out into the world now to make her own Christmas, and it was too late to draw back.

Betty sprang up and dressed quickly. So much conscience as she still retained told her that at least she must do all she could for the common good this last day.

She came down with a docile conscious air, but everybody was too busy and too eager to notice her much.

Someone brought the morning mail—it might have been the milkman on his way home from his route. The neighbors did such kindly things. Betty was wiping the dishes at the time. She looked fearfully toward the pile of letters, half hoping there would be one from Dudley calling off the wedding. If Dudley should want to put it off till after Christmas she wouldn’t feel half-bad, she told herself.

But there was no letter for Betty. There was one for Chester, however, something about Chris, it seemed, for Chris and his father retired to the library and read it. Chris came out smiling and went whistling back to his work. Whenever he spoke his voice was so glad it sounded almost like singing. Betty looked at him curiously once or twice and thought how dear he suddenly seemed. Betty could hardly understand herself all that day. Sometimes she wanted to cry. Even when they all went down that afternoon to skate for a couple of hours, her heart seemed in her throat.

Night came and sitting round the fire. Betty couldn’t stand that. Chester was telling a long story about his boyhood, the night of a blizzard when there was a sick lamb, and he and his brother Clint had to dig a tunnel to the barn and bring it in the house and feed it with warm milk in a bottle. Next there would come some singing and then perhaps another prayer. If she had to kneel through another prayer she would scream! She simply could not carry that picture of her father on his knees away with her into the world. It would spoil everything.