Cicely and Other Stories Part 6

"You see, Elsie had been telling so many truths about us, that poor little Tim believed implicitly in her fortune-telling ability. She felt that her doom was sealed; that the cruel finger of a relentless fate had written it so plainly in her tell-tale palm, that all who saw it might read. She hid her face on my shoulder and sobbed so violently that it put an end to the seance.

"Elsie had to come out from behind the screen to help soothe her.

'Why, Tim, dear, you mustn't take it so to heart!' she insisted. 'Let me look at your hands again. There may be plenty of lines to counteract that one; besides, I am only a beginner, and liable to make a wrong interpretation.'

"By sheer force of her strong, cheery personality, she calmed Tim after awhile, and had her laughing like the gayest of us. n.o.body but Elsie could have done it.

"When Miss Hill made an excuse to come in a little after nine o'clock, we were eating apples and telling riddles as demurely as Quaker ladies."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'SHE HID HER FACE ON MY SHOULDER'"]

When Olive had finished reading this letter aloud, she had to read several more before she came to another mentioning the subject in which she and Sara were most interested; and after that there were only occasional paragraphs scattered here and there among pages of personal news and school happenings.

"I am afraid that Timoroso is going to be ill," wrote Sophia, in one of those gossipy epistles. "She is as white and listless as a tired little ghost. She has slept scarcely any since our palmistry evening, but I did not discover the fact until last night. I woke suddenly to find her standing by the window in the moonlight, with a blanket thrown round her. She was catching her breath in long, choking sobs, and wringing her hands in the greatest distress. The idea that she must sometime take her own life haunts her night and day. I found that she had been brooding over it, taking a morbid interest in all the sensational reports of suicides that she can find in the papers, and that she has been rereading Cleopatra's experiments with poisons."

"Timoroso's case is growing alarming. I have told Elsie, and she feels she is directly responsible for her condition, and bemoans her thoughtlessness in ever telling Tim what she saw in her hand. She is doing all she can now to cheer Tim up and ridicule her out of her morbidness. She is always running in with some funny speech to make us laugh. Of course, all the other girls follow her example, so that poor little Tim is the most popular girl in school now; but I catch her looking at her hand a dozen times a day, with all the horror in her face that Lady Macbeth's had, over the spots that would not out."

"The crisis came last night. I was awakened by hearing a window stealthily opened, and the moonlight was bright enough to show me Timoroso stepping up on the sill.

"'Tim!' I cried, 'what on earth are you doing?' She turned and looked at me wildly for an instant, and then, running across the room, flung herself down on the bed beside me.

"'Oh, I am so glad I did not do it!' she cried, with a little moan. 'I felt that I must jump out of the window. I am glad you called me.

Still,'--she looked round wildly again,--'if I am doomed to such an awful fate, it will have to come sometime, and it might be better to have it over with soon, than to live in this constant dread.'

"When I told Elsie about it, this morning, she cried, and that is something I never saw Elsie Gayland do before.

"'You've got to go with me to see Doctor Phelps about Tim!' she said. 'I can manage to get leave of absence for both of us in one way or another, for I am desperate enough to accomplish anything.'

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'LOOKING AT HER HAND A DOZEN TIMES A DAY.'"]

"Doctor Phelps listened like a father to Elsie's confession of her thoughtlessness in giving Tim such a nervous shock. 'I used to dabble in phrenology and chiromancy, and such things, when I was young,' he said. 'As guides to character they are certainly interesting and often helpful, but, one should remember, by no means infallible.'

"Then he showed us a little mark on his palm. 'Years ago,' he said, 'I was told that that presaged an early death by drowning. It was to occur between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, and although I was on the water almost daily, I never had the slightest accident. I am over sixty now. Had I been a nervous man, I would probably have suffered much from my apprehensions of danger. Tell that to Miss Talbot for her comfort.'

"He walked back to school with us, and while he waited for Miss Hill to be summoned, Elsie went up-stairs to get her book. When she came down there was the queerest expression on her face I ever saw. 'I have made _such_ a mistake!' she said, in an embarra.s.sed way. 'I can never forgive myself for it. I mistook one line for another, and the one in Tim's hand means something entirely different from what I thought it did. That poor little soul has been suffering all this time solely on account of my ignorance!'

"Doctor Phelps smiled. 'When I was a lad,' he said, 'there was a couplet in my grammar that I often had to pa.r.s.e, which ran in this wise:

"'A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring!'"

"Tim's father came to-day. Doctor Phelps telegraphed for him immediately after leaving here yesterday, and they have taken her away to a sanitarium. Doctor Phelps said that she was not able to stand the long journey home, and that her nervous condition was so serious that she must have immediate attention.

"Elsie is inconsolable, although Doctor Phelps a.s.sures her that Tim would undoubtedly have broken down before the close of the year, from the mere strain of school life; she is such a delicate little thing."

"Just a month to-day since Tim left. It will be a full year before she is well and strong again, Doctor Phelps says, and maybe longer. He was invited to speak in the chapel, this morning, and I wish you could have heard what he said on the influence of the imagination. He told some comical stories of patients he had had, who could imagine themselves possessed of a new disease every week.

"Then he spoke of clairvoyants, and mediums, and fortune-tellers of every kind. 'It is one of the kindest provisions of Providence,' he added, 'that we are allowed to see only one minute at a time. Suppose that we could look ahead into the years, and see some terrible calamity coming upon us, with the deadly certainty that every nightfall was bringing it one step nearer. What an agony of apprehension we would be in as the month approached--then the week, the day, and finally the hour! What man could stand the strain of such prolonged torture?

"'Or, suppose it were some joy that we looked forward to. When it came it would be robbed of its bloom by those long years of constant antic.i.p.ation. It is the unexpected good fortune, the bits of happiness that come to us as complete surprises, which give us the keenest thrills of enjoyment.'

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'ASKED ME TO HUNT UP ALL THE REFERENCES'"]

"Whatever Doctor Phelps says is law and gospel with Elsie Gayland, and as she never does anything half-way, I was not surprised when she walked into my room with her book on chiromancy, and put it in the fire. As she stood, grimly watching it burn, she said: 'I thought I should go through the floor when Doctor Phelps called me into the library just now. He gave me this big concordance, and asked me to hunt up all the references in my Bible under the words "hand" and "path," and all the promises for guidance and safety that are given to those who commit themselves into the Eternal keeping. He wants me to read them to Timoroso sometime soon, for he says that nothing but an abiding consciousness that she is in the hollow of an Omnipotent hand will bring her the peace of mind that is essential to her recovery.'"

Olive gathered the letters together, and as she tied them with the white and scarlet ribbons, Helen came back from her frosty drive.

"I thought you would want to hear the sequel," she said, smiling at their eager questions, as she sat down to the cup of steaming chocolate that Sara poured for her.

"Timoroso is entirely well now. She spent this winter in the south of France, and I want you to see the calendar she sent me this Christmas.

Such a beautiful little water colour, with the text illuminated as the old monks used to do it."

Sara and Olive leaned over her shoulder to examine the card Helen took from her desk, and read the verse together, half under their breath:

"Build a little fence of trust Around to-day.

Fill the s.p.a.ce with loving deeds And therein stay.

Look not through the sheltering bars Upon to-morrow; G.o.d will help thee bear what comes Of joy or sorrow."

Helen did not see the glance that pa.s.sed between the girls as they finished reading, but she was not surprised that there was never anything more said about consulting the clairvoyant at the Metropole.

THEIR ANCESTRAL LATCH-STRING

THEIR ANCESTRAL LATCH-STRING

It was an ideal day for a picnic; mid-June in the heart of the Blue Gra.s.s. On the rose-covered back porch of an old Southern mansion two pretty girls were enthusiastically preparing for their day's outing.

It did not cloud their happiness that Claribel had to iron her own shirt-waist for the occasion, or that the dainty lunch Wilma was packing into the basket would leave the larder almost empty. They had always been used to that order of things.

But old Mam Daphne, b.u.mping her scrubbing-brush over the kitchen floor, shook her woolly head sadly. She could remember the time when every day was a gala day in the old mansion, because it was always overflowing with guests to be entertained with free-handed hospitality. Store-room and smoke-house were filled to overflowing then, and there was a swarm of negro servants always in attendance. It hurt the faithful old mammy's pride to see one of her young mistress's daughters bending over the ironing-board, and to hear the other exclaiming over the fried chicken and frosted spice cake in the picnic basket, when such luxuries had once been their family's daily fare.

She was their only servitor, now, coming once a week to scrub and clean.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "IT HURT THE FAITHFUL OLD MAMMY'S PRIDE"]

This morning she looked down the gra.s.s-grown walk to the broken-hinged gate and sighed. She was looking through a bower of climbing roses, but even the Gloire de Dijon, with its thousands of gold-hearted blossoms, could not hide the fact that the old place was fast going to decay.

To Claribel and Wilma, not yet out of their teens, repairs on the old house did not seem half so important as their own personal ones of shoe soles and skirt braids. It was their sister Agnes, ten years older, who shouldered all such worries.

There had been girls in the country place where they lived, girls of the best old families, too, who, feeling the pinch of poverty that followed the changed conditions of the South after the war, had gone away to teach school or learn typewriting. But Agnes, bringing up her sisters in strict accordance with the old family traditions, carefully weeded out of their young minds any such tendencies toward self-support. With the city only fifteen miles away, where they might have had the society and advantages they longed for, her prejudices and family pride kept them in their cage of circ.u.mstances, waiting helplessly like two irresponsible little canaries, for some outside hand to open the door.