The Beloved Woman Part 3

"Well, first I just watched her help for her, and paid the bills, and went to market. And then I got gradually managing more and more; I'd go to pay her interest, or deposit money, or talk to tenants; I liked it and she liked me. And then she talked me into going to France with her, but I cried all the way for my children, and I was glad enough to come home again! She and Miss Annie spent some time over there, but I came back. Miss Alice was in school, and Theodore--dear knows where he was--into some mischief somewhere! But I'd saved money, and she'd given me the Brooklyn houses, and I took a boarder or two, and that was the last I ever worked for any one but my own!"

"Well, that's a nice girl, that Leslie," Norma said, "if her father _was_ wild!"

"Her mother was a good girl," Kate said, "I knew her. But the old lady was proud, Baby--G.o.d save any one of us from pride like that! You'd never know it, to see her now, but she was very proud. Theodore's wife was a good girl, but she was Miss Annie's maid, and what Mrs. Melrose never could forgive was that when she ordered the girl out of the house, she showed her her wedding certificate. She was Mrs. Theodore Melrose, fast enough--though his mother never would see her or acknowledge her in any way."

"They must think the Lord has made a special arrangement for them--people like that!" Norma commented, turning a lovely flushed face from the pan where she was dexterously crisping bacon. "What business is it of hers if her son marries a working girl? That gives me a feeling akin to pain--just because she happens to have a lot of money! What does Miss Leslie Melrose think of that?"

"I don't know what she thinks--she loves her grandmother, I suppose.

Mrs. Melrose took her in when she was only a tiny girl, and she's been the apple of her eye ever since. Theodore and his wife were divorced, and when Leslie was about four or five he came back to his mother to die--poor fellow! It was a terrible sorrow to the old lady--she'd had her share, one way and another! My goodness, Norma," Mrs. Sheridan interrupted herself to say, in half-reproachful appreciation, "I wish you'd always help me like this, my dear! You can be as useful as ten girls, when you've a mind to! And then perhaps to-morrow you'll be as contrary----!"

"Oh, Aunt Kate, aren't you ashamed! When I ironed all your dish-towels last night, when you were setting bread, and I made the popovers Sunday!" Norma kissed her aunt, brushed a dab of cornstarch from the older woman's firm cheek, and performed a sort of erratic dance about the protestant and solid figure. "I'm a poor working girl," she said, "and I get dragged out with my long, hard day!"

"Well, G.o.d knows that's true, too," her aunt said, with a sudden look of compunction; "you may make a joke of it, but it's no life for a girl. My dear," she added, seriously, holding Norma with a firm arm, and looking into her eyes, "I hope I did no harm by what I did to-day! I did it for the best, whatever comes of it."

"You mean stirring up the whole thing?" Norma asked, frowning a little in curiosity and bewilderment. "Going to see her?"

"That--yes." Mrs. Sheridan rubbed her forehead with her hand, a fashion she had when puzzled or troubled, and suddenly resumed, with a great rattling of pans and hissing of water, her operations at the sink.

"Well, nothing may come of it--we'll see!" she added, briskly. Norma, who was watching her expectantly, sighed disappointedly; the subject was too evidently closed. But a second later she was happily distracted by the slamming of the front door; Wolf and Rose Sheridan had come in together, and dinner was immediately served.

Norma recounted, with her own spirited embellishments, her adventures of the afternoon as the meal progressed. She had had "fun" getting to the office in the first place, a man had helped her, and they had both skidded into another man, and bing!--they had all gone down on the ice together. And then at the shop n.o.body had come in, and the lights had been lighted, and the clerks had all gathered together and talked. Then Aunt Kate had come in to have lunch, and to have Norma go with her to the gas company's office about the disputed charge, and they had decided to make, at last, that long-planned call on the Melroses. There followed a description of the big house and the spoiled, pretty girl, and the impressive yet friendly old lady.

"And Aunt Kate--I'm sorry to say!--talked her into a nervous convulsion.

You did, Aunt Kate--the poor old lady gave one piercing yell----"

"You awful girl, there'll be a judgment on you for your impudence!" her aunt said, fondly. But Rose looked solicitously at her mother, and said:

"Mother looks as if she had had a nervous convulsion, too. You look terribly tired, Mother!"

"Well, I had a little business to discuss with Mrs. Melrose," Mrs.

Sheridan said, "and I'm no hand for business!"

"You know it!" Wolf Sheridan concurred, with his ready laugh. "Why didn't you send me?"

"It was her business, lovey," his mother said, mildly, over her second heartening cup of strong black tea.

The Sheridan apartment was, in exterior at least, exactly like one hundred thousand others that line the side streets of New York. It faced the familiar grimy street, fringed on the great arteries each side by cigarette stands and saloons, and it was entered by the usual flight of stained and shabby steps, its doorway showing a set of some dozen letter-boxes, and looking down upon a bas.e.m.e.nt entrance frequently embellished with ash-cans and milk-bottles, and, just at present, with banks of soiled and sooty snow. The Sheridans climbed three long flights inside, to their own rooms, but as this gained them a glimpse of river, and a sense in summer of airiness and height, to say nothing of pleasant nearness to the roof, they rarely complained of the stairs--in fact, rarely thought of them at all.

With the opening of their own door, however, all likeness to their neighbours ceased. Even in a cla.s.s where home ties and home comforts are far more common than is generally suspected, Kate Sheridan was exceptional, and her young persons fortunate among their kind. Her training had been, she used to tell them, "old country" training, but it was not only in fresh linen and hot, good food that their advantage lay.

It was in the great heart that held family love a divine gift, that had stood between them and life's cold realities for some twenty courageous years. Kate idolized her own two children and her foster-child with a pa.s.sion that is the purest and the strongest in the world. In possessing them, she thought herself the most blessed of women. To keep a roof over their heads, to watch them progress triumphantly through long division and measles and skates, to see milk gla.s.ses emptied and plates sc.r.a.ped, to realize that Wolf was as strong morally as he was physically, and that all her teachers called Rose an angel, to spoil and adore the beautiful, mischievous, and amusing "Baby"; this made a life full to the brim, for Kate, of pride and happiness. Kate had never had a servant, or a fur coat; for long intervals she had not had a night's unbroken rest; and there had been times, when Wolf's fractured arm necessitated a doctor's bill, or when coal for the little Detroit house had made a disproportionate hole in her bank account, in which even the thrifty Kate had known biting financial worry.

But the children never knew it. They knew only her law of service and love. They must love each other, whatever happened. There was no quarrelling at meals at Kate's house. Rose must of course oblige her brother, sew on the b.u.t.ton, or take his book to the library; Wolf must always protect the girls, and consider them. Wolf firmly believed his sister and cousin to be the sweetest girls in the world; Rose and Norma regarded Wolf as perfection in human form. They rarely met without embraces, never without brightening eyes and light hearts.

That this att.i.tude toward each other was only the result of the healthy bodies and honest souls that Kate had given them they would hardly have believed. That her resolute training had literally forced them to love and depend upon themselves in a world where brothers and sisters as habitually teased and annoyed each other, would have struck them as fantastic. Perhaps Kate herself hardly knew the power of her own will upon them. Her commands in their babyhood had not been couched in the language of modern child-a.n.a.lysts, nor had she given, or been able to give, any particular reason for her law. But the instinct by which she drew Wolf's attention to his sister's goodness, or noted Wolf's cleverness for Rose's benefit, was better than any reason. She summed the situation up simply for the few friends she had, with the phrase:

"They're all crazy about each other, every one of them!"

Kate's parlour would have caused Annie von Behrens actual faintness. But it was a delightful place to Rose and Wolf and their friends. The cushioned divan on Sunday nights customarily held a row of them, the upright ebony piano sifted popular music impartially upon the taboret, the patent rocker, and the Rover rug. They laughed, gossiped, munched candy, and experimented in love-making quite as happily as did Leslie and her own intimates. They streamed out into the streets, and sauntered along under the lights to the moving pictures, or on hot summer nights they perched like tiers of birds on the steps, and the world and youth seemed sweet to them. In Kate's dining-room, finished in black wood and red paper, they made Welsh rarebits and fudge, and in Kate's spotless kitchen odours of toast and coffee rose at unseemly hours.

Lately, Rose and Norma had been talking of changes. Rose was employed in an office whose severe and beautiful interior decoration had cost thousands of dollars, and Norma's Old Book Room was a study in dull carved woods, Oriental rugs, dull bronzes, and flawless gla.s.s. The girls began to feel that a plain cartridge paper and net curtains might well replace the parlour's florid green scrolling and Nottingham lace. But they did not worry about it; it served as a topic to amuse their leisure hours. The subject was generally routed by a shrewd allusion, from Norma or Wolf, to the sort of parlour people would like if they got married, married to someone who was doing very well in the shoe business, for example.

These allusions deepened the colour in Rose's happy face; she had been "going" for some three months with an attractive young man who exactly met these specifications--not her first admirer, not noticeable for any especial quality, yet Rose and Norma, and Kate, too, felt in their souls that Rose's hour had come. Young Harry Redding was a big, broad, rather inarticulate fellow, whose humble calling was not the more attractive to the average young woman because he supported his mother by it. But he suited Rose, more, he seemed wonderful to Rose, and because her dreams had always been humble and self-sacrificing, Harry was a thousand times more than she had dreamed. She felt herself the luckiest girl in the world.

Kate sat at the head of her table, and Wolf at the foot. Rose, a gentle, quiet copy of her handsome mother, was nearest the kitchen door, to which she made constant flying trips. Norma was opposite Rose, and by falling back heavily could tip her entire chair against the sideboard, from which she extracted forks or salt or candy, as the case might be.

The telephone was in the dining-room, Wolf's especial responsibility, and Mrs. Sheridan herself occasionally left the table for calls to the front door or the dumb-waiter.

To-night, after supper, the girls flew through their share of clearing-up. It never weighed very heavily upon them; they usually began the process of piling and sc.r.a.ping dishes before they left the table, Rose whisking the tablecloth into its drawer as Norma b.u.mped through the swinging door with the last dishes, and Kate halfway through the washing even then. Chattering and busy, they hustled the hot plates onto their shelves, rattled the hot plated ware into its basket, clanked saucepans, and splashed water. Not fifteen minutes after the serving of the dessert the last signs of the meal had been obliterated, and Kate was guilty of what the girls called "making excuses" to linger in the kitchen. She was mixing cereal, storing cold potatoes and cut bread, soaking dish-towels.

But these things did not belong to the duties of Norma and Rose, and the younger girl could flash with a free conscience to the little room she shared with Rose. Wolf had called out for a companion, they were going to take a walk and see what the blizzard had done!

Norma washed her face, the velvety skin emerging with its bloom untouched, the lips crimson, the blue eyes blazing. She pressed a great wave of silky dark hair across her white forehead, and put the fur-trimmed hat at a dashing angle. The lace blouse, the pearl beads, her fur-collared coat again, and Norma was ready to dance out beside Wolf as if fatigue and labours did not exist.

"Where's Rose?" he said, as they went downstairs.

"Oh, Wolf--Sat.u.r.day night! Harry's coming, of course!" Norma slipped her little hand, in its shabby glove, through his big arm. "She and Aunt Kate were gossiping!"

"Suits me!" Wolf said, contentedly. He held her firmly on the slippery lumps of packed snow. The sidewalks were almost impa.s.sable, yet hundreds of other happy persons were stumbling and scrambling over them in the mild winter darkness. Stars were out; and whether Norma was blinking up at them, or staring into lighted windows of candy stores and fruit markets, her own eyes danced and twinkled. The elevated trains thundered above their heads, and the subway roared under their feet; great advertising signs, with thousands of coloured lights, fanned up and down in a haze of pink and blue; the air was full of voices, laughing and shouting, and the screaming of coasting children.

"I have my pearls on," Norma told her companion. They stopped for some mola.s.ses peppermints, and their pungent odour mingled for Norma in the impression of this happy hour. "Wolf, how do they do that?" the girl asked, watching an electric sign on which a maid mopped a dirty floor with some prepared cleaner, leaving the floor clean after her mop. Wolf, interested, explained, and Norma listened. They stopped at a drug store, and studied a picture that subtly altered from Roosevelt's face to Lincoln's, and thence to Wilson's face, and Wolf explained that, too.

Norma knew that he understood everything of that nature, but she liked to impress him, too, and did so far more often than she realized, with her book-lore. When Norma spoke lightly of a full calf edition de luxe of the Sonnets from the Portuguese, she might almost have been speaking in that language for all she conveyed to Wolf, but he watched the animated face proudly just the same. Rose had always been good and steady and thoughtful, but Wolf knew that Norma was clever, taking his big-brotherly patronage with admiring awe, but daring where he hesitated, and boldly at home where he was ill at ease. When she said that when she got married she wanted Dedham china, and just a plain, gla.s.s bowl for goldfish, Wolf nodded, but he would have nodded just as placidly if she had wanted a Turkish corner and bead portieres. And to-night when she a.s.serted that she wouldn't be Leslie Melrose for anything in the world, Wolf asked in simple wonderment why she should be.

"Imagine, a maid came to take those big girls home, Wolf! They can speak French," Norma confided. Wolf did not look for coherence from her, and took the two statements on their face value. "Now, I know I'm not pretty," she continued, following, as was usual with her, some obscure line of thought, "but I'm prettier than Doris Alexander, and she had her picture in the paper!"

"Who broke it to you that you're not pretty?" Wolf asked.

"Well, I _know_ I'm not!" Norma jumped along at his side for a few minutes, eyeing him expectantly, but Wolf's mind was honestly busy with this a.s.sertion, and he did not speak. Wasn't she pretty? Girls had funny standards. "You know," she resumed, "you'd hate a girl like Leslie Melrose, Wolf!"

"Would I?"

"Oh, you'd loathe her. But I'll tell you who you _would_ like," Norma added, in a sudden burst. "You'd love Mr. Liggett!"

"Why should I?" Wolf asked, in some surprise.

"Oh, because he's nice--he's very good-looking, and he has such a pleasant voice, as if he knew everything, but wasn't a bit conceited!"

Norma said. "And he picks out books for his wife, and when I try to tell him something about them, he always knows lots more. You know, in a pleasant, careless sort of way, not a bit as if he was showing off. And I'll tell you what he did. Miss Drake was showing him a pottery bowl one day, and she dropped it, and she told me he sort of caught at it with his hand, and he said to Mr. Biretta, 'I've very stupidly broken this--just put it on my bill, will you?' Of course," Norma added, vivaciously, "old B. G. immediately said that it was nothing at all, but _you know_ what Miss Drake would have caught, if _she'd_ broken it!"

Perhaps Wolf did, but he was thinking at the moment that the family baby was very cunning, with her bright eyes and indignant mouth. He stopped her before a vaudeville house, in a flare of bright light.

"Want to go in?"

"Oh, Wolf! Would Aunt Kate care? Oh, Wolf, _let's_!"

There was absolute ecstasy in her eyes as they went through the enchanted doorway and up the rising empty foyer toward the house. It was nine o'clock; the performance was fairly under way. Norma rustled into a seat beside her companion without moving her eyes from the coloured comedian on the stage; she could remove hat and gloves and jacket without losing an instant of him.

When the lights went up Wolf approved the dark hair and the pearls, and bent toward her to hear the unending confidences. Norma thought she had never seen anything better, and even Wolf admitted that it was a good show. They finished the peppermints, and were very happy.

They had seen the big film, and so could cut the last third of the programme, and reach home at ten o'clock. There was no comment from Aunt Kate, who was yawning over the evening paper in the dining-room. Rose and Harry were murmuring in the dimly lighted parlour. Wolf, who was of the slow-thinking, intense type that discovers a new world every time it reads a new book, was halfway through a shabby library copy of "War and Peace," and went off to his room with the second volume under his arm.

Norma went to her room, too, but she sat dreaming before the mirror, thinking of that Melrose house, and of Leslie's friendliness, until Rose came in at eleven o'clock.