Read Ebook: Re-creations by Hill Grace Livingston

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Ebook has 1599 lines and 103803 words, and 32 pages

Then she caught a glimpse of her father at the train gate, with his old derby pulled down far over his forehead as if it were getting too big, and his shabby coat-collar turned up about his sunken cheeks. How worn and tired he looked! yes, and old and thin. She hadn't remembered that his shoulders stooped so, or that his hair was so gray. Had all that happened in two years? And that must be Louise waving her handkerchief so violently just in front of him. Was that Harry in that old red baseball sweater with a smudged white letter on his breast, and ragged wrists? He was chewing gum, too! Oh, if these new acquaintances would only get out of the way! It would be so dreadful to have to meet and explain and introduce! She forgot that she had a most speaking face, and that her feelings were quite open to the eyes of her new friends, until she suddenly looked up and found the young man's eyes upon her interestedly, and then the pink color flew over her whole face in confusion.

"Please excuse me," she said, reaching out for her suitcase. "I see my father," and without further formalities she fairly flew down the remainder of the platform and smothered herself in the bosom of her family, anxious only to get them off to one side and away from observation.

"She's a lovely girl," said the lady wistfully. "She wants to be an interior decorator, and make a name and fame for herself, but instead she's got to go home from college and keep house for that rabble. Still, I think she'll make good. She has a good face and sweet, true eyes. Sometime we'll go and see her and find out."

"M'm!" said the son, watching Cornelia escape from a choking embrace from her younger brother and sister. "I should think that might be interesting," and he walked quite around a group of chattering people greeting some friends in order that he might watch her the longer. But when Cornelia at last straightened her hat, and looked furtively about her, the mother and son had passed out of sight, and she drew a deep sigh of thanksgiving and followed her father and the children downstairs to the trolley. They seemed delightful people, and under other circumstances she might have heartily enjoyed their company; but if she had hard things to face she didn't want an audience while she faced them. Her father might be shabby and old; but he was her father, and she wasn't going to have him laughed at by anybody, even if he didn't always see things as she thought he ought to see them.

It was a long ride, and the trolley was chilly. Cornelia tried to keep from shivering and smile at everything Louise and Harry told her, but somehow things had got on her nerves. She had broken out into a perspiration with all the excitement at the station, and now felt cold and miserable. Her eyeballs ached with the frequent tears that had slipped their salt way that afternoon; and her head was heavy, and heavier her heart.

Across the way sat her father, looking grayer and more worn in the garish light of the trolley. His hair straggled and needed cutting, and his cheeks were quite hollow. He gave a hollow cough now and then, and his eyes looked like haunted spirits; but he smiled contentedly across to her whenever he caught her glance. She knew he meant that she should feel how glad he was to get her back. She began to feel very mean in her heart that she could not echo his gladness. She knew she ought to, but somehow visions of what she had left behind, probably forever, got between her and her duty, and pulled down the corners of her mouth in a disheartening droop that made her smiles a formal thing, though she tried, she really did try, to be what this worn old father evidently expected her to be, a model daughter, glad to get home and sacrifice everything in life for them all.

These thoughts made her responses to the children only half-hearted. Harry was trying to tell her how the old dog had died and they had only the little pup left, but it was so game it could beat any cat on the street in a fight already, and almost any dog.

Louise chimed in with a tale about a play in school that she had to be in if Nellie would only help her get up a costume out of old things. But gradually the talk died down, and Louise sat looking thoughtfully across at her father's tired face, while Harry frowned and puckered his lips in a contemplative attitude, shifting his gum only now and then enough to keep it going and fixing his eyes very wide and blue in deep melancholy upon the toe of his father's worn shoe. Something was fast going wrong with the spirits of the children, and Cornelia was so engrossed in herself and her own bitter disappointment that she hadn't even noticed it.

In the midst of the blueness the car stopped, and Mr. Copley rose stiffly with an apologetic smile toward his elder daughter.

"Well, this is about where we get off, Nellie," he said half wistfully, as if he had done his brave best and it was now up to her.

Something in his tone brought Cornelia keenly to her senses. She stumbled off the car, and looked around her breathlessly, while the car rumbled on up a strange street with scattering houses, wide open spaces reminding one of community baseball diamonds, and furtive heaps of tin cans and ashes. The sky was wide and open, with brilliant stars gleaming gaudily against the night, and a brazen moon that didn't seem to understand how glaringly every defect in the locality stood out; but that only made the place seem more strange and barren to the girl. She had not known what she expected, but certainly not this. The houses about her were low and small, some of them of red brick made all alike, with faded greenish-blue shutters, and a front door at one side opening on a front yard of a few feet in dimensions, with a picket fence about it, or sometimes none at all. The house her father was leading her to was a bit taller than the rest, covered with clapboards weather-beaten and stained, guiltless of paint, as could be seen even at night, high and narrow, with gingerbread-work in the gable and not even a porch to grace its poor bare face, only two steps and a plain wooden door.

Inside, at the end of the long, narrow hall the light from the dining-room shone cheerfully from a clean kerosene-lamp guiltless of shade, flaring across a red and white tablecloth.

"We haven't done a thing to the parlor yet," said the father sadly, throwing open a door at his right as Cornelia followed him. "Your mother hadn't the strength!" he sighed deeply. "But then," he added more cheerfully, "what are parlors when we are all alive and getting well?"

Cornelia cast a wondering look at him. She had not known her father thought so much of her mother. There was a half-glorified look on his face that made her think of a boy in love. It was queer to think it, but of course her mother and father had been young lovers once. Cornelia, her thoughts temporarily turned from her own brooding, followed into the desolate dining-room, and her heart sank. This was home! This was what she had come back to after all her dreams of a career and all her pride over an artistic temperament!

There was a place set for her at one end of the red-clothed table, and a plaintive little supper drying up on the stove in the kitchen; but Cornelia was not hungry. She made pretence of nibbling at the single little burned lamb-chop and a heavy soda-biscuit. If she had known how the children had gone without meat to buy that lamb-chop, and how hard Louise had worked to make these biscuits and the apple-sauce that accompanied them, she might have been more appreciative; but as it was she was feeling very miserable indeed, and had no time from her own self-pitying thoughts to notice them at all.

The dining-room was a dreary place. An old sofa that had done noble duty in the family when Cornelia was a baby lounged comfortably at one side, a catch-all for overcoats, caps, newspapers, bundles, mending, anything that happened along. Three of the dining-room chairs were more or less gone or emaciated in their seats. The cat was curled up comfortably in the old wooden rocker that had always gone by the name of "Father's rocker," and wore an ancient patchwork cushion. The floor was partly covered by a soiled and worn Axminster rug whose roses blushed redly still behind wood-colored scrolls on an indiscriminate background that no one would ever suspect of having been pearl-gray once upon a time. The wall-paper was an ugly dirty dark-red, with tarnished gold designs, torn in places and hanging down, greasy and marred where chairs had rubbed against it and heads had apparently leaned. It certainly was not a charming interior. She curled her lip slightly as she took it all in. This her home! And she a born artist and interior decorator!

Her silence and lack of enthusiasm dampened the spirits of the children, who had looked to her coming to brighten the dreary aspect of things. They began to sit around silently and watch her, their keen young eyes presently searching out her thoughts, following her gaze from wall-paper to curtainless window, from broken chair to sagging couch.

"We haven't been able to get very much to rights," sighed Louise in a suddenly grown-up, responsible tone, wrinkling her pink young brow into lines of care. "I wanted to put up some curtains before you got here, but I couldn't find them. Father wouldn't let me open the boxes till Carey came home to help. He said there was enough around for me to tend to, all alone, now."

"Of course," assented the elder sister briefly and not at all sympathetically. In her heart she was thinking that curtains wouldn't make any difference. What was the use of trying to do anything, anyway? Suppose the beautiful stranger who had been so sure she would make her home lovely could see her now. What would she think? She drew a deep sigh.

"I guess maybe I better go to bed," said Louise suddenly, blinking to hide a tendency to tears. It was somehow all so different from what she had expected. She had thought it would be almost like having mother back, and it wasn't at all. Cornelia seemed strange and difficult.

"Yes," said the father, coming up from the cellar, where he had been putting the erratic furnace to bed for the night; "you and Harry better get right up to bed. You have to get up so early in the morning."

"Perhaps you'd like to come, too," said Louise, turning to Cornelia with one more attempt at hospitality. "You know you have to sleep with me; that is I sleep with you." She smiled apologetically. "There isn't any other room, you know," she explained as she saw the look of dismay on Cornelia's face. "I wanted to fix up the linen-closet for me, but father couldn't find another cot yet. Harry sleeps on one cot up in a little skylight place in the third story that was only meant for a ladder to go up to the roof. Carey has the only real room on the third floor, and there aren't but two on the second besides the little speck of a bathroom and the linen-closet."

A sudden realization of the trouble in the little sister's eyes and voice brought Cornelia somewhat to her senses.

"That's all right, chicken," she said, pinching the little girl's cheek playfully. "We won't fight, I guess. I'm quite used to a roommate, you know."

Louise's face bloomed into smiles of hopefulness.

"Oh, that will be nice," she sighed. "Are you coming to bed now?"

"You run along, Louise," put in her father. "I guess Nellie and I will have a bit of a talk before she comes up. She'll want to know all about mother, you know."

The two children withdrew, and Cornelia tried to forget herself once more and bring her reluctant thoughts to her immediate future and the task that was before her.

"What is the matter with mother?" she asked suddenly, her thoughts still half impatient over the interruption to her career. It was time she understood more definitely just what had come in to stop her at this important time of her life. She wished that mother herself had written; mother never made so much of things, although of course she didn't want to hurt her father by saying so.

"Why, she was all run down," said Mr. Copley, a shade of deep sadness coming over his gray face. "You see she had been scrimping herself for a long time, saving, that the rest of us might have more. We didn't know it, of course, or we would have stopped it." His voice was shamed and sorrowful. "We found she hadn't been eating any meat,"--his voice shook like an old man's,--"just to--save--more for the rest of us."

Cornelia looked up with a curl on her lip and a flash in her eyes; but there was something in her father's broken look that held back the words of blame that had almost sprung to her lips, and he went on with his tale in a tone like a confession, as if the burden of it were all on him, and were a cloak of shame that he must wear. It was as if he wanted to tell it all at its worst.

"She didn't tell us, either, when she began to feel bad. She must have been running down for the last three years; in fact, ever since you went away. Though she never let on. When Molly had to go home to her folks, your mother decided not to try to keep a servant. She said she could get along better with sending out the washing, and servants were a scarce article, and cost a lot. I didn't want her to; but you know how your mother always was, and I had kind of got used to letting her have her own way, especially as about that time I had all I could do night and day at the office to try to prevent what I saw was coming for the business. She worked too hard. I shall never forgive myself!" He suddenly buried his face in his hands, and groaned.

It was awful to Cornelia. She wanted to run and fling her arms about his neck and comfort him; yet she couldn't help blaming him. Was he so weak? Why hadn't he been more careful of the business, and not let things get into such a mess? A man oughtn't to be weak. But the sight of his trouble touched her strangely. How thin and gray his hair looked! It struck her again that he looked aged since she had seen him last. It gave her the effect of a cold douche in her face.

"Don't father!" she said, her voice full of suppressed pain, and a glint of tenderness.

"Well, I know I oughtn't to trouble you this way, daughter," he said, looking up with a deprecatory smile; "but somehow it comes over me how much she suffered in silence before we found it out, and then I can't stand it, especially when I think what she was when I married her, so fresh-faced and pretty with brown hair and eyes just like yours. You make me think a lot of her, daughter. Well, it's all over, thank the Lord," he went on with a sigh, "and she's on the mend again. You don't know what it was to me the day of the operation."

"Operation!" The word caught in Cornelia's throat, and a chill of horror crept over her. "Why, you never told me there was an operation!"

"I know," her father said apologetically. "That was mother, too! she wouldn't have you troubled. She said it was just your examination time, and it would mean a great deal to you to get your marks; and it would only be a time of anxiety to you, and she was so sure she would come out all right. She was wonderfully brave, your mother was. And she hoped so much she'd be able to get up and around, and not have to bring you home till your course was over. We meant to manage it somehow; but you see we didn't know how serious it was, and how she would have to go away and stay a long time till she was strong."

Cornelia's eyes were filled with tears now. She had forgotten her own disappointments and the way she had been blaming her father, and was filled with remorse for the little mother who had suffered and thought of her to the last. She got up quickly, and went over to gather the bowed head of her father into her unaccustomed arms and try somehow to be daughterly. It was strange because she had been away so long and had got out of the way of little endearments, but she managed it so that the big man was comforted and smiled at her, and told her again and again how good it was to have her back, almost as good as having her mother. Then he stroked her hair, looked into her wise young eyes, and called her his little Nellie-girl, the way she could remember his doing before she went away to school.

When Cornelia went upstairs at last with the kerosene-lamp held high above her head so that she would not stumble up the steep, winding staircase, she had almost forgotten herself and her ambitions, and was filled with a desire to comfort her father.

She dropped into her place beside the sleeping sister with a martyr-like quiet, and failed to notice the discouraged droop of the little huddled figure, and the tear-stained cheek that was turned toward the dingy wall. The dreariness of the room and the close quarters had brought depression upon her spirits once more, and she lay a long time filled with self-pity, and wondering how in the world she was ever to endure it all.

In the dimness of the early morning Louise Copley awoke with a sigh to consciousness, and softly slid her hand down to the floor under the bed, where she had hidden the old alarm-clock. With a sense that her elder sister was still company she had not turned on the alarm as usual, and now with clock-like regularity and a sense of responsibility far beyond her years she had wakened at a quarter to six as promptly as if the whir of the alarm had sounded underneath her pillow.

She rubbed her eyes open, and through the half-lifted fringes took a glance. Yes it was time to get up. With one more lingering rub at her sleepy young eyes she put the clock back under the bed out of the way, and stole quietly over the footboard, watching furtively her sleeping sister. How pretty Nellie was even in the early gray light of morning, with all that wavy mane of hair sweeping over the pillow, and her long lashes lying on the pink curve of her cheek! Louise wondered incredulously whether she would be half as pretty as that when she was as old as her sister.

It was nice to have a big sister at home, but now she was here Louise wondered in a mature little housewifely way what in the world they were going to do with her. She didn't look at all fit for cooking and things like that, and Louise sighed wearily as she struggled with the buttons, and thought of the day before her, and the endless weeks that must go by before they could hope for the return of the dear mother who had made even poverty sweet and cheerful. And there was that matter of a spring hat, and a costume to wear at the school entertainment. She stole another glance at the lovely sleeping sister, and decided it would not do to bother her with little trifles like that. She would have to manage them somehow herself. Then, with the last button conquered, and a hasty tying back of her yellow curls with a much-worn ribbon, she tiptoed responsibly from the room, taking care to shut the latch securely and silently behind her.

She sped downstairs, and went capably at the kitchen stove, coaxing it into brightness and glancing fearfully at the kitchen clock. It was six o'clock, and she could hear her father stirring about in his room. He would be down soon to look after the furnace; and then she must have breakfast on the table at once, for he must catch the six-fifty-five car. The usual morning frenzy of rush seized her, and she flew from dining-room to pantry, to the refrigerator for butter, out to the front door for the bottle of milk that would be there, back to the pantry cutting bread, and back to the stove to turn the bacon and be sure it did not burn. It was a mad race, and sometimes she felt like crying by the time she sat down to the table to pour her father's coffee, which somehow, try as she would, just would not look nor taste like mother's. She was almost relieved that her sister had given no sign of awakening yet; for she had not had time to make the breakfast table look nice, and it was so kind of exciting to try to eat in a hurry and have "sort of company" to think about at the same time.

The father came downstairs peering into the dining-room anxiously, with an apology on his lips for his eldest child.

"That's right, Louie; I'm glad you let her sleep. She looked all wearied out last night with her long journey, and then I guess it's been a kind of a shock to her, too."

"I guess it has," said the little girl comfortably, and passed him his cup of coffee and the bread-plate. They both had a sense of relief that Cornelia was not there and that there was a legitimate reason for not blaming her for her absence. Neither had yet been willing to admit to their loyal selves that Cornelia's attitude of apathy to the family strait had been disappointing. They kept hoping against hope.

Mr. Copley finished his coffee hurriedly, and looked at his watch.

"Better let her sleep as long as she will," he said. "She'll likely be awake before you need to go to school; and, if she isn't, you can leave a note telling her where to find things. Where's Harry? Isn't he up?"

"That's right! That's right! You're a good little girl, Louie. Your sister'll appreciate that. Make Harry eat a good breakfast when he gets back. It isn't good to go out on an empty stomach; and we must all keep well, and not worry mother, you know."

"Yes, I know," sighed the little girl with a responsible look; "I made him take a piece with him, and I'm saving something hot for him when he comes back. He'll help me with the dishes, he said. We'll make out all right. Don't you worry, father, dear."

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