"Somebody coming to see you, dear?" asked her mother.
"I don"t know--maybe." Miss Georgie got up, brushing the crumbs from her lap.
"Who is it, dear?" her mother pursued, too casually.
"I tell you it may not be anyone, Ma!" the girl answered, suddenly irritated. A second later they heard her running upstairs.
"I really ought to be early--I promised Miss Evans--" Virginia murmured.
"Yes, I know, lovey," said her mother. "So you run right along. I"ll just do a few little things here, and come right after you." Virginia was Mrs. Lancaster"s favorite child, now she kissed her warmly. "Don"t get all tired out, my darling!" said she, and when the girl was gone she added, "Never gives ONE thought to herself!"
"She"s an angel!" said Loretta Parker fervently.
"But I kind of hate to have you go down to League Hall alone, Ma," said Mary Lou, who was piling dishes and straightening the room, with Susan"s help.
"Yes, let us put you on the car," Susan suggested.
"I declare I hate to have you," the older woman hesitated.
"Well, I"ll change," Mary Lou sighed wearily. "I"ll get right into my things, a breath of air will do us both good, won"t it, Sue?"
Presently they all walked to the McAllister Street car. Susan, always glad to be out at night, found something at which to stop in every shop window; she fairly danced along at her cousin"s side, on the way back.
"I think Fillmore Street"s as gay as Kearney, don"t you, Mary Lou?
Don"t you just hate to go in. Don"t you wish something exciting would happen?"
"What a girl you are for wanting excitement, Sue. I want to get back and see that Georgie hasn"t shut everyone out of the parlor!" worried Mary Lou.
They went through the bas.e.m.e.nt door to the dining room, where one or two old ladies were playing solitaire, on the red table-cloth, under the gas-light. Susan drew up a chair, and plunged into a new library book. Mary Lou, returning from a trip upstairs, said noiselessly, "Gone walking!" and Susan looked properly disgusted at Georgie"s lack of propriety. Mary Lou began a listless game of patience, with a shabby deck of cards taken from the sideboard drawer, presently she grew interested, and Susan put aside her book, and began to watch the cards, too. The old ladies chatted at intervals over their cards. One game followed another, Mary Lou prefacing each with a firm, "Now, no more after this one, Sue," and a mention of the time.
It was like many of their evenings, like three hundred evenings a year.
The room grew warm, the gas-lights crept higher and higher, flared noisily, and were lowered. Mary Lou unfastened her collar, Susan rumpled her hair. The conversation, always returning to the red king and the black four-spot, ranged idly here and there. Susan observed that she must write some letters, and meant to take a hot bath and go early to bed. But she sat on and on; the cards, by the smallest percentage of amus.e.m.e.nt, still held them.
At ten o"clock Mrs. Lancaster and Virginia came in, bright-eyed and chilly, eager to talk of the lecture. Mrs. Lancaster loosened her coat, laid aside the miserable little strip of fur she always wore about her throat, and hung her bonnet, with its dangling widow"s veil, over the back of her deep chair. She drew Susan down to sit on her knee. "All the baby auntie"s got," she said. Georgie presently came downstairs, her caller, "that fresh kid I met at Sallie"s," had gone, and she was good-natured again. Mary Lou produced the forgotten bag of candy; they all munched it and talked. The old ladies had gone upstairs long ago.
All conversations led Mrs. Lancaster into the past, the girls could almost have reconstructed those long-ago, prosperous years, from hearing her tell of them.
"--Papa fairly glared at the man," she was saying presently, won to an old memory by the chance meeting of an old friend to-night, "I can see his face this day! I said, "Why, papa, I"d JUST as soon have these rooms!" But, no. Papa had paid for the best, and he was going to have the best--"
"That was Papa!" laughed his daughters.
"That was Papa!" his widow smiled and sighed. "Well. The first thing I knew, there was the proprietor,--you may imagine! Papa says, "Will you kindly tell me why I have to bring my wife, a delicate, refined Southern woman--""
"And he said beautiful, too, Ma!"
Mrs. Lancaster laughed mildly.
"Poor papa! He was so proud of my looks! "Will you tell me," he says, "why I have to put my wife into rooms like these?" "Sir," the landlord says, "I have only one better suite--""
"Bridal suite, he said, Ma!"
"Yes, he did. The regular bridal suite. I wasn"t a bride then, that was after poor George was born, but I had a very high color, and I always dressed very elegantly. And I had a good figure, your father"s two hands could meet around my waist. Anyway, then Papa--dear me, how it all comes back!--Papa says, fairly shouting, "Well, why can"t I have that suite?" "Oh, sir," the landlord says, "a Mr. George Lancaster has engaged that for his wife, and they say that he"s a man who WILL get what he pays for--"" Another mild laugh interrupted the narrative.
"Didn"t you nearly DIE, Ma?"
"Well, my dear! If you could have seen the man"s face when Papa--and how well he did this sort of thing, deary me!--whips out a card--"
They all laughed merrily. Then Mrs. Lancaster sighed.
"Poor Papa, I don"t know what he would have done if he could have seen us to-day," she said. "It"s just as well we couldn"t see ahead, after all!"
"Gee, but I"d like to see what"s coming," Susan said thoughtfully.
"Bed is coming next!" Mary Lou said, putting her arm about the girl.
Upstairs they all filed sleepily, lowering the hall gases as they went.
Susan yawningly kissed her aunt and Virginia good-night, on the second floor, where they had a dark and rather colorless room together. She and the other girls went on up to the third-story room, where they spent nearly another hour in dilatory undressing. Susan hesitated again over the thought of a hot bath, decided against it, decided against even the usual brushing of her hair to-night, and sprang into bed to lie flat on her tired back, watching Mary Lou make up Georgie"s bed with dislocating yawns, and Georgie, wincing as she put her hair into tight "kids." Susan slept in a small s.p.a.ce bounded by the foot of the bed, the head of the bed, the wall, and her cousin"s large person, and, as Mary Lou generally made the bed in the morning by flapping the covers back without removing them, they were apt to feel and smell unaired, and to be rumpled and loose at the foot. Susan could not turn over in the night without arousing Mary Lou, who would mutter a terrified "What is it--what is it?" for the next ten minutes. Years before, Susan, a timid, country-bred child, had awakened many a time in the night, frightened by the strange city noises, or the fire-bells, and had lain, with her mouth dry, and her little heart thundering, through lessening agonies of fright. But she never liked to awake Mary Lou. Now she was used to the city, and used to the lumpy, ill-made bed as well; indeed Susan often complained that she fell asleep too fast, that she wanted to lie awake and think.
But to-night she lay awake for a long time. Susan was at twenty-one no more than a sweet and sunny child, after all. She had accepted a rather cheerless destiny with all the extraordinary philosophy and patience of a child, thankful for small pleasures, enduring small discomforts gaily. No situation was too hopeless for Susan"s laughter, and no prospect too dark for her bright dreams. Now, to-night for the first time, the tiny spark of a definite ambition was added to this natural endowment. She would study the work of the office systematically, she would be promoted, she would be head girl some day, some day very soon, and obliged, as head girl, to come in and out of Mr. Peter Coleman"s office constantly. And by the dignity and gravity of her manner, and her personal neatness, and her entire indifference to his charms--always neat little cuffs and collars basted in her tailor-made suit--always in her place on the stroke of half-past eight--
Susan began to get sleepy. She turned over cautiously, and bunched her pillow comfortably under one cheek. Hazy thoughts wheeled through her tired brain. Th.o.r.n.y--the man on the dummy--the black king--
CHAPTER III
Among Mrs. Lancaster"s reminiscences Susan had heard none more often than the one in which the first appearance of Billy Oliver and his mother in the boarding-house was described. Mrs. Oliver had been newly widowed then, and had the round-faced, square-shouldered little Billy to support, in a city that was strange and unfriendly. She had gone to Mrs. Lancaster"s intending merely to spend a day or two, until the right work and the right home for herself and Billy should be found.
"It happened to be a bad time for me," Mrs. Lancaster would say, recalling the event. "My cook had gone, the house was full, and I had a quinsy sore throat. But I managed to find her a room, and Alfie and George carried in a couch for the little boy. She borrowed a broom, I remember, and cleaned out the I room herself. I explained how things were with me, and that I ought to have been on my back THEN! She was the cleanest soul I ever saw, she washed out the very bureau drawers, and she took the little half-curtain down, it was quite black,--we used to keep that window open a good deal. Well, and we got to talking, and she told me about her husband"s death, he was a surveyor, and a pretty clever man, I guess. Poor thing, she burst right out crying--"
"And you kept feeling sicker and sicker, Ma."
"I began to feel worse and worse, yes. And at about four o"clock I sent Ceely,--you remember Ceely, Mary Lou!--for the doctor. She was getting dinner--everything was upset!"
"Was that the day I broke the pitchers, Ma?"
"No. That was another day. Well, when the doctor came, he said BED. I was too wretched then to say boo to a goose, and I simply tumbled in.
And I wasn"t out of bed for five weeks!"
"Ma!"
"Not for five weeks. Well. But that first night, somebody knocked at my door, and who should it be but my little widow! with her nice little black gown on, and a white ap.r.o.n. She"d brought me some gruel, and she began to hang up my things and straighten the room. I asked about dinner, and she said she had helped Ceely and that it was all right.
The relief! And from that moment she took hold, got a new cook, cleaned house, managed everything! And how she adored that boy! I don"t think that, in the seven years that she was with me, Nellie ever spent an evening away from him. Poor Nellie! And a witty, sweet woman she was, too, far above that sort of work. She was taking the public library examinations when she died. Nellie would have gone a long way. She was a real little lady. Billy must be more like his father, I imagine."
"Oh, now, Ma!" There was always someone to defend Billy. "Look how good and steady Billy is!"
"Steady, yes, and a dear, dear boy, as we all know. But--but very different from what I would wish a son of mine to be!" Mrs. Lancaster would say regretfully.