Blue Ruin

  The last car swept past her. She turned to find her daughter and beheld her slim as a match in her little black satin sheath with its deep blue facings, silhouetted against a background of taxis and automobiles shaking hands most intimately with an attractive young man in a dark blue suit, his panama hat crushed carelessly on his shapely hand. With a strange foreboding she went toward them, wondering what her wild girl was going to do next. Hoping it would not end in some mortifying experience. It had been that way ever since Jessie was born—Jessie Belle, she corrected herself in her mind—she had been wondering what she would do next—what wouldn’t she do?—and feeling utterly inadequate to cope with it. She kept saying, “Oh, if her father had just lived, it wouldn’t have been this way! He knew how to control her!”

  But the repetition of this happy reflection, however true it might have been, was unfortunately like beating against the wind. It had no effect whatever on Jessie Belle. She continued to go airily on her willful way.

  It was Jessie Belle who had insisted upon their selling the home her father had provided for them in a little, quiet New England village and going to New York to live in a flat that she might have her voice trained. Someone, a summer visitor perhaps, had carelessly told her she had a voice and she rested not day or night after that until she got her mother to go to New York.

  And now, when like that other poor soul in a far country, they had spent all and the interest they had thought was for all eternity most unexpectedly gave out because the principal had been spent, Ella Smith had appealed in a panic to her old school friend Justine Whipple. Even in their dire extremity Jessie Belle had been most trying, weeping hysterically at the idea of leaving New York, berating her mother for mismanagement, threatening to go her own way and find a job at the movies, threatening all sorts of things that had not been considered respectable in the little New England town where Ella Smith had been brought up. It was only when Justine Whipple had casually mentioned Dana that the girl had at last evinced an interest in the gushing invitation to come to the Whipple house for the summer. And here they were! And there was the young man! And what would Jessie—Jessie Belle—do next? Her mother trembled and went forward dazedly to meet him.

  “This is Mrs. Smith?” asked Dana politely with his best parish-call manner.

  “Yes, that’s my Ella,” chimed in the girl, “and I’m Jessie Belle. You are Dana, aren’t you? I thought so. Your aunt described you so perfectly that I should have known you if I had met you on Fifth Avenue. She said there wasn’t another like you anywhere, and I guess she was right.”

  She looked at him with a flattering flutter of her dark, curly lashes and swept him a dimple from the corner of her mouth, which managed to convey a sense of deep admiration and flitted so quickly that he wondered if it had really been there or he had only imagined it. He had never made a study of dimples. He looked at her several times as they progressed to the car to see if it would come again, but Jessie Belle knew how to hold her charms in reserve.

  “Is this your car? Oh, how adorable! It’s new, isn’t it? I’m crazy about that make of car. Say, you’ll teach me to drive, won’t you? I’m wild to learn. I’ve had no chance, you know, being in New York studying so hard. It really isn’t any pleasure, of course, motoring in the city, and we never had time to get out very far. I’ve been doing a lot of serious work, you know. But Dad was going to buy a car just before he died, and we somehow haven’t had the heart to get one since. Of course we’ll get one soon though. May I sit in the front with you? I’ll watch and get my first lesson. Ella, you sit back with the bags.”

  She waved her hand to her mother imperiously, and Ella climbed in with deeper foreboding than ever. A car! She was afraid of automobiles, and Jessie—no Jessie Belle, she must remember that—was so headstrong. Oh dear!

  Jessie Belle was rattling on, and Dana, in the intervals of avoiding traffic, was watching to see if there had really been a dimple.

  “They said you were a theological student. Is that really true? I can’t imagine it. You don’t look a bit gloomy. Don’t you hate it? All those stuffy old subjects about dying and being good and all that? I should think you would have chosen something more—well—up to date, you know. People don’t believe those old things anymore. Why didn’t you learn to fly and be an explorer? That’s all the rage now. You’re much too nice looking to be wasted making long-faced prayers.”

  Dana gave her an indulgent smile.

  “What do you know about such things, kitten? You don’t look as if you had ever spent time even thinking about it.”

  She swept him an upward, coy glance from under her gorgeous lashes, and the dimple came out and flitted back like a sprite.

  “Oh, but I have,” she said coquettishly. Her highly illuminated lips pouted out like a bright red cherry, with the dimple lurking at one corner. “I thought about it a great deal after your aunt’s letter came. It seemed so perfectly awful for a perfectly good young man, a really fine peach of a fella, to throw himself away preaching to a lot of folks who never listen and don’t want to hear him anyway. I just felt sorry for you. And I thought it was going to be perfectly horrid to be here all summer long and the only man on the landscape a preacher. Oh, my soul! I couldn’t see it at all!”

  Her laugh rang out like a chime of silver bells, and the dimple flashed full at him and stayed for a whole second. It was simply breathtaking; he had never seen anything so pretty in his life. He almost ran full into an old gentleman driving a Ford coup and righted himself only to grind into the fender of a shiny new car driven by a woman who frowned deeply at him and gave back a full line of contempt for his driving. But Jessie Belle’s laughter rang out and he got himself into the road once more and hurried on, angry for once with himself, for losing his head. A pretty child, just a pretty child of course, but a really bewitching one! Lynette would be charmed with her. He must take her over at once and get them acquainted. It was going to be quite amusing having her in the house all summer, instead of a nuisance as he had expected. What ridiculous ideas she must have about religion. It would be interesting to set her straight. A good mission to begin on. But he must let her see that her straightlaced idea of a minister was all wrong. Ministers were not like that nowadays.

  Ella Smith in the backseat drew in her breath sharply. This was a new view of her daring daughter. In New York Jessie Belle had kept her friends a good deal to herself. When she brought any of her fellow students home for an evening’s frolic she had made her mother spend the evening with the woman in the neighboring flat. Ella Smith had no idea that her daughter could talk so boldly to a strange young man. And then lie about her father’s going to get an automobile before he died! How terrible for Jessie to talk like that. She hadn’t known that her child would really tell a falsehood. Perhaps she had been joking. Surely she was only joking.

  “There’s the house!” announced Dana as they rounded the curve in the road and brought into view the rambling white house in its thick coat of paint and green blinds. The nasturtiums made a bright border to the path from the gate, shimmering in the last rays of the setting sun.

  “Oh, isn’t it darling!” shouted the radiant Jessie Belle, to her mother’s deep relief. “I know it’s going to be perfectly gorgeous! But I’m going to be terribly homesick for the first day or two; I know I shall. All those dark old mountains off there that you can’t get away from night or day, and that great stretch of emptiness down there. You call that a valley, don’t you? Why don’t they build it up? It looks too empty. Say, you’ll take me to a picture tonight, won’t you, just so I’ll feel at home? I shall die of homesickness if you don’t make me have a good time the first night. I’m always that way. If I don’t like a place at the start I never do. You’ll take me somewhere, won’t you? That’s a darling!” she coaxed making a cupid’s bow out of her adorable vermilion lips. It was bad taste of course, painting lips, immoral and all that, Dana reflected, but she was such a child. And why had he never realized how attractive it was in
a smile?

  “Jessie!” flung forth Ella Smith from frightened, shocked lips, “Belle!” she added feebly, as her daughter gave an upward tilt to her pretty pointed chin, but it was futile. The two in the front seat had not even heard. Ella Smith was sick at heart and cast a backward glance and a fearful look at the road as it vanished behind them. If only she could get out unseen and run somewhere and hide. What should she do with her child?

  But it was plain that neither of the two young people even remembered her presence. It did not matter what she did.

  “Are you going to take me?” urged the girl. “Say you will quick or I’ll jump right out over the wheel and go back to the station.” She was pouting now, adorably, and the young theologue looked down at her amusedly.

  “What a child you are,” he said indulgently.

  “But you will?” she insisted eagerly.

  “Well, sometime soon. I’m afraid not tonight. I have another engagement.”

  “Oh, bother the engagement! That’s just what I was afraid of. You’d be stuffy. You’d always be harping on duty and trying to preach a sermon to me. Well, if you don’t go tonight I’ll know you don’t like me.”

  Her brows drew down, her lips pouted stormily, and her eyes filled with what seemed like almost tears. He had a strange feeling that she was a little child whom he had hurt and he ought to gather her into his arms and kiss her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, rousing to please her. “It was a previous engagement, you know. I couldn’t very well break it.”

  “You don’t like me!” drooped Jessie Belle with fatigue in her tired, pretty face. “Well, you’re only a theological student after all, of course—But if you did like me you’d make a way to take me somewhere when I ask you. I’m your guest, you know. It would be quite natural for you to have a duty toward me the first night I’m here. Oh, you could find an excuse if you just wanted to!”

  “Jessie!” called out Ella Smith again in horror, but perceived she had not been heard above the purring of the motor.

  Jessie Belle turned the soft contour of her profile toward Dana and swallowed hard with her slim white throat, and set her little pointed chin very firmly with a tip tilt to it; not another word did she say until Dana leaned over and spoke.

  “I’ll try to fix it somehow to take you along,” he said gently, as one speaks to a little child. “Of course as a guest in our house I have a duty toward you, and if you want it so much I guess I can fix it somehow.”

  “Now you’re a darling again!” murmured Jessie Belle turning the full flash of her dimpled smile at him. “I knew you weren’t a dub. I could tell it the minute I laid eyes on you. Oh, is all that your yard? Why don’t we make a tennis court? I used to play before I went to New York. You play, don’t you? I’ve got some darling sports things. We can, can’t we? Say we can. I know your mother won’t mind.”

  Dana had a vision of Grandmother Whipple’s face at the mention of turning her staid front lawn into a tennis court, but he murmured, “Well, we’ll see. Now, here we are. Mrs. Smith, let me open that door.” And in a moment more Justine Whipple came out in her orchid voile and pale ribbons and kissed her guests effusively, and Dana was free to drive on to the garage.

  “Now I’m in a pretty kettle of fish,” he told himself disgustedly. “How’m I going to get out of taking that kid along with us tonight? What’ll Lynette think of it? In fact, I don’t believe Lynette will want to go to the movies. She doesn’t like them much. What a mess! I’d like to strangle Aunt Justine, getting me into all this!”

  And then came Aunt Justine herself, hurrying along in the sunset with her unaccustomed orchid ribbons all a flutter and her face shining like a pleased child.

  “Dana, will you please come upstairs right away and open Jessie Belle’s suitcase? Something has happened to the lock. I think she’s broken the key in it or something and she can’t get it open to dress for dinner. And your mother says will you please hurry right in, she wants to tell you how to serve the chicken.”

  Aunt Justine poised like an old robin in the doorway of the garage and then turned to flee before her nephew could object, but he roared after.

  “Serve! Serve! What does she mean? I’m going out to dinner. I was invited to Lynette’s. You knew that! Mother knew that! I can’t possibly be at the table tonight.”

  “Now Dana,” said Aunt Justine, turning upon him a woebegone face, “you wouldn’t desert me like that the first night my company was here! You wouldn’t; I know you wouldn’t! I couldn’t think it of you. Why, what will they think of you, going off like that? The only man in the family. And a young girl here, too.”

  She pronounced it as though it was a young “gull.”

  “Well, I can’t possibly help it, Aunt Justine. You’ll have to be reasonable. You can see for yourself that Lynette would be pretty sore. I had to cut my day short as it was to go to the station for you, and you ought to be able to explain my absence.”

  “Oh, but Dana, I can’t! I can’t! Really I can’t! You really must help me out this once. I won’t ask it again, and of course Lynette would understand. I’ll telephone over and explain to her myself. That’ll fix it all right. I’ll make it perfectly fine with her. You’ll see.” And she turned as if to go into the house at once and do it.

  “Oh gosh!” said Dana now thoroughly aroused. “No, don’t you speak to Lynn. Leave that to me. I’ll have to stay, I suppose, but I wish you and your company were—”

  But Aunt Justine did not stay to hear. She started back to the house and Dana looked up to see Jessie Belle standing in the doorway.

  “I’ve come down to tell you you needn’t bother to come up. I managed the lock myself, and your mother says dinner is on the table. Are you going to take me in?”

  Jessie Belle stood in the glow of the last rays of the setting sun like a vivid little picture, poised slenderly in a bright blue satin scrap of a frock, with her long, slim, pink, silk legs, and her long, slim, pink, bare arms, looking more like a child than ever. A shingled bob, with a few odds and ends of lock curling up adorably like her lashes, set off her white, white skin, and her red, red lips so temptingly pouted.

  Dana, strangely stirred, closed the garage door and came, and made no objection when Jessie Belle slipped her soft, pink arm within his and walked beside him confidingly, looking up into his face. Somehow it surprised Dana that they had so quickly got so intimately acquainted. It was just because she was a child, nothing but a kid of course, a very charming kid. But how the deuce was he to explain things to Lynette?

  Chapter 6

  Lynette was singing in the kitchen again, perhaps a little more quietly, with not quite so happy a lilt in her voice, yet much of the sadness had disappeared. Here in the dear home kitchen, with its clean yellow floor, newly painted for her homecoming, its white oilcloth tables, and its gracious appointment for work, nothing could seem quite sorrowful. Forebodings fled when she went about the familiar task of making biscuits. The feel of the flour and golden butter as she worked them together in the big mixing bowl was good again. She drew a breath of gladness that school days were over at last! She was back where such pleasant, homely tasks were possible. And these must be the best biscuits she had ever made. She would show them all that she had not lost her skill in the months of her absence.

  She smiled dreamily as she measured the water, ice cold from the spring in the backyard, and stirred her batter daintily with a silver knife, touching it lightly as if she were weaving a charm over it. Was not the evening before her? Was not Dana coming back in a few minutes now and they two would be together in the old surroundings? They could talk then, real communion of soul, such as they used to have in the early days of their acquaintance, when the thought of each answered to the other. Why, half of the charm of their companionship had been in their absolute agreement about everything!

  Those things that Dana had said that afternoon were a kind of act, of course, that would wear off with his life at home. Probably every young college
man got that way, that is in most of the colleges. If Dana only knew how wonderful the spirit in her college had been. She would wait until his prejudices had worn off, till they had been together long enough for him to see that she had gained real knowledge and culture in the college of her choice. But not now; he was not ready for it yet. She would bide her time. Let him get the mists from his own university out of his vision. Let the sky and the trees and the mountains do their work in his soul; wait till he got back to the simple vision of God he had held when he went away. Then she could make him understand. It would not take long. Dana was real. Oh, he could not be deceived by the talk of the day! And Dana loved her. She caught her breath at thought of his almost fierce caress, and her cheeks glowed as she slipped the bright aluminum pan of puffy biscuits into the oven and closed the door carefully. Then the lilt came back to her voice and the shine to her eyes. How foolish she had been to think Dana was changed! And in a few minutes he would be here, and they would have the whole long twilight and evening to smooth the misunderstandings away.

  It was perhaps five minutes after that conclusion that the telephone rang.

  There was the best tablecloth, and the napkins were the ones that Lynette had initialed the last time she was home for a holiday. There were roses, too. Grandmother Rutherford had sent for those. She had been very particular about the shade of pink like the color of Lynette’s cheeks, she told Elim when he went down to order them.

  Lynette did not know it but the ice cream was in molds, a lovely pink rose, a luscious pear, an apple, a peach, and a little white lamb with a pink ribbon around its neck. The new caterer was making a feature of these, and it pleased Lynette’s mother to have something new for a surprise.