Ladybird

  She did not explain that this room she was giving the girl was one which she had usually kept for honored guests and that she was putting the child here because she wanted her near her, because she was growing fond of her and because she longed to give her the best she had and see what reaction it would bring.

  Fraley turned and looked at the beautiful room, stately in proportion, decorated and furnished by one of the greatest decorators in New York City, and at a fabulous sum. The effect was charming. To Fraley it seemed too spacious for her small self, too formal and beautiful for common use, too wonderful for the girl who had slept in a little seven-by-nine bedroom off the corner of the cabin on the mountain. But her heart swelled with appreciation of it all.

  When the door to the white-tiled bathroom was open, disclosing its shining spotlessness, with all its perfect appointments for comfort, she stopped and dared not enter. It was so white it dazzled her. White floor, white walls, silver-trimmed fixtures, and a lovely rose silk curtain to the bath!

  “You do not mean this is all for me alone?” she said, turning to the lady, and there were tears upon her lashes. “Oh, if my mother could know I have all this, she would be so glad. Oh, if she could only have had it, I would be willing to go back to the cabin and stay alone. She had it so hard!”

  “Well, she is probably glad you are here,” said the lady, stirred almost to tears herself by the wistfulness of the young voice, “so just be as happy as you can. Now, will you unpack your own things, or do you want the maid to do it for you?”

  “Oh, I will do it,” said Fraley. “I want to do everything myself.”

  “You can put your things in these drawers, and here is one you can lock if you have any special treasures that you don’t want the maid to touch when she comes in to wait on you.”

  “Oh, please, I don’t want to be waited on,” said the girl pleadingly. “I wouldn’t know how to act.”

  “As you please. You’ll get acquainted with all the ways pretty soon, and then you won’t feel so. Jeanne is very good and knows how to put the last touches on an outfit delightfully. She can teach you a great many things you ought to know. I shall tell her you have always lived your life quietly, and she will understand and not bother you. She is quick witted. You will like her.”

  Fraley unpacked her shining bag and took out the old gray woolen bag her mother had made for her. She locked her door and, with the bag in her arms, went and knelt by the smooth white bed and laid her face on the bag, beginning to cry.

  “Oh Mother, Mother, Mother,” she sobbed softly, “if only you were back again. I’d rather be on the mountain with you. Oh, I would!”

  But presently she dried her tears and looked around trying to grow accustomed to her surroundings and realized that this room was to be her home now, this beautiful room! If she could have had a glimpse of this to which she was coming while she lay behind that rock, for instance, or while she was fleeing from the wild steers or from the men who were her enemies, how astonished she would have been! So this was what God had been leading her to all this time.

  Slowly she unpacked the bag, taking out the old Bible and looking around for a suitable place to put it, where she could easily use it every day.

  Beside her bed was a little night table, with a silken shaded lamp—a Dresden shepherdess under a pink umbrella. She laid the old Bible with its cotton covers down upon this table under the shade of the pink umbrella.

  She put her mother’s bag with the crude little cotton garments in the safe drawer and locked it. She realized by this time how odd they were beside the things that other people wore. She was not too proud to wear them still, but she knew that the lady would not like her to appear odd, and neither would her mother wish it; and moreover, she did not want the critical eye of strangers on the precious garments that her dear mother had made with her last dying strength. So she locked them away tenderly.

  Then she made herself sweet and neat and went softly out into the hall.

  As the door across the hall was shut and there were no sounds except far away downstairs, she went back to her room and sat down by the window to watch the river.

  It was like having a new picture in place of her mountains, that great still river down there with the busy boats, so many of them, and off at the left, very far away in an evening mist of gold, a place that looked like a very forest of boats.

  She watched the pearly mists that began to rise as the evening came on, watched the sunset tints and thought how even now they were out there in her western sky, back at the home mountain, and back at the ranch house where the missionary friend would be at this time of night perhaps.

  She wondered if he had forgotten her by this time. It seemed a long, long two days since she bade him good-bye. Was he sticking by his job?

  Then suddenly she became aware of someone standing in the open door, and looking up there she saw the stiff young person in her black dress and white apron and bonnet.

  “Dinner is served. Madam says will you come down to the dining room?”

  Fraley rose, fear born of formality upon her, and followed the maid.

  Chapter 16

  It was an awesome room to which she was led, with high paneled walls in cream color and rich, heavy draperies over the white curtains at the windows.

  The dishes were fragile and glittering, some of them like frostwork. There was a great deal of silver and rich damask napkins with large embroidered initials. It was not at all like the neighborly little tables in the dining car. Fraley suddenly felt very small and awkward. It seemed a long walk from the door over to the table where Mrs. Wentworth stood, like some stranger in a wonderful sleeveless low-cut gown of deep rich velvet in dark red tones. There were ropes of little pearls around her neck and hanging low on the front of her gown. Fraley felt as if she did not know her until she looked up and smiled, but even the smile was rather absent-minded.

  She was reading a letter and seemed annoyed at something.

  The tall gentleman in strange black clothes was standing at the door, and the maid who had brought her word about dinner being ready was at the other end of the room.

  “When did this come, Saxon?”

  “This morning, ma’am,” said the gentleman, bowing obsequiously.

  “And did you tell them when I would arrive?”

  “I told the messenger that you were expected to arrive this afternoon.”

  “And nothing has come since? No telephone message even?”

  “Nothing, ma’am, except a box of flowers. I had it put in the icebox, Madam.”

  “Have them brought in,” said the lady curtly and swept to her seat at the head of the table. The man pulled her chair out for her and pushed it in when she was seated, and then he came and did the same for Fraley. The girl wished he would not. It only made it harder, but she tried to do just what Mrs. Wentworth had done and to act as though it were nothing new.

  There was nothing to eat on the table but little long-stemmed glasses of delicious fruit, and the lady began to eat it at once, tasting daintily, not seeming to care much about it. But to the girl it tasted like a wonderful, heavenly nectar.

  The butler brought the flowers in—wonderful roses and strange, weird fluted things that her hostess said were orchids, tinted a strange green with brown markings. The roses looked like a sunset. Fraley had never seen roses before—not roses like those. Her mother had cultivated a sickly little bush from a root she had got somewhere before Fraley was born, and it produced little tight, red, purply pink button roses without any fragrance. But these looked as if they must have fallen from heaven, and the fragrance was like all sweet winds and perfumes melted together and flung upon the air.

  The lady called for a crystal bowl and directed the maid in arranging the flowers in water. She seemed far more interested in them than in the delicious soup that was presently put before them. Fraley wondered if the flowers came from the lady’s husband, but she did not dare ask. Perhaps he was feeling bad about their divorce and want
ed to make it right again. She watched the lady’s lovely head as it was bent over the flowers, her white fingers flashing with precious stones, giving a touch to the flowers skillfully, making them lie in the water as if they grew there and lift their lovely heads like little people. Fraley was very much in love with the lady. She hoped with all her heart that she would make up with her husband. The lady seemed absorbed and was not talking, so Fraley kept still and watched her.

  “Rather nice ones, aren’t they? One of my admirers sent them.” And she laughed.

  Somehow Fraley felt disappointed, but she tried to answer with a shy smile.

  “I’d like to send you some as nice someday!” she said wistfully.

  “Well, you can,” said the lady as the butler took her only-half-finished soup. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t bother. You’ll have plenty of uses for your money, and I get a lot of flowers. Sometimes I’m perfectly fed up of them.”

  The girl had a feeling that she was only half thinking of her. Presently the telephone rang, and the butler brought a message. It meant nothing to the girl, something about someone coming to call at nine o’clock, but after that the lady was more cheerful, and the dinner went briskly.

  There was half a little bird for the next course, and the mountain girl, who had lived on corn bread and bacon nearly all her life, with eggs and milk when it could be spared, felt wicked and wasteful with so much all for her own. There were delicious vegetables and strange little entrées and a salad even more unusual than the things she had on the train, and the meal finished off with a delicate frozen pudding.

  Black coffee was served in tiny cups, and when Fraley declined it, the lady said to the butler, “See that there is milk for Miss MacPherson in the morning. She prefers milk.

  “Now,” said the lady as they rose from the table, “I am expecting callers. I wonder what you would like to do. As soon as we do some shopping for you, I shall want you to come in sometimes and meet my friends. But tonight you can amuse yourself as you like. There’s the library. Perhaps you’ll find some books you’ll enjoy, unless you think it’s wicked to read any book but the Bible. And there are folios of engravings and some signed etchings and watercolors in the drawer of the big table. There’s the radio, too, and the Victrola. I’ll show you how to turn them off and on, and you can do what you like. I suppose perhaps you’re tired anyway, after the journey. I surely am, but I shall be busy this evening.”

  “Oh, I’m not tired,” said Fraley happily. “I’ll love just to look around. And of course I shall enjoy looking at the books. This is such a wonderful house! I should think you would be the happiest woman in the world. You have just everything you want, don’t you? Everything there is.”

  A strange look passed over the woman’s face.

  “No, I’m afraid not, little girl,” said the woman sadly. “There are several things I would have liked that never came my way.”

  “But you never were hungry or cold or afraid!” mused the girl.

  “Yes, I’ve often been afraid,” said the woman, more as if she were talking to herself than the girl.

  “We don’t need to be afraid,” said Fraley softly, with her eyes full of a far-off longing, as if she were reminding herself of deliverance in the past. “God will always take care of us if we trust Him. He sent you to me!”

  Violet Wentworth suddenly walked over to the girl, with a quite new and tender look in her face, and putting her arms around her, kissed her. Then she walked away quickly into the other room, as if to hide her emotion.

  Fraley went into the library and browsed around among the books. They were all of course utterly unknown to her. She had not even heard their names. Things beyond what she had seen herself she knew of only through her mother’s telling. A bit of newspaper wrapped around something from the distant store, once a year perhaps, had been as near to a newspaper as she had ever come; and that was only a scrap now and then, treasured and puzzled over, but seldom complete enough to demand any real interest. Save for the old Bible, which her mother had probably carried away with her more as a matter of superstition and sentiment than for any real love of it at the time, no other book had come her way.

  That Bible had become a liberal education to the isolated child, for from its pages alone her mother had contrived to give the little Fraley a rare knowledge of English and composition; an intelligent if not extensive idea of mathematics; a curious fragment of oriental geography; a vague glimpse into geology, botany, zoology, and astronomy; to say nothing of a thorough knowledge of theology.

  So Fraley stood in front of those walls of books delighted, reading their titles and wondering over them. They were not all of them such as a mother of such a girl would have selected for her daughter’s perusal, but Fraley did not know that and went over their titles, selecting such as invited her interest.

  Violet Wentworth’s taste in literature was extremely modern. All the lurid, liberal, daring novels of the day were set in flaring rows across her shelves without discretion. For convention’s sake she had, of course, other rows on the higher shelves all the classics and it was to these, after a dip into about twenty titles on the lower shelves, that the girl found herself drawn.

  “They are more like the Bible,” she explained later to Violet when she pointed out that those books on the lower shelves were the newer ones and therefore more important for her to read, as everybody would be talking about them and she must be ready to take her part in the conversation.

  “But I don’t like the people in those books,” objected Fraley. “Now this one,” she went on, taking up a volume of George Eliot, “has real people in it. They are living in earnest. But those other books down on the lower shelves, why, the people in them like to be bad! They just seem to be trying to hunt out new ways to do wrong. They are like the people before the flood.”

  “They are up-to-date,” said Violet with a firm line to her lips, “and they are what you ought to read to be well informed on your times. They will do a lot for you. They will show you how to move in the circle of my acquaintances and do your work right. I want you to read them.”

  Fraley looked appalled.

  “I’ll try,” she said slowly, “but it doesn’t seem quite right. Some of them just make me sick!”

  Her mentor laughed. “You’ll get over that, my dear. It’s the way of the world, and if you live in New York you’ve got to grow up. You can’t be a wild bird all your life. It’s a part of your education.”

  “Of course I’ll try to do what you want me to do,” said Fraley, looking worried, “but it seems like being among a lot of wicked, dirty-minded people.”

  “Well, you’ve got to get used to the world, or how can you ever live in it?” asked the elder woman with a firm set to her lips.

  Fraley was silent for a full minute with her eyes wide and serious, then she said slowly, almost as if she thought the other woman would not understand, “The Bible says you must keep your garments unspotted from the world.”

  Violet Wentworth went upstairs from that discussion feeling that she had just put over another slaughter of the innocents.

  Fraley continued to browse among the books, delighting in the top shelves and dutifully skimming a few of the books on the lower ones.

  But on this first evening she did little more than browse.

  A little later when she was on her way upstairs with several books she had selected to read, she caught a glimpse of the caller as he entered.

  She did not like his face. For an instant she almost thought it was Pierce Boyden come for her, so like he seemed to the other. Even the swift, furtive glance he cast around seemed like the way Pierce had always entered the cabin. She shrank back in the shadows of the landing, startled, and so became an unintentional witness to the intimate greeting he gave to Violet, who came forward at once from the big room on the right of the hall without waiting for the butler to announce the visitor.

  The sight was most disturbing, the girl could not quite tell why. It was none of
her business, of course, what this lady of hers did or what relation she bore to this unpleasant caller, but she did long to feel that she was beyond reproach in every way.

  So she went up to her lovely room with an oppression upon her that she could not shake off.

  The room was in a soft light from the rose-shaded lamp by her bedside, and the covers were turned back for her convenience. A rose-colored satin quilt lay like a bright cloud across the foot of the bed, and on a chair lay rosy garments for the night and a delightful robe of rose and white chiffon with frills and tiny rosebuds of ribbon. Think of having things like this to wear when she was all by herself in her room! Nobody else to share its beauty! A sense of reluctance was upon her that she should have luxury when her mother had gone without everything lovely most of her life and was lying now in that hasty unmarked grave in the distant valley. If only her mother could have shared all this!

  She turned her back on the beautiful room and went to the window to gaze out on the dark river.

  There were lights below on the drive, cars hurrying by, lights off to the left where she knew the crowded city lay, lights across in the little park between the drive and the river, lights everywhere along the shore, and out on the river, on the boats. There were even lights twinkling across on the opposite shore and high above on the palisades, where dim outlines of tower and roof marked noble mansions among the trees.

  And up in the wide sky there were lights, her dear stars, come to New York with her. She would not be able to locate them all perhaps, but she had found the Little Dipper at once, and it made her feel at home. God’s sky, how wide and dear it was!

  She stood within the shadow of the draperies that shrouded the windows and tried to shake off the oppression that was upon her about her dear lady, and she found tears upon her cheeks. Oh Mother! If only you were here! Oh God, show me how to walk!

  There was a slight stirring, and she turned to see the white-capped maid standing in the doorway.