Beauty for Ashes (30 page)

“But I don’t understand,” said the mother. “How did Vanna happen to have to get home by herself?”

“Because I ran away from him,” said Vanna haughtily. “He was no gentleman, Mother. He refused to take me back. He insisted that I should stay at a roadhouse and dance, and I was
afraid
of him, Mother. You don’t know what he is!”

“How absurd!” said the mother. “Have you been listening to some of those ridiculous tales about the poor man, too? Your father has got hold of them, and nothing will get them out of his head. But it is just ridiculous. And I’m ashamed of you, Vanna! It certainly wasn’t polite of you when a man had come all that way to take you for a drive that you should childishly run away from him!”

“No, Mother, it wasn’t polite,” said Vanna, “and I never mean to be polite to him again. I don’t think he’ll ever try to come here anymore, but if he does, I shall not see him. I want that thoroughly understood.”

“Vanna! How absurd! You can’t be a spiteful child! You don’t realize that he is not a boy to be treated like the rest of your boyfriends. He is a man of the world, a man of fortune and culture, and you cannot afford to throw away a friendship like that. He is more than ready, I feel sure, to put himself and his fortune at your feet, and these days there are not too many men with fortunes going begging. I want you to understand that ladies do not behave in such childish ways.”

Vanna shut her lips hard together, and then she spoke. “I’m sorry, Mother, for your sake, but I’m done with Emory Zane forever!” And Vanna went quietly out of the room and closed the door.

“I cannot think what has come over your sister!” said Mrs. Sutherland to Gloria.

“If you had lived through the night of storm and worry while we waited for her return, you would understand, Mother. You just don’t understand, that’s all!”

“Yes! So you, too, have caught the germ of rebellion! Well, I thought when I heard your father had taken you up to that forsaken farm country that trouble would come, and it will probably be a long time before we get you back to normal again. Wild, strange doings! Planting corn in the mud!” and her mother arose with dignity and walked from the room.

Gloria went and stood by the window looking out over the lovely stretch of lawn, bordered now with glowing summer flowers, and felt exceedingly lost and lonely. By and by she went upstairs to find her sister, but Vanna was writing a letter already to Robert and did not see the loneliness in Gloria’s eyes. So Gloria sat down and wrote a letter to Murray, and by lunchtime her fortitude was restored. Also both Murray and Robert called up again that evening from New York where they had been all day on business, and that helped a great deal.

But by the time another forty-eight hours had passed, both Vanna and Gloria had enough to keep both hands and hearts busy, for the morning papers came out with the announcement that the fine old firm of Sutherland and Brainerd had gone bankrupt, and Brainerd, the friend of years, had committed suicide! They had found him in his palatial library with his pistol by his side and a bullet through his brain. He left a note behind him saying that the failure had been all his fault and he could not face the shame of it.

The girls read it with blanched faces and looked at one another.

“Oh, Vanna!” said Gloria. “If you and I had not learned to know the Lord, how could we stand all this?”

“Isn’t that the truth, Glory,” answered Vanna.

But then came their mother wildly downstairs in her dressing gown, her hair still in its combs, frantic tears on her face that looked old and haggard without its smart makeup. “Now, Vanna, you’ll
have
to marry Emory Zane! You’ll
have
to, you know, to save Daddy’s business! You wouldn’t let one bad experience stand between you and saving the business, would you? Why, Vanna, how are we to live without money?”

“Mother, how would marrying Emory Zane save Father’s business?

“Well, it would!” said her mother with emphasis. “Your father has been under a heavy strain for a long time financially. That’s why he had to come home. It was all the fault of those foreign agents, something about the dollar or the price of gold, or else it wasn’t, I forget. Anyway, your father was almost distracted, and I happened to mention it to Mr. Zane one evening when he was here, and he very kindly offered to help. He said he wouldn’t let any price hinder him from helping your father if it came to that. He spoke as if things were all but settled between you and himself, Vanna. He said that it was all in the family, and things like that!”

“But, Mother,” said Vanna in distress, “how could you discuss Father’s affairs with a stranger? You know that Father would not like that!”

“Your father might not like it at first, but the business had to be saved, didn’t it? How could we live otherwise? Why, Vanna, we might even have to give up this house.”

“There are other houses,” said Vanna coolly.

“That is ungrateful, Vanna, after your father has provided a palatial home for you.”

“I’m not ungrateful, Mother. I loved it while we had it, but I think there might be places where we could be a lot happier than here. And anyhow, Mother, now the business is gone, and likely the house is gone, too, but if Father gets well, it won’t matter.”

“If your father gets well and finds his business gone, he will go all to pieces. He will die. Or else he will do what his partner has done,” said the mother, now suddenly gone tearful again.

“No, Mother, Father wouldn’t do that,” said Gloria. “Father wouldn’t think that was right. Father isn’t a coward! And Mother, it’s up to us to keep him from feeling downhearted. We must just be happy and cheerful and do our best to show him that everything will be all right even if he had lost his money. That isn’t the greatest loss in the world.”

“Yes,” said her mother with a sob, “that’s what I’m trying to tell Vanna. She must rise to the occasion and marry Emory Zane, who is so deeply devoted to her, and then everything will be all right. He has great holdings abroad and no end of money. The depression hasn’t even touched him a tiny bit, and he has practically promised me that he will see your father through. It doesn’t matter what the paper says, Emory Zane will straighten everything out. He has promised that he will if Vanna marries him.”

“I wouldn’t trust him around the corner,” said Gloria indignantly. “Vanna shall
never
marry him. I would rather we all died of starvation than have Vanna marry that awful man!”

“Gloria,” said her mother, “have you turned against me, too? Well, you might at least have a little forethought for your sister. If she doesn’t marry Emory Zane, and the money is all gone, she won’t ever have a
chance
to marry anyone. Who would want a penniless girl? Have you thought of that?”

Vanna suddenly stood up and looked her mother in the eye, speaking very quietly. “Mother,” she said, “you are wasting breath. I shall never marry Emory Zane! And you needn’t worry about my never having a chance to get married. I’m going to marry a farmer! I’ve been engaged for almost a week, a whole wonderful week, and here’s his ring on my hand!” Vanna held out her slim white hand, whereon gleamed a lovely ring, a ruby and a pearl set in quaint antique silver.

Mrs. Sutherland gazed in horrified silence for an instant and then became voluble again. “Stuff and nonsense!” she said, relapsing into the vernacular of her earlier days. “Wearing an old-fashioned ring like that when you might have some of the crown jewels if you wanted them!”

“But I don’t want them,” said Vanna with a royal smile, “and I love my farmer man! I’d rather be dead than marry the man you want. I’m going to marry Robert Carroll!”

Vanna walked out of the room and left her mother weeping, but Gloria rushed after her sister and threw her arms about her.

“I’m so glad, so glad, Vanna dear!” she whispered. “And I’m going to marry Murray. Only don’t tell Mother yet, for she would think I was indecent so soon after Stan’s’ death!”

“No,” said Vanna, smiling, “we won’t tell Mother yet, poor dear. She’s got enough to do to contend with me for a while, and, oh, Gloria, it’s going to hit her hard to have the fortune gone! I don’t think Dad would mind so much if Mother would take it bravely, but she never will!”

“No,” said Gloria, “I’m afraid she never will! It’s going to be a hard time for a while, isn’t it, Vanna? But, oh, if Father will only get well, it won’t matter so much!”

But before night, Robert and Murray arrived by plane. They had seen the news and had come on to see if there was any way they could help, and the girls realized that their heavenly Father had not left them without earthly human comfort as well as heavenly.

T
he days that followed were full of anxiety and distress, and the newfound faith of the two sisters was tried to the utmost. Their father continued to be critically ill, sometimes seemingly at the point of death, and their mother took to her bed, plunged into deepest distress. They could not rouse her to take a hopeful view of things. It almost seemed at times that she was grieving as much or more over the loss of the fortune than over her husband’s critical condition, almost as if sick as he was, she was blaming him for not getting up and doing something about it.

Gloria and Vanna slipped in often to their father’s bedside, one at a time, and sometimes when the nurse let Gloria stay in her place a few minutes, she would kneel and softly pray for her father. Both the girls learned to depend much upon prayer in those hard days.

Things downtown in the office were in chaos. Underlings came and went and sought to get advice, but there was nobody to give advice, and the course of the law went on its inexorable way. They were going to lose everything of course. The girls had quietly accepted that as a fact at the first, and it was not troubling them. They scarcely realized what it would mean, they had so many worse things to face just now.

Then one day came Nance, a frightfully haggard, strangely old Nance. Her eyes were sunken deep and had a wild glitter, her voice was harsh, her expression bitter. She looked at Gloria in amazement.

“You’re fresh as a rose!” she said enviously. “Maybe you didn’t care as much as I thought you did!”

Gloria gave her a sweet look and folded her in her arms. “You poor dear!” she said softly. “You’ve been walking down a fiery path since I went away, haven’t you?”

Nancy Asher accepted the affection stoically, blinking away a mist in her hard eyes that Gloria’s tone had brought.

“It hasn’t been easy,” she said harshly, “but at that it was only my parents, my brother. I didn’t lose a bridegroom. And you with such wonderful prospects! All gone to smash! Wedding presents returned, trousseau put away, wedding dress unworn, and that great, gorgeous mansion of yours standing there empty! And yet you seem to have survived it. What’s your secret? Tell it to me! I’ve been thinking of going into the garage and starting a car, or something. I can’t go on like this. Father’s like a dead man with his great eyes following me around the room, and Mother’s entirely crazy. I can’t stand it much longer. You, with your father at death’s door and your mother sick with worry, can smile. You have a light in your eyes. What’s your secret? Have you one?”

“Yes, I have a secret,” said Gloria, lifting tender eyes, “but maybe you won’t understand.
I
wouldn’t have awhile ago. But I’ve found Jesus Christ as my Savior, Nance dear, and my whole life is made over!”

Nancy Asher stared at her bitterly. “Do you mean to tell me you’ve gone religious on us? Got a God-complex? My soul! How did you get that way?”

“I have been studying the Bible, Nancy,” answered Gloria, “and I’ve been finding out God’s secrets. I’ve been learning that this life down here on earth is only a little part of the wonderful whole. It doesn’t matter so much about what kind of house I have here; there’s a mansion preparing for me in heaven. I’ve learned, too, that it is sweeter to let God have His way in your heart than to have your own way!”

Nance stared again. “No, I don’t understand you at all,” she said. “It sounds batty to me. You’re out of my class! I think I’ll go home!” and she marched out of the room and stalked sadly away.

But she came again several times, and though she asked no more questions, she watched Gloria’s sweet serenity and sighed.

The letters that came from Maine or New York, as the case might be, were great sources of comfort to the two girls now, and the not infrequent telephone calls that brought beloved voices near. The two made a little circle of their own, and sometimes during those hardest days when the life of the precious father hung in the balance, they would go together to a quiet place where they would not be disturbed and, kneeling hand in hand, would pray quietly.

And then one morning the fever was gone, and their father, though mortally weak, opened his eyes and smiled at Gloria when she slipped in to look at him. He said afterward that he felt it was Gloria’s smile and the look of peace in her eyes as much as anything else that brought him back to earth again and made it seem possible for him to live and go on.

Slowly he crept back to a semblance of strength again, and one day when Gloria and Vanna had come in with some late roses from the garden to bid him good morning, he made them sit down and began to ask questions.

“You’re not to talk about business yet,” said Vanna, smiling but firm. “The doctor positively forbids it.”

“All right,” he said pleasantly, “but there’s something I’ve got to say. I know that everything is lost. That won’t be any news to me. That’s what put me on this bed of course, though I hoped I’d pull through somehow and be able to stand by when the crash came. I know it must have come now. I’ve seen the shadow of it in your eyes sometimes, and it was written all over your poor mother’s face when she came in to see me yesterday, but I just want you to know this. You two girls are provided for, whatever else goes. Gloria has her house in her own name. I saw to that when it was built, and it’s all paid for, too. It ought to bring a good price if she wants to sell it. There’s the same amount of money put away safely in trust for you, Vanna, when you want to marry or build. It can’t be touched. Then there’s only the old farm at Afton left. They won’t touch that; it isn’t worth enough. We can live there of course, only it will be hard on your dear mother! But at least it will be a roof over our heads till I can do something! Unless of course Gloria wants us all to live in her house.”