Beauty for Ashes (7 page)

There were appetizing odors coming up from downstairs, and cheery voices. It must be late. She sprang up and dressed hastily, her thought eager for the new day. She glanced eagerly from the window and identified her mountain all hazy pink and purple in the morning sun, lying like a painting on the sky beyond the treetops, and felt a thrill that she had recognized it even in the dark. Then she hurried down to breakfast, trying to imagine herself back in the days when her father was a boy.

After breakfast her father took her over the farm, showing her everything, explaining the way of farm people, telling her stories of the past, until everywhere she went the way was peopled with the kith and kin she had never known.

She asked her father about those five children of Grandmother’s of whom she had never heard until last night, and learned that one was dead in childhood, one had married a European and gone to live abroad, one was in California living on a ranch, and the last lived on another farm only thirty miles away with his wife and family, cousins she had never known.

“And why haven’t we known them, Dad?” she asked, wide-eyed. “Why haven’t we come up here, and why haven’t they visited us?”

A slow dull red came up in her father’s cheeks and a cloud came over his happy face.

“Well, Gloria, perhaps I was wrong, but your mother sort of took a dislike to this part of the country when we were first married and didn’t seem to want to come up here, and I was too proud to urge her. I figured that someday she would get over it and we’d get together yet, but she never has, and now they are mostly scattered. I don’t know how many of George’s children are at home now. It’s been my fault, I guess. I was too busy to write many letters, and when they found we didn’t come up here, they got rather offended, I’m afraid, and I had to let it go at that.” He ended sadly.

“Well, can’t we hunt them up?” asked Gloria earnestly. “I’d like to know my cousins.”

“Yes,” said her father, brightening. “We’ll do that very thing. It’ll make up for a great deal, you wanting to go with me.”

It suddenly came to Gloria how much her father would have enjoyed having his children more with him. Why, he was like a boy, going around here in his old haunts and telling her all about it. Her heart thrilled to think how pleased he was to share it with her and how much she and Vanna had missed in not being more with their father! She reflected that it had been all wrong, going selfishly about their own life, going wildly from one thrill to another, and having so little to do with their own father. Why, he was interesting and worth cultivating! He could show her a better time than any of the young men with whom she had whiled away her days and evenings sometimes far into the mornings. But somehow she didn’t even want to think of those days. She just wanted to enjoy this quiet place and these still, beautiful days with her father.

They went fishing in the old trout brook the next day and caught a string of trout. Gloria even caught a couple herself and went back to the house and stood over her father while he cleaned them and then stood by while Emily Hastings cooked them. They came on the table a delicious crisp brown, and nothing ever tasted so good as they did, eaten with the white homemade bread and the delicious fresh butter.

There were photograph albums for the evenings, when Gloria got acquainted with a lot of relatives whom she had never heard of before, albums that she pored over again and again, until she felt she knew each one—Aunt Abby, Uncle Abner’s wife, and Cousin Joab and his daughter Kate, little Anne who died just as she was growing into sweet womanhood, and young pretty Aunt Isabella who married the foreigner and went to live abroad in a castle, almost breaking her mother’s heart going so far away, that mother who had been her grandmother, who had washed and mended and cooked and lived in this sweet old home. Oh, how could pretty Isabella go away from this home and marry any man? How could any girl? How had she been going to trust herself to Stan and go out of her father’s care? Stan who had died with another girl!

She shivered as she turned the pages of the album and went up to bed to listen to the silence and try to forget.

She learned a number of things in her father’s old home. She learned to make her bed and make it well. Ever since she had come up to her room and found Emily Hastings with deft fingers turning down the sheets smoothly over the candlewick spread and plumping the pillows into shape, she had made it herself. At first with clumsy fingers that could not get the blankets to spread smooth nor make the counterpane hang evenly. And finally she had humbly asked to be shown how. Before this, she had never thought about beds being made. They might spread themselves up as soon as one went out of the room for all the notice she had ever taken of them. Her bed was always made at home and her room in order when she came back after ever so brief an absence. But she discovered that it made a difference to have no servants. It seemed funny to her that she had never thought about it before.

Sunday morning they went to the church with the white spire, the old church the Sutherlands had attended for years. There was even a tablet up by the pulpit in memory of Great-Grandfather Sutherland, the one who had been taken away from his old wife only a few months before she went herself. The old red cushions on the family pew had faded from red to a deep mulberry, and the ingrain carpet was threadbare in places and drearily dull in its old black and red pattern. Gloria sat with her toes on the wooden footstool that was covered with ingrain of a later vintage and didn’t quite match. She watched the red and purple and green lights from the old stained glass windows fade and travel from the minister’s nose, across his forehead, and twinkle on the wall in prisms and patterns, under the solemn sentence done in blue and gold: “T
HE
L
ORD
I
S IN
H
IS
H
OLY
T
EMPLE
. L
ET
A
LL THE
E
ARTH
K
EEP
S
ILENCE BEFORE
H
IM
.” It did not seem a happy thought to her. It seemed to her like a challenge from a grim and angry person. She looked around on the shabby little church that so sorely needed refurbishing and couldn’t make it seem a holy temple for a great God to enter. Yet when she looked at her father, she realized there was something sacred here, some memory perhaps, that brought a softened light to his worldly-wise face and a tenderness to his eyes, and she looked around again less critically.

There was a cabinet organ played by an elderly woman who touched the keys tenderly and dragged the hymns, and the singers were mostly older people with voices whose best days were over, yet she recognized that there was something in it all that held these people to a thought, a standard perhaps, and bound them together in a common aim. Else why should they come here? Why should they keep on coming here Sunday after Sunday, year after year?

She looked around at their faces, old and tired and over-worked; yet they were in a way enjoying this dull service. Gloria puzzled over it and could not understand. There must be something unseen behind it all.

The old minister who preached was closely confined to his notes and did not get her attention at all. He was to her merely a part of the whole, like the organ and the carpet and the old bell that rang so hard after they were seated in the pew that it shook the floor and the seats and seemed threatening momentarily to descend and bring the bell tower with it. Gloria had no feeling of God being there or of anything holy about the place, except when she looked at her father’s face, and then she wished she knew what it was that reached down so deep into her father’s life and was connected with this old building. She decided that it must be the memory of his mother. Such a mother! Her grandmother! She thought she would like to be like that grandmother if she only could.

That afternoon they drove over to call on the uncle’s family, and Gloria had a sudden setback in her enthusiasm for searching out relatives. Uncle George came out to the car to meet them and seemed exceedingly reserved. He didn’t smile at all at first until Gloria was introduced, her father stating that she had wanted to come and get acquainted with her relatives.

The uncle turned a quick searching glance on her face, took in all its loveliness, questioned with his eyes its artless smile of eagerness, and finally warmed under its brightness into something like geniality.

“She looks like Mother, doesn’t she?” he said unexpectedly, and the pleased color came into the girl’s face.

“Oh, that’s nice!” said Gloria, “I’d like to be like her! I’ve been hearing such wonderful things about her, only I’m afraid I never could come up to her standards!”

“She was a great little woman!” said Uncle George with growing approval in his eyes. “You’d be doing well to be like her! But I thought all city girls these days were highflyers.” His eyes searched his new niece with surprise.

Gloria laughed. “What are highflyers?” she asked with a twinkle in her eyes.

Her uncle twinkled back and said with a half grin, “Well, if you don’t know, I won’t tell you. I wouldn’t want to spoil you; you’re too much like Mother! But come on, get out and come in the house. Come see how you like your aunt and cousin.”

“Cousin?” said Gloria’s father, “aren’t they all at home? I hoped we’d catch the whole family, coming on Sunday.”

“No,” said Uncle George, “the boys are both away out west for good, I’m afraid. Only Joan is home, and she goes back to Portland to her school tomorrow. She teaches there now.”

“It sounds as if she were probably more like Grandmother Sutherland than I am,” said Gloria wistfully as she got out of the car and looked about her at the well-kept house and yard.

Uncle George gave a grim grin. “No,” he said with a half sigh, “Joan’s more like her mother’s side. She never looked like Mother. The youngest boy is the only Sutherland in my flock. Barney. He’s out in Chicago now—got a good job. He’s not likely to come back unless he gets transferred east. Albert is out in Wisconsin farming. He married a western girl, and I guess he’s anchored for life. But he’s like his mother, too. Well, come on in.”

In the house, the welcome was unsmiling and almost haughty. Aunt Miranda Sutherland was a woman with a prim mouth and gimlet eyes. Gloria could see at the first glance that she disapproved of her at sight, and Joan was only a slightly more modern edition of her mother. She seemed a good deal older than Gloria. They shook hands stiffly and sat down as far from the chair they had given Gloria as the limits of the big parlor would allow. For a few minutes, they said little, leaving the conversation entirely to the two brothers, but when Gloria began to say how charmingly their house was located and to rave over the view, the cousin turned and looked her over critically, and the aunt said with a sharp tinge to her voice, “How is it you’re off up here? The last I heard of you, you were going to be married. We got your cards. Wasn’t it this week?”

The color suddenly drained out of Gloria’s sweet face and pain came into her eyes. “Yes—I was—” she began haltingly. It hadn’t occurred to her that she would meet with that tragic matter up here so far out of her world. It stabbed through her heart like a knife and twisted cruelly. What to answer, how to explain the terrible thing without making it more tragic? It seemed as if there were no words to go on. But her father had heard and answered for her.

“Gloria has been through a very sorrowful time,” he said gravely. “Her fiancé is dead. That was why I brought her up here, to get her away from everything for a little while.”

An embarrassed instant of silence fell upon the room, and Gloria’s eyes were down, but bravely she lifted them and set a little wan, wistful smile out toward her unknown relatives.

“Oh!” said the aunt obviously curious. “I wondered. We saw a notice in a New York paper. Joan brought it home from Portland. It was the same name as that on the invitation, but I thought it might be just a coincidence.”

“No,” said Gloria quietly, “it wasn’t just a coincidence.” There was infinite sadness in her tone, but it did not invite further questioning.

Her aunt looked at her avidly for a moment, obviously expecting more details, but Gloria remained silent. “Well, that certainly was too bad!” she said at last, half grudgingly. “There’s many a slip, of course, but we aren’t always looking for it to happen to folks we know. Did you know the girl he was with when it happened?”

Suddenly Gloria’s father arose and stepped forward, his hat in his hand, his voice clear and a bit haughty. “Well, I guess we must be going,” he said, offering his hand to his sister-in-law and then to his niece. “It’s quite a drive back to Afton, and Mrs. Weatherby is expecting us both to tea. Also, I’m rather expecting a business telegram, which may call me back home suddenly. I’m glad to have seen you. It’s nice to know you’re so pleasantly located. The view certainly is lovely from here. You must enjoy it a lot.”

He talked incessantly, keeping between Gloria and her aunt and giving her no opportunity to reply to the question that had been asked her. Gloria managed to keep a semblance of a smile on her face until they were in the car and started off again. She even had the grace—or the courage—to say graciously as they drove away, “Can’t you drive over to Afton and see us while we are there? We’re going to stay a few days yet I think.”

Joan thanked her ungraciously and said, “I don’t think it’ll be possible. I go back to Portland in the morning, and Mother doesn’t go out much anymore.”

Gloria, once out of their sight, settled back in the car with a stricken look.

Her father gave her a troubled glance. Finally, he said, “I wouldn’t mind so much what she said. I don’t think they really meant to be unkind. They’re just curious and perhaps a little hurt that we didn’t write and explain, as they are relatives. I think that has been their grievance all along. They think we feel ourselves above them.”

“No, I don’t mind so much about them,” said Gloria with a sorrowful little sigh. “I was just thinking, all the world knows my disgrace. I didn’t realize anybody would know it outside of Roselands.”