Re-Creations (3 page)

Chapter 2

I
t was a long ride, and the trolley was chilly. Cornelia tried to keep from shivering and smiled at everything Louise and Harry told her, but somehow things had gotten on her nerves. She had broken out into a perspiration with all the excitement at the station and now felt cold and miserable. Her eyeballs ached with the frequent tears that had slipped their salty way that afternoon, and her head was heavy, and heavier her heart.

Across the way sat her father, looking grayer and more worn in the garish light of the trolley. His hair straggled and needed cutting, and his cheeks were quite hollow. He gave a hollow cough now and then, and his eyes looked like haunted spirits, but he smiled contentedly across to her whenever he caught her glance. She knew he meant that she should feel how glad he was to get her back. She began to feel very mean in her heart that she could not echo his gladness. She knew she ought to, but somehow visions of what she had left behind, probably forever, got between her and her duty, and pulled down the corners of her mouth in a disheartening droop that made her smiles a formal thing, though she tried, she really did try, to be what this worn old father evidently expected her to be—a model daughter, glad to get home and sacrifice everything in life for them all.

These thoughts made her responses to the children only halfhearted. Harry was trying to tell her how the old dog had died and they had only the little pup left, but it was so game it could beat any cat on the street in a fight already, and almost any dog.

Louise chimed in with a tale about a play in school that she had to be in if Nellie would only help her get up a costume out of old things. But gradually the talk died down, and Louise sat looking thoughtfully across at her father’s tired face, while Harry frowned and puckered his lips in a contemplative attitude, shifting his gum only now and then, enough to keep it going, and fixing his eyes very wide and blue in deep melancholy upon the toe of his father’s worn shoe. Something was fast going wrong with the spirits of the children, and Cornelia was so engrossed in herself and her own bitter disappointment that she hadn’t even noticed it.

In the midst of the blueness the car stopped, and Mr. Copley rose stiffly with an apologetic smile toward his elder daughter.

“Well, this is about where we get off, Nellie,” he said half wistfully, as if he had done his brave best, and it was now up to her.

Something in his tone brought Cornelia sharply to her senses. She stumbled off the car and looked around her breathlessly, while the car rumbled on up a strange street with scattered houses, wide-open spaces reminding one of community baseball diamonds, and furtive heaps of tin cans and ashes. The sky was wide and open, with brilliant stars gleaming gaudily against the night and a brazen moon that didn’t seem to understand how glaringly every defect in the location stood out, but that only made the place seem more strange and barren to the girl. She had not known what she expected, but certainly not this. The houses about her were low and small, some of them of red brick made all alike, with faded greenish-blue shutters and a front door at one side opening on a front yard of a few feet in dimensions, with a picket fence about it, or sometimes none at all. The house her father was leading her to was a bit taller than the rest, covered with clapboards, weather-beaten and stained; guiltless of paint, as could be seen even at night; high and narrow, with gingerbread-work in the gable and not a porch to grace its poor bare face, only two steps and a plain wooden door.

Cornelia gasped and hurried in to shut herself and her misery away from the world. Was this what they had come to? No wonder her mother had given out! No wonder her father— But then her father—how could he have let them come to a place like this? It was terrible!

Inside, at the end of the long, narrow hall, the light from the dining room shone cheerfully from a clean kerosene lamp guiltless of shade, flaring across a red and white tablecloth.

“We haven’t done a thing to the parlor yet,” said the father sadly, throwing open a door at his right as Cornelia followed him. “Your mother hadn’t the strength!” He sighed deeply. “But then,” he added more cheerfully, “what are parlors when we all are alive and getting well?”

Cornelia cast a wondering look at him. She had not known her father thought so much of her mother. There was a half-glorified look on his face that made her think of a boy in love. It was strange to think it, but of course her mother and father had been young lovers once. Cornelia, her thoughts temporarily turned from her own brooding, followed into the desolate dining room, and her heart sank. This was home! This was what she had come back to after all her dreams of a career and all her pride over an artistic nature!

There was a place set for her at one end of the red-clothed table and a plaintive little supper drying up on the stove in the kitchen, but Cornelia was not hungry. She made pretence of nibbling at the single little burned lamb chop and a heavy soda biscuit. If she had known how the children had gone without meat to buy that lamb chop, and how hard Louise had worked to make these biscuits and the applesauce that accompanied them, she might have been more appreciative; but as it was she was feeling very miserable indeed and had no time from her own self-pitying thoughts to notice them at all.

The dining room was a dreary place. An old sofa that had done noble duty in the family when Cornelia was a baby lounged comfortably at one side, a catchall for overcoats, caps, newspapers, bundles, mending, anything that happened along. Three of the dining room chairs were more or less gone or emaciated in their seats. The cat was curled up comfortably in the old wooden rocker that had always gone by the name of “Father’s rocker “and wore an ancient patchwork cushion. The floor was partly covered by a soiled and worn Axminster rug whose roses blushed redly still behind wood-colored scrolls on an indiscriminate background that no one would ever suspect of having been pearl-gray once upon a time. The wallpaper was an ugly, dirty dark red, with tarnished gold designs, torn in places and hanging down, greasy and marred where chairs had rubbed against it and heads had apparently leaned. It certainly was not a charming interior. She curled her lip slightly as she took it all in. This was her home! And she a born artist and interior decorator!

Her silence and lack of enthusiasm dampened the spirits of the children, who had looked to her coming to brighten the dreary aspect of things. They began to sit around silently and watch her, their sharp young eyes presently searching out her thoughts, following her gaze from wallpaper to curtainless window, from broken chair to sagging couch.

“We haven’t been able to get very much in order,” sighed Louise in a suddenly grown-up, responsible tone, wrinkling her pink young brow into lines of care. “I wanted to put up some curtains before you got here, but I couldn’t find them. Father wouldn’t let me open the boxes till Carey came home to help. He said there was enough around for me to tend to, all alone, now.”

“Of course,” assented the elder sister briefly and not at all sympathetically. In her heart she was thinking that curtains wouldn’t make any difference. What was the use of trying to do anything, anyway? Suppose the beautiful stranger who had been so sure she would make her home lovely could see her now. What would she think? She drew a deep sigh.

“I guess maybe I better go to bed,” said Louise suddenly, blinking to hide a tendency to tears. It was somehow all so different from what she had expected. She had thought it would be almost like having mother back, and it wasn’t at all. Cornelia seemed strange and difficult.

“Yes,” said the father, coming up from the cellar, where he had been putting the erratic furnace to bed for the night. “You and Harry better get right up to bed. You have to get up so early in the morning.”

“Perhaps you’d like to come, too,” said Louise, turning to Cornelia with one more attempt at hospitality. “You know you have to sleep with me; that is, I sleep with you.” She smiled apologetically. “There isn’t any other room, you know,” she explained as she saw the look of dismay on Cornelia’s face. “I wanted to fix up the linen closet for me, but father couldn’t find another cot yet. Harry sleeps on one cot up in a little skylight place in the third story that was only meant for a ladder to go up to the roof. Carey has the only real room on the third floor, and there aren’t but two on the second besides the little speck of a bathroom and the linen closet.”

A sudden realization of the trouble in the little sister’s eyes and voice brought Cornelia somewhat to her senses.

“That’s all right, chicken,” she said, pinching the little girl’s cheek playfully. “We won’t fight, I guess. I’m quite used to a roommate, you know.”

Louise’s face bloomed into smiles of hopefulness.

“Oh, that will be nice,” she sighed. “Are you coming to bed now?”

“You run along, Louise,” put in her father. “I guess Nellie and I will have a bit of a talk before she comes up. She’ll want to know all about Mother, you know.”

The two children withdrew, and Cornelia tried to forget herself once more and bring her reluctant thoughts to her immediate future and the task that was before her.

“What is the matter with Mother?” she asked suddenly, her thoughts still half impatient over the interruption to her career. It was time she understood more definitely just what had come in to stop her at this important time of her life. She wished that Mother herself had written; Mother never made so much of things, although of course she didn’t want to hurt her father by saying so.

“Why, she was all run down,” said Mr. Copley, a shade of deep sadness coming over his gray face. “You see she had been scrimping herself for a long time, saving, that the rest of us might have more. We didn’t know it, of course, or we would have stopped it.” His voice was shamed and sorrowful. “We found she hadn’t been eating any meat”—his voice shook like an old man’s—“just to—save—more for the rest of us.”

Cornelia looked up with a curl on her lip and a flash in her eyes, but there was something in her father’s broken look that held back the words of blame that had almost sprung to her lips, and he went on with his tale in a tone like a confession, as if the burden of it were all on him and were a cloak of shame that he must wear. It was as if he wanted to tell it all at its worst.

“She didn’t tell us, either, when she began to feel bad. She must have been running down for the last three years—in fact, ever since you went away. Though she never let on. When Molly had to go home to her folks, your mother decided not to try to keep a servant. She said she could get along better with sending out the washing, and servants were a scarce article and cost a lot. I didn’t want her to, but you know how your mother always is, and I had kind of got used to letting her have her own way, especially as about that time I had all I could do night and day at the office to try to prevent what I saw was coming for the business. She worked too hard. I shall never forgive myself !” He suddenly buried his face in his hands and groaned.

It was awful to Cornelia. She wanted to run and fling her arms about his neck and comfort him; yet she couldn’t help blaming him. Was he so weak? Why hadn’t he been more careful of the business and not let things get into such a mess? A man oughtn’t to be weak. But the sight of his trouble touched her strangely. How thin and gray his hair looked! It struck her again that he looked aged since she had seen him last. It gave her the effect of a cold splash of water in her face.

“Don’t Father!” she said, her voice full of suppressed pain and a glint of tenderness.

“Well, I know I oughtn’t to trouble you this way, daughter,” he said, looking up with a deprecatory smile, “but somehow it comes over me how much she suffered in silence before we found it out, and then I can’t stand it, especially when I think what she was when I married her, so fresh-faced and pretty with brown hair and eyes just like yours. You make me think a lot of her, daughter. Well, it’s all over, thank the Lord,” he went on with a sigh, “and she’s on the mend again. You don’t know what it was to me the day of the operation.”

“Operation!” The word caught in Cornelia’s throat, and a chill of horror crept over her. “Why, you never told me there was an operation!”

“I know,” her father said apologetically. “That was Mother, too! She wouldn’t have you troubled. She said it was just your examination time, and it would mean a great deal to you to get your marks; and it would only be a time of anxiety to you, and she was so sure she would come out all right. She is wonderfully brave, your mother. And she hoped so much she’d be able to get up and around and not have to bring you home till your course was over. We meant to manage it somehow, but you see we didn’t know how serious it was and how she would have to go away and stay a long time till she was strong.”

Cornelia’s eyes were filled with tears now. She had forgotten her own disappointments and the way she had been blaming her father and was filled with remorse for the little mother who had suffered and thought of her to the last. She got up quickly and went over to gather the bowed head of her father into her unaccustomed arms and try somehow to be daughterly. It was strange because she had been away so long and had gotten out of the way of little endearments, but she managed it so that the big man was comforted and smiled at her and told her again and again how good it was to have her back, almost as good as having her mother. Then he stroked her hair, looked into her wise young eyes, and called her his little Nellie-girl, the way she could remember his doing before she went away to school.

When Cornelia went upstairs at last with the kerosene lamp held high above her head so that she would not stumble up the steep, winding staircase, she had almost forgotten herself and her ambitions and was filled with a desire to comfort her father.

She dropped into her place beside the sleeping sister with a martyr-like quiet and failed to notice the discouraged droop of the little huddled figure and the tear-stained cheek that was turned toward the dingy wall. The dreariness of the room and the close quarters had brought depression upon her spirits once more, and she lay a long time filled with self-pity and wondering how in the world she was ever to endure it all.