The Flower Brides (32 page)

She turned her eyes once more to the flowers and touched them lightly with her hand. Sweet flowers! So mysterious and lovely! Coming in such a magical way. If she only knew who dropped them, one every morning in her path just where she went down the driveway to take her daily walk. And so fresh and perfect they were! Not old ones that had stood in a vase in a warm room. Not as if they had been thrown away after having been pinned to a coat. A single, perfect bloom lying in almost the same spot every morning! It couldn’t have
happened
. Not three times just alike!

And if it had, if somebody had been carrying an armful of them and it could just happen three times that one slipped out and fell right in that spot, where would the person carrying them be coming from? Where would he—they
—she
be going? That driveway belonged to the Disston house, and nobody would have any business going down it every morning. Not since the butler was gone, and the other servants, and only Maggie in the house. Of course, there was the milkman and the grocery boy, but they always came in at the back entrance, never the front, and what would milkmen and grocery men be doing with pale pink carnations early in the morning? They certainly wouldn’t be throwing them away one at a time, nor dropping them carelessly. Diana reasoned that young men who delivered milk and groceries would not have so many hothouse flowers that they would be careless about them, anyway, certainly not three days in succession. What could be the explanation of the mystery? Probably it had some quite commonplace explanation, but Diana dreamily touched the petals of the flowers again and smiled. She preferred to think there was some delightful romantic magic about it. And since an explanation seemed quite out of normal expectation, why not indulge her dreams? At least it would be fun to see whether a fourth carnation lay on the drive tomorrow. If it did, there would be a real mystery, and she would have to begin investigations. But perhaps it would stop at three times, and then she could just cherish her dreams and not worry herself by the troublesome suggestion of her conscience that perhaps she ought not to have picked them up. They had lain there in the drive, fresh and sweet, demanding to be rescued from a chance passing wheel, and just in the one spot she could not possibly see from the windows of the house, because a big clump of rhododendrons spread out gorgeously and hid the road.

Well, at least she could find out one thing. She could get up very early and see that no one went down the drive from the direction of the house. Or could she? Might not the flowers have been placed in the drive before dawn? Her eyes melted into the dreaminess of speculation.

If Father came this morning, perhaps she would tell him about the flowers. Would she? Or should she take them up to her room and wait to see if another would come tomorrow morning?

Then suddenly she saw the postman carrying a single letter in his hand that he had just taken out of his pack. She sprang to the door to meet him, her eager eyes on the letter. Oh, would he be coming this morning, or would she have to wait another day or two? She sighed at the thought of continued loneliness. And then as she took the letter, recognized the handwriting, and saw how unusually thick it was, her heart sank. He could not be coming or he would not have written so long a letter!

She flung an absent-minded smile at the postman in answer to his good morning and went in with the letter in her hand.

Diana was in a peculiarly lonely position just at present. Her mother had been dead only a little over a year, and for two years before that she had been more or less of an invalid. Diana had delighted to be with her constantly, as much as her school duties would allow. She had attended a nearby college for a couple of years until the invalid needed her more and more, and so, dropping out of her classes for what at the time had seemed to be only a temporary absence, she had dropped out of the lives of her young friends and become more or less of a recluse. After her mother’s death she found herself left out of the youthful merriment of which she had been a part in her high school and early college days, and without a strong desire to enter it again.

It was not that she was too shy or gloomy, it was just that the precious last days of her companionship with her beloved mother had somehow set her apart from the little world where she had moved so happily when she was a child and a growing girl, and had made her more thoughtful, more particular, perhaps, about her friendships than she might have been without the refining experience of sorrow.

Oh, there were a few of her old companions who came dutifully out to call. Some of them had even tried to drag her back into young society again. Others had written her lovely notes and sent flowers, but somehow her place among them seemed gone. They were interested in new things—some of them were married, most of the rest engaged—chattering about social affairs in which she had no part and almost no interest, and she hadn’t felt eager to follow them back.

Later their mothers had called, and there had been quite a good many invitations recently. Diana had accepted some of them and found a strange distaste for the life she had once so enjoyed. The conversation seemed to her vapid, the activities sometimes almost stupid, and the excesses in which some of her former companions now indulged did not tempt her. She found herself revolted at the way some of them talked; the way they drank at their parties, just as a matter of course; and the way so many of them spoke of sacred things, lightly, flippantly. Was she growing morbid, she wondered, or was this just growing up? Certainly her old friends had changed. Perhaps they had grown up and she had just stayed a little girl. But she was twenty, and she had become rather close with death and sorrow. Still death and sorrow were not meant to sour one on life, to make one a recluse. So, from day to day she had tried to reason it out and had forced herself to go more and more among her acquaintances.

There were several of her young men friends who had begun to come to the house of late, but none of them especially interested her. They were nice boys, she told herself, some of them were quite grown up and dependable. There were even a couple who did not drink—at least not much, just politely. But she had never thought seriously about any of them. She told herself that it would make little difference to her if they all stayed away, though she smiled whimsically as she said it and realized that she would probably feel forsaken if nobody ever came. It was a significant thing that in puzzling over the carnations she had never questioned if any of them could possibly have dropped those flowers in the drive for her. It was a thought that her mind rejected when it was first presented as a solution to the pleasant mystery. There were several who might have sent flowers formally, a whole box full, but not just a single blossom dropped on her pathway daily.

So Diana came in with her letter, intending to sit down by the window and read it. Then suddenly she wanted to take it to her room. Perhaps some premonition warned her that she would want to be uninterrupted as she read, would not even want Maggie coming in for the orders of the day. As she turned back toward the hall, she paused and picked up the crystal vase, carrying it with her up to her room.

She put the vase on a table in her own pretty room, a room whose windows looked out on the same sweep of lawn and drive and nestling cottage among the trees, where she had just been watching for the postman. She sat down beside the table to read her letter, but even as she tore the envelope open, again a premonition warned her. This was such a thick letter! Was he having to stay another week and leave her alone? Her heart sank. And then she began to read.

Somehow the words seemed more formal than his usual, “Dear Di,” or “Dear little girl.” How silly she was. It must be true that she was growing morbid! Then she read on.

Diana lifted frightened eyes and looked quickly around at the familiar beauty of her own room—the sweet room that her mother had planned for her before she went away—as if to reassure herself that nothing could hurt her, nothing destroy the home and the steady things of life that the years had built up around her. She gave a little gasp and closed her eyes as if she were afraid to read on then drew a deep breath, taking in the spicy perfume of the flowers before she went on with her letter.

Ah! Then there was something! There had been something that had worried him. It had not been her imagination after all! Oh, was it money, in spite of what he had said? Well, if it was money, she would just be thankful that it was nothing worse. Even if both of them had to go out and do hard manual labor and be very poor, she would not care. They would have each other. She drew another deep breath and tried to take courage as she read on.

Her trembling hands suddenly dropped the letter into her lap, and she relaxed in her chair. Oh, would he never come to the point? Must there be this long preamble before she knew the worst? Yes, the
worst
! She felt sure now it was going to be something terrible, or else why would he not have enjoyed telling her face-to-face? Her eyes went back to the letter.

How words could stab! She felt she never would forget the sharpness of the pain that came as she read the next words.

Alone! Did they not have each other?

Diana steadied herself tensely to take in this awful, cataclysmic thought. Her father was going to put another woman in her mother’s place! How could he? Oh, how could he!

This
couldn’t
be true! She was dreaming!

Her eyes wildly sought the letter again to extract some word of hope somewhere from what yet remained to be read.

Diana wildly began to go over the list of their acquaintances, rejecting each one as impossible, while she swept the sudden tears away that blinded her eyes so that she could not read the rest. Then, desperately she read on.

But suddenly the letter dropped from Diana’s nerveless fingers and she gave a terrible, wild little cry, the tears pouring down in a torrent!

“Cousin Helen! Oh,
not
Cousin Helen!” she gasped aloud in quivering sobs, shuddering as she wept. “Oh, he can’t, he
can
’
t
—he
wouldn
’
t
do that! My f–f–father—w–w–would–n’t—do
thha–at
!”

The great house was still and only echoed back her piteous cries hollowly. Suddenly she was aware how empty the home had become—and how
dear
it was! And now her father was going to destroy this home for her forever, destroy it so fully that she would not even want to think of it or its pleasant memories because it would be so desecrated!

She staggered to her bedside and dropped down upon her knees. Not that she was thinking to pray, only that she must weep out her horror over this new calamity that had befallen her.

Kneeling there and weeping in her first abandoned grief, she seemed hardly to be able to think. “Oh, God!” she cried again and again, until it seemed that God must be there somewhere listening, though she hadn’t been conscious of Him before. Yet it seemed somehow to comfort her to think that perhaps God might listen to her trouble.

There were no words in her frenzy, but scene after scene in her girlhood in which this cousin Helen had figured went whirling through her mind, as if she were presenting pictures of what happened for God to see and remember, to remind Him how unbearable a situation it would be with Cousin Helen in her mother’s place.

“Oh, Father doesn’t understand!” she sobbed out. “He never knew how hateful she was!”

Instance after instance of unfortunate contact unfolded before her frightened brain, beginning with little things in her childhood, too petty perhaps to notice now, since they were both grown up. She had been only a baby when Cousin Helen took her precious best doll and singed her hair all off with her curling iron. It had been a desecration of something precious to the little girl. But the fourteen-year-old cousin had laughed impishly and flung the doll aside, breaking its lovely face, and then had run away laughing.

Diana, even in the midst of her weeping, recognized that it would not be fair to judge the woman by an act of a partly grown girl. But there had been so many ugly things. Every time she had come to visit, each day had been full of trial and torture to the finely strung child.

There was the time she hid Diana’s essay that she was to have read in school that afternoon. She let the whole household search for it frantically, and Diana finally had to go and read from scraps of paper on which it had been written, only to find the neat manuscript lying on her desk on her return from school with a placard beside it scrawled in Helen’s most arrogant handwriting, “April Fool!” Diana had been fourteen then, and Cousin Helen old enough to know better. Cousin Helen had left for home that morning before Diana got back from school. Diana’s father had taken her into the city to the train. He had missed the whole excitement about the essay. Perhaps no one had ever told him the outcome. So he didn’t understand. Diana’s wild thoughts glided over dozens of other unhappy times when Cousin Helen had cheerfully, almost demoniacally, committed some selfish depredation upon something Diana counted precious.