Across the Years Part 23

ter be on Sat.u.r.day, Thaddeus! I want yer ter hitch up an' drive over ter Hopkinsville ter send the telegrams. The man's new over there, an' won't know yer. You couldn't send 'em from here, of course."

Thaddeus Clayton never knew just how he allowed himself to be persuaded to take his part in this "crazy scheme," as he termed it, but persuaded he certainly was.

It was a miserable time for Thaddeus then. First there was that hurried drive to Hopkinsville. Though the day was warm he fairly s.h.i.+vered as he handed those two fateful telegrams to the man behind the counter. Then there was the homeward trip, during which, like the guilty thing he was, he cast furtive glances from side to side.

Even home itself came to be a misery, for the sweeping and the dusting and the baking and the brewing which he encountered there left him no place to call his own, so that he lost his patience at last and moaned:

"Seems ter me, Harriet, you're a pretty lively corpse!"

His wife smiled, and flushed a little.

"There, there, dear! don't fret. Jest think how glad we'll be ter see 'em!" she exclaimed.

Harriet was blissfully happy. Both the children had promptly responded to the telegrams, and were now on their way. Hannah Jane, with her husband and two children, were expected on Friday evening; but Jehiel and his wife and boy could not possibly get in until early on the following morning.

All this brought scant joy to Thaddeus. There was always hanging over him the dread horror of what he had done, and the fearful questioning as to how it was all going to end.

Friday came, but a telegram at the last moment told of trains delayed and connections missed. Hannah Jane would not reach home until nine-forty the next morning. So it was with a four-seated carryall that Thaddeus Clayton started for the station on Sat.u.r.day morning to meet both of his children and their families.

The ride home was a silent one; but once inside the house, Jehiel and Hannah Jane, amid a storm of sobs and cries, besieged their father with questions.

The family were all in the darkened sitting-room--all, indeed, save Harriet, who sat in solitary state in the chamber above, her face pale and her heart beating almost to suffocation. It had been arranged that she was not to be seen until some sort of explanation had been given.

"Father, what was it?" sobbed Hannah Jane. "How did it happen?"

"It must have been so sudden," faltered Jehiel. "It cut me up completely."

"I can't ever forgive myself," moaned Hannah Jane hysterically. "She wanted us to come East, and I wouldn't. 'Twas my selfishness--'twas easier to stay where I was; and now--now--"

"We've been brutes, father," cut in Jehiel, with a shake in his voice; "all of us. I never thought--I never dreamed-father, can--can we see--her?"

In the chamber above a woman sprang to her feet. Harriet had quite forgotten the stove-pipe hole to the room below, and every sob and moan and wailing cry had been woefully distinct to her ears. With streaming eyes and quivering lips she hurried down the stairs and threw open the sitting-room door.

"Jehiel! Hannah Jane! I'm here, right here--alive!" she cried. "An' I've been a wicked, wicked woman! I never thought how bad 'twas goin' ter make _you_ feel. I truly never, never did. 'Twas only myself--I wanted yer so. Oh, children, children, I've been so wicked--so awful wicked!"

Jehiel and Hannah Jane were steady of head and strong of heartland joy, it is said, never kills; otherwise, the results of that sudden apparition in the sitting-room doorway might have been disastrous.

As it was, a wonderfully happy family party gathered around the table an hour later; and as Jehiel led a tremulous, gray-haired woman to the seat of honor, he looked into her s.h.i.+ning eyes and whispered:

"Dear old mumsey, now that we've found the way home again, I reckon we'll be coming every year--don't you?"

The Black Silk Gowns

The Heath twins, Miss Priscilla and Miss Amelia, rose early that morning, and the world looked very beautiful to them--one does not buy a black silk gown every day; at least, Miss Priscilla and Miss Amelia did not. They had waited, indeed, quite forty years to buy this one.

The women of the Heath family had always possessed a black silk gown. It was a sort of outward symbol of inward respectability--an unfailing indicator of their proud position as members of one of the old families.

It might be donned at any time after one's twenty-first birthday, and it should be donned always for funerals, church, and calls after one had turned thirty. Such had been the code of the Heath family for generations, as Miss Priscilla and Miss Amelia well knew; and it was this that had made all the harder their own fate--that their twenty-first birthday was now forty years behind them, and not yet had either of them attained this _cachet_ of respectability.

To-day, however, there was to come a change. No longer need the carefully sponged and darned black alpaca gowns flaunt their wearers'

poverty to the world, and no longer would they force these same wearers to seek dark corners and sunless rooms, lest the full extent of that poverty become known. It had taken forty years of the most rigid economy to save the necessary money; but it was saved now, and the dresses were to be bought. Long ago there had been enough for one, but neither of the women had so much as thought of the possibility of buying one silk gown.

It was sometimes said in the town that if one of the Heath twins strained her eyes, the other one was obliged at once to put on gla.s.ses; and it is not to be supposed that two sisters whose sympathies were so delicately attuned would consent to appear clad one in new silk and the other in old alpaca.

In spite of their early rising that morning, it was quite ten o'clock before Miss Priscilla and Miss Amelia had brought the house into the state of speckless nicety that would not shame the l.u.s.trous things that were so soon to be sheltered beneath its roof. Not that either of the ladies expressed this sentiment in words, or even in their thoughts; they merely went about their work that morning with the reverent joy that a devoted priestess might feel in making ready a shrine for its idol. They had to hurry a little to get themselves ready for the eleven o'clock stage that pa.s.sed their door; and they were still a little breathless when they boarded the train at the home station for the city twenty miles away--the city where were countless yards of s.h.i.+mmering silk waiting to be bought.

In the city that night at least six clerks went home with an unusual weariness in their arms, which came from lifting down and displaying almost their entire stock of black silk. But with all the weariness, there was no irritation; there was only in their nostrils a curious perfume as of lavender and old lace, and in their hearts a strange exaltation as if they had that day been allowed a glad part in a sacred rite. As for Miss Priscilla and Miss Amelia, they went home awed, yet triumphant: when one has waited forty years to make a purchase one does not make that purchase lightly.

"To-morrow we will go over to Mis' Snow's and see about having them made up," said Miss Priscilla with a sigh of content, as the stage lumbered through the dusty home streets.

"Yes; we want them rich, but plain," supplemented Miss Amelia, rapturously. "Dear me, Priscilla, but I am tired!"

In spite of their weariness the sisters did not get to bed very early that night. They could not decide whether the top drawer of the spare-room bureau or the long box in the parlor closet would be the safer refuge for their treasure. And when the matter was decided, and the sisters had gone to bed, Miss Priscilla, after a prolonged discussion, got up and moved the silk to the other place, only to slip out of bed later, after a much longer discussion, and put it back. Even then they did not sleep well: for the first time in their lives they knew the responsibility that comes with possessions; they feared--burglars.

With the morning sun, however, came peace and joy. No moth nor rust nor thief had appeared, and the l.u.s.trous lengths of s.h.i.+mmering silk defied the sun itself to find spot or blemish.

"It looks even nicer than it did in the store, don't it?" murmured Miss Priscilla, ecstatically, as she hovered over the glistening folds that she had draped in riotous luxury across the chair-back.

"Yes,--oh, yes!" breathed Miss Amelia. "Now let's hurry with the work so we can go right down to Mis' Snow's."

_"Black_ silk-_black_ silk!" ticked the clock to Miss Priscilla was.h.i.+ng dishes at the kitchen sink.

"You've got a black _silk_! You've _got_ a black _silk!"_ chirped the robins to Miss Amelia looking for weeds in the garden.

At ten o'clock the sisters left the house, each with a long brown parcel carefully borne in her arms. At noon--at noon the sisters were back again, still carrying the parcels. Their faces wore a look of mingled triumph and defeat.

"As if we _could_ have that beautiful silk put into a _plaited_ skirt!" quavered Miss Priscilla, thrusting the key into the lock with a trembling hand. "Why, Amelia, plaits always crack!"

"Of course they do!" almost sobbed Miss Amelia. "Only think of it, Priscilla, our silk--_cracked_!"

"We will just wait until the styles change," said Miss Priscilla, with an air of finality. "They won't always wear plaits!"

"And we know all the time that we've really got the dresses, only they aren't made up!" finished Miss Amelia, in tearful triumph.

So the silk was laid away in two big rolls, and for another year the old black alpaca gowns trailed across the town's thresholds and down the aisle of the church on Sunday. Their owners no longer sought shadowed corners and sunless rooms, however; it was not as if one were _obliged_ to wear sponged and darned alpacas!

Plaits were "out" next year, and the Heath sisters were among the first to read it in the fas.h.i.+on notes. Once more on a bright spring morning Miss Priscilla and Miss Amelia left the house tenderly bearing in their arms the brown-paper parcels--and once more they returned, the brown parcels still in their arms. There was an air of indecision about them this time.

"You see, Amelia, it seemed foolish--almost wicked," Miss Priscilla was saying, "to put such a lot of that expensive silk into just sleeves."

"I know it," sighed her sister.

"Of course I want the dresses just as much as you do," went on Miss Priscilla, more confidently; "but when I thought of allowing Mis' Snow to slash into that beautiful silk and just waste it on those great balloon sleeves, I--I simply couldn't give my consent!--and 'tisn't as though we hadn't _got_ the dresses!"

"No, indeed!" agreed Miss Amelia, lifting her chin. And so once more the rolls of black silk were laid away in the great box that had already held them a year; and for another twelve months the black alpacas, now grown shabby indeed, were worn with all the pride of one whose garments are beyond reproach.