Elsie Marley, Honey Part 6

Her smile faded and her hand went to her heart in an affected way.

"My being such a sad invalid is a terrible drag on your uncle, though he won't confess it," she added feebly. "I often and often drop a secret tear over it, I own; but now that there'll be some one to help with the little services that would naturally fall to a pastor's wife, I shall be quite content. You know how the poet says that others shall sing the song and right the wrong? 'What matter I or they?' That is how it seems to me."

Mr. Middleton gazed at his wife tenderly, but Elsie's youthful scorn increased. She was not sufficiently mature to understand that it shows something of character to look on kindly while another younger, fairer person steps in to fulfil duties that should have been one's own, even though one may have repudiated them.

Directly lunch was over, Elsie ran up-stairs--something she seldom had done--unfastened her trunk, took out an embroidered white linen suit and dressed quickly. She could scarcely wait until time to go to the library. She was ready to lose the train to-day, and even to-morrow if need be.

At the library, she found the procedure simple and easily acquired. It was fascinating, also, as was the great airy room; and she wandered about through the stacks, and gazed at the books, magazines, pictures, maps and bulletin-board in a sort of dream. It was a warm day and no one came in during the first half-hour.

Mr. Middleton had scarcely left, however, when a little girl in a scant, faded frock that was clean, however, and freshly starched, came shyly in with a book--a child of nine or ten with an anxious expression on her old, refined little face which hadn't yet lost all its baby curves.

"Why, where's Miss Rachel?" she asked, the look of anxiety fading and a shy little smile appearing in its stead.

Elsie explained.

"Well, I think you're ever 'n' ever so much nicer, and so pretty!" said the child. Then her face clouded again as she opened the book that she held in thin little hands that were like claws.

"The baby did it," she said sorrowfully as she exhibited a picture torn across. "He isn't a year old yet and don't understand. He isn't the least naughty, only _mischeevious_, you know. Ma says I ought not to have been reading it while I was minding him, but you see I'm _always_ minding him except when he's asleep--and then he wakes right up, mostly."

She sighed. "Do you s'pose you can mend it?" she inquired.

"Yes, indeed," returned Elsie promptly, and smiled involuntarily.

The child fingered her frock. "Miss Rachel would scold," she faltered,

Elsie didn't know what to say. Neither did she understand why tears should come to her eyes, except that the little girl was so small, so thin, so clean and sweet, and so very childish in spite of her responsibility.

She found some gummed paper, cut a strip, brought the torn edges carefully together and mended the picture as neatly as if she had not been a week ago as helpless an able-bodied girl of her age as there was anywhere to be found. Her sense of satisfaction was certainly commensurate, perhaps extravagant.

"There! Miss Stewart will never know," she said. "Do you want another book now?"

"Yes, please; but--is it right for Miss Rachel not to know?"

Elsie considered. "Perhaps not," she admitted, "but at any rate she won't mind since it looks as well as before."

"And I'll be very careful after this," added the child.

She selected another volume from the children's shelf, and having had it charged, turned to go. But somehow Elsie was loath to have her.

"Why don't you sit down at the table and look at the picture papers?"

she suggested.

"Oh, I've got to mind the baby," said Mattie--Mattie Howe was the name on her card. "I must be home when he wakes up. Good-by."

She started--came back--stood irresolute.

"Thank you for mending the book so good--so _goodly_," she said shyly, "and--I'd like to kiss you."

With a curious sensation that had no admixture of reluctance, Elsie bent over and received the kiss.

"You're prettier than the princess," the little girl declared, and ran away with her book.

Elsie Marley hardly knew what would have happened if an elderly lady hadn't come in at that moment and asked for "Cruden's Concordance."

She had some difficulty in finding it, but the lady was very pleasant and grateful, and after that there was a constant succession of visitors. Many children came in, all attractive, to Elsie's surprise, though none so appealing as Mattie Howe; and older people in surprising numbers, considering Mr. Middleton's prophecy.

But word had somehow gone round that the minister's niece was "tending library," and things being rather dull in the midsummer pause of most of the activities of the place, no doubt more than one came out of curiosity.

It was a very friendly curiosity, however, expressed in the pleasantest manner, and Elsie found herself responding to their advances without knowing how. She wondered at herself. The girl did not realize that being in the library made a difference. It was her first experience of work, or of doing anything whatever for any one else, so that even the service of getting out books for another established a sort of relations.h.i.+p between them. At the close of the afternoon, though tired, she was strangely happy.

But she couldn't understand it--didn't know herself. She found herself wondering who the stranger was who had worn her frock and occupied the chair of the librarian that afternoon. Grandmother Pritchard wouldn't have recognized her, nor Aunt Ellen. Had she, in a.s.suming another name, changed her nature also?

CHAPTER IX

Shortly before the death of her aunt in California, Miss Julia Pritchard had made up her mind to give up her position at the city desk on her fiftieth birthday, and retire to some pleasant country town to pa.s.s the remainder of her life quietly, in friendly intercourse with her neighbors. She felt that she had more than enough to "see her through," as the phrase is, very comfortably. She had worked for over thirty years, her responsibilities and salary increasing periodically; and though she had lived and dressed well and given liberally, she had added each year to a small inheritance that had come to her through her grandfather, and had gained further by judicious investment.

But when both her aunt and cousin died, and she was left guardian of the sixteen-year-old Elsie Marley, whose inheritance was small, Miss Pritchard decided to remain where she was a few years longer. It wasn't imperative, indeed, yet she felt that the last little Pritchard should have the best chance she could give her, and until she should have put her on her feet, the woman of fifty, who was strong and well and at the height of her powers, would gladly remain in harness. Her announcement to this effect was hailed with delight at the office, and another increase made in her salary so substantial that she declared she ought to adopt a whole family.

Though the sacrifice was greater than any one dreamed, nevertheless she made it quietly and cheerfully, expecting no reward nor desiring any.

She didn't expect much of Elsie Marley, indeed, recollecting the atmosphere of the household in which the girl had been reared, which she had herself found impossibly stifling during a short visit there fifteen years before.

At that time her Cousin Augusta had been living with her husband and baby in Portland, Oregon. What with her knowledge of the Pritchards in general, however, her observation of that stereotyped family after a long interval of years, and their intense anxiety lest the one descendant of that branch become in any way a Marley rather than a Pritchard, she was able to gather a very fair idea of what Elsie's upbringing must have been. Unless she might have inherited a sense of humor from the Marley side (which was unlikely, since no one possessing a sense of humor would have married Augusta Pritchard), the girl could hardly have escaped becoming a prig at the mildest. Cold, colorless, correct, self-sufficient, Elsie Pritchard would doubtless make her mother's cousin feel keenly her fifty years, her lack of grace, and her general and utter lack of claim to the royal name she bore.

On the other hand, she was also, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, Elsie _Marley_, and she was only sixteen. She couldn't have, at that age, completely compa.s.sed the woodenness of her adult relations. She might still be amenable to change, to development. In any event, as Miss Pritchard remarked to a friend in the office, any sort of young female connection cannot but be welcome to the heart of a lonely spinster who reaches her half-century milestone on midsummer's day.

Miss Pritchard occupied two large, handsome rooms on the second floor of a boarding-house near Fifth Avenue, a few blocks from the lower end of Central Park. In preparation for the young girl, she had the large alcove of the parlor shut off by curtains and her bed and dressing-table moved into it, and gave over her bedroom to Elsie. She spent much time and thought and not a little money in making it an inviting and attractive place for a girl, and would have felt quite satisfied had it not been for her remembrance of the rather heavy but stately elegance of the mansion in San Francisco.

On the June day on which Elsie was expected, Miss Pritchard confessed to the friend at the office to whom she had spoken before, that she was beginning to feel nervous.

"I almost wish she weren't coming until a week later," she said. "Do you know, I think if I had actually pa.s.sed my fiftieth birthday, I might feel somehow more solid and fortified. It's really an ordeal for an old-fas.h.i.+oned woman like myself to encounter the modern girl of sixteen. Fifty might pull through, but oh, dear, what of forty-nine plus?"

She was interrupted by the telephone. A telegram which had come to the boarding-house for her was read to her. She was smiling as she hung up the receiver.

"Well, what do you think!" she cried. "My young relative has decided for some reason to take a later train and has telegraphed me to that effect. Now there's something rather alert and self-reliant about that. That girl must have something in her, after all. I can no more imagine her mother or any of the family getting off at any stage of a through journey than I could fancy myself not getting off for a fire or an earthquake or, perhaps, for a wild West show. At the very least, there's a sort of suppleness of mind indicated."

She stood that evening in the station watching the throng emerging from the coaches of the train her cousin had given as hers. A tall, straight woman, large without being stout, her plain face, with large, irregular features, framed in plainly parted iron-grey hair, was singularly strong and fine, and her grey eyes betokened experience bravely met. As she scanned the face of every young girl in the procession, there was something so staunch and true in her appearance as to make it almost striking.

Then on a sudden, right in the midst of it, for a moment she forgot all about Elsie Marley, and what she was standing there for, in the vision that confronted her and surprisingly and instantaneously took her romantic heart by storm. A young girl came straight toward her--such a piquant, sparkling, buoyant young thing as she had never seen before--a small, slender, dark-eyed creature with short brown hair cut square like a little boy's and a charming mouth flanked by dimples that were almost like pockets.

So much she took in in that one long glance. Then, recovering herself, fearful lest she had been lost to all else about her longer than she knew, she glanced anxiously about for the fair, pale little Pritchard.

But the radiant child stopped short before her and looked up into her face.

"Cousin Julia?" she asked in the sweetest voice Miss Pritchard had ever heard. She smiled half-shyly and the dimples deepened.

For a single instant, Miss Pritchard stood still and stared at the girl, not so much incredulous as stunned. Then she cried out: