Part 23 (1/2)
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.