Part 41 (1/2)

Pauline did not prepare a meal in a series of culminating convulsions, with hair rumpling, face reddening, and voice rising every pa.s.sing minute. She moved a s.h.i.+ning pot forward on a s.h.i.+ning stove, she took plates of inviting cold things from the safe, and lifted a damp napkin from her pats of b.u.t.ter. Then she said, in an uninterested voice: ”You might tell your p'pa, Miss Lydia--”

Humble as her business was, she had been taught it well. Martie, insatiable on this particular topic, sometimes questioned Pauline. She was given a meagre picture of a farmhouse on Prince Edward's Island, of a stern, exacting, loving mother who ”licked” daughters and sons alike with a ”trace-end” for any infractions of domestic rule. Of snows so lasting and deep that housewives buried their brown linens in October, and found them again, snowy white, on the April gra.s.s. Pauline's mother, dying of ”a shock,” had been the devoted daughter's charge for eleven hard years, then Pauline had married at thirty, only to be made a widow, by a lumber jam, at thirty-two. So it was fortunate that she could cook, for she was a plain woman, and what the country folk call ”dumb,” meaning dull, and unresponsive, and unambitious.

To-night there was a little unusual clutter in the big, hot, clean kitchen; Lydia was making sandwiches for the Girls' Sodality Christmas Tree at the large table. Two or three empty cardboard boxes stood waiting the neatly trimmed and pressed bread: Lydia did this sort of thing perfectly. At the end of the table, his cheeks glowing, and his dark mop in a tumble, Teddy was watching in deep fascination.

The room had the charm that use and simplicity lend to any room. There was nothing superfluous here, and nothing a.s.sumed. Martie knew every crack in the yellow bowl that held a crinkled rice-pudding; the broom had held that corner for thirty years; for thirty years the roller towel had dangled from that door. She and Len and Sally had seen their mother go to the broom for a straw, to test baking cake, a hundred times; their sticky little faces had been dried a hundred times on the towel.

But to-night a new, homely sweetness seemed to permeate the place.

Martie had left the slim, dark-blue book upstairs in her bureau drawer, but her mood of exquisite lightheartedness she had not laid aside. She sat down in the kitchen rocker, and Teddy climbed into her lap, and, while she talked with Lydia, distracted her with little kisses, with small hands squeezing her cold cheeks, and with the casual b.u.mping of his hard little head against her face.

”I declare it begins to feel Christma.s.sy, Lyd! Did you get down town to see the stores? I never saw anything like Bonestell's in my life. It's cold, too--but sort of bracing cold! We had both the stoves going all day; we had to light the lights at four! It was rather nice, everybody coming in to say 'Merry Christmas!'”

”The children had their closing exercises at school this morning,”

Lydia contributed, ”and afterward Sally and I walked down town, with all the children. She expects Joe to-morrow. She wanted Billy and Jim to get in a nap, so I brought Ted home.”

”And I took a long nap!” Teddy whispered in his mother's ear.

”I don't know what possesses the child to whisper that way!” Lydia said, annoyed.

”He just said that he had a nap, Lyd, I think he didn't want to interrupt.”

”Oh, he got a good nap in,” Lydia admitted, pacified, ”if you're really going to take him to-night, I've laid out his clean things.”

”I saw them on the bed, Lyd--you're a darling!”

”Am I going?” Teddy asked, with a bounce.

”Is Aunt Sally going to take the children?” Martie temporized. But Teddy knew from her tone that he was safe. Indeed, his mother loved the realization that she was his court of last appeal, that it was to her memory of authority abused that his happiness was entrusted. It was her joy to explain, to adjust, to reconcile, the little elements of his life. She taught him the rules of simplicity and industry and service as another mother might have taught him his multiplication table. Teddy might have poverty and discouragement to face some day, but life could never be all dark to him while his mother interpreted it.

She took him upstairs now, to dress for the great occasion of the Sodality Christmas tree, and dressed herself, prettily, as well. But before she turned out the gas, and followed the galloping small boy downstairs, she opened her bureau drawer.

And again the slim book was in her hands, and again her dazzled eyes were reading the few words that gave her new proof that John had not forgotten.

For a few minutes she stood dreaming; dreaming of the old boarding-house, and the little furniture clerk with his eager, faun-like smile. And for the first time she let her fancy play with the thought of what life might be for the woman John Dryden loved.

But she put the book and the thought quickly away, her cheeks burning, and went down to the homely, inviting odours of supper, of Pauline's creamed salmon and fluffy rolls. Her father sat beside the fire, in a sort of doze, his long, lean hands idly locked, his gla.s.ses pushed up on his lead-coloured forehead.

Martie kissed him, catching the old faint unpleasant smell of breath and moustache as she did so, helped him to the table, and tied Teddy's napkin under the child's round, firm chin. She talked of anything and everything, of Christmas surprises, and Christmas duties--

And all the while her heart sang. When with Teddy on one side, and Lydia leaning on the free arm, she was walking through the winter darkness her feet wanted to dance on the cold, hard earth.

”It's Christmas--Christmas--Christmas!” she laughed, when the little boy commented upon her gaiety. Lydia found the usual damper for her mood.

”Very different for you from last Christmas, poor Mart!” she observed, with a long sigh.

Martie was sobered. They went into the church for a moment's prayer, and Teddy wriggled against her in the dark, and managed to get a little arm about her neck, for he knew that she was crying. The revulsion had come, and Martie, tears running down her face in the darkness, was only a lonely woman again, unsuccessful, worried, trapped in a dull little village, missing her baby!

Women were coming and going on the altar, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g it with odorous green for Christmas. There was a pungent smell of evergreen in the air.

About the confessionals there was a constant shuffle, whispering and stirring; radiators hissed and clanked, the big doors creaked and swung windily.