Chapter II Uncle Adolph’s Letter
Several weeks later, in the long, narrow back yard of one of a block of wooden houses in Chicago, a girl was hanging out clothes on a line. An occasional hot breeze blew the soft brown hair in stray locks across her forehead, and the sun beat down from the glowing sky on her unprotected head.
“Clover, Clover darling,” called a weak voice from an open window, “you’ve been out there so long! Aren’t you almost through? You will get a sunstroke. Do, at least, put on a hat.”
The girl brushed her flying hair back with one hand. “I’m all right, mother,” she called, her cheery tones contrasting pleasantly with the sad voice.
“She is doing too much. I know she is,” murmured the feeble watcher within, keeping her yearning gaze on the lithe young figure. “Bless her brave heart!” The dim eyes filled.
The front door slamming broke in upon the mother’s meditations, and another girl entered the shabby room where she sat. She was a tall, broad-shouldered young creature of seventeen, the face under her heavy, half-falling brown hair flushed with heat, health, and happiness. She seemed to fill the room as she skipped up to the white-haired figure and pressed the infantile curve of her peachy cheek against the pale face.
“Oh, I wish for the thousandth time that we could live nearer the lake,” she said in hearty young tones. “Every block one comes inland, one feels the difference in heat. Where is Clover?”
“In the back yard, hanging out clothes,” was the anxious response. “I’m afraid for her, Mildred. I wish you would take her a shade hat.”
“Hanging out clothes!” repeated Mildred, amazed. “What in the world”—She did not wait to finish her sentence, but hastening into the hall seized a broad-rimmed hat hanging there and hurried to the back of the house. Running down the steps, the dancing light quite gone from her clear eyes, she approached her sister.
“What does this mean, Clover?” she exclaimed accusingly.
The elder, already highly colored, now looked uneasy. “You know Mrs. O’Rourke couldn’t come to-day to do the washing,” she answered.
“No, but she can come Wednesday,” retorted the younger, placing the hat upon the sunny roughened hair of the head which was decidedly below her own in height.
“Don’t stick the hat-pin into me,” cried Clover, smiling up into the displeased eyes.
“I don’t know but I will. Just look at your fingers, all white and parboiled!”
Clover clasped the offending hands behind her.
“What did you do it for?” asked the young girl severely. “Here I’ve been having the most elegant jouncy sail,—it is deliciously rough,—sitting at my ease on a cushion, while you’ve been working like this. It isn’t a bit fair.”
“All right. Help me to hang up the rest of these clothes, and I’ll tell you why I did it.”
Mildred snatched up a small blouse waist and a couple of clothespins. What was the use of cooling off on Lake Michigan if one must return to this? How the sun did broil down!
“Was Elsie with you?” asked Clover, as she pinioned the side of an apron to the line.
“Yes, and Frank too. Harry Billings took us all out.”
“I’m afraid that the children will become something of a nuisance down at the boat-house. Of course with you it is different; but the others hang around and look wishful, and of course the young men are too good-natured not to ask them. As for Frankie, he is such an amphibious little animal, we can’t help his living down there.”
“I only wish we all did live on the shore,” grumbled Mildred. “I never shall be resigned to being so far from the lake.”
“Oh, it is something to live in the country,” rejoined Clover comfortingly, “and Hyde Park is pretty all through.”
“Country! Hyde Park!” said Mildred scornfully. “You know it is all Chicago now.”
“To be sure; but the annexation is a novelty yet, so no wonder I had forgotten. However, what’s in a name?”
“Not much, perhaps,” said Mildred, tired of reaching up in the hot sun, and inclined to be pessimistic, “but since we have moved into the middle of this dingy old block, we had better stop talking about living in the country. You haven’t told me yet why you took this last caprice. We can’t afford to go away and have a change in summer, I understand that; but surely there is a difference between stark and staring mad. There are more sensible forms of recreation than to do a family washing on an August day.”
“I haven’t done the biggest, hardest pieces, you see,” said Clover gently. “There, this is the last. Now let us go over under our tree and talk a bit while we cool off.” She turned toward the house and sent a reassuring kiss toward the figure seated in the window, and made a dumb show of applauding her own performance, smiling gayly as she clapped her hands.
“Sit down, Milly,” she said, when they had reached the shade of the one tree their yard boasted; but as soon as they were seated, the elder girl fell silent, and clasping her hands behind her head looked up through the foliage of the ragged oak, slowly dying as all its brothers and sisters do in this region, pining for the old prairie isolation.
Mildred fanned herself with her hat, and regarded her sister half crossly, half curiously.
“I hate to talk over bothers with you, Milly,” said the latter at last; “but I do have a lot of bothers lately.”
Mildred wondered if it were imagination that she saw tears, gather in the other’s eyes. If they were tears, they were well trained to obedience. Clover sank still farther back and lay upon the grass, and any moisture that had crept forth retreated to its source.
“Is mother any worse?” Mildred asked in a hushed voice.
“No; although she is no better, and any suffering she may endure is the hardest trial we can have to bear. Other perplexities are trying in proportion as they have relation to her, and all our perplexities must, in the end, bear upon her. How to conceal them is the study.”
“What have you to conceal? What?” asked Mildred quickly, her large, childlike eyes full of wonder. “Mother knows, she has to, that we barely make both ends meet, and she thinks you are a perfect wonder, the way you manage. What is it, Clover? Is it Frank’s education you are worrying about again? Goodness! Don’t tell me you did the washing to save up money for that?” The speaker’s eyes widened with surprise and disapproval.
Clover shook her head and smiled faintly.
“I’ve noticed lately that you aren’t half so jolly as you used to be.”
Clover sat up with such suddenness as to make Mildred start. “Has mother noticed it?” she demanded.
“No, not that I know of. You needn’t look so tragical. I only mean you are ever so much more thoughtful and old-womanish just lately than you used to be. I’m sure I don’t see why you should let yourself be bothered if we’re all willing to live right down at the bottom of everything, and I don’t make any fuss about wearing the same dress to school until the girls must think I’ve grown into it.”
“You have been good, Milly, just as good as you can be”—
“Pshaw, I’m nothing to what you are for goodness. We all have to feel the pinch of poverty together,” said Mildred with some grandiloquence; “and in a place like Hyde Park it is easier to bear than it might be in some other places. All the old settlers know what father was, and that his honor wasn’t lost when the money was. Everybody we really care for has been friendly to us since he died. Just think, it is nine years now, and we do manage to have some good times,” finished the girl, quite heroically she thought, since there were such a number of joys that she yearned for and had to behold hopelessly in the possession of her more fortunate companions. “Come now,” she added insistently, “you are still guilty of that washing and not a word said to excuse yourself.”
“Milly,”—the older girl looked into her sister’s eyes with an expression full of loving trouble,—“I hate to tell you, but Uncle Adolph’s allowance hasn’t come this month.”
“It is a little late, that is all,” said Mildred, but her face fell and her heart began to beat unpleasantly.
“No,” very sadly, “he has written mother that it will not come any more. Fortunately I opened the letter as usual, and I have not shown it to mother. She thinks it is only delayed.”
“But he owed the money to father,” said Mildred vehemently. “It was not charity to us, it was a debt.”
“Yes, but he simply says that on account of losses he will not be able to let us have any more money, and we cannot force him.”
“Mr. Van Tassel could. Have you told him? He is so very kind to us.”
“Yes, he is very kind; but there is nothing he could do about this.”
“What shall we do?” asked Mildred blankly.
“That is what I have been asking myself for days past.”
“That is why you did the washing!” said the younger slowly and with awe, as though this thought did indeed bring home a realizing sense of the situation. “We are awfully—miserably poor,” she added in a panic.
“Hush! Not so loud,” warned her sister.
“I shall have to leave school and help you do the housework, and Frank can never have any education at all,” declared Mildred despairingly.
“He will have to get a position in some store as a cash boy. Mr. Van Tassel will probably help him that much,” she finished dismally.
“Hush! Don’t keep bringing Mr. Van Tassel into it,” said Clover nervously. “I can’t bear the thought of begging anybody for anything, even influence.”
“Then you have thought of something,” exclaimed Mildred eagerly.
“No, I haven’t, I haven’t,” rejoined the other hastily. “Oh, Milly, forgive me.” Her tone and gesture as she put one hand to her face and quickly extended the other to her sister touched the latter with great surprise. Mildred took the hand and squeezed it between her own.
“Forgive you, you old darling,” she said, tears springing to her eyes. “What for, I wonder? Because you have three children to bring up and work for when you are only twenty? or because you, the prettiest girl in Hyde Park, have wizzled up all your poor fingers washing for us? What is it? Oh, Clover dear!”
For Clover was crying in a hasty, furtive fashion, stifling her sobs, and drying her eyes with light touches, fearing to make the lids redder.
“Because I couldn’t keep it from you, Milly. You see it doesn’t do any good for me to bother you except to relieve me a little.”
“And isn’t that something?” with anxious affection. “Why, you make me as vain as a peacock. I didn’t know I counted a bit. I thought you had to have somebody old, like mother or Mr. Van Tassel, to get any comfort out of them.”
“Now of course you feel as I do, Mildred,” said the older sister, her quick self-control regained. “Nothing is any matter but to keep this from mother.”
“Well, I don’t see how we’re going to do it for any length of time.”
Clover bit her lip. “But as long as we can, we will.”
“Of course. Why, poor mother would be crushed!” Then with a change of tone, “Here she comes this minute, Clover Bryant!”
“And my eyes are so red!”
“Better not come out here, mother dear,” cried Mildred, rising precipitately and advancing to meet her. “The—the clothes are so damp, you’ll—you’ll take cold; and the sun is so hot, you’ll be—be”—
The mother, with her delicate face smiling beneath the prematurely white hair, placed her arm around the tall girl as she met her, and together they advanced, Mildred most reluctantly, to where Clover sat smiling and striving to look indifferent.
“Have you come out to hear the jays scold?” asked the latter. “There is one up there now. Let me hang the hammock for you.” She sprang to her feet.
Mrs. Bryant, without relinquishing her hold on Mildred, put the other arm around her eldest daughter.
Clover flushed violently. There was a look in her mother’s loving eyes, the hint of a smile on her lips, which the girl recognized. It was a certain exalted expression of the dear lined face which her children had seen before, and it always meant rising to an emergency. The girl’s heart contracted painfully.
The wet clothing on the lines flapped spasmodically behind the trio. Unsteady board fences enclosed the narrow heated area. The poverty-stricken tree stretched its gaunt, ill-clothed arms aloft, and the blue-jay’s harsh, jeering note added one more petty discomfort to the surroundings.
“My dear little girls,” said the gentle voice with unusual tenderness.
The sisters only regarded their mother in an apprehensive silence.
“I went to your room for something, Clover, and I found my letter from Uncle Adolph. I have just been reading it. Don’t regret it. I had to know.”