The Lovely Lady. Mary Hunter Austin
spread her skirts as she sat on a flat boulder and began sticking leaves into Peter's hat.
"Peter, what are you going to do this winter?"
"I don't know, I should like to go over to the high school at Harmony, but I suppose I'll try to get a place to work near home."
"We've been getting up a dancing and singing school, to begin in October. The teacher is coming from Dassonville. It will be once a week; we sing for an hour and then have dancing. It will be cheap as cheap—only two dollars a month. I hope you can come."
"I don't know; I'll think about it." He was thinking then that two dollars did not sound much, but when you come to subtract it from the interest it was a great deal, and then there would be Ellen to pay for, and perhaps a dress for her, and dancing shoes for himself and singing books. And no doubt at the dances there would be basket suppers.
"I should think you could come if you wanted to. Jim Harvey's getting it up.... He wants to keep company with me this winter." Ada was a little nervous about this, but as she stole a glance at Peter's face as he lay biting at a stem of grass, she grew quite comfortable again. "But I don't know as I will," she said. "I don't care very much for Jim Harvey."
Peter picked up a stone and shied it joyously at a thrush in the bushes.
"And I don't know as I want you to," he declared boldly. "I'll come to that dancing school if I possibly can, Ada, and if I can't you'll know it isn't because I don't wish to."
"You must want to with all your might and that'll make it come true. You can wish it on my amethyst ring."
"You won't take it off until October, Ada?"
"I truly won't." And it took Peter such a long time to get the ring on and held in place while the wish was properly made, that it was practically no time at all until the others found them on the way home as they came laughing up the hill.
As it happened, however, Peter did not get to the dancing school once that winter. The first of the cold spell Ellen had slipped on the ice, to the further trying of her lame back, and there were things to be done to it which the doctor said could not possibly be put off, so it happened that the mortgage dragon did not get his payment and Peter gave up the high school to get a place in Greenslet's grocery at Bloombury. And since there were the books to be made up after supper, and as Bet, the mare, after being driven in the delivery wagon all day, could not be let stand half the night in the cold at the schoolhouse door, it turned out that Peter had not been once to the dancing school. In the beginning he had done something for himself in the way of a hall for dancing, thrown out from the House of the Shining Walls, in which he and the Princess Ada, to lovely, soundless strains, had whirled away, and found occasion to say things to each other such as no ballroom could afford;—bright star pointed occasions which broke and scattered before the little hints of sound that crept up the stair to advise him that Ellen was stifling back the pain for fear of waking him. They had moved Ellen's bed downstairs as a way of getting on better with the possibility of her being bedridden all that winter, and the tiny whispered moan recalled him to the dread that as the half yearly term came around, what with doctor's bills and delicacies, the mortgage dragon would have not even his sop of interest, and remain whole and threatening as before.
When Ellen was able to sit up in bed the mother moved her sewing in beside it. Then Peter would sit on the other side of the lamp with a book, and the walls of the House rose up from its pages gilded finely, and the lights would come out and the dancing begin, but before he could get more than a word with the Princess, he would hear Ellen:
"Peter, oh, Peter! I wish you wouldn't be always with your nose in a book. I wish you would talk sometimes."
"What about, Ellen?"
"Oh, Peter, you are the worst. I should think you would take some interest in things."
"What sort of things?" Peter wished to know.
"Why, who comes in the store, and what they say, and everything."
"Mrs. Sleason wanted us to open a kit of mackerel to see if she'd like it," began Peter literally, "and we persuaded her to take two cans of sardines instead. Does that interest you?"
"Have you sold any of the blue tartan yet?"
"Ada Brown bought seven yards of it."
"Oh, Peter! And trimmings?"
"Six yards of black velvet ribbon—yes, I forgot—Mrs. Blackman is to make it up for her. I heard Mrs. Brown say she would call for the linings."
"She's having it made up for Jim Harvey's birthday," Ellen guessed shrewdly. "He's twenty-one, you know.... People say she's engaged to him."
Peter felt the walls of the House which had stood out waiting for him during this interlude, fall inward into the gulf of blackness. Nobody said anything for two or three ticks of the large kitchen clock, and then Ellen burst out:
"I think she's a nasty, flirty, stuck-up thing; that's what I think!"
"Shs—hss! Ellen," said her mother.
"Peter," demanded Ellen, "are you reading again?"
"I beg your pardon, Ellen." Peter did not know that he had turned a page.
"Don't you ever wish for anything for yourself, Peter? Don't you wish you were rich?"
"No, Ellen, I don't know that I ever do."
But as the winter got on and the news of Ada Brown's engagement was confirmed, he must have wished it a great many times.
One evening late in January he was sitting with his mother very quietly by the kitchen stove, the front of which was opened to throw out the heat; there was the good smell of the supper in the room, for though he had a meal with the Greenslets at six, his mother always made a point of having something hot for him when he came in from bedding down the mare, and the steam of it on the window-panes made dull smears of the reflected light. The shade of the lamp was drawn down until the ceiling of the room was all in shadow save for the bright escape from the chimney which shone directly overhead, round and yellow as twenty dollars, and as Peter leaned back in his chair, looking up, it might have been that resemblance which gave a turn to his thoughts and led him to say to his mother:
"Why did my father never get rich?"
"I hardly know, Peter. He used to say that he couldn't afford it. There were so many other things he wished to do; and I wished them, too. When we were young we did them together. Then your father was the sort of man who always gave too much and took too little. I remember his saying once that no one who loved his fellowman very much, could get rich."
"Do you wish he had?"
"I don't know that either. No, not if he was happier the way he was. And we were happy. Things would have come out all right if it hadn't been for the accident when the thresher broke, and his being ill so long afterward. And my people weren't so kind as they might have been. You see, they always thought him a little queer. Before we were married, before we were even engaged, he had had a little money. It had been left him, and instead of investing it as anybody in Bloombury would, he spent it in travel. I remember his saying that his memories of Italy were the best investment he could have made. But afterward, when he was in trouble, they threw it up to him. We had never got in debt before … and then just as he was getting round, he took bronchitis and died."
She wiped her eyes quietly for a while, and the kettle on the stove began to sing soothingly, and presently Peter ventured:
"Do you wish I would get rich?"
"Yes, Peter, I do. We are all like that, I suppose, we grown-ups. Things we manage to get along without ourselves, we want for our children. I hope you will be a rich man some day; but, Peter, I don't want you to think it a reflection on your father that he wasn't. He had what he thought was best. He might have left me with more money and fewer happy memories—and that is what women value most, Peter;—the right sort of women. There are some who can't get along without things: clothes, and furniture, and carriages. Ada Brown is that kind; sometimes I'm afraid Ellen is a little. She takes after my family."
"It is partly on account of Ellen that I want to get rich."
"You