Blue Ruin (Musaicum Romance Classics). Grace Livingston Hill
to get any more money after this is gone.”
“Hush, Ella, people will hear you. Hurry. The train is stopping! Let me manage this business. You’re a back number. One would think you’d lived in the country all your life instead of New York. Buck up now and get down to the other door quick! You don’t want to get carried on do you?”
Ella Smith came puffing laboriously down the aisle after her daughter, bowling from one parlor chair to the next with the regular spasmodic lurches, apologizing to first one side and then another, finally bringing up with an elaborate apology to an empty chair at the end of the line, and drawn up with a jerk by Jessie Belle’s restraining hand.
“Cut it, Ella! You’ve lost your head!”
“But Jessie,” gasped the excited mother, “I mean Belle, we weren’t brought up to deceive. All this about your name and pretending we’ve been traveling in the parlor car! Jessie! Belle! I don’t think it is really right to change your name this way. You weren’t baptized Belle, you were baptized Barbour. Jessie Barbour Smith! I don’t feel we ought to go on with this. Your father would”
“Cut it, Ella. Dad’s dead and he’s nothing to say about it, and I prefer Belle to Barbour. Besides, you burned your bridges behind you when you wrote Miss Whipple my name was Jessie Belle and now you’ve got to live up to it. Here we are! Now, you remember, I mean what I say. I’ll clear out if you go to Jessieing me. There! That must be the car just driving up. Gee! He’s good looking! Say Ella, I’m crazy about him already!”
“Now look here, Jessie! I mean Belle!” said the mother pulling at her daughter’s sleeve. “You mustn’t talk that way. That young man is engaged! You know Justine Whipple wrote me he was engaged! It isn’t decent”
“Applesauce, Ella! What’s that to me?” trilled Jessie Belle joyously. “Just a little more exciting, that’s all, Ella. Come on! Give the porter your bag!”
Ella Smith got herself down the steps of the parlor car dubiously and stood like a nice, bewildered old hen whose one pretty chicken had suddenly become a wild duckling.
She looked around her with troubled eyes, trying to find her old friend Justine Whipple, bewildered with the new scenes, anxious and panic-stricken about the outcome of this visit. The bustle and noise of the departing train held her on the platform where she had first stepped off, and she glanced back to the fast-moving car where she had been sitting a few short moments before with a wild longing to jump on its steps and get back to her home again, only there was no home to go to anymore.
The last car swept past her. She turned to find her daughter and beheld her slim as a match in her little black satin sheath with its deep blue facings, silhouetted against a background of taxis and automobiles shaking hands most intimately with an attractive young man in a dark blue suit, his panama hat crushed carelessly on his shapely hand. With a strange foreboding she went toward them, wondering what her wild girl was going to do next. Hoping it would not end in some mortifying experience. It had been that way ever since Jessie was born Jessie Belle, she corrected herself in her mind she had been wondering what she would do next what wouldn’t she do?and feeling utterly inadequate to cope with it. She kept saying, “Oh, if her father had just lived, it wouldn’t have been this way! He knew how to control her!”
But the repetition of this happy reflection, however true it might have been, was unfortunately like beating against the wind. It had no effect whatever on Jessie Belle. She continued to go airily on her willful way.
It was Jessie Belle who had insisted upon their selling the home her father had provided for them in a little, quiet New England village and going to New York to live in a flat that she might have her voice trained. Someone, a summer visitor perhaps, had carelessly told her she had a voice and she rested not day or night after that until she got her mother to go to New York.
And now, when like that other poor soul in a far country, they had spent all and the interest they had thought was for all eternity most unexpectedly gave out because the principal had been spent, Ella Smith had appealed in a panic to her old school friend Justine Whipple. Even in their dire extremity Jessie Belle had been most trying, weeping hysterically at the idea of leaving New York, berating her mother for mismanagement, threatening to go her own way and find a job at the movies, threatening all sorts of things that had not been considered respectable in the little New England town where Ella Smith had been brought up. It was only when Justine Whipple had casually mentioned Dana that the girl had at last evinced an interest in the gushing invitation to come to the Whipple house for the summer. And here they were! And there was the young man! And what would Jessie Jessie Belledo next? Her mother trembled and went forward dazedly to meet him.
“This is Mrs. Smith?” asked Dana politely with his best parish-call manner.
“Yes, that’s my Ella,” chimed in the girl, “and I’m Jessie Belle. You are Dana, aren’t you? I thought so. Your aunt described you so perfectly that I should have known you if I had met you on Fifth Avenue. She said there wasn’t another like you anywhere, and I guess she was right.”
She looked at him with a flattering flutter of her dark, curly lashes and swept him a dimple from the corner of her mouth, which managed to convey a sense of deep admiration and flitted so quickly that he wondered if it had really been there or he had only imagined it. He had never made a study of dimples. He looked at her several times as they progressed to the car to see if it would come again, but Jessie Belle knew how to hold her charms in reserve.
“Is this your car? Oh, how adorable! It’s new, isn’t it? I’m crazy about that make of car. Say, you’ll teach me to drive, won’t you? I’m wild to learn. I’ve had no chance, you know, being in New York studying so hard. It really isn’t any pleasure, of course, motoring in the city, and we never had time to get out very far. I’ve been doing a lot of serious work, you know. But Dad was going to buy a car just before he died, and we somehow haven’t had the heart to get one since. Of course we’ll get one soon though. May I sit in the front with you? I’ll watch and get my first lesson. Ella, you sit back with the bags.”
She waved her hand to her mother imperiously, and Ella climbed in with deeper foreboding than ever. A car! She was afraid of automobiles, and Jessie no Jessie Belle, she must remember that was so headstrong. Oh dear!
Jessie Belle was rattling on, and Dana, in the intervals of avoiding traffic, was watching to see if there had really been a dimple.
“They said you were a theological student. Is that really true? I can’t imagine it. You don’t look a bit gloomy. Don’t you hate it? All those stuffy old subjects about dying and being good and all that? I should think you would have chosen something more well up to date, you know. People don’t believe those old things anymore. Why didn’t you learn to fly and be an explorer? That’s all the rage now. You’re much too nice looking to be wasted making long-faced prayers.”
Dana gave her an indulgent smile.
“What do you know about such things, kitten? You don’t look as if you had ever spent time even thinking about it.”
She swept him an upward, coy glance from under her gorgeous lashes, and the dimple came out and flitted back like a sprite.
“Oh, but I have,” she said coquettishly. Her highly illuminated lips pouted out like a bright red cherry, with the dimple lurking at one corner. “I thought about it a great deal after your aunt’s letter came. It seemed so perfectly awful for a perfectly good young man, a really fine peach of a fella, to throw himself away preaching to a lot of folks who never listen and don’t want to hear him anyway. I just felt sorry for you. And I thought it was going to be perfectly horrid to be here all summer long and the only man on the landscape a preacher. Oh, my soul! I couldn’t see it at all!”
Her laugh rang out like a chime of silver bells, and the dimple flashed full at him and stayed for a whole second. It was simply breathtaking; he had never seen anything so pretty in his life. He almost ran full into an old gentleman driving a Ford coup and righted himself only to grind into the fender of a shiny new car driven by a woman who frowned deeply at him and gave back a full line of contempt