An Alabaster Box. Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
There was in reality only pathos and tragedy in her adoration. It was not in the least earthy, or ridiculous, but it needed a saint to understand that. Even while she conferred with her friends, she never lost sight of the young man, always hoped for that one fleeting glance of approbation.
When her sister-in-law, Mrs. Daggett, appeared, she restrained her wandering eyes. All four women conferred anxiously. They, with Mrs. Solomon Black, had engineered the fair. Mrs. Black had not yet appeared and they all wondered why. Abby Daggett, who had the expression of a saint—a fleshy saint, in old purple muslin—gazed about her with admiration.
“Don't it look perfectly lovely!” she exclaimed.
Mrs. Whittle fairly snapped at her, like an angry old dog. “Lovely!” said she with a fine edge of sarcasm in her tone, “perfectly lovely! Yes it does. But I think we are a set of fools, the whole of us. Here we've got a fair all ready, and worked our fingers to the bone (I don't know but I'll have a felon on account of that drawn-in rug there) and we've used up all our butter and eggs, and I don't see, for one, who is going to buy anything. I ain't got any money t' spend. I don't believe Mrs. Slocum will come over from Grenoble, and if she does, she can't buy everything.”
“Well, what made us get up the fair?” asked Mrs. Dodge.
“I suppose we all thought somebody might have some money,” ventured Abby Daggett.
“I'd like to know who? Not one of us four has, and I don't believe Mrs. Solomon Black has, unless she turns in her egg-money, and if she does I don't see how she is going to feed the minister. Where is Phoebe Black?”
“She is awfully late,” said Lois. She looked at the door, and, so doing, got a chance to observe the minister, who was standing beside the flower-table talking to Ellen Dix. Fanny Dodge was busily arranging some flowers, with her face averted. Ellen Dix was very pretty, with an odd prettiness for a New England girl. Her pale olive skin was flawless and fine of texture. Her mouth was intensely red, and her eyes very dark and heavily shaded by long lashes. She wore at the throat of her white dress a beautiful coral brooch. It had been one of her mother's girlhood treasures. The Dix family had been really almost opulent once, before the Andrew Bolton cataclysm had involved the village, and there were still left in the family little reminiscences of former splendor. Mrs. Dix wore a superb old lace scarf over her ancient black silk, and a diamond sparkled at her throat. The other women considered the lace much too old and yellow to be worn, but Mrs. Dix was proud both of the lace and her own superior sense of values. If the lace had been admired she would not have cared so much for it.
Suddenly a little woman came hurrying up, her face sharp with news. “What do you think?” she said to the others. “What do you think?”
They stared at her. “What do you mean, Mrs. Fulsom?” asked Mrs. Whittle acidly.
The little woman tossed her head importantly. “Oh, nothing much,” said she, “only I thought the rest of you might not know. Mrs. Solomon Black has got another boarder. That's what's making her late. She had to get something for her to eat.”
“Another boarder!” said Mrs. Whittle.
“Yes,” said the little woman, “a young lady, and Mrs. Solomon Black is on her way here now.”
“With her?” gasped the others.
“Yes, she's coming, and she looks to me as if she might have money.”
“Who is she?” asked Mrs. Whittle.
“How do I know? Mrs. Mixter's Tommy told my Sam, and he told me, and I saw Mrs. Black and the boarder coming out of her yard, when I went out of mine, and I hurried so's to get here first. Hush! Here they come now.”
While the women were conferring many people had entered the room, although none had purchased the wares. Now there was stark silence and a concentrated fire of attention as Mrs. Black entered with a strange young woman. Mrs. Black looked doubtfully important. She, as a matter of fact, was far from sure of her wisdom in the course she was taking. She was even a little pale, and her lips moved nervously as she introduced the girl to one and another. “Miss Orr,” she said; sometimes “Miss Lydia Orr.”
As for the girl, she looked timid, yet determined. She was pretty, perhaps a beauty, had she made the most of her personal advantages instead of apparently ignoring them. Her beautiful fair hair, which had red-gold lights, should have shaded her forehead, which was too high. Instead it was drawn smoothly back, and fastened in a mat of compact flat braids at the back of her head. She was dressed very simply, in black, and her costume was not of the latest mode.
“I don't see anything about her to have made Mrs. Fulsom think she was rich,” Mrs. Whittle whispered to Mrs. Daggett, who made an unexpectedly shrewd retort: “I can see. She don't look as if she cared what anybody thought of her clothes; as if she had so much she's never minded.”
Mrs. Whittle failed to understand. She grunted non-assent. “I don't see,” said she. “Her sleeves are way out of date.”
For awhile there was a loud buzz of conversation all over the room. Then it ceased, for things were happening, amazing things. The strange young lady was buying and she was paying cash down. Some of the women examined the bank notes suspiciously and handed them to their husbands to verify. The girl saw, and flushed, but she continued. She went from table to table, and she bought everything, from quilts and hideous drawn-in rugs to frosted cakes. She bought in the midst of that ominous hush of suspicion. Once she even heard a woman hiss to another, “She's crazy. She got out of an insane asylum.”
However nobody of all the stunned throng refused to sell. Her first failure came in the case of a young man. He was Jim Dodge, Fanny's brother. Jim Dodge was a sort of Ishmael in the village estimation, and yet he was liked. He was a handsome young fellow with a wild freedom of carriage. He had worked in the chair factory to support his mother and sister, before it closed. He haunted the woods, and made a little by selling skins. He had brought as his contribution to the fair a beautiful fox skin, and when the young woman essayed to buy that he strode forward. “That is not for sale,” said he. “I beg you to accept that as a gift, Miss Orr.”
The young fellow blushed a little before the girl's blue eyes, although he held himself proudly. “I won't have this sold to a young lady who is buying as much as you are,” he continued.
The girl hesitated. Then she took the skin. “Thank you, it is beautiful,” she said.
Jim's mother sidled close to him. “You did just right, Jim,” she whispered. “I don't know who she is, but I feel ashamed of my life. She can't really want all that truck. She's buying to help. I feel as if we were a parcel of beggars.”
“Well, she won't buy that fox skin to help!” Jim whispered back fiercely.
The whole did not take very long. Finally the girl talked in a low voice to Mrs. Black who then became her spokeswoman. Mrs. Black now looked confident, even triumphant. “Miss Orr says of course she can't possibly use all the cake and pies and jelly,” she said, “and she wants you to take away all you care for. And she wants to know if Mrs. Whittle will let the other things stay here till she's got a place to put them in. I tell her there's no room in my house.”
“I s'pose so,” said Mrs. Whittle in a thick voice. She and many others looked fairly pale and shocked.
Mrs. Solomon Black, the girl and the minister went out.
The hush continued for a few seconds. Then Mrs. Whittle spoke. “There's something wrong about that girl,” said she. Other women echoed her. The room seemed full of feminine snarls.
Jim Dodge turned on them, and his voice rang out. “You are a lot of cats,” said he. “Come on home, mother and Fanny, I am mortal shamed for the whole of it. That girl's buying to help, when she can't want the things, and all you women turning on her for it!”
After the Dodges had gone there was another hush. Then it was broken by a man's voice, an old man's voice with a cackle of derision and shrewd amusement in it. “By gosh!”