Beauty for Ashes (Musaicum Romance Classics). Grace Livingston Hill
thrifty, doing all that work and living away from the world! She felt a faint vague wish that she might somehow begin over again with things clean and fine and real, things worth doing, and make her life something that could be remembered.
The soft footsteps around the house ceased; the glimmer of the hall light beneath the crack of the door went out. There were only the quiet stars like tall tapers turned low to make the big room luminous, and they were half veiled by the dark pine plumes.
The pines were whispering softly at intervals when a little breeze stirred them, but there were great silences between. Gloria thought she had never heard it so still before anywhere. It seemed as if one might hear even the tread of a passing cloud, it was so very quiet, and there seemed to be so much space everywhere and such a nearness to the sky.
She stole out of her bed to kneel by the casement and look out. There were only a few dim shapes that might be houses around somewhat scattered. There were lights in one or two windows. Could that be a mountain off there against the sky, like a soft gray smudge blotting out the starry part and darkening down into the stretch of what must be meadow across the road? She knelt there a long time looking up into the night and listening to the silence. It fascinated her. The world seemed so wide and home so far away. She drew a deep breath and was glad she did not have to think about what she had left behind in the last few days. She was too tired and it was all too dreadful. She shuddered and felt a chill in the spring night air. This north country was colder than the one she had left behind, but it was quiet, oh so quiet! One didn't have to think here. If one dared to think, perhaps one's thoughts would be heard in this stillness as if they were a voice shouting.
She slipped back gratefully into the linen sheets, laid her head on the fragrant pillow, and sank into the sweetest sleep she had known for months.
In the morning when she awoke, there were roosters crowing, hens clucking of the eggs they had laid, a lamb bleating, and now and then a cow's low moo. And yet that great silence was all around like a background for these sweet, strange sounds. She opened her eyes and could not tell for a moment where she was nor what had happened until she heard her father talking to John Hastings outside below her window about the spring planting and the possibilities of the south meadow yield of hay.
There were appetizing odors coming up from downstairs, and cheery voices. It must be late. She sprang up and dressed hastily, her thought eager for the new day. She glanced eagerly from the window and identified her mountain all hazy pink and purple in the morning sun, lying like a painting on the sky beyond the treetops, and felt a thrill that she had recognized it even in the dark. Then she hurried down to breakfast, trying to imagine herself back in the days when her father was a boy.
After breakfast her father took her over the farm, showing her everything, explaining the way of farm people, telling her stories of the past, until everywhere she went the way was peopled with the kith and kin she had never known.
She asked her father about those five children of Grandmother's of whom she had never heard until last night, and learned that one was dead in childhood, one had married a European and gone to live abroad, one was in California living on a ranch, and the last lived on another farm only thirty miles away with his wife and family, cousins she had never known.
"And why haven't we known them, Dad?" she asked, wide-eyed. "Why haven't we come up here, and why haven't they visited us?"
A slow dull red came up in her father's cheeks and a cloud came over his happy face.
"Well, Gloria, perhaps I was wrong, but your mother sort of took a dislike to this part of the country when we were first married and didn't seem to want to come up here, and I was too proud to urge her. I figured that someday she would get over it and we'd get together yet, but she never has, and now they are mostly scattered. I don't know how many of George's children are at home now. It's been my fault, I guess. I was too busy to write many letters, and when they found we didn't come up here, they got rather offended, I'm afraid, and I had to let it go at that." He ended sadly.
"Well, can't we hunt them up?" asked Gloria earnestly. "I'd like to know my cousins."
"Yes," said her father, brightening. "We'll do that very thing. It'll make up for a great deal, you wanting to go with me."
It suddenly came to Gloria how much her father would have enjoyed having his children more with him. Why, he was like a boy, going around here in his old haunts and telling her all about it. Her heart thrilled to think how pleased he was to share it with her and how much she and Vanna had missed in not being more with their father! She reflected that it had been all wrong, going selfishly about their own life, going wildly from one thrill to another, and having so little to do with their own father. Why, he was interesting and worth cultivating! He could show her a better time than any of the young men with whom she had whiled away her days and evenings sometimes far into the mornings. But somehow she didn't even want to think of those days. She just wanted to enjoy this quiet place and these still, beautiful days with her father.
They went fishing in the old trout brook the next day and caught a string of trout. Gloria even caught a couple herself and went back to the house and stood over her father while he cleaned them and then stood by while Emily Hastings cooked them. They came on the table a delicious crisp brown, and nothing ever tasted so good as they did, eaten with the white homemade bread and the delicious fresh butter.
There were photograph albums for the evenings, when Gloria got acquainted with a lot of relatives whom she had never heard of before, albums that she pored over again and again, until she felt she knew each one–Aunt Abby, Uncle Abner's wife, and Cousin Joab and his daughter Kate, little Anne who died just as she was growing into sweet womanhood, and young pretty Aunt Isabella who married the foreigner and went to live abroad in a castle, almost breaking her mother's heart going so far away, that mother who had been her grandmother, who had washed and mended and cooked and lived in this sweet old home. Oh, how could pretty Isabella go away from this home and marry any man? How could any girl? How had she been going to trust herself to Stan and go out of her father's care? Stan who had died with another girl!
She shivered as she turned the pages of the album and went up to bed to listen to the silence and try to forget.
She learned a number of things in her father's old home. She learned to make her bed and make it well. Ever since she had come up to her room and found Emily Hastings with deft fingers turning down the sheets smoothly over the candlewick spread and plumping the pillows into shape, she had made it herself. At first with clumsy fingers that could not get the blankets to spread smooth nor make the counterpane hang evenly. And finally she had humbly asked to be shown how. Before this, she had never thought about beds being made. They might spread themselves up as soon as one went out of the room for all the notice she had ever taken of them. Her bed was always made at home and her room in order when she came back after ever so brief an absence. But she discovered that it made a difference to have no servants. It seemed funny to her that she had never thought about it before.
Sunday morning they went to the church with the white spire, the old church the Sutherlands had attended for years. There was even a tablet up by the pulpit in memory of Great-Grandfather Sutherland, the one who had been taken away from his old wife only a few months before she went herself. The old red cushions on the family pew had faded from red to a deep mulberry, and the ingrain carpet was threadbare in places and drearily dull in its old black and red pattern. Gloria sat with her toes on the wooden footstool that was covered with ingrain of a later vintage and didn't quite match. She watched the red and purple and green lights from the old stained glass windows fade and travel from the minister's nose, across his forehead, and twinkle on the wall in prisms and patterns, under the solemn sentence done in blue and gold: "The Lord is in His holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence before Him." It did not seem a happy thought to her. It seemed to her like a challenge from a grim and angry person. She looked around on the shabby little church that so sorely needed refurbishing and couldn't make it seem a holy temple for a great God to enter. Yet when she looked at her father, she realized there was something sacred here, some memory perhaps, that brought a softened light to his worldly-wise face and a tenderness to his eyes, and she looked around again less critically.
There was a cabinet organ played by an