THE HEROINE GOES TO MARKET
“Let’s see bacon,
eggs, bread, sugar, two cans of corn, and jam.
Have I gotten everything, Alma?” Nancy, checking
off the items in her marketing list, looked over toward
her sister, who had wandered to the door and stood
gazing out into the street where a gentle September
rain was falling. Alma did not answer, seeming
to have gone into a dream, and the grocer waited patiently,
his pencil poised over his pad.
“Alma, do wake up! Have
I forgotten anything? I’m sure there was
something else,” said Nancy, frowning, and studying
her list, with her under lip thrust forward.
“I regularly go and forget something every
Saturday night, when there’s no Hannah to concoct
something out of nothing for Sunday luncheon.”
“You said you were going to
bake a cake a chocolate layer cake,”
suggested Alma, turning, and viewing the proceeding
disinterestedly with her hands in her pockets.
“That’s it. I have
to get flour, and some cooking chocolate, and vanilla.
Alma, you’ve got to help me carry these things.
I’m not Goliath.”
“Mercy, Nancy, we don’t
have to take all that home with us, do we? Can’t
you send them, Mr. Simpson?”
The grocer shrugged apologetically.
“It’s Saturday, Miss Prescott,
and the last delivery went out at three all
my boys have gone home now or I’d try to accommodate
you.”
“I do hate to go about looking
like an old market woman, with my arms full of brown
paper parcels,” murmured Alma, sotto voce
to her sister.
“Goodness, I don’t imagine
there’ll be a grand stand along the way, with
thousands watching us through opera glasses,”
laughed Nancy. “Would you mind telling
me whom you expect to meet who’d faint with
genteel horror because we take home our Sunday dinner?
I don’t intend to starve to spare anybody’s
feelings.”
“Last week I was dragging along
a bag of potatoes and and I met
Frank Barrows. And the bag split while I was
talking to him, and those hateful potatoes went bumping
around all over the pavement. I never was so
mortified in my life,” said Alma, sulkily.
Nancy shot a keen glance at her sister’s
pretty face, and her eyes twinkled. Alma’s
shortage of the American commodity called humor was
a source of continual quiet joy to Nancy, who was
the only member of the Prescott family with the full-sized
endowment of that gift.
“Dear me, whatever did Frank
do? Scream and cover his eyes from the awful
sight? Had he never seen a raw potato in all
his sheltered young life?”
Alma shrugged her shoulders a
slight gesture with which she and her mother were
wont to express their hopeless realization of Nancy’s
lack of finer feelings.
“I don’t suppose you would
have minded it. But I hate to look ridiculous,
particularly before anyone like Frank Barrows.”
“But, Alma, you funny girl,
don’t you see that you look a thousand times
more ridiculous when you act as if a few potatoes bouncing
about were something serious? Don’t tell
me you stood there gazing off haughtily into the blue
distance while Frank gathered up your silly old potatoes?
Or did you disown them? Or did you play St.
Elizabeth, and expect a miracle to turn them into
roses so that they would be less offensive to Frank’s
aristocratic eyes? Come on now, help me shoulder
our provisions. We’re members of the Swiss
Family Robinson, going back to our hut with our spoils.
Pretend we’re savages, and this is a desert
island, and not respectable Melbrook at all.
Next time we go marketing you can disguise yourself
with a beard and blue goggles.”
Alma laughed unwillingly. She
was a dainty and singularly pretty girl a
little bit foolish, and a good bit of a snob, but Nancy
adored her, though she enjoyed making good-natured
digs at Alma’s weak spots.
They took up their bundles, said good-night
to Mr. Simpson, and went out.
It was a walk of three miles from
the village or, as it preferred to be called the
town of Melbrook to the Prescotts’ house, which
lay in the country beyond, a modest little nest enough,
where the two girls had grown up almost isolated by
their poverty from the gay life of the younger Melbrookians.
Alma chafed unhappily against this isolation, chafed
against every reminder of their poverty, and, like
her mother, once a beauty and a belle, craved the
excitement of admiration, luxury and fine things.
She was ashamed of the little house, which was shabby,
it is true, ashamed of having to wear old clothes,
and made herself wretched by envying the richer girls
of the neighborhood their beautiful houses, their
horses and their endless round of gay times.
As Nancy once told her mother, in affectionate reproof,
they were always trying to “play rich” Mrs.
Prescott and Alma. She had tried to teach Alma
her own secret of finding life pleasant; but Alma did
not love books, nor long solitary walks through the
summer woods; and Nancy’s ambition of fitting
herself to meet the world and make her own living
seemed to both Alma and her mother dreary and unfeminine.
Somewhere, in the back of her pretty head, Mrs. Prescott
cherished the hope and the belief that the two girls
would find some way of coming into what she called
“their own” not by Nancy’s
independent plan of action, but through some easier,
pleasanter course. She shuddered at the idea
of their making their own living, and opposed Nancy’s
wish to go to college on the ground that no men liked
blue-stocking women, and that therefore Nancy would
be an old maid.
“But, Mother darling, we can’t
just sit back and wait for some young millionaire
to come and carry us off?” Nancy would plead,
shaking her head. Time was flying, and Nancy
was seventeen, and eager to begin her own life.
“Let me go I can work my way through,
and Alma can stay at home with you.”
“I need you to help me with
Alma,” was Mrs. Prescott’s answer.
Nancy felt helpless. Her father, before her,
had to his sorrow recognized the hopelessness of driving
any common-sense views into Mrs. Prescott’s
pretty, silly little head. She had never realized
that the decline of the family’s fortune had
been, in no small measure, due to her. She accounted
for it on the grounds of old Mr. Thomas Prescott’s
inhuman stubbornness and selfishness.
The two girls, leaving the village
behind them, were walking briskly through the rain,
down the main road, bordered by the imposing country
estates of people who had gradually settled on the
pretty countryside. Nancy could remember when
the hill, where now stood a staring white stone mansion,
surrounded by close-clipped lawns and trim gardens,
had been a wild, lovely swell of meadow, dotted with
clusters of oaks and elms; when in place of the smug
little bungalow, with its artificial pond and waterfall,
and ornate stone fences, there had been a wooded copse,
where squirrels scuttled about among branches of trees,
since fallen in the path of a moneyed civilization.
Other of the houses, of haughty Mansard architecture,
had stood there before she had been born, and it had
often seemed to her that the huge, solemn, beautiful
old place of Mr. Thomas Prescott had been there since
the Creation. As they passed it, they slackened
their pace, and despite the weight of bundles which
grew heavier every minute, stopped and peered through
the bars of the great, wrought-iron gates.
A broad drive, meticulously raked
and weeded, wound away from them under magnificent
arching trees, to the portals Nancy said
it would have been impossible to consider Uncle Thomas’s
door anything but a portal which were just
visible under the low-hanging branches. The
rest of the old stone house was screened from the rude
gaze of prying eyes, like the face of a faded dowager
of the harem; save for the upper half of a massive
Norman tower, which thrust itself up out of the nest
of green leaves, like the neck of some inquisitive,
prehistoric bird.
“I don’t believe Uncle
Thomas has passed through these gates in fifteen years,”
said Nancy. “One could almost believe that
he had really died and had had himself buried on the
grounds, like the eccentric old recluse he is.”
“Well, they would have had to
have done something with all his money,” replied
Alma, pressing her forehead against the iron bars;
“unless he left everything to his butler, and
had the will read in secret. It would be just
like him. Oh, Nancy, why are there such selfish
old misers in the world? Just think if
he’d just give us the least little bit of all
his money. Just enough to get a horse and carriage,
and buy some nice clothes, and and get
a pretty house. It wouldn’t be anything
to him. Mamma says she is sure that he will relent
some day.”
Nancy shrugged her shoulders.
To her mind, it was foolish of her mother to put
any hopes on the whims of an old eccentric. Mrs.
Prescott was one of those poor optimists who believe
earnestly in the miracles of chance, always forgetting
that chance works its miracles as a rule only when
the way has been prepared for them by the plodding
labor of common sense.
“We mustn’t count on that,
Alma,” she said soberly. “There is
no use in living on the possibility that Uncle Thomas
will relent, and make us rich. It isn’t
just for the pure love of money that he has been so
stingy toward us, I believe. He was never a miser
toward Father, you know. I I think
he would have given us everything in the world if if ”
She hesitated, unwilling to state her private opinion
to Alma.
“If what?”
“Well, you see, I think the
trouble was this. Come along, we mustn’t
wait here, or you’ll catch cold.”
“What do you think the trouble
was?” prompted Alma, padding after her sister,
and sloshing placidly through the puddles, in all the
nonchalant confidence of sound rubbers.
“Well, Alma, you mustn’t
misunderstand me. I’m afraid you will.
You know how I adore Mother. She’s so
pretty, and and childlike, and funny that
nobody on earth could ever blame her ”
“Blame her? For what?” cried Alma,
with sudden fire.
“Nothing. Only, Alma,
we must realize that sometimes Mother makes little
mistakes, and I believe that she has had to pay more
heavily for them than she deserves. We’ve
got to try to protect her against them, by looking
at life squarely, and wisely, Alma ”
“Are you going to preach a sermon?
What were you going to say about Uncle Thomas?”
“Just this. You know Uncle
Thomas was a very clever man. He made every
bit of his money himself. Father told me long
ago that when Uncle Thomas began in life he did not
have a cent in the world; he started out as a plain
mill-hand, and then he became a mechanic, and he worked
his way up from one rung to another, until through
his own talent and pluck he became very, very rich.
Well, it’s only natural that a man like that
should give money its full value when he’s
toiled for years at so many cents an hour, he knows
just exactly how many cents there are in a dollar.
Perhaps he puts too great a value upon it, but certainly
we aren’t judges of that. You know that
Uncle Thomas never married, and when Grandfather died,
Uncle Thomas became Daddy’s guardian.
I believe he loved Father better than anyone in the
world. Who could help it?” Nancy’s
voice trembled slightly, and she winked back the tears
which rose to her eyes at the memory of her father’s
handsome merry face, which had grown so unaccountably
saddened and worn before his early death.
“He gave Father everything he
wanted, when he was a boy you know how
Daddy used to tell us how Uncle Thomas would tiptoe
up to his room at night and slip gold pieces into
his stocking, so that he could find them in the morning,
and then when Daddy asked him about it, he would shrug
his shoulders, and his eyes would twinkle, and he’d
say, ’It must have been Brownies.’”
“I can’t imagine how a
man who used to be like that could ever have grown
so hard and bitter,” said Alma.
“Well then, you see,
when Father grew up, Uncle wanted him to be successful
for himself. And he was terribly proud of Father
when Daddy first came back and told him that he had
made five thousand dollars in his first year at business.
Then Father told him that he was going to be married.
Uncle didn’t want him to not until
he had definitely settled himself in life. And
then, Father was very young, and Mother only a girl
of seventeen think of it, just my age.
But when Uncle saw Mother, he adored her, of course.”
Nancy paused, and seemed to have forgotten the rest
of her story, but Alma prompted her curiously.
She had never heard this tale before, for Nancy had
gleaned it bit by bit from her father, when they used
to take long walks together through the country, and,
putting two and two together, she had been able to
get rather close to the real truth of things.
“I know Uncle adored Mother,”
said Alma, kicking through a pile of wet leaves.
“He gave her those lovely Italian earrings,
which I’m to have when I’m eighteen.
And all that wonderful Venetian lace, which the first
one of us to be married is going to have for her wedding
gown.”
“Yes. Well, then then
after Father and Mother were married things didn’t
go so very well. Mother was just a girl just
my age, you know, only she was pretty, like you, and,
I suppose, a little extravagant. At least, they
weren’t able to make ends meet very well, although
Daddy made a good income and, anyhow, Uncle
Thomas would have thought her extravagant. He
didn’t see why it was necessary for her to send
for her clothes to Paris, and why Father was always
worried about bills, when he should have been able
to live well within his income. Anyway, Father
wasn’t able to save a cent, and one day Uncle
Thomas came to him and said that he had a very good
opportunity for him to invest his savings, so that
they would draw a much better income than what they
were giving. The only trouble was that Father
didn’t have any savings. Then Uncle became
furious; he asked Father and Mother what kind of future
they thought they were laying up for us, and he scolded
Mother terribly for not helping Father. He quoted
the Bible about women being the helpmeet of their
husbands, and about the parents eating sour grapes
and setting the children’s teeth on edge.
He said that they were taking the path to ruin, and
that Father could expect no help from him unless he
and Mother economized. But you see, poor Mother
always considered Paris dresses and jewellery and
expensive dainties the necessities and not just the
luxuries of life. I don’t suppose she
really understood how to economize at all. And
anyway, things got worse instead of better.
Then, one year, Daddy lost an awful lot of money trying
to make some quickly so that he could get his debts
cleared up, and start fresh. Instead, he only
got in deeper. And and then he fell
ill. And you remember, Alma, when poor Father
was dying, Uncle came. And he cried and cried.
But when Mother came into the room, he got up and
went out, and shut the door behind him. Then
he shut the gates of his house against us, too.
I think he feels that we we girls must
learn to look at life seriously, to work out our own
futures so that poverty will teach us to
be wiser than than poor, darling little
Mother ” Nancy’s voice
had sunk, as if she were talking to herself, so that
Alma barely heard the last words. She was thinking
of Alma, wondering how she could teach her luxury-loving
little sister to see life practically, without taking
away the joy of it from her.
“We mustn’t rely on Uncle
Thomas, Alma,” she said presently. “We
mustn’t count on anything but what we can do
for ourselves. Remember that, dear. We’ve
got to realize that our lives must run a different
course from those of richer girls we can
never do the things they do but surely
they will be richer lives, and happier lives, if if
we rely on no one, ask nothing from anyone, but what
we earn” her head went up “never
struggle for, or want the things that lie beyond our
means, but make always the opportunities that lie within
our grasp, or the ones that we can make for ourselves,
serve as stepping stones.”
Alma glanced at her sister’s
sober, handsome face. There were times when
Nancy looked to her like some brave, gallant, sturdy
lad, and there were times when she agreed with Nancy
in spite of herself, and against her own inclinations.
“Here we are home
again. And if it isn’t the snuggest, cosiest,
most cheerful burrow between here and Melbrook, why” Nancy
strode gaily up the little brick walk with her long,
boyish strides, and breaking into a laugh, finished,
“I’ll beard the Prescott himself tower,
donjon-keep and all!”