Beauty for Ashes (11 page)

“No, thanks,” said Joan with a look of disgust. “I can’t bear cats, either new or old. They give me the shivers.”

“We came over, Gloria,” said her aunt, ignoring the interlude, “to suggest that perhaps you would like to come over and spend a few days with us while your father is away. How long is he going to be gone?”

Gloria barely suppressed an exclamation of distress at this suggestion, but she managed an icy little smile. “Oh, that’s sweet of you,” she said, controlling a shiver of dislike, “but I think I’ll just stay here where Father left me.”

“But it doesn’t look right for you not to come to us for part of the time,” urged the aunt severely with a tilt of offense to her chin and nose. “The whole countryside will think it’s strange.”

“Why bother?” said Gloria. “It doesn’t matter so much what people think.”

“It certainly does!” said Joan with a toss of her head. “We have to live here, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” said Gloria, sobering thoughtfully. “It hadn’t occurred to me that the countryside had anything to do with it. But in this case, I guess you’ll just have to explain that I’m staying here where Father can call me on the telephone at any time. He expects me to stay here. He calls me up every day sometime.”

“He calls you on the long-distance telephone
every day!”
exclaimed the two in unison.

“But isn’t that terribly expensive?” asked the aunt severely.

“Why, I really don’t know,” said Gloria. “I never thought of it in that way. But anyhow, Dad does it, and he expects me to be here! Thank you for your kindness, and I do appreciate your thinking of me, but at present I’m staying right here. And after all, it’s in a sense my own home. Dad owns this house, you know!”

A quick, startled look passed between the mother and daughter.

“No, I didn’t know that!” said the mother. “I understood it passed out of the family years ago. I don’t see why your father should have any more right to it than the rest of the children.”

Gloria looked at them, puzzled.

“Why, Dad bought it back again several years ago. Didn’t you know that?”

“No, I didn’t know it,” said her aunt, as if she thought it an extremely doubtful statement.

Gloria looked at her in despair. She didn’t seem to be getting anywhere with any kind of a conversation. She turned to her cousin and took a fresh start. “Did you have a pleasant week in your school?” she asked courteously.

“Pleasant? Teaching school? Well, no, I should say not! I don’t teach school exactly for pleasure!”

Gloria laughed. “Well, I should think it would be interesting at least,” she said, determined to make this girl unbend from her stiffness. “I think children are darling!”

“Hm! Well, I
don’t
. I think they are little devils!” said Joan. “If you don’t believe it, come and visit us someday.”

“I’d love to,” said Gloria. “Could I?”

The other girl’s face hardened.

“You wouldn’t like it,” she said sourly, “and you wouldn’t find out just visiting anyway. They’d be on their good behavior. They always are when there are visitors. You’d have to be a teacher and sit there day in and day out, keeping those thirty wild young ones in order and beating a little knowledge into their heads whether your feet ached and your back ached and your head ached or not. Whether the children were impudent and stupid and full of mischief or not. Having eyes in the back of your head to find out what’s going on out in the hall or in the back of the room. Having mothers come and complain because you didn’t give Johnny as good a mark as some other boy. Having the superintendent call you down for something you didn’t do. Oh, yes, you’d love to teach, I’m sure. It’s well enough for you who don’t have to earn your living to talk that way. You’ll get married to somebody pretty soon again, and you won’t do a thing but play bridge and ride around in different cars and go to parties. Yes, you know a lot about it!”

Gloria caught her breath as the tempestuous words swept on, and then a kind of pity grew in her eyes. “I’m dreadfully sorry you’ve had such a hard time,” she said gently, “and you certainly make a good-for-nothing picture out of me. I didn’t realize I was such a lazy, selfish little brute before. But I would gladly have shared my good times with you if I’d known. It’s quite rude I haven’t had to earn my living,” she went on thoughtfully, “but I’ve always hoped I’d be brave about it if I had to, and I can’t help thinking one of the ways I’d choose to try and earn it, if I knew enough to get the job, would be to teach little children.”

“Well, it’s not so hot when you get to doing it,” said the cousin dryly, “and as for sharing your good times, I’m not asking anything of anybody. I’ve got my life to live, and I’ll live it, but I’m not going to pretend it’s all velvet. Ma, isn’t it time we were starting home? If Gloria thinks she can’t go with us, there’s no reason why we should wait any longer.”

“Oh, but you’re going to have a cup of tea before you go,” said Emily Hastings, appearing at the door just then with a tray. “Yes, you are. I’ve got it all ready. Gloria, pull out that little table by Mrs. Sutherland so I can set the tray down. It’s all poured out so it won’t take you long. Do you like cream or lemon in your tea?”

“Neither!” said Mrs. Sutherland severely. “I take mine straight. Just one lump of sugar. And I never did hold with such heathenish customs as putting lemon in tea. What would lemon have to do with a good, plain, straightforward thing like tea?”

Emily Hastings smiled. “Well, isn’t it strange what different tastes we have? Now I drink the tea merely for the lemon.”

“I don’t call it tastes, I call it a slavish adherence to fashion!” said the caller, helping herself to the largest piece of cinnamon toast on the plate.

“Oh, do you?” said Emily peaceably. “Well, now, I hadn’t thought of that! By the way, how is your garden? Have you got any peas up yet?”

A garden seemed a safe enough topic, but there were presently caustic sentences being launched about different methods of planting peas, and Emily had to think up some other neutral subject.

When at last the callers left, Emily sighed. “Poor thing!” she said. “She’s never quite happy unless she thinks she’s making somebody else unhappy. She’s always been that way ever since I knew her. We used to go to school together, and nobody liked her because she had everybody mad in about five minutes after she arrived. Her daughter’s growing just like her, too. It’s too bad! And her husband is so nice and kind. I don’t see how he ever stands it!”

“He is nice, isn’t he?” said Gloria. “It’s the first time I ever saw any of them, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” Emily said, smiling. “Everybody in the countryside knows. She takes pains that they shall, and you can’t do a thing about it. But don’t worry. She must have liked you, or she wouldn’t have taken the trouble to drive over and see you.”

“That makes it nice, doesn’t it?” laughed Gloria. Then catching sight of the tennis racket, she glanced at her watch.

“I was supposed to go back and finish that set,” she said, “but I guess it’s almost supper time, isn’t it?”

“No, run along. I haven’t got the supper started yet. Besides, tomorrow is Sunday and you can’t finish it then.”

Gloria gave her a quick, astonished look, but she said nothing. It hadn’t occurred to her that Sunday would be any different from any other day as regarded tennis. But Emily didn’t even see her surprise.

The twilight almost caught them before they had finished the set, for they both came to it with renewed vigor, and it stretched itself out with exciting fluctuations, till finally with one last smashing blow, Murray landed the ball over the net close to Gloria’s feet, and the set was won.

“I’d like to come over and talk for a while tonight,” said Murray as he escorted her across the road in response to the supper bell, “but I find I’ve got to do something else this evening. I wonder how about Monday evening?”

Gloria felt a little disappointment as she turned to go in. She had been meaning to ask him to come over tonight and answer her questions, and now she must wait until Monday night. A long dismal Sunday between! Why couldn’t they play tennis on Sunday? She began to perceive that standards were different, and she sighed as she vaguely envisioned other equally perplexing questions that made a great wall of separation between her world and this one where she was staying for a little while. Why, at home, a tennis tournament would have gone on with more vigor than ever on Sunday because the crowd of observers would be all the greater.

Well, there would be nothing to do but go to church probably and listen to that droning old preacher she had heard last Sunday, unless she took a lonely walk in the woods, and she shrank from that. The last time she had attempted to walk by herself in the woods she had come upon a man who looked like an old tramp, with shaggy hair and ragged garments, sitting on a log cleaning up a fierce-looking gun. She had been fairly petrified with fright and had stolen back to the road in haste and run almost all the way home. She had not spoken to anybody about it because of a secret fear that perhaps he wasn’t a tramp at all, but a well-known character in the neighborhood, even a fond relative of someone. She had discovered already that you could not always judge a man by his garments and haircut. But she did not care to take any more such chances, so she went to church.

But there, to her surprise and relief, was Murray MacRae again in the pulpit, and her heart was lifted up with hope. Now she would hear some more of his strange doctrines, and perhaps inadvertently some of her questions would be answered without her having to ask them. She dreaded asking any of her questions, lest her tragedy would be revealed and her heart laid bare. It seemed so dreadful to have him know what she had just been through.

The sermon was about the coming of the Lord Jesus for His church, a thing she had never even heard of before, and it filled her with a fine frenzy of fear. She watched the young speaker’s face glow with joy over the thought that sometime, perhaps in the glow of early morning or possibly in the solemn hush of night, Christ, his Christ, was coming, and it might be soon.

It might be all very beautiful for people like Murray MacRae to be glad over a catastrophe like that, but what of a poor lost, unforgiven soul like herself? There were not likely many people like himself in the world, perhaps a few more than she dreamed. She looked about speculatively on the quiet group of elderly people, interspersed with earnest young people, and wondered if they all knew and understood what the preacher was talking about and if they believed it too and were looking forward to a rapture in the air with Jesus Christ. But what would happen to a world left behind with all such true believers taken away? She shuddered almost visibly, and Emily looked over and offered the light shawl she had brought with her, thinking Gloria was cold. Gloria accepted it and threw it around her shoulders, but it did not warm her soul. That was still cold and lonely. Death and horror seemed imminent. Sin and darkness and curse all about! Oh, she hoped such a thing couldn’t be true. She hoped it was only the vision of a dreamer. It would be so much better to have a perfect earth and let it go at that. Why did anyone want anything better? The earth without pain and sorrow. She would ask him all about it tomorrow night. And she would not go to church anymore and hear these unsettling things, things that spoke of another world and made the death of Stan come back so vividly.

Yet when evening came and she heard the old church bell give the half-hour warning for service, she went upstairs and put on her hat and coat again. Just from very torture of her own thoughts, she must go out and hear more. Perchance there would be something comforting or clarifying tonight.

And there was! It was made quite plain. She was told that she was a sinner, with no hope throughout eternity, until God sent His own Son to bear the consequences of her sin and die on the cross in her stead. She learned about the shed blood so clearly that she would never be in doubt again what part it played in man’s salvation, and she was made to see what was meant by eternal separation from God, the fate of the unbeliever.

Most unhappy, she sat and found tears going down her cheeks. She had not cried a tear yet for all the tragedy through which she had passed, but now the tears were breaking through, and she felt that they would soon be beyond her control.

They introduced her to Robert Carroll after church, and winking back the tears that still stood brightly on her lashes, she looked into his clear, true eyes and saw the same radiance in his face that she had noticed in the face of Murray MacRae. Then there were two such men in the world! And if there were two, perhaps there were more! Why had she never met any of them before? Why had her world contained not even one who seemed to have found that look of peace? There were plenty who were hilariously happy but none with a depth of peace in their eyes like these two.

She heard talk of the coming of Lindsey, references to her Sunday school class by members who were eager to have her back again after her long absence, and references to the man she was to marry. Bright, eager, interested talk. These people were not gloomy or dull. They were as interested in their lives and church activities as ever her home group had been in parties and good times. They were not in the least discontented. What was the secret? That thing they spoke of as being saved? Was that it?

She felt exceedingly small and lonely and left out and was glad when they went home. And that night she wept into her pillow, hot tears that had been rending her soul all these days, and wondered if the God of Murray MacRae had ever really thought about her and knew what she was suffering?

And now the ice in her heart seemed to be melting and taking away some of the terrible cold and horror, and making her from a cold, frozen girl who never could go on living again into a warm human being once more who was suffering keenly and needed terribly to be comforted. She wished for her father and decided that if he telephoned the next day she would tell him she was coming home. At once. Only she would have to wait until after Monday night, for she must first have that talk with Murray MacRae. She knew that she would never forgive herself if she went away from here without understanding what he had meant that first day when he said that a time was coming when all the sin and pain and sorrow would be taken away from this earth and it was to be full of perfect joy that nothing could dim. She simply must know what he meant. If there was anything in it but a dream, she must know and understand it. Only—it would be too late now, for Stan was dead!