A STUDIO TEA

The young ship builder by Sophie Swett is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. CHAPTER IX

A STUDIO TEA

I knew in a moment that it was Loveday who had preached at the race-course. I could guess at a reason for her going there, of which Octavia and Estelle knew nothing, for she had not shown them Hiram Nute’s photograph of a horse which had caused the exciting idea to “ketch a holt” of her in the middle of the night.

I was still in the dark as to what the idea might be, but it seemed probable that it was connected with Dave’s trouble. If Dave had been so wicked as to bet, I could not see that it made any difference which horse he had bet upon, but I trusted Loveday sufficiently to be sure that there was some reason for her mysterious actions.

I could see her gaunt figure there among the coarse, rough men, the color bright upon her high cheek-bones—perhaps wavering a little; but I knew there was no wavering of her courage in the “giving of her testimony.” In our church the women kept silent, for Parson Grover strongly shared St. Paul’s opinion on that subject, but Loveday went to the Methodist Church and always “spoke in meeting.”

In his eagerness to tell us about the woman preacher the young man had set down the dainty porcelain teacup he had been holding and stood, leaning upon the back of his sister’s chair; his boyish, somewhat heavy face lighted up and seemed to grow finer, so that the resemblance to his sister was more striking.

“I kept very near to the woman while she was preaching,” he continued, “partly to hear what she said, partly because it was such a rough crowd that I was afraid they might be really rude to her—get to pushing and jostling her, you know.”

The young man glanced with unconscious complacency at his brawny wrists and arms and I began to really like him. It made my heart beat quickly to think of Loveday in such a crowd as that; and yet I could not quite realize that Loveday could fail anywhere, to be mistress of the situation!

“While the jeering and hooting went on,” the young man continued, “the crowd shouted out ridiculous questions as well. What horse was she trying to make a book on? She’d better get the hayseed out of her hair before she went to preaching! Did she ever see anything but a plough-horse in Greenappleville, where she came from!

“‘There ain’t no finer horses anywheres than there is raised in our county!’ she cried indignantly.” He actually imitated Loveday’s voice, as well as her peculiar dialect. Oh, there was no doubt that it was Loveday whom he meant! “‘And our horses are put to noble and fittin’ uses,’ she went on, ‘helpin’ folks to till the sile and get their daily bread and serve their Maker. There ain’t none o’ them put to the evil one’s service, like these poor creturs—leastways I hope there ain’t.’ She uttered the last clause a little doubtfully and the crowd laughed.

“Some jeering fellow asked her if she had come to put up her money on Alf Reeder’s racer. She answered that she hadn’t ‘done no such a thing. She had come in the fear of the Lord to find out something that would lift a burden from a back where it didn’t belong—or where at least she thought it didn’t belong.’” Octavia and I looked at each other. “She had come in the fear of the Lord and she had been so eager to find out something that she hadn’t thought much about the wickedness, but it had been borne in upon her so that the Lord wouldn’t let her go away without raising her voice against it.

“‘When your gain is your fellow-cretur’s loss how are you better than any kind of a thief?’ she asked. And then she began to say things—well, pretty hard things about those who thought it was all right to come if they didn’t bet. I only wish I could repeat them just as she said them! I wasn’t any the less struck by them because the coat fitted! But I can’t make you understand the magnetism—or whatever one may call it—about her personality.”

“I’m very glad she made such an impression upon you, Ned,” said his sister quietly. The young man sat down, looking a little shamefaced, and the girls began assiduously to pour his tea.

“She did make an impression on me,” he said. “I wouldn’t have you think I was just mimicking her,” he continued as he stirred his tea. “I only wanted to give you an idea of her quaint dialect—it seemed to add to the effect of simplicity and straightforwardness that she produced. I’m sure you never heard anything like it in your lives!”

Hadn’t we? Octavia and I looked at each other again.

“It sounds like our Loveday’s dialect,” said Estelle, who still looked like a lily down-beaten by the rain and had shown but a languid interest in the conversation, partly I thought because she shrank from the subject of horse-races.

“It seems a little like Loveday altogether,” she added reflectively. “I think if she hadn’t lived such a retired life she might be capable of doing some such thing as that. Of course, now, she would be simply terrified in such a crowd. She’d be like a pelican of the wilderness and an owl of the desert if anything were to drive her into the world. I can’t think of anything that would drive her here to the city; she hates to go even as far as the Port.”

Estelle looked up suddenly from my face to Octavia’s and something that she read there was answered by a questioning gleam in her eyes.

“It seems so much like Loveday,” she murmured.

“I hope you understand that I wouldn’t ridicule her, for the world,” repeated Ned Carruthers. “I respected her, I reverenced her. And she had more effect on me than all your eloquence has ever had, Peggy. She made me really determine never to go to a horse-race again. You see, Peggy, I’m a little used to your preaching, but hers was of a new kind. When she said it was ‘a livin’ shame to take the noblest dumb creturs the Lord ever made and make ’em minister to one of the most dishonorable of human vices,’ why, it really struck me that the point was well taken! ‘An’ you say that you ain’t betting but only lookin’ on, what be you a-doin’ but encouragin’ the wickedness in a mean-spirited way?’ she said. Then she quoted Scripture; ‘he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad’—You ought to have heard her voice ring out on that! She had one of those high-keyed, vibrating voices that have such a carrying power. I really think”—the young man stirred his tea with reflective deliberation, “that I shall never go to a horse-race again.”

“Then Heaven bless the preacher-woman!” his sister exclaimed with an undertone of real earnestness. “I only wish you had met her before you went to college,” she added.

There was evidently a hidden meaning in the wish, for it made the young man color to the roots of his blonde hair.

“You do not know what hard work Peggy makes of being a sister,” he said, glancing up from his tea, half laughing, and yet, as it was easy to see, really shamefaced and embarrassed. “I’ve been an awful lot of trouble to her.”

“We have had some experience in being sisters ourselves,” said Octavia drily.

“Our boys are perfectly lovely!” Estelle remarked decidedly, and scowling at her tea-cake, since it was not quite the thing to openly scowl at Octavia. Estelle had become quite too uncomfortably sensitive since Dave’s misdoing.

“They are all perfectly lovely—from the proper point of view. That’s what I tell Peggy,” said Ned Carruthers, like a graceless young scamp. “But, seriously, I suppose I was some trouble to Peggy up there at the country college, after we first had the money left us, you know. I went to horse-races up there. The preacher-woman is quite right; I wish I had met her before as you say, Peggy, and then I might not have gone. Perhaps, however, I was in a more receptive frame of mind from having gotten into trouble by means of horse-races. There was not so rough a crowd either up there in the country, as I saw to-day. There were a good many innocent and guileless farm boys who were the ready prey of the sharpers.”

“Were the college students allowed to go?” interrupted Estelle.

“Oh, no, they were not allowed,” admitted Ned Carruthers, and blushed a genuine, honest boyish blush. He had, in fact, had a little difference with the faculty on that very point, he added with a side glance at his sister. We began to understand what the trouble was that Peggy had had with him and sympathy stirred in our hearts.

“I didn’t leave the country college solely because I wished to be at Harvard and near Peggy. I should probably have done that, in time, after Peggy decided that she wished to come to Boston and live in what she calls this lovely old house, but I should not have done it so soon if the faculty had not voted to dispense with my society because I went to a horse-race.”

He looked as if he were really ashamed and were moved by an impulse to be honest about himself—an impulse perhaps engendered by the experiences of the day.

I felt, ridiculously of course, that it was vaguely incongruous that Miss Carruthers should be so stylish and so artistic and yet have a brother lying heavily upon her heart, just as we plain country girls had.

“There were a lot of fellows at that college who got along without being expelled. Give me some credit for honesty at least!” the young man went on. “There was a big fellow there, overgrown but with splendid biceps, a handsome young fellow, who ran off to the races and lost some money. I rather think he was new to the business. He forged a check—on his uncle, I think,—and then funked; got into a regular panic about it and borrowed the money of me. We had just come into our money then, Peggy and I, and I had plenty.

“And if the faculty when they gave me leave to go didn’t hold that very fellow up to me as an example. I lost my temper and gave him away—yes, I did, Peggy, and I know it was a nasty thing to do. I never told you that part of the trouble before, did I, Peggy?”

I pressed Estelle’s foot under the table. Her bosom was heaving and her blue eyes flashing fire. Could that conceited young man think that her feeling was all for him? He was consuming a great quantity of tea-cakes and did not seem to be observing anything beyond his plate.

Of course I had gathered, from the very first, that he meant Dave, and I was inwardly tempestuous, myself, but these were Alice Yorke’s friends, and Miss Peggy Carruthers had been very kind and hospitable to us all. And it was so dreadful to have a scene! I did hope Estelle was not going to make one.

“You needn’t pity him,”—as his sister uttered an exclamation of surprise. “I shan’t, at least not until he pays me my money. He has written to me once or twice as if he really meant to, but I never expect to get it.”

“You will get it! It is our Dave, my own brother whom you are saying those dreadful things about. And they are not true, they’re perfectly false!” Estelle burst forth like a small cyclone. “There is some dreadful mistake about—about his going to the races. He never had the least taste for that sort of thing; he never had any coarse tastes at all!” And my hand on her arm—I gave it a pinch—had no effect whatever.

The young man arose to his feet, his face actually pale with consternation.

“I’m sure you’ll believe that I didn’t—that I never imagined such a thing!” he stammered.

“It’s no matter about me—about us,” she returned hotly. “You only care because you said it before us. Of course you wouldn’t have done that if you had known! You have no right to think such things about Dave! And to dare to think that he won’t pay you,—Dave who would work his fingers to the bone, who would starve, rather than leave a debt unpaid!”

“But I didn’t know anything about him. If somebody had only given me a hint!” groaned the young man. “I knew that Miss Yorke lived in the same place that his letters came from, but I didn’t think anything about it.”

He looked really distressed and he halted and stammered in his speech like a school-boy.

Peggy Carruthers was very red in the face and I fancied that she was inwardly torn by the conflict between her duties as a hostess and her resentment of Estelle’s plain-speaking. I was sure that she was wishing that Alice Yorke had not brought her rude and countryfied friends to her studio.

“I—I wish you wouldn’t think anything about the money,” he stammered on. “Of course it doesn’t signify at all! I would have bitten my tongue out before I would have said it if I had known! I don’t think it was quite the thing; quite kind of you I mean, to let me go on talking when—when he is your brother!”

“All you think of is that you have spoken out before us!” cried Estelle tempestuously again. “You don’t care at all that you have ill-treated and misjudged him!”

It was the old story. Estelle was fiercely resentful against any one who did not believe in Dave. While, under the circumstances, it was surely scarcely reasonable to expect that the young man should do so.

“My dears, my dears, I trust that nothing unpleasant is happening!” interrupted Miss Bocock, whose serenity rivaled that of the Minerva on the pedestal beside her. She looked from one disturbed face to another with a little deprecating smile.

“Things seem to have become very unfortunately personal,” said Alice Yorke nervously. “I am sure no one meant——”

Octavia came to the rescue—with the dignity that never had failed to impress any one but the publishers.

“It is unfortunate,” she said. “Of course we were not sure whom Mr. Carruthers meant when he began to speak. And then the subject is a very painful one to us.”

She had not a word of blame for Estelle, she linked herself with her! That I thought would not have happened yesterday.

“We must be excused for feeling keenly, for our brother’s expulsion from college was a very bitter disappointment to him and to us. And, as my sister said, nothing could have been more unlike him than the wrong-doing of which he was accused. So we—we cannot help thinking that there is some mistake, some mystery, especially as we cannot doubt that the woman whom you heard preaching at the race-course was our—our servant, our housekeeper, our friend—Loveday.”

“Loveday? why, it seems like her, but how could it be?” murmured Estelle.

“She had hinted to me that she had some reason for believing that Dave was innocent,” continued Octavia. “When I saw her in the street to-day, I felt that her secret errand was to discover something that would clear Dave. When I knew that she had gone to a race-course and heard what she had said there, I was doubly sure.”

“Dear, sweet, lovely old Loveday!” murmured Estelle, with the tears running down her cheeks. “But what can she have found out?”

“You make me feel more a brute than ever,” said Ned Carruthers ruefully and casting distressed glances at Estelle’s tear-stained face.

“I’m sorry if I was rude,” said Estelle penitently. A gleam of hope was lighting her face like an April sunbeam. “It has been so dreadful to me that people should think such things of Dave and I’ve borne it so long! And it seems like the ruin of his life—only I know that he wouldn’t let it be—nobody but me knows what stuff there is in Dave! He is my own brother and of course I couldn’t bear not to have him at least what every man should be—honest and honorable and—clean. I couldn’t bear even to have Dave smoke—he never did.”

She looked really beautiful in her earnestness, although her cheeks were blotchy with tears. “And even our own wouldn’t believe in him—no one has but me,—and perhaps Loveday, but I didn’t know that.”

I saw Octavia press her hand tenderly under the table—but I knew she was feeling, with me, that there had been quite enough of our own affairs.

“I am sure he must be a most lovable young man,” said Miss Bocock politely. She looked a trifle disturbed, now, and I thought that the gold-thread legs of the stork that she was embroidering were a little wabbly. “Young men will have their little differences; only a trifling misunderstanding, in this case, I am sure.”

Ned Carruthers was looking at Estelle as if he had never seen her before. In fact, I think he had come in wrought to so high a tension by his experience at the race-course—by our Loveday’s preaching, of all queer things!—that he had not especially observed any of us, but had rather regarded us collectively as an audience upon which to pour out his pent-up feelings. He looked at her without a trace of the admiration which a young man naturally bestows upon a pretty girl, but with an abashed and downcast air, as before a Daniel come to judgment—with rather more reverence than I thought that Estelle with her tearful impetuosity really deserved.

“Honest, honorable and clean!” he repeated meditatively and almost solemnly. “That wouldn’t mean betting at a horse-race or—or giving another fellow away, would it? Well, I have turned over a new leaf—but—what a mess I have made of things, this afternoon!”

The conclusion was so boyish that we all laughed.

Miss Carruthers had recovered herself and tried to restore a light and merry tone to the conversation. But that was not easy. Miss Bocock asked to see the contents of Estelle’s portfolio and Peggy Carruthers pinned them up, in effective positions, all over the studio.

Now I did not feel at all sure about them; it seemed to me that they were queer. I wondered a little that none of the dealers would have her paintings. I still meant to hang one over the mantel in the spare bed-room, but the drawings didn’t look to me like other people’s. Peggy Carruthers praised them extravagantly, however. I suspected her of being a little insincere, from a kindly desire—very kindly under the circumstances—to soothe Estelle’s wounded feelings. Miss Bocock thought them very pretty, but criticized a little, preferring the artistic methods of her youth and quarreling with the “poster” style of her storks. Even embroidery had been invaded by the helter-skelter, touch-and-go fashion. For her part she liked finish.

She was cried down by the younger people but Ned Carruthers said ruefully:

“We seem fated to hurt you here, Miss Dupont.”

“Oh, I’m used to it about my work. I’m all full of little stabs! but those don’t count—comparatively,” she said. She made it quite evident that she had not forgiven him Dave’s injuries, for all his penitence. I thought our hostess was a little relieved when we came away; a serene atmosphere was evidently what suited her.

Alice Yorke took Estelle away with her to stay with a relative in town. She was to visit the editor who “might like to see her drawings,” in the morning and she wanted us to go with her.

As for me, I was going into the region of cheese and preserves and possible sausages. Practical affairs were likely to settle my mind after all this disturbing mystery about Dave.

But I certainly was unable to compose myself now, or to cease wondering what Loveday could have discovered to account for her strange pilgrimage. I was anxious, too, about what had become of her; Loveday did seem so entirely out of her element in the city.

I had no appetite for the dreary boarding-house dinner and after it was over I managed to slip out of the house. Octavia had lain down, thoroughly tired out by the emotions and excitements of the day.

I had remembered suddenly the slip of paper that was constantly fluttering out of Loveday’s Daily Food—the little devotional book that she carried in her pocket. There was written upon it the address of an aunt whom she meant, sometime, to go to see in an old-fashioned street in the West End of the city. I remembered the street and number perfectly, so many times had I picked up the scrap of paper for her in more youthful days, vaguely feeling it to be a curious thing that Loveday should have an aunt. It was still very early in the spring evening and the street was not far away.

As I went down the steps I met Ned Carruthers coming up. He had heard us mention where we were staying and he had taken the liberty to come to see if we could give him Loveday’s address. Now it was one thing to intrude myself upon the privacy that Loveday evidently intended to preserve and another thing to aid and abet a strange young man in doing it. I said that I had only a guess as to her whereabouts and that I did not feel at liberty to divulge.

“But you can’t go alone, in the evening,” he insisted.

I replied, a little stiffly, that Palmyran conventions were not those of the city and I was not afraid.

“It is my business, you know,” he said stoutly, in the boyish way that made one like him. “Anyway you can’t hinder me from finding Alf Reeder and his horse.”

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