III
One long month and one entire week to wait. If Time was interminable, Miss Adgate resolved to make Time bear fruit. She took herself in hand. She tried to quell the little tremors of joy which kept welling up in her throat when she thought of the end of those five weeks.
“They'll probably not come. They'll change their minds. If they do come—it's more than likely some nonsense of Lucilla's!... Well.... Besides I've other businesses to attend to,” the lady said with a most determined air.
As the least profitless way of passing those interminable days, Ruth set herself to the task of enhancing the natural beauties of Barracks Hill. She caused paths to be cut through the woods; she enlarged the flower gardens; she prepared the Morris House for her June visitors. As to the library and the music-room they had long since been ready for occupation. And in the interim of labour Miss Adgate gave a series of children's parties, calling Jackie Enderfield to her assistance. Her invitations vested in that young gentleman's hands, he became cock-of-the-walk among the girls and boys of Oldbridge and Rutherford was thus kept at bay. Yet notwithstanding these spartan derivatives, Ruth walked on clouds, smiling at love.
“She breathes roses and lilies,” Miss Deborah Massington declared with enthusiasm.
Eighty, thereabout, Miss Deborah was sister to Mrs. Leffingwell and her junior by ten years.
“She has charm,” Mrs. Leffingwell answered, discreetly, while they watched Ruth's erect young buoyant figure disappear beyond the lindens. “She makes one feel that everything's all right—better to come. I wonder...”
Ruth liked an hour spent in these ladies' bow-window; gay and fragrant window, all vivid of sunshine, filled with blossoming geranium and heliotrope. While she entertained them with tales of Italy, which they could never hear enough about, Ruth Adgate reflected that the lives of her grandmothers must have been just such quiet, such repressed, contented lives as these.
Mrs. Leffingwell and Miss Massington, types of New England's most exquisite product—the old lady. The old lady who, with all her gentle unworldliness, is a patrician to her finger tips. As the perfume of rose-leaves is preserved in a fine porcelain jar—so the hushed fragrance of these temperate lives emanates, yet stays, to the end. White, ethereal, peaceful—and pictorially the replicas of Whistler's mother, these two ladies were waited upon by a black servant, whose gorgeous head-gear was the red, blue, and yellow bandanna. Each lady had her window in the low-ceilinged, white-panelled drawing-room; each was clad in good black silk; on each white head a cap reposed of fine Honiton lace—and their gowns were finished with a transparent lace collar and cuffs. Both ladies were slightly deaf; both were omnivorous readers, both were eager listeners; both had the sense of humour; and both were indulgent amused lookers-on at the small games of life which they were no longer privileged to take part in; and if gracious patience be a virtue these ladies may well be considered beautiful products of a fast vanishing Puritan tradition.
Easter fell on the twenty-third of April. The Bolingbrokes arrived at Barracks Hill the day before Easter, but on the morning of their arrival came a disastrous piece of news. Almost the whole of Ruth's fortune had been swept out of existence overnight in one of those cataclysmic melodramas which melodramatic Nature loves to enact in the United States. On Good Friday, the twenty-first of April, nineteen hundred and eight, the town of Wyoming was annihilated by a tornado. The merry monster chose the small hours before midnight, when, giving rein to his pranksome cubfulness, he swept men, women, children into Eternity with hardly a warning.... The mines—they formed the raison d'être of the town—caved in, flooded by a water spout. The entire district was reduced to desolation.
Seated at breakfast, in the crispest of white morning confections, Ruth became informed of this and of her losses through the medium of the Oldbridge Morning Herald, whose items she was reading aloud, a concession, to her uncle.
General Adgate, far more than his lovely niece, was affected by the news. Had he not enjoyed vicariously the sense of her wealth? It had tickled his fancy as well as his family pride to see her squander with a lavish hand, without so much as a thought of the value of money. It had pleased his sense of the incongruous that notwithstanding the obvious joy she took in opening her fingers, in letting the gold slide through them, she had acquiesced in, nay adopted, many of the Spartan habits of New England; New England—which has never been purse-proud because she has never, until lately, had very much money in her purse. Ruth, indeed, had all she could do to cheer General Adgate.
“If all is lost, save honour,” she consoled, “I have still some investments in England by the mercy of which I shall not be poverty stricken. I've as much as three thousand safe pounds a year coming from there, you old darling,” she cooed. “Harry Pontycroft invested it for me long ago. That ought to be enough for any woman with economical tastes,” she assured him. “And I've a lot in the bank,—Heaven knows how much! I've never spent anything like my income for I had nothing which seemed worth spending it upon,—since, ugh!—I detest automobiles, and you know it. We can still keep open house this summer and never trouble.”
Of a truth, Miss Adgate experienced relief,—why?—she did not try to fathom—at the thought of her diminished fortunes. She might, possibly, this blithe adventuress, or had she not been expecting guests, she might, even, have tried to persuade General Adgate to lead her to the scene of the disaster. I doubt, though, if she would have succeeded.
A fat cheque went instead by the Red Cross Society to the relief of the sufferers. And lo! the diminishing days were dwindled to a pinpoint.