I
“Perhaps I’m too old to be wearing such things, but I love bright colors, and there’s not a bit of use denying it.”
Mary Ann gathered one end of the fancy tartan into a handful, and looked approvingly at its soft, heavy folds.
“Particularly at this time of year. It’s warming to the blood on a cold autumn day just to see a dress like this on the street. I always did like a good rich tartan. It becomes me, too. Look, Selina’n’Jane.”
She held the dress material against one cheek, and her sisters looked—but somehow failed to see what a pleasing picture she made. She had just come in from shopping and had not yet removed her hat, and its trimming of foliage repeated the colors of her face—autumnal tints of red and bronze and healthy yellow. She, the eldest of the family and the only unmarried one, was forty-five, but she was rosy and fat and matronly, while her sisters were pinched and anemic. They were old maids by nature, she by chance.
“It becomes you well enough, but under the circumstances,” Jane said, exchanging glances with Selina, “it seems a pity to buy all these things.”
Mary Ann opened her eyes wide.
“Circumstances? What circumstances? It’s no more than I buy every fall,” protested the puzzled Mary Ann. “The flowered piece is for a morning wrapper, the tartan’s for a street suit, and the blue-gray’s a company dress.”
Jane and Selina again exchanged glances, and Selina nodded.
“You never did seem to look ahead, Mary Ann,” said Jane, thus encouraged. “I don’t believe you realize that an attack of bronchitis is serious at Ma’s age. I wouldn’t have got all my clothes colored. It’s never any harm to have one black dress.”
Mary Ann gasped.
“Good gracious!” was all she said.
“Well, Mary Ann,” said Selina, coming to Jane’s rescue, “there’s not a particle of use shutting your eyes to plain facts. Ma’s in a serious condition, and if anything happens to her, what’ll you do with all that stuff? You may dye the blue, but that tartan won’t take a good black.”
“Why,” Mary Ann said, recovering speech, “Ma has bronchitis at the beginning of cold weather every year. She’ll be downstairs in a week or two, the same as she always is.”
“I hope so, Mary Ann. I hope, when next she comes down, it won’t be feet first. But we’re told to prepare for the worst while we hope for the best,” said Jane solemnly, imagining that she was quoting scripture. “You and Ma act as if there was nothing to prepare for. To see you, sitting by her sick-bed, reading trashy love-stories out of the magazines, and both of you as much interested!—it gives me a creepy feeling.”
“When my poor husband lay in his last illness,” sighed Selina, “he was only too willing to be flattered into the belief that he was going to get well, but I wouldn’t let him deceive himself, and it’s a comfort to me now I didn’t. I had everything ready but my crape when he died. I didn’t have to depend on the neighbors for a dress for the funeral, as I’ve known some do.”
“Many a time I’ve lent, but never borrowed,” Jane boasted.
“And of course, never laying off widow’s weeds, I’m ready for whatever comes.” Selina stroked her tarletan cuffs complacently, yet modestly withal, as if not wishing to make others feel too keenly the difference in their position.
“JANE AND SELINA ... LOOKED AT PATIENT AND NURSE WITH DISAPPROVING GLOOM”
Mary Ann gathered the dress goods together and threw them in a heap on the sofa. “There, I’m sorry I showed them to you,” she cried; “you’ve got me almost turned against them. 380 I declare, I’d be melancholy in two minutes more. Now you listen to me, Selina’n’Jane. There’s no need to worry about Ma’s preparations for the next world; she’s not thinking of leaving this world yet, and there’s no reason why she should. The day you two go away, she’ll be standing at the gate to say good-by to you, just the same as she always is. You see if she’s not, Selina’n’Jane.”
She left the room with something as like a flounce as her figure would permit. Stealing softly into the half-darkened bedroom at the head of the stairs, she stood looking down at the sleeping woman in the bed. The indignant moisture in her eyes turned to a mist of tenderness that blotted out the sight until a few drops formed and fell.
She was too unsuspicious to observe an unsleeplike flickering of the eyelids. She turned to tiptoe out of the room again. There was a quick peep, a look of relief, a husky whisper, “Is that you, Mary Ann?”
“Well now, I never did see anything like the regular way you wake up at medicine time,” Mary Ann said, opening the shutters and consulting her watch. “Anybody’d think you had an alarm inside of you to go off at the right time.”
She administered the dose and then went on with a cheerful monologue. She had got into this habit in the sick-room, because her mother hated silence and had to save her own voice.
“What kept me so long was that everybody I met wanted to stop me and ask how you were. Everybody seemed pleased to hear you were getting along so nicely. Mrs. Dowling said Dr. Corbett told her you were the most satisfactory patient he had, because you always did everything he told you and always got well.”
The sick woman smiled up at her. She had a smile that came and went easily, and Mary Ann had become skilful in the art of conducting a conversation in such a way that it served as well as words.
“And Caroline Sibbet said to tell you she was counting on going with us to the reception to the minister, and she didn’t believe she’d go at all unless you were well by then.”
It was a wistful smile now.
“So I told her she needn’t be afraid, you’d be there.”
A smile of appeal, as if to ask, “Do you really think so?”
Mary Ann gave her a puzzled glance. Something was wrong.
“Of course you’ll be well by then, dearie. You heard what the doctor said to-day—that you might go back to having your cup of tea again to-morrow. That’s always the first sign you’re getting well, then you get leave to sit up. A week sitting up in your room, a week going downstairs——” Mary Ann began to check off the weeks on her fingers, but her mother interrupted.
“Was that Jane the doctor was talking to so long in the hall to-day?”
“Let me see. No, that was Selina.”
“What was he saying to her?”
“He was saying every blessed thing that he’s said to me since you took sick, and that I’ve repeated over again to her. But you know how it is with those two, Ma. I believe they think there’s some kind of magic in the marriage ceremony that gives a woman sense—they don’t give me credit for a speck. When Selina told me she was going to speak to the doctor herself to-day, says she, ‘You know that it stands to reason, Mary Ann, that you can’t be as experienced as one that has been a wife five years and a widow seven’; and then Jane seemed to think it was being cast up to her that she wasn’t a widow, so she speaks up real snappy, ‘Nor one that’s brought up a family of four boys,’ and then Selina she looked mad.” Mary Ann went off into a peal of laughter at the remembrance.
“Jane told me he said at my age the heart was weak and there was always more or less danger.”
“He always says that after he’s told what good sound lungs you have, and what steady progress you’re making, and how he’d rather pass you for insurance than most women half your age. It means we’re not to be too reckless, all the same.”
“She says if I should recover from this attack——”
“Sakes alive! Did she come over all that with you too? ‘If you should recover from this attack, you’d better sell the house and visit round among your married children?’ Visit round as much as you like, Ma, but have a house of your own to come back to; that’s my advice.”
“She said you wouldn’t want to keep up a house after you were left alone——”
Mary Ann threw up her hands. “No wonder Selina’n’Jane are thin—they wear the flesh off their bones providing for the future. They’re born Colquhouns. I’m glad I take after your side of the family. Do you know what Selina told me, Ma? The preserves she put up this year won’t have to be touched till winter after next. She has enough to last her over two years. ‘Land sakes!’ I said, ‘what do you want to eat stale jam for, when you might have fresh?’ The two get competing which will be furthest ahead in their work; from the way 381 they talk, I shouldn’t wonder if before long their fall house-cleaning would be done in the spring. It makes me think of what Pa used to tell about his uncle Alick Colquhoun—how he was earlier and earlier with the milking, till at last the evening milking was done in the morning, and the morning’s was done the night before. Then there was Eva Meldrum; you remember she had all her marriage outfit ready before she was asked—sheets, tablecloths, and everything. As soon as Fred Healey proposed, she got right to work with the final preparations, and when she found herself left with nothing else to do—she just sat down and wrote out notes of thanks for the wedding gifts, leaving blanks for the names of the articles. I laughed till I was sore when she told me. ‘You’re a Colquhoun,’ I said, ‘though you do only get it from your grandma; you’re a Colquhoun by nature if not by name.’ You know I always say it comes from having such a name. It’s enough to make an anxious streak in the family, having to spell it, one generation after another.”
Mary Ann laughed so heartily that the sound reached her sisters, who wondered what “Ma’n’Mary Ann” were at now. And still the little cloud lingered, and the smile only flitted waveringly.
“I called at the library, Ma, and brought home the magazine. Now we’ll find out for sure whether Lady Geraldine marries the earl—I don’t believe but what she’s in love with the private secretary.”
“Did you do the shopping?” her mother whispered.
“Yes, and if you feel rested with your sleep, I’ll show you what I got. Mr. Merrill opened out such a heap of pretty things, I didn’t hardly know what to take. I was thinking, Ma, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have Miss Adams in to sew, the first week you’re downstairs, when we’ve got to be in the house anyway.”
At this moment Jane and Selina came into the room to see what the sounds of merriment meant. They looked at patient and nurse with disapproving gloom. Jane settled herself at once to her knitting; Selina, who never worked in the afternoon when she was wearing her widow’s collar and cuffs, sat regarding her mother with an expression of grieved wonder. Mrs. Colquhoun was uncomfortably conscious of being judged by something in her own child of other heritage than hers—one of the strangest sensations a parent can have.
“You’d ought to be kept quiet, Ma,” Selina said, after a prolonged scrutiny. “If you had any suitable book in the house, I’d read to you. There was one my poor husband used to listen to by the hour in his last illness—‘Preparations for the Final Journey.’”
“I’m going to run down and fetch that stuff I bought to-day to show it to Ma and get her opinion,” Mary Ann interrupted, and a minute later she was standing by the bed with the three dress lengths piled in confusion upon her arms. To the woman in the bed it was as if an angel looked out from over a tumbled rainbow and smiled a message of hope to her from the sky.
“Take an end of this tartan, will you, Jane, and stand off a little with it. There, I knew you’d like it, Ma. I said so to Mr. Merrill the minute he showed it to me. That flowered piece? That’s for a morning wrapper. I know it’s gay, but somehow, after the flowers are all over, I do hanker after gay colors. In summer I don’t feel to want them so much on my back when I can have them in the garden. The gray-blue’s for a company dress. I’ll have it made up in time for the reception to the new minister. You’ll need a dress for that too, Ma. We’ll get samples as soon as you’re well enough to choose. It was between this and a shot silk, but I thought this was more becoming at my age. To tell the truth,” confessed Mary Ann with a laugh, “I’d rather have had it than this, and more than either I’d love to have bought a dress off a piece of crimson velvet Mr. Merrill had just got in.”
She rested an elbow on her knee and sank the length of a forefinger in her plump cheek.
“When I was a little girl,” she ruminated, “I was awfully fond of the rose-in-campin’ that grew in our garden at home—you mind it, mother; mullein pink, some call it. I used to say to myself that if ever I could get what clothes I liked, I’d have a dress as near like that as I could find. Well, there I was to-day looking at the very thing, the same color, the same downy look, and all, and money enough in my purse to buy it. Of course I know it would be silly. But don’t it seem a pity that the things we dream of having some day—when the day comes, we don’t want ’em? I feel somehow as if I’m cheating that little girl that wished for the dress like a rose-in-campin’.”
She began to fold the dress pieces thoughtfully. “Made up handsomely with a train,” she said, half to herself, “and worn on suitable occasions, it wouldn’t seem so silly, either. I believe I’ll have that crimson velvet yet,” she concluded, with a laughing toss of the head. Her mother looked from the bright materials to the bright face above them.
“She would never have gone and bought all these colors just after the doctor said I wasn’t going to get well,” she thought, and turned over and fell into a real sleep. The last had been 382 feigned—to escape Jane’s disquieting remarks and to ponder their significance.