CHAPTER V
Since the coming of the Fords the house in Waverly Place had awakened. Sue’s presence had had its effect from cellar to roof. No sunbeam that ever smiled into a dungeon could have been more welcome. The gloomy old stairs zigzagging up to the top floor seemed more cheerful, and the narrow hallways it led to less dingy. Even Aunt Matilda’s cat—a scared and fat-headed old mouser who had refused half through January to leave its warm refuge under her stove in the basement—could now be seen nibbling and cleaning her paws as far up as the top carpeted step on Enoch’s floor.
There radiates from the personality of a pure young girl like Sue something strangely akin to sunshine, something indefinable, luminous, and warm, which no one yet has been quite able to describe—any more than one can define “charm”—that which touches the heart, neither can we place our finger upon that thin, wavering border line between friendship and love—a pressure of the hand, a glance of the eyes, a smile, a sudden gaze of sympathy and understanding, and we stumble headlong across the frontier into the land of adoration. To fall in love! What nonsense! We rise, with love tingling through our veins—pounding at our temples, its precious treasure our own, safe forever, we believe, in our beating hearts.
Ah! yes indeed, it has ever been so, and it always will be. Why is it that Cupid, the god of love, has always been depicted as a frail little cherub, when the truth is he is a giant, dominating, relentless, strong as death—who swings the whole world at his beck and call. How much misery, doubt, and happiness he has conceived and fashioned to suit him since the world began (bless his little heart!) it is quite impossible to compute. Eve and Adam are unfortunately dead, or we should have it at first-hand from both of them.
Sue was not only beautiful—she was fresh, and young, and cheery, with a frank gleam in her clear blue eyes, a complexion like a rose, the sheen of gold in her fair hair—a lithe grace to her slim, active body—pearly teeth, and a kind word for every one who deserved it.
No wonder that Joe Grimsby impulsively lost his head and his heart to Sue at first sight of her. More than a week had elapsed, and although he had had from that young lady little more encouragement than his buoyant imagination supplied, he was far from disheartened. What really had occurred, was that he had met his ideal face to face on the stairs the day after the party, and she had thanked him for inviting her, rather coldly, Joe thought. Indeed it had been quite a formal little meeting after all. He had expressed his sorrow at her not being able to come, and she had expressed hers—quite as formally as a strange girl at a tea might, and he being too innately well-bred a gentleman to force matters, had accepted her proffered little hand with more added regrets, and shaken it as punctiliously as he was wont to do the hands of his various hostesses in bidding them good night. And so she went up-stairs and he went down, not, however, without a beating heart over the interview, brief and unsatisfactory as it had been, and a firm resolution to call on her mother—which he did the very next day, and received word from the Irish maid of all work who opened the door, that “Mrs. Ford begged to be excused.” The truth was that this Southern lady did not care to know the young men in the house, and as for Sue, the oversudden invitation to meet the young architects of the third floor had left more of an impression of distrust than desire.
As for Joe, Sam Atwater’s better sense and advice had only the effect it usually does in such painful cases, of fanning into a blaze Joe’s infatuation and spiriting on his stubborn determination to convince Sue Preston of its sincerity. Alas! Joe had reached that stage among young architects in love, of covering half the margins of his quarter-scale drawings with pictorial memories of Sue—sketching with his HB lead pencil her clean-cut, refined profile, detailing with infinite pains the exact curve of her lovely mouth, expressing as best he could the tenderness in her eyes, and the precise way in which she wore her hair, half hiding her small, pink ears—in fact, he got to dreaming hopelessly over her as he drew, and forgot in the second draft of the Long Island woman’s cottage important members of cornices, windows, and doors, laying in cross-sections and elevations in a scandalous, sloppy way, until Atwater finally had to call a halt over his shoulder with: “For Heaven’s sake, old man, cut it out,” at which Joe grinned, and with good-natured embarrassment promised to really get down to work.
He had declared to Sam Atwater in his outburst of enthusiasm at the office that Sue could not sing. He was positive of this—“She did not look like a girl who could sing”—whereas if Sue possessed one great gift, it was her splendid soprano voice. Her voice was her very life, her whole ambition, a possession far more valuable than the whole worthless lot of Ebner Ford’s business ventures combined, and wisely enough Sue realized that, whatever might happen to the always uncertain budget of the Ford family, at least with her concert work and her teaching, she could make her own living. When her stepfather’s six-house venture had failed, it was Sue who came to the rescue—with what she had earned during the two years previous, singing in the smaller towns of Connecticut, giving lessons wherever she could, mostly in Ebner Ford’s home town of Clapham, the very town in which her mother had married him ten years before to escape from impending poverty.
It may be seen, therefore, that the hard struggle the stepdaughter had gone through had left her with a far more serious knowledge and view of life than either Joe or the rest of the inmates of No. 99 Waverly Place were in the least conscious of.
Sue thoroughly understood her stepfather; briefly, she regretted his methods, and still wondered how her mother could have ever married him, poor as they were. Inwardly, too, she trembled over his wildcat schemes, none too overscrupulous at best, while his hail-fellow-well-met manner, which he assumed upon any occasion when he saw a commission for himself hanging loose about the stranger, grated upon her. Indeed she knew him thoroughly, just as he was, bombastic varnish, vagaries, common self-assurance, and all. Behind closed doors in the intimacy of his home, before her mother and herself, Ebner Ford was a different man. His respect for his stepdaughter’s wishes and better judgment was often one of ill-tempered resignation.