CHAPTER VIII
“A Secret Among the Stars”
While the general appearance of improvement and progress was becoming distinctly visible and encouragingly permanent on the leading business street of Ashwater, precisely the same thing was happening in its nearest neighbouring village, Bluffport. The old board side walks had given way to flagging. The muddy streets had become paved with cobblestone. The new brick bank and the hardware store and two dry-goods stores radiated affluence. A fine, big high school stood near the centre of the town and the spires of three churches lifted their white fingers toward the sky as if to write thereon in letters large and plain: “This is not a Godless community.”
Perhaps nothing new in all the village so became it as the proud brick structure that arose on the corner where Smithley’s junk shop had sprawled its disfiguring presence to the mortification of the city that was beginning to lift its head and to take pride in demolishing fences and spreading abroad smooth lawns brocaded with beds of gaudy flowers. And this new building which had risen like magic on one of Bluffport’s most prominent corners gave over its second story to Doctor Garvin, who really cured a large assortment of Bluffport’s ills, and Squire Boardman, who really settled a large proportion of Bluffport’s troubles. Their offices were across the dividing hall from each other. They were a pair of honest and respectable men, each of whom was trying, in his own way, to do his share for the improvement of Bluffport and to acquit his soul in a graceful manner of the obligation to love his neighbour as himself. Neither the doctor nor the lawyer felt that he was loving his neighbours in the degree in which he loved himself, but they did feel that they were making a sweeping gesture in that direction, which was infinitely better than apathy. Also, they regularly paid a reasonable rent, which contributed to the prosperity of the owners of the building.
The lower story was occupied by, and the entire building belonged to, Nancy Bodkin and Marcia Peters, and was so entered in the records of the office of the county clerk. The corner location gave them advantageous front-display windows and a large amount of side space. These windows proved that, to an exclusive and attractive line of millinery, there had been added fashionable neckwear for the ladies; scarfs of silk; breakfast shawls of Scotch plaid and flowered merino; fancy hosiery; pincushions and toilet articles, and a seemly collection of decorated china.
The window displays were attractively managed. Inside the millinery was kept in drawers and curtained cases. Several big mirrors and a number of chairs constituted the greater part of the furnishings. Any one stepping into this room had almost an impression of entering a well-ordered home.
The back part of the building was taken up with Nancy’s work room; the living arrangements, which had increased to a separate room for each of the friends, a most attractive sitting room, a small dining room, and a tiny kitchen. For four years these two women had lived and worked together. They had engaged in small financial enterprises and taken part in the civic life of the town. They could be depended upon to superintend attractive and unusual decorations when the principal street needed to become festive upon some great occasion. They could be depended upon to do their fair share for the churches, for the schools, for the Grand Army, for their political party. Under the guiding hand of Marcia, Nancy had bloomed like the proverbial rose lifted from the hard clay soil of lingering existence and set where its roots could run in congenial earth, watered with affection, nourished in the sunshine of love. The change in Nancy had been so convincing that Bluffport only dimly remembered a time when she had been an anæmic, discouraged, overworked little woman. At the present minute, she was not overworked. She had her work so beautifully in hand that she could accomplish it and find time for rest and reasonable recreation. She had nourishing food, skilfully prepared, and these things wrought a great physical change. She was enjoying the companionship of a woman who was alert and eager, who felt that life owed her much and who was bent upon collecting the debt to the last degree, if it were a possible thing. When Marcia had finished exercising all the arts of the toilet she knew upon Nancy Bodkin, Nancy gradually developed into an extremely attractive woman. She evolved a healthy laugh and a contagious interest in the flowing of life around her.
As for Marcia herself, she was in truth blooming. Such a huge weight rolled from her shoulders when she began life in the daily living of which there was nothing secret, nothing questionable, nothing of which to be ashamed. She might look her world in the face and go on with her work in a healthful and prideful manner. Always an attractive woman, under the stimulus of self-assertion and prosperity she had become beautiful. Natural grace had developed until she had become gracious.
These two women were together every day and within speaking distance every night. They were making of life the level best thing that was possible for either of them through their united efforts. Nancy was born a designer. Marcia had been born with executive ability. The combination produced as a result the attractive store, exhaling prosperity, and a pair of women of whom Bluffport was distinctly proud. The whole town was proud of the Bodkin and Peters share of improvement on the business street, proud of the two good-looking, well-dressed women who managed their affairs so capably that they were able to meet their business obligations and were rapidly repaying the encumbrances they had shouldered in the erection of the building.
In this close contact, and in what the town supposed to be intimacy, these two women, rapidly approaching middle age, lived and worked together. The town would have been dumbfounded had it known that Nancy Bodkin never had asked her new partner one word concerning her life previous to her advent into the partnership. Conversely, Marcia had respected the little milliner. They had simply begun life with the hour of their meeting and gone forward to the best of their combined ability. Neither of them had seemed inclined to be communicative concerning herself, and each of them had too much inherent refinement to engage in a business that a popular poet of their day graphically described as the “picking open of old sores.” If either of them had an old sore, she was depending wholeheartedly upon the other to help her in concealing it. In breaking away from the years of her life with Martin Moreland, Marcia had followed an impulse. In her heart she had always known that this thing would happen some day. She had steeled herself from the very beginning against Jason. She did not want to love him; she did not want him to love her. When the day of separation came, as she always had felt that it would, she figured upon reducing the pain of it to the minimum. Exactly what she felt concerning the boy was a secret locked in her heart. Freed of his presence and his influence, she found that the greatest feeling possessing her concerning Martin Moreland was a feeling of fear. Twice she had witnessed his brutality toward Jason when to her it was without sufficient reason. She realized that any day the same storm of wrath might break upon her head for as small cause.