CHAPTER VII
When Betty found herself seated on the day coach of a way train, jogging along toward a town she had never seen and away from the scenes and people of her childhood, she found herself trembling violently. It was as if she had suddenly been placed in an airplane all by herself and started off to the moon without any knowledge of her motor power or destination. It both frightened and exhilarated her. She wanted to cry and she wanted to laugh, but she did neither. Instead she sat demurely for the first hour and a half looking out of the window like any traveler, scarcely turning her head nor looking at anything in the car. It seemed to her that there might be a detective in every seat just waiting for her to lift her eyes that he might recognize her. But gradually as the time dragged by and the landscape grew monotonous she began to feel a little more at her ease. Furtively she studied her neighbors. She had seldom traveled in a common car, and it was new to her to study all types as she could see them here. She smiled at a dirty baby and wished she had something to give it. She studied the careworn man and the woman in black who wept behind her veil and would not smile no matter how hard the man tried to make her. It was a revelation to her that any man would try as hard as that to make a woman smile. She watched the Italian family with five children and nine bundles, and counted the colors on a smart young woman who got in at a way station. Every minute of the day was interesting. Every mile of dreary November landscape that whirled by gave her more freedom.
She opened the little shabby handbag that Jane had given her and got out the bit of mirror one inch by an inch and a half backed with pasteboard on which lingered particles of the original green taffeta lining and studied her own strange face, trying to get used to her new self and her new name. Jane had written it, Lizzie Hope, on the back of the envelope containing the address of Mrs. Carson. It seemed somehow an identification card. She studied it curiously and wondered if Lizzie Hope was going to be any happier than Betty Stanhope had been. And then she fell to thinking over the strange experiences of the last twenty-four hours and wondering whether she had done right or not, and whether her father would have been disappointed in her, "ashamed of her," as her stepmother had said. Somehow Jane had made her feel that he would not, and she was more light-hearted than she had been for many a day.
Late in the afternoon she began to wonder what Tinsdale would be like. In the shabby handbag was her ticket to Tinsdale and eight dollars and a half in change. It made her feel richer than she had ever felt in her life, although she had never been stinted as to pocket money. But this was her very own, for her needs, and nobody but herself to say how she should spend either it or her time.
Little towns came in sight and passed, each one with one or two churches, a schoolhouse, a lot of tiny houses. Would Tinsdale look this way? How safe these places seemed, yet lonely, too! Still, no one would ever think of looking for her in a lonely little village.
They passed a big brick institution, and she made out the words, "State Asylum," and shuddered inwardly as she thought of what Jane had told her about the morning paper. Suppose they should hunt her up and put her in an insane asylum, just to show the world that it had not been their fault that she had run away from her wedding! The thought was appalling. She dropped her head on her hand with her face toward the window and tried to pretend she was asleep and hide the tears that would come, but presently a boy came in at the station with a big basket and she bought a ham sandwich and an apple. It tasted good. She had not expected that it would. She decided that she must have been pretty hungry and then fell to counting her money, aghast that the meager supper had made such a hole in her capital. She must be very careful. This might be all the money she would have for a very long time, and there was no telling what kind of an impossible place she was going to. She might have to get away as eagerly as she had come. Jane was all right, but that was not saying that her mother and sisters would be.
It was growing dark, and the lights were lit in the car. All the little Italian babies had been given drinks of water, and strange things to eat, and tumbled to sleep across laps and on seats, anywhere they would stick. They looked so funny and dirty and pitiful with their faces all streaked with soot and molasses candy that somebody had given them. The mother looked tired and greasy and the father was fat and dark, with unpleasant black eyes that seemed to roll a great deal. Yet he was kind to the babies and his wife seemed to like him. She wondered what kind of a home they had, and what relation the young fellow with the shiny dark curls bore to them. He seemed to take as much care of the babies as did their father and mother.
The lights were flickering out in the villages now and gave a friendly inhabited look to the houses. Sometimes when the train paused at stations Betty could see people moving back and forth at what seemed to be kitchen tables and little children bringing dishes out, all working together. It looked pleasant and she wondered if it would be like that where she was going. A big lump of loneliness was growing in her throat. It was one thing to run away from something that you hated, but it was another to jump into a new life where one neither knew nor was known. Betty began to shrink inexpressibly from it all. Not that she wanted to go back! Oh, no; far from it! But once when they passed a little white cemetery with tall dark fir trees waving guardingly above the white stones she looked out almost wistfully. If she were lying in one of those beside her father and mother how safe and rested she would be. She wouldn't have to worry any more. What was it like where father and mother had gone? Was it a real place? Or was that just the end when one died? Well, if she were sure it was all she would not care. She would be willing to just go out and not be. But somehow that didn't seem to be the commonly accepted belief. There was always a beyond in most people's minds, and a fear of just what Betty didn't know. She was a good deal of a heathen, though she did not know that either.