Re-creations

by Grace Livingston Hill

These thoughts made her responses to the children only half-hearted. Harry was trying to tell her how the old dog had died and they had only the little pup left, but it was so game it could beat any cat on the street in a fight already, and almost any dog.

Louise chimed in with a tale about a play in school that she had to be in if Nellie would only help her get up a costume out of old things. But gradually the talk died down, and Louise sat looking thoughtfully across at her father’s tired face, while Harry frowned and puckered his lips in a contemplative attitude, shifting his gum only now and then enough to keep it going and fixing his eyes very wide and blue in deep melancholy upon the toe of his father’s worn shoe. Something was fast going wrong with the spirits of the children, and Cornelia was so engrossed in herself and her own bitter disappointment that she hadn’t even noticed it.

In the midst of the blueness the car stopped, and Mr. Copley rose stiffly with an apologetic smile toward his elder daughter.

“Well, this is about where we get off, Nellie,” he said half wistfully, as if he had done his brave best and it was now up to her.

Something in his tone brought Cornelia keenly to her senses. She stumbled off the car, and looked around her breathlessly, while the car rumbled on up a strange street with scattering houses, wide open spaces reminding one of community baseball diamonds, and furtive heaps of tin cans and ashes. The sky was wide and open, with brilliant stars gleaming gaudily against the night, and a brazen moon that didn’t seem to understand how glaringly every defect in the locality stood out; but that only made the place seem more strange and barren to the girl. She had not known what she expected, but certainly not this. The houses about her were low and small, some of them of red brick made all alike, with faded greenish-blue shutters, and a front door at one side opening on a front yard of a few feet in dimensions, with a picket fence about it, or sometimes none at all. The house her father was leading her to was a bit taller than the rest, covered with clapboards weather-beaten and stained, guiltless of paint, as could be seen even at night, high and narrow, with gingerbread-work in the gable and not even a porch to grace its poor bare face, only two steps and a plain wooden door.

Cornelia gasped, and hurried in to shut herself and her misery away from the world. Was this what they had come to? No wonder her mother had given out! No wonder her father—— But then her father—how could he have let them come to a place like this? It was terrible!

Inside, at the end of the long, narrow hall the light from the dining-room shone cheerfully from a clean kerosene-lamp guiltless of shade, flaring across a red and white tablecloth.

“We haven’t done a thing to the parlor yet,” said the father sadly, throwing open a door at his right as Cornelia followed him. “Your mother hadn’t the strength!” he sighed deeply. “But then,” he added more cheerfully, “what are parlors when we are all alive and getting well?”

Cornelia cast a wondering look at him. She had not known her father thought so much of her mother. There was a half-glorified look on his face that made her think of a boy in love. It was queer to think it, but of course her mother and father had been young lovers once. Cornelia, her thoughts temporarily turned from her own brooding, followed into the desolate dining-room, and her heart sank. This was home! This was what she had come back to after all her dreams of a career and all her pride over an artistic temperament!

There was a place set for her at one end of the red-clothed table, and a plaintive little supper drying up on the stove in the kitchen; but Cornelia was not hungry. She made pretence of nibbling at the single little burned lamb-chop and a heavy soda-biscuit. If she had known how the children had gone without meat to buy that lamb-chop, and how hard Louise had worked to make these biscuits and the apple-sauce that accompanied them, she might have been more appreciative; but as it was she was feeling very miserable indeed, and had no time from her own self-pitying thoughts to notice them at all.