"You mark my words, the sun will be out before we come home!"
Regina, punching the two dimes carefully into the jolting receiver, made only a respectful murmur for answer. She was, like many a maid, a snob where her mistress was concerned, and she did not like to have Mrs. Melrose ride in public omnibuses. For Regina herself it did not matter, but Mrs. Melrose was one of the city's prominent and wealthy women, and Regina could not remember that she had ever sunk to the use of a public conveyance before to-day. The maid was glad when they descended at a street in the East Sixties. They would probably be sent home, she reflected, in Mrs. Liggett's car. For Regina noticed that private cars were beginning to grind and slip over the snow again.
Old Mrs. Melrose was going to see her daughter Alice, who was Mrs. Christopher Liggett, because Alice was an invalid. It had been only a few years after Alice's most felicitous marriage, a dozen years ago, when an accident had laid the lovely and brilliant woman upon the bed of helplessness that she might never leave again. There was no real reason why the spine should continue useless, the great specialists said, there was a hope—even a probability—that as Alice grew rested and strong, after the serious accident, she might find herself walking again. But Alice had been a prisoner for ten years now, and the mother and sister who idolized her feared that she would never again be the old dancing Alice and feared that she knew it. What Christopher Liggett feared they did not know. He insisted that Alice's illness was but temporary, and was tireless in his energetic pursuit of treatment for his wife. Everything must be hoped, and everything must be tried, and Alice's mother knew that one of the real crosses of her daughter's life was sorrowful pity for Chris's optimistic delusions.
The young Liggetts had sold the old house of Christopher's father, an immense brownstone mansion a few squares away, and lived in a modern, flat-faced gray-stone house that rose five stories from the beautifully arranged basement entrance. There were stone benches at the entrance, and a great iron grill, and two potted trees, and the small square windows were leaded, and showed blossoming plants inside. The three long windows above gave upon a little-used formal drawing-room, with a Gothic fireplace of white stone at one end, and a dim jumble of rich colours and polished surfaces between that and the big piano at the other. The room at the back, on this floor, was an equally large and formal dining-room, gleaming with carved mahogany and fretted plate, used only on the rare occasions of a dinner-party.
But on the floor above the gracious mistress of the house had her domain, and here there was enough beauty and colour to make the whole house live. The front room, cool all summer because it faced north, and warm all winter, because of the great open fireplace that augmented the furnace heat, was Alice's sitting-room; comfortable, beautiful, and exquisitely ordered. None of the usual clutter of the invalid was there. The fireplace was of plain creamy tiling, the rugs dull-toned upon a dark, polished floor. There were only two canvases on the dove-gray walls, and the six or seven photographs that were arranged together on the top of one of the low, plain, built-in bookcases, were framed alike. There were no meaningless vases, no jars or trays or plaques or ornaments in Alice's room. Her flowers she liked to see in shining glass bowls; her flat-topped desk was severely bare.
But the cretonne that dressed her big comfortable chairs and her couch was bright with roses and parrots and hollyhocks, and the same cretonne, with plain net undercurtaining, hung at her four front windows. The room was big enough to accommodate besides, even with an air of space and simplicity, the little grand piano that Christopher played for her almost every night. A great Persian tortoise-shell cat was at home here, and sometimes Alice had her magnificent parrot besides, hanging himself upside down on his gaily-painted stand, and veiling the beady, sharp eye with which he watched her. The indulgent extravagance of her mother had bound all the books that Alice loved in the same tone of stony-blue vellum, the countless cushions with which the aching back was so skillfully packed were of the same dull tone, and it pleased the persons who loved her to amuse the prisoner sometimes with a ring in which her favourite note was repeated, or a chain of old lapis-lazuli that made Alice's appreciative blue eyes more blue.
Back of Alice's room was a den in which Christopher could conduct much of his personal business, and beyond that was the luxurious bathroom, a modern miracle of enamel tiling and shining glass. Across the sun-flooded back of the house were Alice's little bedroom, nunlike in its rigid austerity, her nurse's room adjoining, and a square sun-room, giving glimpses of roofs and trim back-gardens, full of flowers, with a little fountain and goldfish, a floor of dull pink tiling, and plants in great jars of Chinese enamel. Christopher had planned this delightful addition to Alice's domain only a few years ago, and, with that knowledge of her secret heart that only Christopher could claim, had let her share the pleasure of designing and arranging it. It stretched out across the west side of the spacious backyard, almost touching the branches of the great plane tree, and when, after the painful move to her mother's house, and the necessary absence during the building of it, Alice had been brought back to this new evidence of their love and goodness, she had buried her face against Christopher's shoulder, and told him that she didn't think people with all the world to wander in had ever had anything lovelier than this!
One of the paintings that Alice might look at idly, in the silence of the winter noon, was of a daisied meadow, stretching between walls of heavy summer woodland to the roof of a half-buried farmhouse in the valley below. The other picture was of the very mother who was coming toward Alice now, in the jolting omnibus. But it was a younger mother, and a younger Alice, that had been captured by the painter's genius. It was a stout, imperious, magnificently gowned woman, of not much more than thirty, in whose spreading silk lap a fair little girl was sitting. This little earnest-eyed child was Alice at seven. The splendid, dark-eyed, proud-looking boy of about fourteen, who stood beside the mother, was Teddy, her only son, dead now for many years, and perhaps mercifully dead. The fourth and last person pictured was the elder daughter, Annie, who had been about nine years old then, Alice remembered. Annie and Alice had been unusually alike, even for sisters, but even then Annie's fair, aristocratic type of blonde prettiness had been definite where Alice's was vague, and Annie's expression had been just a trifle haughty and discontented where Alice's was always grave and sweet. Annie had almost been a beauty, she was extremely and conspicuously good-looking even now, when as Mrs. Hendrick von Behrens, wife of a son of an old and wealthy Knickerbocker family, she was supreme in the very holy of holies of the city's social life.
Mrs. Melrose came unannounced upon her daughter to-day, and Alice's colourless warm cheek flushed with happiness under her mother's fresh, cold kiss.
"Mummy—you darling! But how did you get here? Miss Slater says that the streets are absolutely impassable!"