“She’s so pretty, and has such ways, and we’re not orphans any longer!” she gasped.
CHAPTER SIX
“SOMETHING BETWEEN A HINDRANCE AND A HELP”
Mary Garden woke with a start the next morning. Her room was filled with the beautiful light that preceded the sun on a mid-June morning, when the days are longest. She could not recall for a bewildered instant what it was that made her feel such a sense of great possession, such flooding joy. Then the chorussing birds in the garden below aroused her more fully, and she knew!
“The first day!” she thought, sinking back into the pillows, and into the birdsong and translucent air, feeling that all beauty flowed around her and held her up, that she lay on great joy-filled hands which at once gave to her and sustained her.
It was not yet four o’clock, so Mary gave herself up for a delicious half-hour to turning over the wealth that had come to her; she felt as one might whose hands were dripping with unset gems of the purest water. It all lay before her—the setting, and learning, and enjoying of this strange gift. In that brief time which she had spent with her mother on her arrival Mary had seen that nothing which they knew of ordinary mothers would help the Garden girls to acquaintance with their own, neither in teaching them their duty toward her nor in enjoying her. As she lay in thought, gradually Mary’s ecstasy in waking merged into a graver sense of responsibility that reversed the relationship of this new mother and her eldest daughter. Mary recalled her mother’s pretty mannerisms, spontaneous yet trained; her dainty appointments, her dependence, her appeal, as of one who had been accustomed to homage and must have it.
“She has come home because she is cruelly wounded; we must remember that every moment,” Mary thought, feeling her way. “She cared more for her singing, her career, than for anything else—yes, anything else!” Mary repeated this to herself sternly. “We can’t mean much to her yet; she doesn’t know us. She will miss her old life dreadfully. She will feel wretched when she remembers that she cannot sing now. We must keep her from thinking of it, but it will rush over her at times, in spite of all that we can do. I wonder how girls like us can keep her company, not let her get lonely, yet not bore her to death? Really, it is going to be hard—we must do our best!” Mary rebuked her thought for taking a form that might be interpreted to mean that the task would be hard to the girls: hard, not merely difficult. “We shall have a great deal to do!” And Mary sprang up and began to dress rapidly, as if to be ready to do. This morning she had expected to be first in the garden, but, early as it was, Jane was already there when she came down.
“I couldn’t sleep, the birds sang so,” Jane explained.
“And our hearts sang so, Janie,” Mary added. “That is what wakened me, though I never heard the birds sing as they did this morning, nor saw such a sunrise. Do listen to that catbird! He’s just like a little gray lead pipe, pouring out liquid song! Do hear how it bubbles and ripples!”
Jane tipped back her head till her long, delicate face was turned skyward, and the mounting sun transformed her hair into a part of himself, as if he were reflected in a golden shield.