“They’re nice, good people, and Nan is a darling, always was, but—Beaconhite seems like home, not here, and no one here seems to me like anyone I ever knew well,” thought Cis; she looked sadly at herself in the mirror as she braided her glowing hair.
There is no exile so remote, no loneliness so profound as the return to old associations which have been completely outgrown.
CHAPTER XXI
THE WEAVING
CIS stayed on, living on the surface of her little native city. Miss Braithwaite was still in California; she wrote that she could not tell how long she might be detained; it seemed probable that it would be for all of the winter, or its greater part. Her friend was dying slowly in the lingering agonies of the most agonizing of all diseases; she clung to Miss Braithwaite, praying her not to leave her, and Miss Braithwaite had promised to stay to help her to die. Cis suspected it was also to teach her how to die; that she was less versed than Miss Braithwaite in the science of the saints.
With Miss Braithwaite gone, Cis had no desire to return to Beaconhite; it was not the place, it was that home and its mistress for which Cis longed, for the lack of which she felt lost.
Mr. Singer had found out that Cicely Adair had returned, and he hunted her up, imploring her to take up his work with his telephone girls, help to organize the measures which he was trying to put on foot for their welfare. Cis agreed to undertake this work, but only with the understanding that she was free to lay it down at any time. Her experience under Miss Braithwaite, in Father Morley’s Girls’ Club, in the many good works which occupied her Beaconhite friends, stood Cis in good stead now; she did well with Mr. Singer’s girls, and was interested in them. It was strange and amusing to have gone away, dismissed by the Telephone Company for a breach of law, and return to be placed over their employees’ pretty rooms for recreation and rest, installed as the hostess, friend and guide of these girls.
Cis visited Jeanette Lucas often; the two girls were strongly drawn to each other; their friendship deepened and grew. Jeanette had come out of her trial with a darkened outlook upon life. Cis had come out of her struggle and loss undismayed, strengthened, in a sense refreshed, reaping the reward of her choice. Although there were moments when a simple tune whistled by a boy in the street, a phrase, a half resemblance stabbed her with pain, yet Cis was able truthfully to tell Nan that she was happy. By temperament and will she was framed to look forward, not back. Her optimistic courage was inspiring to Jeanette; she grew fond of Cis and turned to her as to a tonic, a summons to do her best also.
Nan was submerged in her house, in its master and little Matt. She paid Cis her old loving worship, raised to an incalculable degree by her reverence for Cis as for one who had given her proofs, but there was no time in any day to spare for anyone but Joe and Matt. Nan and Cis met in the baby more intimately, more frequently than in each other, outside this powerful little downy link.
To her amazement, Cis discovered herself a baby worshiper; she had not known that she was a member of that order, in one of its highest degrees.
Her godson was to her hardly less adorable than to his mother. She hung over him, absorbing his violet-scented, milky sweetness as the odor of a flower; brooding over the miracle of his tiny features, their curious twistings, the crooked smile of his sucked-in lips; the funny thrusts of his absurdities of hands, doubled into fists and taking her in the eye, or letting her mumble them with kisses that inclosed the wrinkles of his wrists, the blue-blue veins traced below the whiteness of the backs of those belligerent little hands. When he looked into her eyes and laughed aloud, clutching her wealth of hair, Cis was elated, humbled, flattered. In baby Matt she found a new joy that revealed her to herself; she knew now what she had renounced when she had gone out of that pretty apartment, leaving Rodney there amid the ruins of his hopes and hers. Not for an instant did she regret, turn back in thought upon her right course, but she understood the void which ached in her, and often the baby’s fine white tiny yoke was damp when his godmother raised her face from it, while he was gurgling with laughter because she had burrowed into his neck, tickling him.