CHAPTER FOUR
ITS RELATIVES
Although Fayre was a small Connecticut town not two hours away from New York, the Greys followed the simple country practice of dining at mid-day. It was much pleasanter, when the mistress of the house and its daughters constituted also its service, for them to be able to draw a long breath when the forenoon's labors were over, and feel that nothing more onerous and damaging to gowns than preparations for tea lay before them. The last dish had been put away, and the delicate towels hung out in the sunshine to dry. Most human lots have their compensations, and Mrs. Grey found the remembrance of her sweet, fine dish-cloths consolatory to her amid the hardships of household drudgery.
Rob's brief depression in parting from her father that morning had passed away. Rob's heart had not been fashioned to sink under weight; she refused to believe in trouble until it forced itself upon her, and then she still refused to salute it by its proper name. Now the girls and their mother had dropped into chairs around the dining-room table, and were enjoying that most restful stolen rest, to which one has no right at that particular moment. No one in the family was quite presentable if anyone should come, and it was already two o'clock; they all felt that they had no right to linger there, still they lingered. Yet what they called their "uniform" was pretty and becoming. Each sister wore a plain, dark blue gingham, straight-hemmed skirt and blouse waist, with a deep sailor collar, feather-stitched in white, as were the cuffs. The collars opened low, and were tied with a narrow white-linen knotted tie, and the fresh young faces and white throats rose from the dark cotton, looking prettier than usual for the plainness of their setting. The duplicates of these gowns hung, fresh and newly ironed, upstairs; it was the Greys' working regalia, "the badge of their labor union," Rob said. The warmth of the day, and of getting and clearing away dinner, had made every one of Rob's unruly locks stray out over neck and brow, and curl up at their ends. She sat with her elbows on the table, her face in her hands, and Prue sat in precisely the same position opposite her, both enjoying the unconventional pose, as they did loitering in their working dresses when the old dining-room clock had struck two. Oswyth leaned back in her chair, her small, slippered feet thrust out before her, one arm dangling over the chair-back. Mrs. Grey rocked cosily by the window on the breeze side, and white Kiku-san, who was beginning to adjust himself to his new home, though he still approached strange objects with body elongated and with many nervous backward starts, sat now with his head on one side, watching the shadows on the floor of the swaying tendrils of the honeysuckle around the window.
"Oh, my heart, the Angel!" exclaimed Rob, suddenly, in panic-stricken tones. They all looked up. Across the newly shorn grass approached a figure, not very tall, but exceedingly awesome, and the Greys knew that they were caught.
"Aunt Azraella!" murmured Wythie, uncrossing and drawing in her feet, and bringing her arm to the front to join its mate.
With some incomprehensible notion of endowing her daughter with a celestial name Aunt Azraella's mother, the late Mrs. Brown, had christened her by a feminine form, of her own invention, of the name of the dread angel of death. Prue had once caustically suggested that it must have been because Mrs. Brown had foreseen "that she was going to turn out so deadly." There were a great many hard points about the Greys' life, but if any one of them was asked suddenly which was her greatest trial she would probably have answered unhesitatingly: "Living so near Aunt Azraella."
The girls speculated privately on what she could have been in her youth to have made their mother's brother—the Uncle Horace whom they did not remember—marry her. She was one of those persons born with a sure conviction of their fitness and mission to set the world right. She oversaw the Greys' expenditures, commented unfavorably on their methods of economy, condemned severely almost all their pleasures as extravagant, was wholly intolerant of what she called "Sylvester Grey's shiftlessness," and was thoroughly convinced that she could bring up three girls far more strictly, and far better than her sister-in-law—and as to the first half of her proposition she was doubtless correct. Yet she was not an ill-intentioned woman—Rob said that was the worst of it, "because if she meant to be horrid you could bid her to go to"—and in her peculiar way she really admired and was fond of her late husband's sister.
"I wonder what we've done now," said Rob, out of her past experience, and taking a rapid mental survey of events since her aunt had visited them, in a vain attempt to discover a peg on which she could hang blame.