She lay awake staring into the dark for half the night, with tearless eyes, one hand clasping the little book under her pillow.
CHAPTER XVIII
ZELDA LIFTS A BURDEN
Copeland, the lawyer who never practised, knew Mariona pretty well, and he was responsible for the remark that while women in High Street continued to admonish their maids from second-story windows as to the relation between employer and employee, there was no manner of use in trying to be a city.
Mariona was still a good deal of a village and gossip spread through its streets like news in the Sudan. But it must be said that the Mariona gossips who had been expecting an explosion among the Merriams since Zelda Dameron came home were greatly disappointed. Zelda’s life differed in no important particular from that of other girls of her circle. She lived with her father, which was wholly proper; she went about to luncheons, teas and balls and derived amusement from them in a perfectly normal, natural way; she had a voice, and when she was asked to sing, she sang; and she struck every one as being thoroughly unaffected and amiable. It became known that she could tell a story, and her reputation among girls as a raconteur soon dimmed that which her singing had earned for her. A girls’ luncheon in Mariona, as elsewhere, is a function where a dozen girls, more or less, assemble to eat unwholesome combinations of food to the accompaniment of rapid exclamations about nothing in particular. Zelda gained a hearing at first because she was a new girl in town, but her audience was assured when it became known that she could tell a story.
She told her stories with the gravity that is second nature in the born story-teller; and her fund of anecdotes of personal misadventure was seemingly inexhaustible. Her account of the way in which she and her aunt had been ushered by mistake into a train bearing a royal funeral party at Berlin, and of how an aged duke had worked himself into a state of apoplexy in trying to determine just who the Americans were; and of how, finally, when a countess and her daughter, for whom the Americans had been mistaken, were missed, the train was carried back to the Berlin station,—this incident related with trifling but illuminative details,—of how the people looked, of the yells of the duke to his servant not to forget the lunch basket; the grim rage of the master of ceremonies when he discovered that Zelda and her aunt had been put aboard by mistake,—made a story that convulsed her auditors.
Zelda saw much of Morris during the winter. He went often to the old house in Merriam Street in spite of the fact that he assured himself constantly that she did not interest him more than other girls. She continued to delight in plaguing him, particularly before her uncle, who learned, however, not to praise Morris to Zelda. Mrs. Forrest pretended to be a diligent chaperon, but Mariona social affairs did not amuse her, and she went out very little. Frequently Merriam took Zelda to the theater; now and then he connived with Morris to the end that Olive should be asked, and the four would go afterward for a supper at Merriam’s house. Zelda brought Olive more and more into touch with her own life. She knew no happier day than Christmas, when Mrs. Forrest,—not, however, without urging,—gave a family dinner to which Ezra Dameron, Olive and her mother sat down at the same board, with Rodney presiding. There were times when Zelda’s courage failed,—when the shadow of her mother’s unhappiness fell darkly upon her; but she made no sign to the world. So the winter passed, and in the first bright wistful days she went forth with Zan to find the spring.
“I have not heard you speak of your aunt and uncle of late,” said Ezra Dameron to Zelda one day, after she had been for an outing with Olive.
“I saw Aunt Julia this afternoon. She isn’t well; she suffers a great deal.”
“She doesn’t look like a sick woman. She was always quite robust.”
“She’s robust enough, but her nerves aren’t. She has asked me to go away with her again,—she likes going about, and she has planned to visit a number of summer places.”