“And now I’m going to take care of you, and you’re never going to work.”
She rose and walked into the parlor, opening the sacred shutters wide and seating herself at the old-time organ with its carpet-covered pedals and apricot plush stool. She began playing chords, her blue eyes looking across the road, beyond the old box-car wagon, as if she saw visions of worlds still to be conquered—the worlds that the child Thurley had pledged herself to know.
There was little in Betsey Pilrig’s house of value to Thurley, but mere furnishings never mattered. She was oblivious to shabby carpets, and, when she dusted the parlor furniture or set the table with nicked and varied styles of china, she was too busy singing or thinking of Dan to notice her actual surroundings. Nor did clothes bother Thurley—she was happy in a white middy blouse and a serge skirt and quite as beautiful as if she wore a Paquin creation. Besides, Thurley rebelled at taking help from Betsey Pilrig and her only way of earning money was limited. Even if one was the best singer and piano teacher in the township with the commendation of having learned: first, all Kate Sills knew, which ended with an E flat valse and “Dixie” with variations; and, second, all that a small city organist could teach her during his summer vacation spent in the Corners, and, last, all Thurley herself taught herself by diligent practice and “just coming natural to her”—even so, who wanted to pay more than twenty-five cents an hour to learn how to sing or play on the piano? So Thurley was forced to content herself with being organist, choir mistress and soloist in the church, with a dozen pupils to round out her income. Whenever she begged Dan to let her clerk in his store, he always asked her to marry him, thus blockading her desire.
With a restless gesture she closed the organ. “Ho-hum, I need Dan to make love to me,” she ruminated. “I can’t seem to make myself take anything seriously. I wonder why God made the Precores stop off here instead of a city—things would have been different in a city....” A moment later she mentally upbraided herself, “As if you weren’t the luckiest girl in the world! You ought to get down on your knees and ask poor ’Raine to forgive you, and Dan and Granny, too.... Go out and start a patchwork quilt this instant and don’t let a single song be heard in this house until it is a third finished!”
But the scolding seemed to have no effect, for, instead, she reopened the organ and sang the opera aria she had just learned. As she finished it, she spied Miss Clergy’s shabby coupé pausing behind the clump of maple trees.
“Why—that’s the second time within a few days!” Thurley said delightedly. “Now—I wonder....”
With the exception of paying her wages or making some childish complaint, Abigail Clergy seldom spoke to Hopeful. It was an event to be summoned into those always lighted, seldom aired front rooms, crowded with keepsakes of a bygone generation, to stand before the chair of the imperious creature in her rusty black silk and hear her upbraidings over the fact that harmless urchins had been seen crossing the Fincherie lawn.
During the first tedious years of Miss Clergy’s self-imprisonment, Hopeful, then younger and stronger of spirit, used to remonstrate against the order of things, urge a new doctor, a jaunt to the seaside, even if she saw no one. She tried to persuade Miss Clergy to wear new gowns, to turn off the penetrating gaslights which burned day and night no matter how bright the sun or how mellow the moon, to open the windows and let the fresh air revive her spirits, read a daily paper and, gradually, gently be swept back into the current of everyday living.
To none of these suggestions did Miss Clergy lend anything but a deaf ear. Her life had become her martyrdom and she did not propose to lose a single jot of it. With the exception of Ali Baba, who had proved himself faithful beyond a doubt, Miss Clergy had registered an everlasting hatred and distrust of men, it mattered not who. No clergyman dared enter her door; her physicians were women, her lawyers acted as if they had been sentenced to the gallows and were merely enjoying a brief stay of execution. No man could ever command even her respect, she had told Hopeful; no woman could have her confidence or her love. She hated all living creatures. And as the years passed with Miss Clergy a trifle more wrinkled of skin, whiter of hair and distorted of mind, Hopeful ceased making efforts to change her viewpoint. Indeed, she, too, fell into a sort of charmed, even existence, free from material want or keenness of interest in the world without. The Clergy fortune continued to multiply. All Miss Clergy had to do was figuratively to wave a yellowed, jewelled hand and a barrel of gold was at her command. Yet no repairs were permitted to be made at the Fincherie, not even a new coupé nor for Ali Baba a new livery. And when, one by one, the old mares would die and the purchase of another was inevitable, Miss Clergy would fly into a rage.