The Flower Brides

by Grace Livingston Hill

  She looked at him with that adoring, languishing glance that always thrilled him, the glance that had flattered the wistful growing-old part of him and made him think he was young again, and he smiled sadly, indulgently at her, looked down at the little painted fingernails, and sighed.

  “No, I suppose not,” he said.

  “We’re going out to lunch and do some shopping in the city, you said. You’re going to buy that diamond clasp for me, you know, and we could just as well stay in the city for dinner and see a play or something, and then you think by that time Maggie will get over her huff, don’t you? You said she was just angry and would be back?”

  She lifted her liquid eyes so trustingly to his face, and he passed his hand gently over her head, thinking what a pretty child she was and how sad it was that they should have anything to interfere with the perfect bliss of their homecoming. And then his heart would swell again with anger and indignation at the incredible way in which Diana, his devoted child, had taken all this, when he had really done it for her sake as much as anything else.

  “Yes, I think—I hope she will be back—” he said then sighed deeply. “She’s very fond of Diana, you know, and I suppose she’s just angry in sympathy with her. I can’t think what has come over Diana to act this way. It isn’t in the least like her. I don’t know but I ought to take the noon train and find her and bring her back. Things won’t go right until we have an understanding. It’s just as I told you, dear; Diana is hurt. I think she was hurt because we didn’t insist on her coming up to the wedding. I felt that all along. You know, we’ve always been so close—!”

  “And now you’re thinking that I have come between you!” said the artful Helen, with a quiver of her red lips and a quick brimming of tears into her eyes. “You are sorry you married me! You are! You a-a-rre!” And soft gentle sobs and well-trained tears, not so very wet, rolled harmlessly over the smooth cheeks. Those tears and controlled sobs went to his heart like barbed darts as she had meant they should do. He had to take her in his arms then and comfort her, and assure her that he loved her above all things else, and that certainly he was not sorry that he had married her, and surely everything would come out all right as soon as Diana understood.

  She let herself be comforted and swept off to the city to get the diamond clasp as a consolation prize. They had gone and stayed as she had planned, and now they had come back to a cheerless dark house, with those dirty dishes still huddled in the sink and not a scrap or sign of a repentant note or telegram from the prodigal daughter, and no Maggie in the kitchen, no prospect of anyone to get the breakfast ready for tomorrow morning. The master of the house was frantic. Nevertheless, his attitude of consolation was still required, and his role for the present was such that he must not let Helen see how frantic he was about his missing daughter.

  All day Helen had kept him strained to the utmost to prove to her that she was not superfluous. If he sighed so much as a breath or let a distant look come into his tired eyes or let his smile droop on his lips she charged him with having to work so hard to make her think he was happy with her. And then all the day’s work of reassuring her had to be done over again. He felt suddenly old and tired, and somehow condemned.

  He had wanted to go and hunt for his child, but Helen had tenderly persuaded him that it was unwise, that she would only think she had the upper hand and there would be no harmony ever if she thought he was wrong and she was right. She had made the argument so plausible and so gentle, so delicately punctuated with tears and regrets that she had married him that he felt his hands utterly tied.

  Time and again during the day and evening he had tried to slip away and telephone long distance to the old aunt’s house where she was supposed to have gone, but always he was followed and gently questioned and urged to do the best way, just patiently wait until the prodigal returned repentant. And always he would come back with her to something she wanted to do and sit and look at her and think what a sweet, forgiving, lovely woman he had married and how amazingly wicked Diana had been to take such a silly prejudice against her. Yet underneath all the time his heart was crying out to go after Diana, have a heart-to-heart talk with her, and bring her back into the path of submission and rectitude. Why, Diana had never been like this! He was sure he could bring Diana to her senses if he only had a few minutes’ talk with her.

  So the harassed father and husband had gone through the house, until now they were back in the house again, the empty house, with their problems all unsolved before them, and Helen sighing and making him feel like a veritable Blue Beard in his Castle.

  It was all wrong, of course. He could see it now. He should have taken Diana into his confidence. He should have had her invite Helen there or sent her to visit Helen. He should have revealed the whole matter more gradually and been near to comfort and sustain her in the first shock. Diana was merely hurt, of course. He could understand it better now since the thing was done. She evidently had had no such thought that he would ever marry again. She was a young girl, and, of course, perhaps it was perfectly natural that she should be shocked. Time did not move so rapidly with young people as it did with older ones. It seemed to him ages since the death of his first wife, and it had been so wonderful that Helen in her youth and beauty had been willing to come in and relieve the terrible loneliness that Marilla’s going had made. He had always thought of it as their loneliness, his and Diana’s, not his alone. Diana would, of course, profit by having a mother who was also young enough to be a sort of companion for her. He had deceived himself into thinking, into actually believing that Diana would be glad over the addition to the household. Her attitude had in reality been a great shock to him. Little Di whose utmost delight had always been to do his will, whose most cherished plans were ready to be flung aside for anything he had to propose. It was cataclysmic for her to rebel at anything he did or wanted. Surely this would not last! Surely she would come to herself very soon, as Helen had suggested, and return to her home and be her sweet self.

  So at last he submitted to the inevitable and retired to a sleepless night, trying to persuade himself that the morrow would bring good news from the penitent. Then they could really begin to live! Then he would gently try to lead Diana and Helen to understand one another!

  So the weary hours crept by but no sleep came. In the morning he looked drawn and haggard, and Helen, rousing from a late beauty sleep to take the tray he brought to her again, surveyed him with veiled vexation.

  “You have no business to take things this way,” she said sharply. “It makes you look old, and you can’t afford that. You married me, and now it’s up to you to keep young. And this toast is horribly burned! It isn’t fit to eat! We’ve got to have some servants today or go to a hotel. I won’t stand for this sort of thing!”

  He winced as she said that about his looking old, and a gray look passed over his face as he turned away with a sigh and went out of the room.

  Chapter 13

  Diana was really too exhausted to lie awake long that night, and she fell asleep almost as soon as she lay down in her berth. But when she awoke, quite early in the morning, her first thought was of the words she had read from the little tract the stranger girl had given her in the station. It had seemed somehow to be something strong to lean upon. She hadn’t grasped it yet, nor taken it for her own, but she wondered if it could be true, and her heart reached out in longing for something outside herself that would bear her up. For just now she felt as if she were going to crumple up and die just anywhere, as if she were utterly unable to think or decide any matter.

  But next her whole pitiful situation flashed over her, and she realized that now in a few brief minutes she had to do something about a place to stay.

  She glanced at her watch and found it had stopped in the night. She had forgotten to wind it, of course. She pulled aside the curtain and looked out. It was broad daylight, and she thought she recognized the landscape. Yes, there was the name of a town she had often heard that could not be
more than an hour or so from her home city. She must hurry and get herself ready! And she must decide where she was going when she got there.

  The little paper caught her eye as she was closing her suitcase. It had slipped down under the sheet. She picked it up carefully, put it into her purse, and stole a glimpse at her flowers in their soft wrappings. They still seemed to be alive. She must get them into water as soon as possible. She did not want to lose them. They were hardy little things. Only one of them was getting a bit brown around its fringes. They were all she had left of home now, dear mysterious flowers! Then she remembered the girl and her message. Mysterious flowers and mysterious messenger. Could they be connected in some way? Was God sending them both into her life? She gave the flowers a pitiful little smile and a touch like a caress, then closed her suitcase, put on her hat, and got ready to get out.

  They were coming into the city now. The rows of cheap little houses, brick and wood and stucco, reminded her of the city where she had searched for a room yesterday. She shuddered as she drew a deep, courageous breath and tried to think what she must do first. She did not seem to be any nearer a decision than last night, but she must do something. She would probably have to go to the woman’s hotel for a day or two, anyway.

  When she got out of the train and walked through the station she looked around half frightened, almost expecting to see her father and Helen standing there waiting for her. Then she remembered they did not know where she was and took courage, glad though to take refuge in the taxi. But when she arrived at the hotel her heart failed her again, for she found that even the very cheapest room in the place was far beyond what she ought to spend in her present state of finances. She was fairly frightened to realize just how much she had spent of her small hoard in just the two or three days since she had cut herself loose from home. But she must get somewhere and rest a little and freshen up before she started on another hunt.

  After breakfast and a bath, arrayed in fresh garments, she felt better and started out on foot in search of a room. If she could only find a decent room where she could use her own furniture, it would be so much more comfortable.

  But a couple of hours’ hunt revealed the same state of things that had been obtained in the other city she had searched. Rooms were either too expensive or in too sordid a neighborhood to seem at all possible.

  As she went along the weary way from house to house she began to realize that either she must find some way to increase her income, or else she must give up her ideas of what was barely decent in the way of a residence.

  Right off the start she registered a vow that she would not ask her father for money. He had made it impossible for her to stay at home and he didn’t seem to see it; therefore, she would maintain herself somehow without his aid.

  The matter of money had never bulked very largely in Diana’s life. She knew that her mother had left her something, how much she had never bothered to inquire, or if she had ever been told, to remember. She had her allowance, which had been ample for her needs, and when she wanted anything extra, it had always been forthcoming. She knew that for a time their fortunes had been somewhat straitened, and she had not asked often for money. She seemed to have everything she wanted. But now, faced with the problem of providing shelter and food, her allowance suddenly shrank in proportion to her needs.

  Many another girl with her income would have counted herself well off and made the allowance cover an amazing lot of needs, but Diana had no experience in such things and was moreover bound by the traditions of her family as to what was necessary. However, she had a lot of courage and character, and she faced the problems before her like a thoroughbred.

  She spent the afternoon canvassing dreary boardinghouses and trying to conceive of herself as being one of their regular guests, but she turned from each one with a loathing that she had hard work to conceal from their hard-faced, weary keepers.

  There were other boarding places, of course. She tried a few attractive ones but found them altogether beyond her price.

  That night she came home with the evening papers and all day Sunday pored over the Want advertisements and columns of cheap apartments and rooms.

  Three days she thus pursued her weary hunt, growing more desperate each day, until she finally located a large bare room on the third-story back of a shabby row of old brick houses in a crowded street of the old and unfashionable portion of the city. It wasn’t just unfashionable; it was so far away from ever having been recognized by fashion as not to be within the awareness of those who lived on the substantial, comfortable streets now far away. It was a street where a week ago Diana would have picked her way, looking questioningly at the rows of ash cans and milk bottles, and hurried out into another block to draw a free breath again. But Diana’s standards had come down a good many notches during that three-day hunt. She no longer was looking for pleasantness in surroundings or for attractiveness in a landlady or for culture in a neighborhood. The sole requirement she was determined upon now was cleanliness, and even that didn’t extend to the street anymore. She wasn’t sure as she entered that last door whether she would even require cleanliness in the halls or stairs, if she could just have a spot that she had a right to scrub clean herself, where she might lie down and cry her heart out and then sleep until this awful ache of weariness had left her breast and she could go out and try for a job. For now there was no more question, she must have a job or she could not live long even in this room.

  Each night when she came back to the hotel there had been the slowly fading carnations, and in her purse the little tract, which she had read over more than once and pondered as she was dropping off to sleep. But though the hotel room contained the Bible she had wished for, she had been too tired and depressed to look up the references, and more and more the impression of the little tract had grown dim and left her with that lonely feeling again. Sometime when she was settled she would look into it, but she was too tired to think about it anymore now. So she slept through the nights and toiled through the days, looking alternately for rooms and jobs. She had learned to unite the two in certain neighborhoods and found each equally hopeless as to results, until she finally took that large bare room on the third-story back overlooking an alley and a row of kitchens belonging to an even shabbier row of houses on the next street. When she took the room she cast a thankful glance out the window at its dreary mate behind, whose open window sheltered a woman in dirty negligee who looked as if her every hope was gone. Diana was actually thankful that she hadn’t fallen quite as low as that next row of houses and had them only to look at.

  The room was not heated and had only one poor electric bulb hung from a long wire in the middle, but it was still summer and she would not need heat at present, and she would just have to manage about the light.

  They told her she might have possession at once, and she called up her storage company, who promised to deliver her furniture early the next morning and refund half of the storage for the month.

  The room didn’t look very clean even to Diana’s inexperienced eyes, and she hated to have her pretty things come into a dirty room, so she went to the corner grocery nearby, bought a bucket, a broom, a mop, a cake of soap, and a couple of dishcloths to clean it with. The woman who waited on her suggested a scrubbing brush so she bought that.

  Tired as she was it was, no easy task, even if she had ever done it before, which she hadn’t, to scrub that rough, dirty floor. She had to bring up the water from the floor below, and there wasn’t any hot water, nor any way to heat it. In her inexperience she sloshed on the soap and water and then had a terrible time wiping it up, and as for wringing that unwieldy mop, it seemed impossible. But by the time it grew dark, she had the walls wiped down, the floor mopped up in a sort of way, the baseboards wiped off, and also the windowsills. The windows would have to wait until another time. She was too tired to drag another step. With a despairing look around in the dusk, she locked her door, toiled downstairs, and could scarcely get back to her hotel.r />
  That night she dreamed of the girl in the station with the happy eyes who had given her the tract and awoke wondering if she were real or if that experience, too, had been a dream. She had to go to her handbag and take out the tract to straighten it all out in her mind. She was so tired she could not think and so downhearted that nothing seemed worthwhile. Was there really Someone somewhere who cared? She wished she could see that girl again and talk with her a little while.

  When she got to her new abode, by morning light the room looked cleaner than she had feared. At least it had lost that musty smell. The floor had dried in streaks and the ugly wall paper showed up all its defects, and they were many. She stood in the middle of the room and looked around her and tried to imagine that this was her home now, for as long as she had money to maintain it.

  She went to the window and looked out on the backyards and alley. There were two cats—a gray one with a dirty white star on its forehead and a black one with a torn ear and an ugly sneer on its weird, scrawny face—sitting tucked upon the back fence at respectable distances making faces at one another and occasionally uttering guttural threats. There was a dirty old man with a burlap bag slung over one shoulder and a long iron rod in his hand, poking around among the ash cans. Someone flung a bit of garbage over the fence, and the two cats were down in a second and after it; but a sharp little nondescript dog went like a streak from some invisible place and got there first, growling his right to the tidbit. A mere baby with tousled hair was toddling down the alley with nothing on but a diminutive shirt and mud streaks over the whiteness of its undernourished body. It was scrawnier than the cats. Two women were arguing angrily over their side fence, and an old man with crutches beside him was sitting dolefully on one pair of back steps. It was not a pleasant prospect. Even so early in the morning there were flies around, swarming over a garbage can and buzzing up in a whirl now and then as if in disagreement. Diana turned from it disconsolately with a sudden memory of the broad sweep of lawn in front of her father’s home and the deep cool setting of woodland behind the house. How had her fortunes changed in these few brief hours! A few days ago she was mistress in that beautiful home that had been her mother’s wedding gift from the grandfather, and now here was her fortune laid, with alley cats and garbage cans and brawling neighbors. She turned from the window with a sudden new sinking of heart and felt as if she could not stand up another minute in that bare room.