Beauty for Ashes

by Grace Livingston Hill

  Gloria looked up, and a white spire showed among the trees. White houses nestled here and there amid spacious distances. And all around, mellow ground lay plowed and ready in various stages for the planting. Some were already beginning to show green in symmetrical rows. Out from the wooded road it did not seem so late. The sky was luminous with a fleck of crimson in the west, and there was still a small rim of the red sun left above the horizon. It cast a glow over the fields and made them look like rare merchandise spread out for customers to view. A single star flashed out as they looked, and a light or two from the village, as they neared it, winked at them. Gloria held her breath and watched the little settlement approach, like a picture of the past, her father’s past! It seemed wonderful to her.

  They had come to the outermost sentinel of the village houses now, white with green blinds and tall plumy pines standing guard. On the right was a cottage quite colonial and tiny. There were lights in some windows of almost every house, though it still did not seem dark in the street.

  There were pleasant odors of coffee and frying ham, and something sweet and spicy like gingerbread just out of the oven. The man drew a deep breath and closed his eyes.

  The picture-book village opened up, house after house.

  “That was where my grandmother lived!” said the man, pointing to a small, neat house with two wings and a marvelous front door. “She and Grandfather used to sit there on the porch afternoons in the summertime and talk, Grandmother with her knitting. And after Grandfather was gone, Grandmother would sit there and look off at the sunset alone.”

  “I wish I could have known them!” said Gloria wistfully. “They died before I was born, didn’t they? I never heard anything about them.”

  “Your mother never knew them,” said the father evasively. “She didn’t like the country and she—never—came up here!”

  “How much she has missed!” said the daughter, drinking in the quiet farm village scenes.

  A cow mooed mournfully at the pasture gate near a big red barn, tinkling the bell around her neck, and off in the pasture there sounded the bleat of a very young lamb and the baa-aa-a of its mother answering. There were birds twittering in the elms that arched the street, though they must have been chilly, for the elms were only just in bud yet.

  The glow of the sun was gone, but the night had flung a banner in the east, and a jeweled glow of stars rent the sky, shining like a halo above the white spire at the end of the village street.

  “This is the house!” said the man in a voice that sounded almost breathless with eagerness, as if he had suddenly become young again was expecting to meet the loved ones who had been gone long years now.

  Chapter 4

  It was a lovely old house, spacious and comfortable, white like all the other houses around—the whitest white, Gloria thought, that she had ever seen. It was set about with tall pines, whose dark tassels whispered to each fanlight over the door and a wide veranda. The road rambled near to the house in a friendly way, giving no idea of publicity as the highways at home did, but as if it were only a beaten path from neighbor to neighbor. The house was lit both upstairs and down, and a welcoming path of light streamed out into the road from the wide-open front door. Through one window Gloria caught a glimpse of flames flickering in a spacious fireplace. It seemed like arriving in a new world as they drew up to the front door and stopped. And then almost instantly a sweet old lady came out the door, as if she had been watching for them to come, and a younger man came around one end of the long front veranda and down the path toward the car.

  “Well, you got here on time!” was his greeting in a pleased tone. “Emily said we mustn’t count on it. She said you’d probably be late, driving up for the first time. But I said you’d make it—I was sure!”

  “Yes, we made it!” said Gloria’s father with satisfaction, flinging open the car door. “This is my daughter Gloria, John. Glory, this is Mr. John Hastings.”

  Gloria found her hand being shaken by a strong, rough, hearty one and found her heart warming to this stranger. Keen eyes, a pleasant smile, a genial welcome, and nondescript clothes, scrupulously clean and neat, but not at all the right thing for a gentleman to wear at this hour of day—style, material, cut, all wrong, quite out-of-date according to the standards she knew— yet strangely she did not think of this at the time.

  “And here comes my wife!” he said with a nice ring to his voice as if he were proud of her.

  Gloria saw a trim, youngish woman in a plain dark blue dress with a ruffled white apron tied around her waist as if she had just come from the kitchen. She had beautiful hair, a good deal of it, with a natural wave away from her face, and done in a heavy knot at the back of her head, a bit carelessly as if she had not spent much time or thought on it, and yet there was something lovely and attractive about the effect. Here was another person Gloria couldn’t quite place in her scheme of things. She wouldn’t fit into a fashionable picture at all, and yet she had both beauty and dignity. Gloria liked her at once.

  But it was the little old lady, Mrs. Weatherby, standing at the top step of the veranda, who took her heart by storm, the one her father had called a friend of his mother’s. She was small and frail, her soft gray hair smoothly parted in the middle but with a natural willful wave here and there that made it a little like a halo of silver. She wore a simple gray cotton dress without form or comeliness after the manner of long ago, a long white apron, and a little shoulder shawl of gray plaid. She put her hands on Gloria’s shoulders, looked for an instant into her beautiful face, and then drew her into her arms.

  “Oh, my dear!” she said softly. “You look as your grandmother used to look when we were girls together!”

  And then Gloria felt somehow that she had got home.

  There was stewed chicken for supper on little biscuits, with plenty of gravy. There were mashed potatoes and little white onions smothered in cream dressing and succotash the like of which Gloria had never tasted before, even though it was made from canned corn and beans, but it was a triumph of home canning. There was quivering currant jelly, homegrown celery and pickles, and for dessert a baked Indian pudding, crisp and brown and full of fat raisins.

  Up in the big square front room assigned to her, Gloria looked around her. Her father had the other front room across the hall. The bed in her room was a four-poster of beautiful old mahogany, rarely kept, and polished by loving hands through the years.

  “This was your grandmother’s room,” said the sweet old lady who had come up to show her around, “and that was her canopy bed. It used to have chintz curtains. It was considered a very fine piece of workmanship. That was her chair by the window, that big rocker. The cushion covers are the same she had when she was living. Many times I ran in and found her sitting there by the window darning stockings or turning the collar on a shirt or putting in a new riband. She was a wonderful one with her needle, little fine stitches, the same on an old shirt as on a cambric handkerchief. She did beautiful embroidery, too, when she had time, but there were five children, and this was a big house, and what with the washing and churning, there wasn’t much time for embroidery.”

  “Oh! Did she do it all? Didn’t she have any servants?” asked Gloria, wide-eyed.

  “Servants?” said the old lady. “Where would she get servants? Sometimes at threshing time or harvest when there were a lot of extra farmhands to feed, she would have in a neighbor farmer’s daughter to help for a few days, but mostly she was proud and thrifty and did it all herself!”

  “Oh!” said Gloria in a small voice, trying to conceive of such circumstances, and failing.

  Lying between the sheets that smelled of lavender, she tried to visualize that grandmother that she had never known, her father’s mother, young and proud and thrifty, doing all that work and living away from the world! She felt a faint vague wish that she might somehow begin over again with things clean and fine and real, things worth doing, and make her life something that could be remembered.

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bsp; The soft footsteps around the house ceased; the glimmer of the hall light beneath the crack of the door went out. There were only the quiet stars like tall tapers turned low to make the big room luminous, and they were half veiled by the dark pine plumes.

  The pines were whispering softly at intervals when a little breeze stirred them, but there were great silences between. Gloria thought she had never heard it so still before anywhere. It seemed as if one might hear even the tread of a passing cloud, it was so very quiet, and there seemed to be so much space everywhere and such a nearness to the sky.

  She stole out of her bed to kneel by the casement and look out. There were only a few dim shapes that might be houses around somewhat scattered. There were lights in one or two windows. Could that be a mountain off there against the sky, like a soft gray smudge blotting out the starry part and darkening down into the stretch of what must be meadow across the road? She knelt there a long time looking up into the night and listening to the silence. It fascinated her. The world seemed so wide and home so far away. She drew a deep breath and was glad she did not have to think about what she had left behind in the last few days. She was too tired and it was all too dreadful. She shuddered and felt a chill in the spring night air. This north country was colder than the one she had left behind, but it was quiet, oh so quiet! One didn’t have to think here. If one dared to think, perhaps one’s thoughts would be heard in this stillness as if they were a voice shouting.

  She slipped back gratefully into the linen sheets, laid her head on the fragrant pillow, and sank into the sweetest sleep she had known for months.

  In the morning when she awoke, there were roosters crowing, hens clucking of the eggs they had laid, a lamb bleating, and now and then a cow’s low moo. And yet that great silence was all around like a background for these sweet, strange sounds. She opened her eyes and could not tell for a moment where she was nor what had happened until she heard her father talking to John Hastings outside below her window about the spring planting and the possibilities of the south meadow yield of hay.

  There were appetizing odors coming up from downstairs, and cheery voices. It must be late. She sprang up and dressed hastily, her thought eager for the new day. She glanced eagerly from the window and identified her mountain all hazy pink and purple in the morning sun, lying like a painting on the sky beyond the treetops, and felt a thrill that she had recognized it even in the dark. Then she hurried down to breakfast, trying to imagine herself back in the days when her father was a boy.

  After breakfast her father took her over the farm, showing her everything, explaining the way of farm people, telling her stories of the past, until everywhere she went the way was peopled with the kith and kin she had never known.

  She asked her father about those five children of Grandmother’s of whom she had never heard until last night, and learned that one was dead in childhood, one had married a European and gone to live abroad, one was in California living on a ranch, and the last lived on another farm only thirty miles away with his wife and family, cousins she had never known.

  “And why haven’t we known them, Dad?” she asked, wide-eyed. “Why haven’t we come up here, and why haven’t they visited us?”

  A slow dull red came up in her father’s cheeks and a cloud came over his happy face.

  “Well, Gloria, perhaps I was wrong, but your mother sort of took a dislike to this part of the country when we were first married and didn’t seem to want to come up here, and I was too proud to urge her. I figured that someday she would get over it and we’d get together yet, but she never has, and now they are mostly scattered. I don’t know how many of George’s children are at home now. It’s been my fault, I guess. I was too busy to write many letters, and when they found we didn’t come up here, they got rather offended, I’m afraid, and I had to let it go at that.” He ended sadly.

  “Well, can’t we hunt them up?” asked Gloria earnestly. “I’d like to know my cousins.”

  “Yes,” said her father, brightening. “We’ll do that very thing. It’ll make up for a great deal, you wanting to go with me.”

  It suddenly came to Gloria how much her father would have enjoyed having his children more with him. Why, he was like a boy, going around here in his old haunts and telling her all about it. Her heart thrilled to think how pleased he was to share it with her and how much she and Vanna had missed in not being more with their father! She reflected that it had been all wrong, going selfishly about their own life, going wildly from one thrill to another, and having so little to do with their own father. Why, he was interesting and worth cultivating! He could show her a better time than any of the young men with whom she had whiled away her days and evenings sometimes far into the mornings. But somehow she didn’t even want to think of those days. She just wanted to enjoy this quiet place and these still, beautiful days with her father.

  They went fishing in the old trout brook the next day and caught a string of trout. Gloria even caught a couple herself and went back to the house and stood over her father while he cleaned them and then stood by while Emily Hastings cooked them. They came on the table a delicious crisp brown, and nothing ever tasted so good as they did, eaten with the white homemade bread and the delicious fresh butter.

  There were photograph albums for the evenings, when Gloria got acquainted with a lot of relatives whom she had never heard of before, albums that she pored over again and again, until she felt she knew each one—Aunt Abby, Uncle Abner’s wife, and Cousin Joab and his daughter Kate, little Anne who died just as she was growing into sweet womanhood, and young pretty Aunt Isabella who married the foreigner and went to live abroad in a castle, almost breaking her mother’s heart going so far away, that mother who had been her grandmother, who had washed and mended and cooked and lived in this sweet old home. Oh, how could pretty Isabella go away from this home and marry any man? How could any girl? How had she been going to trust herself to Stan and go out of her father’s care? Stan who had died with another girl!

  She shivered as she turned the pages of the album and went up to bed to listen to the silence and try to forget.

  She learned a number of things in her father’s old home. She learned to make her bed and make it well. Ever since she had come up to her room and found Emily Hastings with deft fingers turning down the sheets smoothly over the candlewick spread and plumping the pillows into shape, she had made it herself. At first with clumsy fingers that could not get the blankets to spread smooth nor make the counterpane hang evenly. And finally she had humbly asked to be shown how. Before this, she had never thought about beds being made. They might spread themselves up as soon as one went out of the room for all the notice she had ever taken of them. Her bed was always made at home and her room in order when she came back after ever so brief an absence. But she discovered that it made a difference to have no servants. It seemed funny to her that she had never thought about it before.

  Sunday morning they went to the church with the white spire, the old church the Sutherlands had attended for years. There was even a tablet up by the pulpit in memory of Great-Grandfather Sutherland, the one who had been taken away from his old wife only a few months before she went herself. The old red cushions on the family pew had faded from red to a deep mulberry, and the ingrain carpet was threadbare in places and drearily dull in its old black and red pattern. Gloria sat with her toes on the wooden footstool that was covered with ingrain of a later vintage and didn’t quite match. She watched the red and purple and green lights from the old stained glass windows fade and travel from the minister’s nose, across his forehead, and twinkle on the wall in prisms and patterns, under the solemn sentence done in blue and gold: “THE LORD IS IN HIS HOLY TEMPLE. LET ALL THE EARTH KEEP SILENCE BEFORE HIM.” It did not seem a happy thought to her. It seemed to her like a challenge from a grim and angry person. She looked around on the shabby little church that so sorely needed refurbishing and couldn’t make it seem a holy temple for a great God to enter. Yet when she looked
at her father, she realized there was something sacred here, some memory perhaps, that brought a softened light to his worldly-wise face and a tenderness to his eyes, and she looked around again less critically.

  There was a cabinet organ played by an elderly woman who touched the keys tenderly and dragged the hymns, and the singers were mostly older people with voices whose best days were over, yet she recognized that there was something in it all that held these people to a thought, a standard perhaps, and bound them together in a common aim. Else why should they come here? Why should they keep on coming here Sunday after Sunday, year after year?

  She looked around at their faces, old and tired and over-worked; yet they were in a way enjoying this dull service. Gloria puzzled over it and could not understand. There must be something unseen behind it all.

  The old minister who preached was closely confined to his notes and did not get her attention at all. He was to her merely a part of the whole, like the organ and the carpet and the old bell that rang so hard after they were seated in the pew that it shook the floor and the seats and seemed threatening momentarily to descend and bring the bell tower with it. Gloria had no feeling of God being there or of anything holy about the place, except when she looked at her father’s face, and then she wished she knew what it was that reached down so deep into her father’s life and was connected with this old building. She decided that it must be the memory of his mother. Such a mother! Her grandmother! She thought she would like to be like that grandmother if she only could.

  That afternoon they drove over to call on the uncle’s family, and Gloria had a sudden setback in her enthusiasm for searching out relatives. Uncle George came out to the car to meet them and seemed exceedingly reserved. He didn’t smile at all at first until Gloria was introduced, her father stating that she had wanted to come and get acquainted with her relatives.