Beauty for Ashes

by Grace Livingston Hill

  She was still wondering about Murray MacRae when she fell asleep that night, and the morrow didn’t seem, in prospect, nearly so drab and monotonous as it had the night before.

  Chapter 6

  Murray MacRae was suddenly called away the next morning on business, he said, stopping a moment at the Sutherland house to explain, and he put off the tennis until Saturday afternoon when he expected to be back. As Gloria turned back to the breakfast table, she felt the day go blank again. She had been looking forward to the exercise and most of all to asking that strange young man a lot of questions, and now they would have to wait. She was disappointed.

  “Does Mr. MacRae have a church somewhere?” she asked as she sat down again to her interrupted breakfast.

  “A church?” said Emily Hastings, pouring more cream into her coffee. “Why no, he isn’t a minister. He’s just a young businessman. They say he has a very fine business opening offered him, and I suppose he has had to go to New York and look after something, although he isn’t going to start in regularly until fall I believe.”

  “Why, I thought he was a minister. He had charge of the meeting last night.”

  “Oh, did Murray lead the meeting? My, I’m sorry I had to miss it. We got in so late last night Mother didn’t have a chance to tell me yet. He’s fine, isn’t he? No, he isn’t a minister, but he might as well have been, only he thinks we need more Christian businessmen who understand the Bible. You know, he’s just graduated from some kind of theological college down south somewhere. He went down there and took a regular ministerial course just as if he had been going to preach. He said he thought it was up to all Christians today to understand their Bibles, and if they were going to be businessmen, they needed it all the more.”

  “He’s”—Gloria hesitated for a word—“different, isn’t he?” she finished lamely. “At least he’s different from any young man I know.”

  “Yes, I suppose he would be,” said Emily thoughtfully, “but I like to hear him. He had the Sunday night services all last summer when he was home on vacation, and the church was just packed. People came from over the other side of the state line after it got known he was to speak. They say he is a smart business fellow, too. They say it’s a wonderful position he’s going into this fall. I don’t know just what the business is. I haven’t heard his mother say. His sister, Lindsey, will be home next week. She’s lovely. You’ll like her, too. She is registrar in a girl’s school. She is older than her brother but a very charming young woman.”

  “Her brother spoke of her,” said Gloria politely, trying to keep up a conversation.

  “We have several nice young people around here you would enjoy knowing,” said Emily. “There’s Bob Carroll down beyond Ripley. He’s Murray’s friend. Everybody thought he was going to be a college professor, but instead he surprised his friend by taking a course in agriculture, and now he’s gone in for intensive farming, developing some land his uncle left him.”

  “How interesting!” said Gloria wonderingly, trying to imagine any one of the group of young men who had constituted her set at home going in for anything that required manual labor. “You don’t mean that he does the actual work himself, do you? He just directs his laborers, I suppose?”

  “Not a bit of it!” spoke up John Hastings, a flush on his own face, although he could see that Gloria hadn’t an idea that she was casting a little slur at himself. She hadn’t been there long enough to see him in overalls plowing or out by the stream shearing sheep. “Bob Carroll is right on the job all the time. Last summer he had only one helper, though I hear this spring he’s hired a couple more hands. He’s real, that fellow is. He and Murray are two of a kind. Not a lazy hair on their heads. He’s no slouch either. He’s called awfully good-looking by most people, and he was an honor man at college and a Phi Beta Kappa man and had no end of athletic letters. Football captain and all that. He’s just two years out of college! Wait till you see him.”

  Gloria found it impossible to stretch her imagination enough to take in such a person. In her secret heart, she was sure she would find something more to be desired in this farmer paragon.

  During the next two days, Gloria devoured three more books and found herself wondering if Murray MacRae had read them, found herself thinking deeply over the questions they raised in her mind, wondering why these old books were so different from the literature that had previously come under her notice. There was scarcely a hint in any of them of the present-day triangular love theme, though there were plenty of sweet love stories woven into their fascinating pages. There was murder, mystery, and crime in some proportion, but it did not constitute the main theme of any of these books. Pride, hatred, selfishness, impurity, unscrupulousness were there but not exalted or victorious. Love and fineness and chivalry were stressed as she had never heard them stressed by anyone except her father.

  As Saturday drew near, she found herself anticipating the coming of Murray MacRae. She found herself most eager to ask him questions and determined to open the way at once for him to give that explanation he had promised.

  But of course, her common sense told her it would turn out to be some mystic thing connected with religion and nothing she would be able to comprehend, nothing from which to get any real help in her trouble. There wasn’t any help for such trouble as hers. Her life was just blasted, that was all.

  Yet after all her resolves, when Saturday afternoon came and he came over after her, wearing a white sweater that made his eyes look young and blue, and escorted her over to the tennis court, she grew suddenly shy before him, shy about asking questions such as she wanted to ask. She kept thinking of him as almost a minister and dreading to bring out her crude thoughts that only had reference to her own personal troubles. She shrank from having his keen, knowing eyes look deep into hers and read her life. She found she didn’t want him to suspect that the man she had been going to marry had been a man who frequented nightclubs and had been shot by a chorus girl’s lover. So she walked beside him across the road and around to the tennis court talking of most indifferent matters, what a lovely day it was and how the spring was getting almost as advanced here as it had been in her home when she came away.

  Yet there was something exhilarating in it, just to be walking beside a pleasant young person, acting like a carefree girl again, forgetting the dark cloud on her life.

  The air was crisp and clear, the sunshine bright, the court in the pink of perfection, for Murray had been working on it all the morning, and they played like two old hands who had been playing together for years. Gloria wondered why it was so pleasant to be playing with this stranger of whom she had been just the least little bit afraid when she was walking across the street with him.

  They had played two sets and were well on into the third when John Hastings came around the corner of the house and signaled for their attention.

  “Sorry to have to take the lady away,” he said with a grin, “but she has callers over at the house.”

  Gloria’s face went blank. Calling on her? There must be a mistake. Who would call on her way up here? It couldn’t be that some of her friends from home had hunted her out and mistakenly come to see her! She shuddered at the thought, and the sunlight went out of her eyes as if a cloud had suddenly passed across them.

  “Perhaps they won’t stay long and we can finish this afterward. It’s three all, and the last was a love game, remember?”

  Her eyes lit up.

  “Here’s hoping!” he said with another grin that seemed to make him her comrade and friend.

  So she hurried across the street ahead of John Hastings, who had lingered to talk to Murray about his garden. She forgot that she had carried the racket with her, forgot that it was not her own, and remembered too late, as she came within recognition of her callers, realizing that a racket was the wrong thing for her to be carrying. She felt their disapproval by the very set of their shoulders as they sat in Emily Hastings’s porch rockers awaiting her. It was her aunt Miranda and her co
usin Joan! Of all people the least expected! And they would think a game of tennis a waste of time. She was sure they would. If she had only left that racket behind, they might have thought she had been over to call on Mrs. MacRae.

  But there was no alternative now but to walk up, racket and all. They had seen her. She could not well cast it in the road. And anyway, why should Gloria Sutherland cringe before a disagreeable pair of relatives? It really didn’t matter whether they thought that tennis was a waste of time or not.

  So she walked coolly up to the porch and greeted her relatives as if they were welcome, laying her racket aside on a table as calmly as if she had not seen two pairs of eyes fasten upon it just as her intuition had foreseen they would do.

  “We heard that you were still here,” said Aunt Miranda, fixing her cold eyes upon Gloria, “and Joan seemed to think we ought to come and call, since you asked us.”

  “That was nice of you,” said Gloria, trying to smile into the hostile eyes of her cousin.

  “We thought perhaps you were lonesome,” said Joan, her eyes giving a significant glance at the racket, “but it seems you have found other friends.”

  “People have been very kind,” said Gloria, looking her cousin in the eye and trying not to change color. “I’ve just been having a little much-needed exercise. Since Father had to go back home, I just stayed around the house and read, and I really needed to get some good hard exercise.”

  “Don’t they have any extra housework here they could let you do?” asked her aunt, looking about on the immaculate porch with its neatly painted chairs in a row, each chair back covered whitely with a clean linen cover. In her glance, Gloria read for the first time that even a row of porch rockers wearing white linen covers required labor to make and keep them that way. It was a revelation, but Gloria did not let her callers know it. She suddenly realized that there must have been other ways she might have helped besides just making her bed and drying the dishes now and then. She tucked that away in her mind for future reference.

  “Oh, they let me do a little now and then.” She smiled pleasantly. “Are you home every Saturday, Joan? How nice that must be!”

  “Yes,” said her mother grimly, “she manages to get a good deal done Saturdays. She’s always been one to help at home. My Joan never was one to shy away from work.”

  “I suppose you play games a good deal, don’t you?” remarked Joan with another glance at the tennis racket.

  “Oh, I do almost anything that’s going,” laughed Gloria.

  “I shouldn’t suppose you’d feel much like games, now, though, not under the circumstances,” remarked her aunt grimly with a thin, disapproving set of her lips.

  Gloria’s eyes suddenly grew dark with surprise and pain, and her color went white. “One doesn’t always do just what one feels like,” she said slowly, with down-drooping eyes.

  “Well, I should suppose almost anybody would excuse you now from engaging in frivolity,” said Aunt Miranda. “I shouldn’t suppose they’d expect you to go playing around now!”

  “I think perhaps,” said Gloria, feeling around for words, “that it’s just as easy to go ahead and do things. It sometimes helps you to forget the hard things.”

  “I’ve always thought good hard work was the best panacea for trouble,” said her aunt severely. “I’m sure I’ve found it so in my own case. When my little boy was killed by a tree falling on him, I just went downstairs and cleaned the cellar. That was the only way I could stand it. Get at something hard that has to be done and do it! That’s my way!”

  “We don’t all have cellars to clean.” Gloria smiled faintly. “And I don’t suppose everybody bears trouble in the same way.”

  “But wasn’t this to have been your wedding day?” asked the cousin sharply with another hostile glance at the tennis racket.

  Gloria felt as if she should scream. She wondered if she did what effect it would have. Would Emily come and help her out? Would her callers take their leave? But she answered quietly, her eyes down-drooped. “No, it was last week!”

  “Oh!” said Joan. “A week ago! Only a week ago!”

  Gloria felt that she had stood all that she could stand. She suddenly lifted up her head with some of the old arrogance with which she had always been able to subdue enemies, and looking at her cousin with a lovely smile, she said, “Oh, there are some darling little new kittens down behind the barn. Wouldn’t you like to come around and look at them? They are the darlingest things!”

  “No, thanks,” said Joan with a look of disgust. “I can’t bear cats, either new or old. They give me the shivers.”

  “We came over, Gloria,” said her aunt, ignoring the interlude, “to suggest that perhaps you would like to come over and spend a few days with us while your father is away. How long is he going to be gone?”

  Gloria barely suppressed an exclamation of distress at this suggestion, but she managed an icy little smile. “Oh, that’s sweet of you,” she said, controlling a shiver of dislike, “but I think I’ll just stay here where Father left me.”

  “But it doesn’t look right for you not to come to us for part of the time,” urged the aunt severely with a tilt of offense to her chin and nose. “The whole countryside will think it’s strange.”

  “Why bother?” said Gloria. “It doesn’t matter so much what people think.”

  “It certainly does!” said Joan with a toss of her head. “We have to live here, you know.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Gloria, sobering thoughtfully. “It hadn’t occurred to me that the countryside had anything to do with it. But in this case, I guess you’ll just have to explain that I’m staying here where Father can call me on the telephone at any time. He expects me to stay here. He calls me up every day sometime.”

  “He calls you on the long-distance telephone every day!” exclaimed the two in unison.

  “But isn’t that terribly expensive?” asked the aunt severely.

  “Why, I really don’t know,” said Gloria. “I never thought of it in that way. But anyhow, Dad does it, and he expects me to be here! Thank you for your kindness, and I do appreciate your thinking of me, but at present I’m staying right here. And after all, it’s in a sense my own home. Dad owns this house, you know!”

  A quick, startled look passed between the mother and daughter.

  “No, I didn’t know that!” said the mother. “I understood it passed out of the family years ago. I don’t see why your father should have any more right to it than the rest of the children.”

  Gloria looked at them, puzzled.

  “Why, Dad bought it back again several years ago. Didn’t you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t know it,” said her aunt, as if she thought it an extremely doubtful statement.

  Gloria looked at her in despair. She didn’t seem to be getting anywhere with any kind of a conversation. She turned to her cousin and took a fresh start. “Did you have a pleasant week in your school?” she asked courteously.

  “Pleasant? Teaching school? Well, no, I should say not! I don’t teach school exactly for pleasure!”

  Gloria laughed. “Well, I should think it would be interesting at least,” she said, determined to make this girl unbend from her stiffness. “I think children are darling!”

  “Hm! Well, I don’t. I think they are little devils!” said Joan. “If you don’t believe it, come and visit us someday.”

  “I’d love to,” said Gloria. “Could I?”

  The other girl’s face hardened.

  “You wouldn’t like it,” she said sourly, “and you wouldn’t find out just visiting anyway. They’d be on their good behavior. They always are when there are visitors. You’d have to be a teacher and sit there day in and day out, keeping those thirty wild young ones in order and beating a little knowledge into their heads whether your feet ached and your back ached and your head ached or not. Whether the children were impudent and stupid and full of mischief or not. Having eyes in the back of your head to find out what’s going
on out in the hall or in the back of the room. Having mothers come and complain because you didn’t give Johnny as good a mark as some other boy. Having the superintendent call you down for something you didn’t do. Oh, yes, you’d love to teach, I’m sure. It’s well enough for you who don’t have to earn your living to talk that way. You’ll get married to somebody pretty soon again, and you won’t do a thing but play bridge and ride around in different cars and go to parties. Yes, you know a lot about it!”

  Gloria caught her breath as the tempestuous words swept on, and then a kind of pity grew in her eyes. “I’m dreadfully sorry you’ve had such a hard time,” she said gently, “and you certainly make a good-for-nothing picture out of me. I didn’t realize I was such a lazy, selfish little brute before. But I would gladly have shared my good times with you if I’d known. It’s quite rude I haven’t had to earn my living,” she went on thoughtfully, “but I’ve always hoped I’d be brave about it if I had to, and I can’t help thinking one of the ways I’d choose to try and earn it, if I knew enough to get the job, would be to teach little children.”

  “Well, it’s not so hot when you get to doing it,” said the cousin dryly, “and as for sharing your good times, I’m not asking anything of anybody. I’ve got my life to live, and I’ll live it, but I’m not going to pretend it’s all velvet. Ma, isn’t it time we were starting home? If Gloria thinks she can’t go with us, there’s no reason why we should wait any longer.”

  “Oh, but you’re going to have a cup of tea before you go,” said Emily Hastings, appearing at the door just then with a tray. “Yes, you are. I’ve got it all ready. Gloria, pull out that little table by Mrs. Sutherland so I can set the tray down. It’s all poured out so it won’t take you long. Do you like cream or lemon in your tea?”