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Sisters

K >> Kathleen Norris >> Sisters



Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team




THE WORKS OF KATHLEEN NORRIS

SISTERS

VOLUME X




TO

FRANCES ROSE BENET

Dear mother of my mother's child, to you
The tribute brings not praise from me alone,
Still clings some grace of hers to what I do,
And the gift comes in her name, as my own.




CHAPTER I


Cherry Strickland came in the door of the Strickland house, and
shut it behind her, and stood so, with her hands behind her on the
knob, and her slender body leaning forward, and her breath rising
and falling on deep, ecstatic breaths. It was May in California,
she was just eighteen, and for twenty-one minutes she had been
engaged to be married.

She hardly knew why, after that last farewell to Martin, she had
run so swiftly up the path, and why she had flashed into the
house, and closed the door with such noiseless haste. There was
nothing to run for! But it was as if she feared that the joy
within her might escape into the moonlight night that was so
perfumed with lilacs and the scent of wet woods. In this new
happiness of hers a fear was already mingled, a sweet fear, truly,
and a delicious fear, but she had never feared anything before in
her life. She was afraid now that it was all too wonderful to be
true, that she would awaken in the morning to find it only a
dream, that she would somehow fall short of Martin's ideal--
somehow fail him--somehow turn all this magic of moonshine and
kisses into ashes and heartbreak.

She was a miser with her treasure, already; she wanted to fly with
it, and to hide it away, and to test its reality in secret, alone.
She had come running in from the wonderland down by the gate, just
for this, just to prove to herself that it would not vanish in the
commonplaceness of the shabby hall, would not disappear before the
everyday contact of everyday things.

There was moonlight here, too, falling in clear squares on the
stairway landing, white and mysterious and bewitching, but on the
other side of the hall was wholesome, cheerful lamplight creeping
in a warm streak under the sitting-room door.

Dad was in the sitting room, with the girls. The doctor's house
was full of girls. Anne, his niece, was twenty-four; Alix,
Cherry's sister, three years younger--how staid and unmarried and
undesired they seemed to-night to panting and glowing and
glorified eighteen! Anne, with Alix's erratic help, kept house for
her uncle, and was supposed to keep a sharp eye on Cherry, too.
But she hadn't been sharp enough to keep Martin Lloyd from asking
her to marry him, exulted Cherry, as she stood breathless and
laughing in the dark hallway.

Cherry had never had any other home than this shabby brown
bungalow, and she knew every inch of the hall, even without light
to see it. She knew the faded rugs, and the study door that
swallowed up her father every day, and the table where Alix had
put a great bowl of buttercups, and the glass-paned door at the
back through which the doctor's girls had looked out at many a
frosty morning, and red sunset, and sun-steeped summer afternoon.
But even the old hall had seemed transformed to-night, lighted
with a beauty quite new, scented with an immortal sweetness.

Hong came out of the dining room; the varnished buttercups
twinkled in a sudden flood of light. He had come to put a folded
tablecloth into the old wardrobe that did for a sideboard, under
the stairs. Cherry, descending to earth, smiled at him, and
crossed the hall to the sitting-room door.

An older woman might have gone upstairs, to dream alone of her new
joy, but Cherry thought that it would be "fun" to join the family,
and "act as if nothing had happened!" She was only a child, after
all.

Consciously or unconsciously, they had all tried to keep her a
child, these three who looked up to smile at her as she came in.
One of them, rosy, gray-headed, magnificent at sixty, was her
father, whose favourite she knew she was. He held out his hand to
her without closing the book that was in the other hand, and drew
her to the wide arm of his chair, where she settled herself with
her soft young body resting against him, her slim ankles crossed,
and her cheek dropped against his thick silver hair.

Alix was reading, and dreamily scratching her ankle as she read;
she was a tall, awkward girl, younger far at twenty-one than
Cherry was at eighteen, pretty in a gipsyish way, untidy as to
hair, with round black eyes, high, thin cheek-bones marked with
scarlet, and a wide, humorous mouth that was somehow droll in its
expression even when she was angry or serious. She was rarely
angry; she was unexacting, good-humoured, preferring animals to
people, and unconventional in speech and manner. Her father and
Anne sometimes discussed her anxiously; they confessed that they
were rather fearful for Alix. For Cherry, neither one had ever had
a disquieting thought.

Anne, smiling demurely over her white sewing, was a small,
prettily-made little woman, with silky hair trimly braided, and a
rather pale, small face with charming and regular features. She
was not considered exactly pretty; perhaps the contrast with
Cherry's unusual beauty was rather hard on both the older girls;
but she was so perfectly capable in her little groove, so busy,
contented, and necessary in the doctor's household, that it was
rather a habit with all their friends to praise Anne. Anne had
"admirers," too, Cherry reflected, looking at her to-night, but
neither she nor Alix had ever been engaged--engaged--engaged!

"Aren't you home early?" said Doctor Strickland, rubbing his cheek
against his youngest daughter's cheek in sleepy content. He was
never quite happy unless all three girls were in his sight, but
for this girl he had always felt an especial protecting fondness.
It seemed only yesterday that Cherry, a rosy-cheeked sturdy little
girl in a checked gingham apron, had been trotting off to school;
to him it was yesterday that she had been a squarely-built baby,
digging in the garden paths, and sniffing at the border pinks. He
had followed her exquisite childhood with more than a father's
usual devotion, perhaps because she really had been an
exceptionally endearing child, perhaps because she had been given
him, a tiny crying thing in a blanket, to fill the great gap her
mother's going had left in his heart. He had sympathized with her
microscopic cut fingers, he had smiled into her glowing, damp
little face when she stuttered to him long tales of bad doggies
and big 'ticks; he had brought her "jacks" and paper-dolls and
hair ribbons; he loved the diminutive femininity of the creature;
she was all a woman, even at three. Alix he proudly called his
"boy"; Alix used hair ribbons to tie up her dogs, and demanded hip
boots and an air rifle and got them, too, and used them, but when
he took Alix in his arms she was apt to bump his nose violently
with her hard young head, to break his glasses, or at best to
wriggle herself free. Little Cherry, however, was 'fraid of dogs,
she told her father, and of guns, and she would curl up in his
arms for happy half-hours, with her gold curls sprayed against his
shoulder, and her soft little hand tucked into his own.

"Mr. Lloyd had to take the nine o'clock train," Cherry answered
her father dreamily, "and he and Peter walked home with me!" She
did not add that Peter had left them at his own turning, a quarter
of a mile away.

"I thought he wasn't going to be at Mrs. North's for dinner," Anne
observed quietly, in the silence. She had been informally asked to
the Norths' for dinner that evening herself, and had declined for
no other reason than that attractive Martin Lloyd was presumably
not to be there.

"He wasn't," Cherry said. "He thought he had to go to town at six.
I just stopped in to give them Dad's message, and they teased me
to stay. You knew where I was, didn't you--Dad?" she murmured.

"Mrs. North telephoned about six, and said you were there, but she
didn't say that Mr. Lloyd was," Anne said, with a faint hint of
discontent in her tone.

Alix fixed her bright, mischievous eyes upon the two, and
suspended her reading for a moment. Alix's attitude toward the
opposite sex was one of calm contempt, outwardly. But she had made
rather an exception of Martin Lloyd, and had recently had a
conversation with him on the subject of sensible, platonic
friendships between men and women. At the mention of his name she
looked up, remembering this talk with a little thrill.

His name had thrilled Anne, too, although she betrayed no sign of
it as she sat quietly matching silks. In fact, all three of the
girls were quite ready to fall in love with young Lloyd, if two of
them had not actually done so.

He was a newcomer in the little town, a tall, presentable fellow,
ready with laughter, ready with words, and always more than ready
for flirtation. He admitted that he liked to flirt; his gay daring
had quite carried Anne's citadel, and had even gained Alix's
grudging response. Cherry had not been at home when Martin first
appeared in Mill Valley, and the older girls had written her,
visiting friends in Napa, that she must come and meet the new man.

Martin was a mining engineer: he had been employed in a Nevada
mine, but was visiting his cousin in the valley now before going
to a new position in June. In its informal fashion, Mill Valley
had entertained him; he had tramped to the big forest five miles
away with the Stricklands, and there had been a picnic to the
mountain-top, everybody making the hard climb except Peter Joyce,
who was a trifle lame, and perhaps a little lazy as well, and who
usually rode an old horse, with the lunch in saddle-bags at each
side. Alix formulated her theories of platonic friendships on
these walks; Anne dreamed a foolish, happy dream. Girls did marry,
men did take wives to themselves, dreamed Anne; it would be
unspeakably sweet, but it would be no miracle!

And Anne, always busy and happy and helpful, was more so than
ever, unpacking the delicious lunch, capably arranging for
everybody's comfort and pleasure, looking up with innocent
surprise when Martin bent over her as she fussed and rearranged
baskets.

"I thought YOU were gathering wood!"

"Did you, indeed? Let the other fellows do that. I shan't be here
forever, and I'm privileged."

"Would you like me to give you something else to do?"

"No, ma'am, I'm quite happy, thank you!"

Not much in the words to remember, truly, but the tone and the
look went straight to Anne's close-guarded heart. Every time she
looked up at the mountain, rearing its dark crest above the little
valley, they had come back to her.

That was all several weeks ago, now. It was just after that
mountain picnic that Cherry had come home; on a Sunday, as it
chanced, that was her eighteenth birthday, and on which Martin and
his aunt were coming to dinner. Alix had marked the occasion by
wearing a loose velvet gown in which she fancied herself; Anne had
conscientiously decorated the table, had seen to it that there was
ice-cream, and chicken, and all the accessories that make a Sunday
dinner in the country a national institution. Cherry had done
nothing helpful.

On the contrary, she had disgraced herself and infuriated Hong by
deciding to make fudge the last minute. Hong had finally relegated
her to the laundry, and it was from this limbo that Martin,
laughing joyously, extricated her, when, sticky and repentant, she
had called for help. It was Martin who untied the checked brown
apron, disentangling from the strings the silky gold tendrils that
were blowing over Cherry's white neck, and Martin who opened the
door for her sugary fingers, and Martin who watched the flying
little figure out of sight with a prolonged "Whew-w-w!" of utter
astonishment. The child was a beauty.

But if she was beautiful when flushed and cross and sticky, there
was no word for her when she presently came demurely downstairs,
her exquisite little red mouth still pouting, her bright head
still drooping sulkily, but her wonderful eyes glinting mischief,
and the dark, tumbled apron replaced by thin white ruffles that
began at Cherry's shoulders and ended above her ankles. Soft, firm
round chin, straight little nose, blue eyes ringed with babyish
shadows; Martin found them all adorable, as was every inch of the
slender, beautifully made little body, the brown warm hand, the
clear, childish forehead, the square little foot in a shining
slipper.

Her eighteenth birthday! He learned that she had just put up her
hair, indeed, after dinner, her father made her tumble it down in
a golden mop again. "Can't lose my last girl, you know," he said
to Mrs. North, Martin's aunt, seriously. Martin had been shown her
birthday gifts: books and a silver belt buckle and a gold pen and
stationery and handkerchiefs. A day or two later she had had
another gift; had opened the tiny Shreve box with a sudden
hammering at her heart, with a presage of delight. She had found a
silver-topped candy jar, and the card of Mr. John Martin Lloyd,
and under the name, in tiny letters, the words "O fudge!" The
girls laughed over this nonsense appreciatively, but there was
more than laughter in Cherry's heart.

From that moment the world was changed. Her father, her sister,
her cousin had second place, now. Cherry had put out her innocent
little hand, and had opened the gate, and had passed through it
into the world. That hour was the beginning, and it had led her
surely, steadily, to the other hour to-night when she had been
kissed, and had kissed in return.

Nobody dreamed it, she told herself with innocent exultation,
looking at Alix, sunk into her chair ungracefully, and at Anne,
peacefully sewing. They thought of her as a child--she, who was
engaged to be married!

"So--we walk home with young men?" mused the doctor, smiling.
"Look here, girls, this little Miss Muffet will be cutting you
both out with that young man, if you're not careful!"

Alix, deep in her story, did not hear him, but Anne smiled
faintly, and faintly frowned as she shook her head. She considered
Cherry sufficiently precocious without Uncle Lee's ill-considered
tolerance. Anne had often told him that Cherry was the "pink-and-
white type" that would attract "boys" soon enough without any
encouragement from him. But he persisted in regarding her as
nothing more than a captivating baby!

He would have had them always children, this tender, simple,
innocent Doctor Strickland. He was in many ways a child himself.
He had never made money in his profession; he and his wife and the
two tiny girls had had a hard enough struggle sometimes. Anne and
her own father had joined the family eight years ago, in the same
year that the Strickland Patent Fire Extinguisher, over which the
doctor had been puttering for years, had been sold. It did not
sell, as his neighbours believed, for a million dollars, but for
perhaps one tenth of that sum. It was enough, and more than
enough, whatever it was. After Anne's father died it meant that
the doctor could live on in the brown house under the redwoods,
with his girls, reading, fussing with a new invention, walking,
consulting with Anne, laughing at Alix, and spoiling his youngest-
born.

The house was shingled, low, framed in wide porches, smelling
within and without of the sweet woods about it. Here the
Stricklands weathered the cold, damp winters, when the trees
dripped and the creeks swelled, and here they watched the first
emerald of spring breaking through the loam of a thousand autumns;
here they hunted for iris and wild lilac in April, and hung
Japanese lanterns through the long, warm summers. It was a perfect
life for the old man; it was only lately that he begun uneasily to
suspect that they would some day want something more, that they
would some day tire of empty forest and blowing mountain ridge,
and go away from the shadow of Mt. Tamalpais, and into the world.

Anne, now--was she beginning to fancy this young Lloyd? Doctor
Strickland was surprised with the fervour with which he repudiated
the thought. Anne had been admired, she must go to her own home
some day. But her uncle hoped that it would be a neighbouring
home; this young engineer, who had drifted already into a dozen
different and distant places, was not the man for staid little
Anne. He was twenty-eight years old, but it was not the
discrepancy in years that mattered. The doctor had himself been
twelve years older than his wife. No, it was something less
tangible--

"What did you want to see Mr. Lloyd about to-morrow, Dad?" Cherry
interrupted his thoughts to ask.

"The rose vine!" her father reminded her.

"You'll never get that back on the roof!" Alix looked up to assure
him discouragingly. "I told you, when you were pruning it," she
added vivaciously, "that you were cutting too deep. No--you knew
it all! Now the first wind brings it down all over the place, and
you get exactly what you deserve!"

Her tone was less harsh than her words; indeed, it was the tone he
loved from her, that of a devoted but long-suffering mother. She
came to Cherry's hassock, and dropped on it, and rested her untidy
head against his knee.

"Anne aided and abetted me!" said the doctor meekly.

"To the extent of handing you your shears!" Anne said promptly.

"No, but really you know, Dad, you were a pig-headed little
creature to do that!" Alix said musically. "You might just as well
cut it down at the roots and plant another double banksia."

"I rather thought that Lloyd might have some idea of a tackle--or
a derrick or something--" submitted her father vaguely.

"Well, if anybody can--" Anne conceded, laughing. "What did he say
about coming over, Cherry?"

But Cherry had not been listening, and the conversation was
reviewed for her benefit. She remarked, between two rending yawns,
that Mr. Lloyd was coming over to-morrow at ten o'clock, and
Peter, too--

"Peter won't be much good!" Alix commented. Cherry looked at her
reproachfully.

"You're awfully mean to Peter, lately!" she protested. Her father
gave her a shrewd look, with his good-night kiss, and immediately
afterward both the younger girls dragged their way up to bed.

Alix and Cherry shared a bare, woody-smelling room tucked away
under brown eaves. The walls were of raw pine, the latticed
windows, in bungalow fashion, opened into the fragrant darkness of
the night. The beds were really bunks, and above her bunk each
girl had an extra berth, for occasional guests. There was scant
prettiness in the room, and yet it was full of purity and charm.
The girls sat upon their beds while they were undressing, and
plunged upon their knees on the bare pine floor and rested their
elbows upon the faded patchwork quilts while they said their
prayers. Mill Valley was so healthful a little mountain village
that among her two thousand residents there was only one doctor,
the old man who sat by the fire downstairs, and he had formally
retired from general practice. The girls, like all their
neighbours, were hardy, bred to cold baths, long walks, simple
hours, and simple food. In the soft Western climate they left
their bedroom windows open the year round; they liked to wake to
winter damp and fog, and go downstairs with blue finger-tips and
chattering teeth, to warm themselves with breakfast and the fire.

So Alix said nothing when Cherry went to the window to-night, and
knelt at it, looking out into the redwoods, and breathing the
piney air. In the silence of the little room the girls could hear
a swollen creek rushing; rich, loamy odours drifted in from the
forest that had been soaked with long April rains. Cherry saw a
streak of light under the door of Hong's cabin, a hundred yards
away; there was no moon, it was blackness unbroken under the
trees. The season was late, but the girls felt with a rush of
delight that summer was with them at last; the air was soft and
warm, and there was a general sense of being freed from the
winter's wetness and heaviness.

Alix rolled herself in a gray army blanket, and was asleep in some
sixty seconds. But Cherry felt that she was floating in seas of
new joy and utter delight, and that she would never be sleepy
again.

Downstairs Anne and the doctor sat staidly on, the man dreaming
with a knotted forehead, the girl sewing. Presently she ran a
needle through her fine white work with seven tiny stitches,
folded it, and put her thimble into a case that hung from her
orderly workbag with a long ribbon.

"Wait a minute, Anne," said the doctor, as she straightened
herself to rise. "This young Lloyd, now--what do YOU think of
him?"

She widened demure blue eyes.

"Should you be sorry if I--liked him, Uncle Lee?" she smiled.

The old man rumpled his silver hair restlessly.

"No-o," he said, a little ruefully. "I suppose it'll be some man
some day, my dear. I've been thinking--even little Cherry seems to
be growing up!"

Anne, who modelled her deportment somewhat upon the conduct of
Esther in "Bleak House," came to the hassock at his knee, and sat
there, looking up at him with bright affection and respect.

"Cherry's only a child," she assured him, "and Alix will not be
ready to give her heart to any man for years to come! But I'm
twenty-four, Uncle. And sometimes I feel ready to--to try my own
wings!"

He smiled at her absently; he was thinking of her mother, an
articulate, academic, resolute woman, of whom he had never been
fond.

"That's the way the wind blows, eh?" he asked kindly.

Anne widened her pretty eyes.

"Well--you see how much he's here! You see the flowers and books
and notes. I'm not the sort of girl to wear my heart on my
sleeve," Anne, who was fond of small conservational tags, assured
him merrily. "But there must be some fire where there's so much
smoke!" she ended.

"You're not sure, my dear?" he asked, after some thought.

"Oh, no!" she answered. "It's just a fancy that persists in coming
and going. You know, Uncle Lee," Anne pursued, confidentially,
"I've always had rather a high ideal of marriage. I've always said
that the man I would marry must be a big man--oh, I don't mean
only physically! I mean morally, mentally--a man among men!"

"And you think young Lloyd--answers that description, eh?"

"I think he does, Uncle Lee," she answered seriously. And
immediately afterward she got to her feet, saying brightly, "Well!
we mustn't take this too gravely--yet. It was only that I wanted
to be open and above-board with you, Uncle, from the beginning.
That's the only honest way."

"That's wise and right!" her uncle answered, in the kindly, absent
tone he had used to them as children, a tone he was apt to use to
Anne when she was in her highest mood, and one she rather
resented.

"Cherry, now--" he asked, detaining her for a moment. "She--you
don't think that perhaps Peter admires her?"

"PETER!" Anne echoed amazedly, and stood thinking.

Peter was more than thirty years old, thin, scholarly, something
of a solitary, the sweet, dreamy, affectionate neighbour who had
shared the girls' lives for the past ten years. Cherry had bullied
Peter since her babyhood, ruined his piano with sticky fingers,
trampled his rose-beds, coaxed him into asking her father to let
her sit up for dinner. For some reason she could not, or would
not, define, Anne liked the idea of Cherry and Peter falling in
love--

"Somehow one doesn't think of Peter as marrying any one--" she
said slowly, still trying to grasp the thought. "He's so--self-
sufficient," she added, shaking her head. "You--you WOULDN'T like
that, Uncle?"

"Peter is a dear fellow," the doctor mused. "But Cherry--why,
she's barely eighteen! He--" The old man hesitated, began again:
"I suppose there's no reason why Peter shouldn't kiss her, in a--
brotherly sort of way?" he submitted doubtfully.

"Did he kiss her?" Anne exclaimed.

"I don't know that he did," Cherry's father said hastily.

"But what made you think he did?" the girl persisted.

"Just a fancy," he assured her. "Just an old father's fear that
she is growing up too fast!"

"Because we all, and you especially, spoil her," Anne reminded
him, smiling. "Peter," she added thoughtfully, "has kissed us all,
now and then!" She stooped for a dutiful good-night kiss, and was
gone. And as she went, lightly and swiftly across the hall, up the
stairway with her shoulders erect, and methodically and prettily
moved about her brushing and folding and disrobing, she saw
herself engaged to be married, saw herself veiled and mystical in
white, on her Uncle's arm, heard the old neighbours and friends
saying that little Anne Strickland had gone to her own home, and
had won the love of a fine man.

Downstairs, the doctor sat on, thinking, and his face was grave.
He was thinking of little Cherry's goodnight kiss, half an hour
ago. She had rested against his arm, and he had held her there,
but what had been the thoughts behind the blue eyes so near his
own? Perhaps Anne was right--perhaps Anne was right. But he
realized with a great rush of fear that some man had kissed Cherry
to-night, had held her against a tobacco-scented coat, and that
the girl was a woman, and an awakened woman at that. Cherry--
kissed a man! Her father's heart winced away from the thought.

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