The Prodigal Girl (15 page)

The headlights of the car picked out the white pathway foot by foot and lit up a little brown rabbit standing startled right in the way. The children came to life at this, and even Betty, thrilled with the thought of being out there in that dense woods in the snow, stretched her neck to see the little creature of the wild. It was like being in the scene of an educational movie.

“For Pete’s sake, where are we going?” asked Betty at last, roused to a shivering idea of discomfort. “What’s the little old idea, anyway, Chester? Do you want us to freeze to death? It looks to me as if you were trying to see how far you could go before you finished us all. And you call this a lark!”

Chester’s lips shut in a thin, firm line, but he did not reply. He was driving carefully over ruts a foot deep, and the car lurched from side to side and wavered on like a foundering ship at sea.

It seemed hours that they were plowing along in that narrow, dark trail, though in reality it could not have been more than five minutes, before they suddenly emerged to a wide, clear space, deep with snow, the air thick with great flying flakes. It was like coming to the top of the world and looking out on winter. Gradually as they hitched along more slowly yet, there emerged from out of the thick whiteness an outline of a low, rambling building, dark and snow crowned, like an old woman hunched into a shawl with a heavy wool hood over her eyebrows.

Chester drew up at the side of this building and shouted to Michael to pull in also. They all looked out in dismay. It seemed terrible to think of getting out into that whirl of driving, blinding snow.

Chester, with his flashlight in his hand, got out and unlocked the door. He went inside, and they could see the bobbing of the flashlight through the doorway and the windows as he went into another room. Then there flickered up another light, yellower, steadier.

They sat and waited, and in a moment more another flare lighted up the room, wide and yellow and cheering, and the long, low, old farmhouse came alive. Chester had lit a fire in the great old fireplace, and welcome leaped out to meet them.

Chester appeared at the doorway again, an eager smile on his tired, dirty face.

“Come!” he shouted through the blizzard. “It will soon be warm in here! Chris, help your mother and the girls out while I light the other fires. We’ll have a warm house in no time!”

Chris clambered out stiffly and helped out his mother and Betty. Then he went back and carried Doris in, dumping her on a couch, and going back for wraps and bags.

Michael and his brother had already backed up the truck and were unloading boxes and bags, great packing cases of canned goods, and the trunks and bales of blankets.

“They all came through in great shape,” smiled Michael to Eleanor, as he threw down the last bale of blankets.

Betty was walking about disdainfully studying the rooms. She felt that prison walls were about to close in upon her.

Eleanor was busying herself pouring out hot coffee from the thermos bottle for the two men, Michael and his brother.

“It seems dreadful, Chester,” Eleanor was saying, “to let them go out in this storm again tonight after driving all day.”

“I’m bound to get down that mountain, ma’am,” said Michael, smiling, “afore this snow gets any deeper. There’s goin’ to be drifting before morning, an’ I’ll feel easier if I get beyond the pass before I sleep. Jim an’ I’ll be all right, ma’am, don’t you worry, an’ I wantta get back where I can telegraph my wife, fer she’ll be that worried if she don’t hear.”

“Of course,” said Eleanor sympathetically. “But are you sure it’s safe to go back now in the dark?”

“Perfectly safe, ma’am, while the snow lies still, but if a wind should come up, an’ she might any minute now, it wouldn’t take long to put that pass twelve or fifteen feet deep. O’ course there’s other roads, but not so quick, and Jim and I figure we’ll get down the mountain and beyond the pass now while the goin’ is passable, and then we’ll take our rest. Good-bye, ma’am, an’ I hope you find everything all right, and get along fine—”

Betty and Chris listened as though they heard the keys to their cell turning in the lock. So, Michael and Jim were going back! Then who was going to do things for them? Were there servants in this strange, desolate place to which they had been brought?

Chester stayed out in the snow with Michael and Jim for a few last words, but Eleanor shut the door and came over near the fire.

“Isn’t this wonderful!” she said cheerily, though they could see she was terribly worn and tired. “I’ve dreamed of a fireplace like that! I was beginning to be chilled clear through.”

“I’d much rather have a hot water radiator!” said Betty contemptuously.

“We’d better undo these blankets at once and spread them out to take the chill off them before we start to make up the beds. Come Betty, get to work.”

Betty reluctantly drew off her gloves, and Chris without being asked untied the big ropes that bound them together.

“I can’t see what was the idea of prancing off here to do all this hard labor,” said Betty. “Why not stay at home and work if it had to be? Is it just a gesture, or what?”

But nobody answered her. Eleanor was spreading out the blankets in front of the fire.

“Isn’t it funny having no electric lights!” giggled Doris, waking up to look around.

“Look out, Doris, don’t go near the table. A candle is a dangerous thing. We’ll have to get the lamps in shape as soon as possible.” Eleanor lifted the candle and set it on the high mantel.

“Lamps!” said Betty, aghast. “For cat’s sake! You don’t mean kerosene lamps? I draw the line at that. You can count me out if that’s what you have in mind. I never saw such folly! It’s perfectly
poisonous!
Chester must have gone crazy!”

“And now,” said Chester, coming back, stamping the snow from his feet, “isn’t this cozy?” He beamed about on them with almost a happy look on his tired, lined face.

“I’ll say it is,” said Betty contemptuously. “Cozy as the tomb! I should have thought you could have found a cemetery nearer home, but perhaps this one is cheaper!”

Chester looked at her as if she had struck him, an ashen shadow stealing over his face, but Eleanor, deliberately cheery, called forth:

“Yes, dear, it is wonderful! I’m going to love it, I’m sure. Now Chester, we need some more light, and let’s see how many beds we can get ready in a jiffy. These children need to be put to bed; they are too cross to live with.”

“Yes,” said Chester. “I have five pounds of candles here.” He picked up a box by the door. “If I remember rightly there are candlesticks in every room. We’ll light the fires in the airtight stoves, and you don’t know how quickly you will have nice comfortable rooms, everywhere. Old-fashioned stoves beat the furnaces for quick heat every time.”

He led the way up a quaint staircase leading from a large hall covered with old oilcloth in tessellated gray and black blocks. The stair rail was mahogany, and the risers were painted white.

Eleanor followed Chester, urging sleepy little Doris. The other children remained huddled in the big living room where they had arrived, looking about with alien eyes.

“Some dump!” commented Chris, slumping into a grandfather chair that would have been almost worth its weight in gold in a New York antiques shop.

“Isn’t it perfectly poisonous!” responded Betty, turning from a survey of a snow-plastered windowpane. “I’ve a notion to go out and sit in the car.”

“You can’t,” said Chris shortly. “It’s gone!”

“Gone? What do you mean? I mean our car.”

“Well, I say it’s gone.”

“But how could it go?”

“Jim drove it. Whaddaya ‘spose he came along for?”

“You don’t mean we’re stranded in this desert without a car?”

“I said it.”

“Chris Thornton! I shall go raving insane!”

“Good stunt!” responded Chris. “Might enliven the desert.”

“Chris, did you manage to get anything?”

“Not a red.”

“I’m just ready to pass out.” “Same here.”

Jane eyed them knowingly.

“You needn’t be so terribly mysterious. I know what it is you’re talking about. Cigarettes. I’m not dumb! I guess I’ve smoked cigarettes, too!”

“Shut up, you baby! We were speaking of chocolates. If you go babbling what we say you’ll get what’s comin’ to you, that’s all,” threatened Chris.

“So will you if you call me baby anymore,” said Jane impishly. “I’m going upstairs and choose the best bed!” And she vanished into the hall.

The big old farmhouse had a hall running through the center upstairs with rooms on each side, and then down three steps from the top of the stairs, rooms rambled off again over the back wings of kitchen and sheds. They seemed vast chambers with their great, old four-poster beds and their fine, old mahogany chests of drawers. Eleanor, tired as she was, could not refrain from laying an admiring hand on the rare old wood and exclaiming over some particularly fine old specimen of a chair or little bedside table.

She chose the right-hand front room for Chester and herself, with the room connecting just in back of it for Jane and Doris. Betty was assigned to the room across the hall from her mother’s, and Chris and John in the room in back of that. There would be plenty of room for each of the children to have separate quarters later if it seemed feasible, but tonight the main thing was to get everybody to bed as comfortably and quickly as possible. There were airtight stoves downstairs with drums in the two back upper rooms, and a gradual warmth was beginning to penetrate the whole house, though it still felt damp and chilly.

“Chris,” called Chester, “you and John come with me and bring up several armfuls of wood. We’ve got to keep fires going all night.”

“We can’t go out in all this snow and get wood,” growled Chris.

“You don’t have to,” laughed his father. “Come this way. If I’m not much mistaken you’ll find the kitchen shed full. Come on, you wouldn’t make much of a pioneer.”

“I should say not!” responded Chris disgustedly. “I think the world has got beyond that stage. There’s no sense in living the primitive life in these days!”

He flung a meaningful glance at Betty with whom he had just been discussing their father’s failure in merciless terms. They both felt that he had no right to fail when he was responsible for them. They felt that he was taking their discomforts in altogether too blithe a manner and needed reproving.

Chester carried a candle and set it on a high shelf in the kitchen and put another in the kitchen shed. Chris came slowly after him. He stared about at the great rambling shed with its rough floor and high rafters, unlike any room he had ever looked upon before, reaching out into weird shadows of seemingly illimitable proportions. It might have been a barn or storehouse, a warehouse perhaps, but what a peach of a gym it would make! His mind wandered to basketball vaguely. Perhaps if one worked things rightly there might be some fun left in the desert after all, that is provided there were any natives near enough in the wilderness to make up two teams.

Along the entire length of one wall was a huge pile of wood, neatly cut in stove lengths and fireplace lengths, and over it the one candle shed the weirdest play of light and shadow. Chris reluctantly consented to carrying an armful of wood into the living room, and slowly returned for another, while John, fully awake now and delighted with the kitchen shed, carried three.

Betty and Jane meantime had been requisitioned for bed making, and the house took on an atmosphere of liveliness, with cheerful voices calling back and forth and candles flickering in every room. The old house had not seen the like for almost twenty years. Chester came up the stairs with an armful of wood humming an old tune: “We’ll stand the storm, it won’t be long. We’ll anchor by and by—”

Unconsciously he had chosen an old favorite of his father’s. It seemed somehow to have been a part of his childhood waiting for him in the old house, come to his heart to welcome him. As he went down the stairs for another load he began to hum and the old words came back to him unconsciously:

“Should earth against my soul engage, soul engage
,

Should earth against my soul engage, soul engage
,

Should earth against my soul engage, and fiery darts be hurled
,

Then I can smile at Satan’s rage
,

And face a frowning world. We’ll stand—”

“Listen to Dad!” said Betty with a wondering look on her face as she paused in the flinging of a warm, sweet-smelling sheet across her great-grandmother’s bed to Jane, who was supposed to be helping make the beds. “I never heard him sing like that! Never!”

“I think it’s going to be
fun!”
declared Jane, catching the sheet and vigorously tucking it in on her side.

Betty suddenly froze into a frown.

“Help yourself!” she said bitterly. “Not me! I’m not accepting things like this when they’re wished on me.”

“What’r ya going to do about it?” mocked Jane.

“I’ll find something to do, mighty quick, and don’t you forget it, Jane!” affirmed Betty mysteriously.

“Well, if you want my opinion, Betts, you’re a fool not to take the fun while it’s going. All us here together like this, and Dad and Mother playing along with us, I think it’s going to be great.”

“It’s poisonous, Jinny, just perfectly poisonous! And you’ll find out quick enough. Just wait till you have to fill a lamp, precious! I’ve heard about lamps. They smell to heaven, and you never can get your hands clean afterward. Sort of a Lady Macbeth act, darling. Not all the rain in the sweet heavens and all that sort of thing. You know you’ve had that in school. Only in this case it would be snow, of course. Did you ever see snow like that? I ask you. Look at the windowpanes, perfectly obliterated, and there’s a pile of snow, on every windowsill! Will you look? Isn’t this the grandest dump for the Thornton family to arrive in, caught like rats in a trap.”