Josselyn's wife

Chapter I

Ellen Latimer reached the big station just before the rain began to fall, and whisked into its gloomydepths with a smile of triumph on her pretty gipsy face. Her suit had just been pressed, and her hat was new; it would have been a calamity to have them get wet. Aunt Elsie had cautioned her to carry her umbrella that morning, and Ellen had merely shaken her head; the November sky was dark and low, it was true, but they were reaching the season now when they might look for snow, not rain.

However, now it was raining, and she had escaped it undeservedly. Ellen followed the line of hurrying Long Island commuters down the long arcade, her own feet adding to the unceasing crisp and shuffle of a thousand other feet. She went past the paper stand, where laden men were slapping down pennies and rushing on with hardly a perceptible pause, and where young boys and girls were buying packages of gum and chocolates, and where all the pretty girls in the world were smiling from the brilliant covers of magazines; girls peeling pumpkins, in demure kitchen ginghams, and girls furred to the eyes, going to football games with pennants over their shoulders, for Thanksgiving was close at hand. And she went past the clock that was watched by so many patient and eager eyes, and the empty bootblack stand where a tired woman had established herself and her babies, and so came to the special gate among a dozen gates where a red boxed sign showed the words "Express Port Washington 5:22." Already a hundred tired men and women, in sober wet-weather clothing, were pressed against this gate, and Ellen pressed with them. She had spent the morning, as usual, at the Art Students' League, but she had deliberately loitered about the city, all the afternoon, in the hope that Ellis Thorpe would join her on this train. Ellen's destination was Port Washington, a quiet old village at the terminus of the line, but Ellis lived at Douglaston, which was a fashionable modern colony, four miles nearer New York.

Ellen did not know him well: they had been introduced in the train, and never met elsewhere. Ellis was only nineteen, still in High School, and the girl was more than three years older. But, for want of more appropriate admiration, she enjoyed his, and she made room for him beside her in the seat to-night with a welcoming smile.

He was a handsome boy, with rain on his thick, rough suit, and on his absurd yellow oxfords, and on his pale gray felt hat. Ellen thought him marvellously well-dressed, an opinion the youth innocently shared. She knew only a few men, and she was at an age that hungers for their company.

They talked only of themselves as the train tore on its noisy way. Ellen talked of her day's experiences at the Art League, and her starry beauty, and the Rash of her blue eyes, under the new, fur-trimmed hat, and the infectious gaiety of her laugh, lent the dull subject a sudden charm. Young Thorpe was personal in his replies; his was the type that renders personalities inoffensive, and Ellen flushed with amusement and pleasure, and turned from his merciless stare to smile at her own reflection in the dark car window.

It was a lovely reflection. The laughing eyes were a deep Irish blue, with soft shadows and long sooty lashes accentuating their essential innocence. The skin had a pure and healthy pallor, except on the high cheekbones, where there was a brilliant touch of colour, and Ellen's mouth was wide, like her Irish mother's, kindly, humorous, the thin lips exquisitely red, the big teeth shining. Her hair was a satiny black, and to-night the rain had curled it, and little strands had blown up against the fur of her hat. Ellen thought, herself, that she was pretty, but the thought rarely gave her any pleasure. What was the use of mere beauty if one lacked every other good thing in the world? She was poor, ambitious, eager for life, ignorant as to the means of gaining her place in the world.

Her father's father had been a sea captain. He was an old man now, living with a vigorous widowed daughter, Ellen's Aunt Elsie. The two had made a home for Ellen and little Joe when Ellen's father, several years after her mother, had died ten years ago. Her father's business had been vaguely connected with ships, too; he had a little office on a dock, in the city, and sometimes took the children there on Sunday afternoons in summer, calling various men he met "Dan" and "George," and being called "Joe" by them in return. In these days the children boarded With him in a quiet old house in Christopher Street, and Mrs. Daley, the landlady, washed them tremendously before school each morning, and scolded them about their clothes.

At least once a month their father took them down to Port Washington, eighteen miles away from New York on the Sound side of Long Island, to see Grandpa Latimer and Aunt Elsie, in the old-fashioned house on Main Street, and sometimes he left them there for a week or two, in summer, and they swam and boated and wandered along the shore as happy as the clams that shot streams of water over their boots, or the puppy that gambled in their wake. Aunt Elsie worried and fussed over them constantly, and Grandpa was notably inhospitable, but they did not notice grown persons in these care-free days, and were always sorry to go back to Christopher Street.

But with their father's sudden death everything was changed. They said good-bye to the weeping Mrs. Daley forever, and went to live with Aunt Elsie in the Main Street house. Ellen was twelve then, and sensitive, and Joe, at eight, was beginning to be unmanageable. Grandpa, idle, and shelved after a life of high adventure, resented their noise and their claims. And Aunt Elsie's way of enjoying life was to worry and fret, fume and scold and fuss. Ellen never realized this; she always believed that Aunt Elsie might have been happier had domestic events run more smoothly. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Baldwin was supremely happy, in her own way.

Ellen went to the village school, and then to High

School, always with the dread in her young heart that

after High School she would have to "work." To her

there seemed something dreadful in the idea of becom-

, ing a working woman. She decided that she would go away, if this necessity came upon her, she would become a nurse, in a trim white uniform, and there would be, in the hospital, a stunning young doctor. . . .

However, just before her graduation, a miracle happened. On a certain July day, when there were a million roses in bloom in the old garden, Mrs. E. Sewall Rose came to call on Aunt Elsie. Her car waited at the gate, she was on her way to Sands Point, the fashionable colony of a score of seaside homes two miles away. She was large, perfumed, beautiful, and kindly. She kissed Ellen, and called her "Nellie Buckley's girl," and she told Ellen that she had loved her mother. They had been girls together in a convent boarding-school.

"The Buckleys were lovely people," said this enchanting visitor, "and Nellie was an angel. They had a great deal of money then; I went to drive with her many a time behind a pair of the handsomest horses you ever saw. Whatever happened. . . ?"

Aunt Elsie said something of speculations; it was all long apo. The Buckleys were all scattered and dead. She sighed with sad enjoyment.

The visitor roamed about the parlour, with its shells and albums and antimacassars, and its embroidered mantel drapery, and glass tube of sand from Palestine. The summer sunlight came in under the green shades, and through the stiff lace curtains, and the canary, over a window full of potted plants, broke into song.

She came upon some of Ellen's school work, and asked Ellen questions. And Ellen told her with shy eagerness that she had hoped to be an artist; she had gotten all the highest marks, and once had won a prize. Mrs. E. Sewall Rose asked her where she was going to study.

Aunt Elsie answered this question. Ellen had no time for fooling; she was going to work; they had the boy to raise, and Father felt they had done all that duty required. It was time now for Ellen to realize that life wasn't all prettiness and play.

She said it pleasantly enough, and the background of the comfortable home, and pretty Ellen, in her carefully made gingham, and the plate of crullers and the decanter of wild cherry wine were all there to soften it. But a week later Mrs. E. Sewall Rose wrote to Aunt Elsie, and sent a check that was to cover all the expenses; commutation-ticket, lunches, materials, and fees, for Ellen's first quarter at the Art Students' League. Ellen mounted straight into Paradise. To tell the girls — to let it casually drop that her life was not to be as other lives — to spend her mornings in a real studio, with real workers — it was Heaven indeed. Ah, how she would work, how she would advance, how proud they would all be some day!

She fairly rushed into it. She was the most earnest, <he most tremblingly happy, of all the earnest, trembling beginners that fall. And she did succeed. Her honesty, and her simplicity, and her pure and fiery ambition, made her a marked figure in the classes from the beginning. She was pretty, and she naturally loved admiration, but she did not recognize harm, and her soul slipped from it unscathed. There were a great many silly girls in the art classes, and a few serious ones, like Ellen. The boys were dark, earnest young Hebrews for the most part, risen from emigrant homes; poor, shabby, sometimes hungry, but making steadily for their goal. Other boys were there, too, lounging, unkempt youths, who meant to "get into the newspaper game." Olga Briner, a pretty Russian girl of whom Ellen was fond, said, with what Ellen thought profound truth, one day: "These boys are fun. But the sort of men you and I could marry are in college at these years."

Perhaps two or three times during the winter Mrs. Rose asked her protegee to lunch with her. She would be on a shopping trip, furred, and scented with violets, and she would make Ellen order all sorts of expensive dishes. Mrs. Rose herself generally played with clear bouillon and cold chicken, but she made Ellen have sweets, at the end, and smiled at her as she sipped black coffee. The girl went back to her work with a flushed face and a dancing heart. All afternoon she would be living over their conversation; had she talked too much? had she talked foolishly?

So two terms, three terms, went by. And now Ellen was well into a fourth, and felt herself no nearer a livelihood than she had been at the end of the first. How did a woman begin to support herself by art? Some of the boys did really drift into newspaper offices, but what they did there seemed to be errands and answering the telephones and rushing about town upon uninteresting investigations, rather than sitting at drawing-boards. Ellen could not do that. Nor could she open a studio on Washington Square, and go about from office to office of the magazines selling pictures.

A deep discontent fell upon her, and she began to turn to the world-old refuge of women: she would marry. Then, when the urgent financial question was laid at rest, she might begin to make her way.

She knew that Ellis Thorpe came of a good family, for he spoke of "Mother's dinners," and "the year Sis came out," and he was sometimes met at the train by a motor-car. Ellen innocently decided that Ellis would "do," in spite of the humiliating discrepancy in their ages. If he asked to call some day, she would ask him to dinner. That would be the beginning.

He left her at Douglaston, and looking out into the black night to smile a good-bye, she saw with satisfaction that the rain had really turned to a line snow, the first of the season. Her hat was safe.

And Joe, with an umbrella, met her with the first rush of pure country air, at the station. Ellen, whose Celtic heart was always eagerly reaching for evidences of affection in this adored younger brother, thought this wonderfully sweet in Joe.

He was a big, lumbering, loosely-built lad of eighteen, in muddy boots, rough corduroy trousers, and with a gray sweater's rolling collar touching his ears. Winter and summer Joe lived in this or a similar sweater. His untidy black hair fell in a long lock between his handsome black eyes; he grinned amiably at his sister.

"Joe, you are a darling!" Ellen said gratefully. "Aunt Elsie would have scolded me. Did you come right out again, when you got home, to meet me?"

"No, I've been home all afternoon, fooling 'round." Joe yawned. "I fixed a coal-box on the back porch for Aunt Elsie. All you've gotter do is have the feller slide in half a ton, and she doesn't have to go down cellar at all!"

"But what about Bates?" Ellen asked anxiously. For Joe's latest employment had been with a contractor named Bates. Joe had declined High School, and had driven the village grocery wagon during his fifteenth year. Then he had worked with the plumber, and the electrician. After that he had worked upon a private yacht for a whole summer, had lived in New York for a few months, deeply enjoying his initiation into the work of a cub reporter, and only two weeks ago, upon Grandpa Latimer becoming distrustful of the effect upon so young a boy of boarding in the city, Joe had indifferently and good naturedly returned home, and engaged himself to Bates.

"Can't work this weather!" he reminded his sister, keeping beside her, but refusing to share the umbrella.

"I wish Grandpa had left you with the Tribune!" Ellen said. "You could have gone in on the seven train, and gotten the six back!"

"Sure I could!" agreed Joe, with another yawn. Ellen looked at him, and sighed sharply. Joe was utterly devoid of ambition.

The Latimer house was on the right side of Main Street, perhaps the tenth or twelfth in an unbroken line of fenced, old-fashioned village homes. On the left side of the wandering street, which curved half a mile downhill to the shore of Manhasset Bay, several orderly blocks had been outlined, but the houses on the right hung on the edge of a hill, and behind them was only old farmland. All these houses had flat gardens in front, and big trees. All were wooden, and simple of design: four windows separated by a porch door downstairs, five windows in an unbroken row upstairs, looking out upon the porch roof. There was a definite, primitive beauty about them; they were old, and age had somewhat softened their ugliness; their smallpaned windows radiated homely cheer. But Ellen saw no beauty here, she longed for one of the modern, smaller houses up toward Flower Hill; houses with bathrooms in them, and electric light, and fireplace and furnaces; houses with wide windows, and shingles and white paint.

The Latimer house was warmed downstairs by two air-tight stoves and upstairs by such currents of softened air as emanated from these homely but useful articles. Also there was a large kitchen range, built solidly in a brick frame, with a cast-iron top, in which there was only one circular opening, and four graded rings of iron to fill the opening. There had been five rings once, but Joe had lost the littlest one, to Aunt Elsie's abiding grief. Since then there had always been a tiny round hole on the very top of the fire, into which a child might glance at the blue heart of the flames. This stove radiated a glorious heat, and on cold mornings the family breakfasted in the kitchen, with winter sunshine pouring in the window, and toast and eggs and coffee smoking hot from the fire; a dazzle of snow without, and all comfort and cheer within. But Ellen never told her friends at the League that she break-* fasted in the kitchen.

To-night her aunt nodded to her from the stove, and Ellen, who had hung up her hat and coat, smiled back as she warmed her hands over the glow. There was a delicious smell in the kitchen. Mrs. Baldwin was a stubborn cook, not apt to learn new ways of doing things, and inclined to sniff at talk of calories and phosphates and the balance of starches and fats. But she cooked a great many things with skill, and was justly proud of her art. Her mood never came so close to gaiety as when Joe shouted over her layer-cakes and

JOSSELYN'S WIFE IS

waffles, or when, as now, Ellen gave a deep smiling sigh at the sight of creamed mutton stew with dumplings, corn pudding, and fried sweet potatoes.

"Oo — Aunt}! What a good dinner! And I'm starving."

''Well, I hope you'll get enough," Mrs. Baldwin said, with the little nervous twitch of her countenance that passed for a smile. "I don't know what possesses the meat — they don't give you the meat now they did ten years ago. You cook the taste all out of it, and then it's as tough as your shoe. I s'pose you didn't think to tell Joe to leave his shoes outside the door or else come in through the laundry. It'd be a relief to me, Ellen, if you'd try to think of it now and then. I can't wait on you folks like you were babies, forever. There's a letter for you up by the clock. Go tell Grandpa supper's ready, and see if I've left anything off the table. . . ."

Ellen escaped the tireless voice. She went into the living room, a rather small room where the round table was already set for supper. One of the air-tight stoves was here, and near it sat old Captain Latimer, with his thin silky white hair brushed scrupulously, and his old carpet slippers resting on the nickel-plated shield of the stove. He wore old gray trousers, and a brown jacket he called his "Cadogan," and over his chest a thin beard flowed, as white as milk. His sharp eves were bright blue, in a clean, weather-beaten face. He was reading the Port Washington News.

"Do, Ellin?" he said, in a sharp, high old voice. "Don't Elsie p'pose to give us no supper t'night?"

"Two seconds, Grandpa!" Ellen answered absentmindedly. Her eyes were only for her letter, a big square letter, standing by the carved and filagreed Swiss clock on the mantel. Who was it from? Ah! it was from Mrs. Rose, of course.

Two minutes later the exulting Ellen was back in the kitchen.

"Aunt Elsie, isn't this wonderful? Isn't this just lovely ? Mrs. Rose wants me to go to her Thanksgiving house party. Her son, that's Arthur, and the girl, Lucia, are going to have a lot of friends at Hastings-on- Hudson! Oh, I think she's a darling to want me. And here's my ticket and all — my made-over gray dress, and my lace dress — doesn't it just seem as if my clothes were made for this special thing? And she signs it: 'Your friend, Abby Carnaby Rose'; I think Carnaby's a stunning name "

Thus Ellen, stuttering and stumbling in her joy and excitement, and all the while automatically assisting in the process of "dishing up." She took the glasstowel her aunt handed her, tucked the precious letter into her blouse, engineered the bubbling dish of corn to a cold plate, decorated a platter of stew with puffy dumplings, and finally bore the latter in to the dining room. Mrs. Baldwin followed with a glazed brown tea pot and other delicacies. Ellen had to rush back for a second load, rush back a third time to hang up her tea-towel; finally a jerk of her foot brought her chair to the table, and Joe, entering through the kitchen, placed his grandfather's chair, and gave the stiff old man a helping hand.1

The little room, filled with useless possessions of every description, was already warm from the stove, now the steam from cooked meat and strong tea rose in the air. They were all hungry, and ate fast. Ellen propped her letter against the tea pot, and regaled her family upon the delights of winter house parties among the upper classes; Joe listened with a grin; the old Captain drank his tea noisily from his saucer, and removed from his mouth portions of the stew too hard for mastication. Mrs. Baldwin, who had been a baby in his arms fifty years before, a dutiful little daughter, an admiring comrade, was his mother now. She crushed the hard crusts of his toast, and over-sweetened his tea, and saw that he had plenty of soft food. Now and then she told him bits of village gossip; that Captain Johnny wasn't so well, and she shouldn't wonder if the Robbinses moved down to the Cherry Place. He could no more offend her than might a baby of two years. Joe's own conduct at the table was almost equally open to criticism, and Ellen was too used to her grandfather to suffer from his manner, so that great harmony reigned in the house on Main Street. Ellen had had her times of objecting to the country custom of putting the dessert on the table with the dinner, and to the little old-fashioned butter-plates, but her aunt, after an intensely practical life, had small patience with these affectations, and the girl's ideas of gentility were too vague, even in her own mind, to make much impression. To-night she saw nothing and heard nothing; she was going to visit at a fashionable country house; she was beginning to live!

There were difficulties to be met, of course. The first was the surprising resentment of Aunt Elsie. Thanksgiving was a home day. Aunt Elsie didn't like the idea of Ellen going off with a lot of godless people; dancing, as likely as not, getting her head fulJ of crack-brained ideas

"Well, I don't like the idea of old-fashioned Thanksgiving!" Ellen answered, trying not to sound impertinent. "We all eat too much, and the house gets too hot, and you're working for three days baking and fussing ! "

She did not dream that she struck to her aunt's heart. The national holiday was a sacred institution to Mrs. Baldwin. The turkey and mince pies were on her mind for many happy, bustling days. She always had Cousin Tom and Ella and their two — or three, or four — babies, over from Roslyn for the whole day, and she liked them to praise her food. She liked to have both the air-tight stoves red hot, and Ella, thin and radiant, gossiping at the end of her kitchen table while the babies napped. And now Ellen— Ellen was disparaging Thanksgiving!

The two were in Ellen's bedroom when this conversation took place, and Mrs. Baldwin turned and went downstairs without a word. Ellen stood still, in the centre of the ice-cold room, her face flushed with shame, the gaudy patchwork quilt she was about to spread over her newly made bed hanging from her hands. Outside the sun was shining on the first heavy fall of snow, boys were sliding down Main Street with wild shrieks. The trolley car grated by, and Ellen saw Joe flounder down the snowy path and begin to shovel snow from about the blocked gate. His aunt, her checked apron over her head, called him from the steps; she had his thick woollen gloves, and also something edible that Joe was munching as he shuffled back to his work.

Ellen's heart smote her. They would miss her on Thanksgiving Day. But what could she do? Noth»

ing in life seemed so important as Mrs. Rose's wonderful invitation.

When she went downstairs, there was a decided chill in her aunt's attitude. Mrs. Baldwin was reading from the paper a sheriff's vendue notice that was printed too finely for the old Captain's glasses to decipher, and he was listening with his white head cocked like a spaniel's. It was Sunday, and the older woman was neatly dressed for church. She enjoyed church, and would come home at half-past twelve rosy from the cold air, and full of kindly gossip. She would walk down to the post-office for the mail, too; there was rarely any mail, but all the world of Port Washington would be there.

The house was still. Captain Latimer pushed his glasses up on his forehead, and went to sleep. The canary- burst into song; fell silent again. Out in the spotlessly clean kitchen the clock ticked and ticked. Ellen would have liked to sew on her fancy-work, but her aunt would not let her sew on Sunday. So she began to read. She felt guilty. She wished that she were heroic enough to give up the Rose week-end, and stay here and help Aunt Elsie through Thanksgiving.

Mrs. Baldwin brought back one letter, after all. It was from Mrs. Rose, for Ellen. It said that Mrs. Rose was delighted that Ellen could be with them, and that she would expect her on the two o'clock train from New York— on Friday! So that Ellen would have Thanksgiving at home, after all.

"Well, I guess you're not too good for some white meat and fixings, party or no party!" Mrs. Baldwin said drily. Ellen could find nothing to say.

The question of clothes remained. Even when

Ellen had run fresh ribbons into her best underwear, and had washed her one pair of silk stockings, and had pressed the cheap yet dainty lace gown, and basted fresh frills into the neck and cuffs of the made-over gray velvet; even then she felt some misgivings. She had the dresses, but what about all the accessories? She did not even know what they were; much less did she own them. Combs, pins, hair-ornaments, scarfs, and belts flitted uneasily through her dreams. She woke, in the cold winter mornings, filled with wretched doubts. But at night, when her lamp, and the stove in the hall downstairs, had somewhat warmed her room, she sat at her mirror, and looked at the lovely vision of rosy cheeks and shy eyes and loosened black hair; and the red lips would curve in spite of themselves into a confident smile.

Might she be the belle of the whole party? . might they all admire her? Might it be a glorious triumph for the newcomer, the beginning of wonderful things. Ellen would jump between the cold, heavy sheets with a smile still in her eyes, and go off to dreams of glory.

Chapter II

All the way up in the train she was busy identifying the various groups about her, as either being bound for the Rose house party, or being unworthy of that classification. Ellen was so excited by this time that she could not breathe naturally; her cheeks were blazing, and her heart beat fast. With her little new suitcase — it was Joe's, and she had given it to him on his birthday a few weeks before — she got down from the train in a sort of joyous panic of expectation. The Roses's chauffeur made himself known, and Ellen, a gray-haired, elderly man, and an exceptionally handsome and self-possessed young woman, all got into the limousine. The two bags that were now associated with Ellen's bag were the finest of their kind, and were plastered with the labels of European hotels. Ellen imagined the pair to be father and daughter, and thought it would be romantic to be rich, and travel abroad with an adoring father.

The lady looked at her amiably enough, but did not speak. Long afterward Ellen realized the absurdity of their two-mile drive in silence; the other two occasionally murmuring a comment upon the scenery, and smiling vaguely when their eyes encountered Ellen. Presently they turned in at a snow-powdered gate and could see a splendid stone mansion, lying along a hillside draped in bare vines, but with heartening smoke arising from a dozen chimneys.

"Isn't that a lovely house!" Ellen said shyly then, and the old man nodded smilingly, while the lady said with a sort of languid sweetness :

"Isn't it, though! I've never seen it before."

"Nor I," Ellen said eagerly, glad not to be the only stranger.

"I designed it for them," the old man said casually, and the lady said, "Oh, did you, dearest ? You smart boy ! "

This did not sound exactly daughterly. Ellen was puzzling over their relationship as they all went up the stone steps, and were admitted to an enormous warm hall, where fires and tables and rich rugs and great bowls of flowers all were jumbled together before her confused senses. Here was Mrs. Rose, magnificent and distrait, murmuring that the children were about somewhere, perhaps they had gone out, giving a maid directions in an aside, and looking a little blankly at Ellen until the girl reminded her brightly: "It's Ellen Latimer!"

"Well, of course it is, you dear child," she said then, with a warming kiss, " and you came up in the car with Mr. and Mrs. Josselyn. Tom, this is a little friend of mine, Miss Latimer; and this is Mr. and Mrs. Josselyn, Ellen. I hope you all talked to each other?"