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Sisters
“Jenny gal, what air yo’ sayin’, talkin’ to yourself that a-way?” The girl suddenly looked up, realizing that she had neared the high hedge that separated the farm from the mansion-like home and its grounds. Laughing happily, she replied: “What you’d call up to my old tricks, Granddad, reciting poetry that Miss Dearborn has had me learn. See, here is a pail brimming full of cool lemonade, if it hasn’t warmed while I crossed the field. I’m sure you must be as thirsty as Grandma and Dobbin and I were.” For answer the old man pushed his wide brimmed straw hat to the back of his head, lifted the pail to his lips and drank it all without stopping. Then said gratefully: “I reckon I kin keep on now fer a spell longer. I was most petered out an’ I do want to finish this field afore I quit.”
The girl left at once, as she wished to hurry home to help with the ironing. She followed the hedge, as the walking was easier, but suddenly she paused and her hand went to her heart. She had heard the voices of girls talking on the other side of the evergreens and what one of them was saying greatly startled the listener.
“Oh, yes, indeed,” a proud voice was saying, “we own about one hundred acres, Ma Mere, brother Harold and I. Our property extends along the seacoast to the highwater mark, then back across the highway up into Laurel Canon, and includes the farm just beyond the hedge.”
Another voice commented, “If your mother should die, you and your brother would be very rich.”
“Oh, yes, fairly,” this with a fine show of indifference. “But if I had my way, all of our country property would be turned into money, then we could live abroad ever after. Mother promised that when she comes in July she will consider selling the farm and the canon property at least. She would have sold the farm two years ago had it not been for my brother Harold. For some reason, which Ma Mere and I cannot in the least understand, he pleaded to have the farm kept. He even offered to take it as part of his share, that and the canon acreage, and let me have the home and estate.”
“What did your mother say to that?” a third voice inquired.
“Too utterly ridiculous to consider, and that, since she wishes to turn something into cash, if we are to live abroad, she will sell one or the other, and, of course, there will be a more ready market for the farm. It’s a most picturesque old place. That is, from a distance. I have never really been there. You see, we have practically lived away from our country home ever since I was born. I have always supposed that, because of our father’s long lingering illness here, Ma Mere has dreaded returning to stay, so imagine my surprise when she wrote that we were all three to spend this summer at the old place.”
Jenny, who had stood transfixed, listening, though against her will, for she scorned eavesdropping, started to run across the ploughed field, stumbling and almost falling in her haste. Oh, what should she do? Should she tell Grandma and Grandpa the terrible possibility that, after all, Rocky Point Farm might be sold, and that very summer? No! No! She couldn’t do that. Oh, if only she had not loaned Etta Heldt part of the honey and egg money, and yet, with a crushing sense of depression, Jenny realized that it did not in the least matter about that paltry sum. If Mrs. Poindexter-Jones wished to sell part of her land, all that her grandfather had saved or could procure would be no inducement to her.
When the orchard was reached, she stood very still for a moment, her hand again on her heart, as though to quiet its anxious beating that was almost a pain. “Jenny Warner,” she said to herself, “you must not let Grandma suspect that anything is wrong because, perhaps, nothing really is. If Harold does not want the farm sold, his mother may heed his wishes.”
Two moments later a smiling girl entered the kitchen, hung her hat on its nail by the door as she said, “Well, Granny Sue, I was longer than I expected to be and you have started on the shirt. Let me have the iron. I’ll promise not to scorch it, the way I did that towel you let me iron when I was just head above the ironing board. Do you remember it? You were so sweet about it when I cried. I recall, even now, how you comforted me by saying that the two ends of the towel would make such nice wash cloths, hemmed up, and that it was lucky the scorch was in the middle of the towel because that would make the wash cloths just the right size.” The old woman had relinquished the iron, and, sitting near in Grandpa’s armed chair, she smiled lovingly at the girl, who continued: “That’s just the way you’ve overlooked all the mistakes I ever made. I do wish that every girl in all the world had a grandmother like you.” Jenny was purposely chattering to keep from telling what was uppermost in her mind.
“What a proud, vain girl that Gwynette Poindexter-Jones must be!” Jenny’s thoughts were very different from her spoken words. “How cold and superior the tone of her voice when she informed her friends that she had never visited the farm, but that it looked very picturesque from a distance.” Jenny’s cheeks flushed as she indignantly told herself that she certainly hoped that the farm never would be visited by – . Her thought was interrupted by her exclamation of dismay. “Grandmother Sue. Here they come!”
The old woman rose hastily from the armed wooden chair. “Who, dearie? Who is it you see?” No wonder she asked, for the girl with the iron safely upheld, that it might not scorch the shirt front, was staring with a startled expression out of the window toward the long lane.
Susan Warner had not seen the missionary’s older daughter in many years, and so she did not recognize her as being the young lady in the lead mounted on a nervous, high-stepping black horse. Following were two other girls in fashionable riding habits on small brown horses. But the old woman did not need to be told who the visitor was, for at once she knew. There was indeed a resemblance to her own Jenny in the face and the very build of the girl in the lead. However, a stranger who did not know the relationship would think little of it because of the difference in the expressions. One face indicated a selfish, proud, haughty nature, the other was far more sensitive, joyous and loving. Jenny was again ironing when the old woman turned from the window to ask, “Do yo’ know who they be?”
“Why, yes, Granny; the one ahead is Gwynette Poindexter-Jones, and the two others are her best friends, the ones who came to Granger Place with her from San Francisco. You know I saw them all close up this noon when I waited on table over at the seminary.”
Susan Warner had stepped out on the side porch when the young lady in the lead drew rein. She wanted to close the door, shutting Jenny in, but since the door stood open from dawn until sunset each day, she knew that such an act would arouse suspicion. But how she did wish she could prevent Jenny’s meeting her very own sister and being treated as an inferior.
The girl at the ironing board listened intently, strainingly, that she might hear if the selling of the farm was mentioned.
Gwynette was saying, “My mother told me to ride over to our farm some day and ask you to see that the big house is put in readiness for occupancy by the first of July. Ma Mere said that you could hire day labor to have the cleaning done, but that she prefers to engage our permanent servants after she arrives.”
How unlike her dear grandmother’s voice was the one that was coldly replying: “I reckon your ma’ll write any orders she has for me. She allays does.”
If Gwynette recognized a rebelliousness in the remark and manner of the farmer’s wife, she put it down to ill-breeding and ignorance, and so said in her grandest air, “Kindly bring us each a drink of milk.” Then, turning to her friends, she added, “All of the produce of the farm is for our use, but since we are seldom here, it is, of course, sold in the village. I suppose Ma Mere receives the profits.”
“Aren’t you being unnecessarily rude?” Beulah Hollingsworth inquired. Gwynette shrugged. “Oh, nobody heard,” she said in a tone which implied that she would not have cared if they had. But she was mistaken, for Jenny had heard and her cheeks flamed with unaccustomed anger.
“Are the bees yours also?” Patricia Sullivan inquired, glancing back at the orchard where a constant humming told that swarms of tiny winged creatures were gathering sweets.
“Why, of course,” was the languidly given reply. “We’ll take some of the honey back with us. These people have to do as I say. They are just our servants.” To the amazement of the three, a flashing-eyed girl darted out on the porch as she cried, “You shall not call my grandmother and my grandfather your servants. And those bees do not belong to you. I bought them, and the white hens, with my very own Christmas and birthday money.”
Susan Warner, coming from the cooling cellar with three goblets of milk, was amazed, for very seldom had she seen a flash of temper in the sweet brown eyes of her girl.
“Never mind, dearie, whatever ’twas they said,” she murmured in a low voice. “Go back to your ironin’, Jenny; do, to please your ol’ granny.”
Obediently the girl returned to the kitchen, but she felt sure, from the fleeting glance she gave the companions of Gwynette, that they were not in sympathy with her rudeness.
After drinking the milk, the three rode away, and from the indignant tones of one of them the listeners knew that the proud daughter of Mrs. Poindexter-Jones had been angered by the attitude of her mother’s servants.
Jenny’s heart was indeed heavy as she contemplated the dreary possibility that her angry words might hasten the day when her loved ones would lose their home.
Sadly she finished her task and put away the ironing board. Then she recalled that an hour before she had assured herself that nothing else of an unusual nature was apt to happen in that day already crowded with events, but she had been mistaken. She had met Harold’s sister and had quarreled with her. Then, and for the first time, she realized that she had half hoped that the daughter of their next door neighbor and she might become friends. Jenny had never had a close girl friend, and like all other girls she had yearned for one.
“Dearie,” her grandmother was making an evident effort at cheeriness, “if you’ll be settin’ the table, I’ll start the pertatoes to fryin’. Here comes your grandpa. He looks all petered out, and he’ll want his supper early.”
Jenny smiled her brightest as she began the task of consoling herself with the thought that Harold Poindexter-Jones was their true friend, and how she did wish that she might see him and ask him if the farm was to be sold.
CHAPTER IX.
AN OLD FRIEND APPEARS
The next morning, while Jenny was standing in front of her mirror in her sun-flooded bedroom nearest the sea, she reviewed in memory the events of the day previous. She found it hard to understand her own anger or why it had flared so uncontrollably. After all Grandpa Si was the farmer in Mrs. Poindexter-Jones’ employ and, what was more, Grandma Sue had been housekeeper over at the big house for years before Jenny had been born, and there was no disgrace in that. The girl challenged the thought that had recalled this almost forgotten fact. Didn’t Miss Dearborn say that it is not your occupation but what you are that really counts?
Determinedly she put from her the troubling memory and centered her attention for the first time on the reflection before her. She did indeed look pretty in the ruffled white muslin with the pink sprig embroidery, and tender brown eyes looked out from under a wide white hat, pink wreathed. There was no complaining thought in her heart because both dress and hat were many summers old.
Opening a drawer in her old-fashioned bureau, Jenny took out her prized pink silk parasol and removed its soft paper wrappings.
A mocking bird just outside her open window poured one joyous song after another into the peaceful sunlit air. For a thoughtful moment the girl gazed out at the shimmering blue sea. “I’m sorry I flared up at Harold’s sister,” she said aloud. Then hearing her grandmother calling from the side porch, she sang out: “Coming, Granny Sue.”
Jenny could not have told why everything and everyone revolved around Harold P-J. She thought of the proud woman, whom she had once seen in the long ago, as “Harold’s mother,” and of the girl whom she had defied as “Harold’s sister,” yet she had not seen the boy since that stormy day two years before.
Skipping to the side porch, she found Grandma Sue looking very sweet in her lavender muslin, and tiny black bonnet with lavender ribbons, already up on the wide seat of the buggy. Breaking a few blossoms from the heliotrope at the corner of the house, Jenny handed them up to her. “Put them on, somewhere,” she called merrily, “and I shall have a cluster of pink Cecile Brunner roses for my belt. Granddad, how dressed up you look in the shirt that I ironed. Do you want a buttonhole bouquet?”
“Me?” the old man’s horrified expression amused the girl. Standing on tiptoe, she kissed his brown, wrinkled cheek, then clambered up beside her grandmother.
Silas Warner climbed over the wheel and took up the loose rein. Dobbin was indeed a remarkable horse. He seemed to know that on Sunday he was to turn toward the village, and yet he stopped after having cantered about two miles and turned down a pine-edged lane that led to St. Martin’s-by-the-Sea. It was the only church in all that part of the country, and so was attended by rich and poor alike. The seminary girls attended the service all together and filled one side of the small church. Jenny, near the aisle, close to the back, was kneeling in prayer when a late arrival entered and knelt in front of her. It was a young man dressed in a military school uniform.
Grandpa Si was the first to recognize the stranger and he whispered to his companion: “Ma ain’t that little Harry?”
Discreetly the good woman nodded, her eyes never leaving the face of the preacher who was beginning his sermon. Jenny’s heart was in a flutter of excitement. Surely it was her friend Harold P-J, and yet, two years before he had been just a boy. Now he was much taller with such broad shoulders and how straight he stood when they rose to sing a hymn. She had not seen his face as she was directly behind him. Perhaps, after all, she was mistaken, she thought, for she had plainly heard his sister tell her friends that Harold was not expected until the mother returned from France in July and it was only the first week in May. But she had not been wrong, as she discovered as soon as the benediction had been said, for the young man turned with such a pleased expression on his good looking face, and, holding out his hand to the older woman, he said with ringing sincerity in his voice. “It’s great, Mrs. Warner, to see you looking so well.” Then, after giving a hearty handshake, and receiving two from the farmer, the boy turned smilingly toward Jenny. “You aren’t, you can’t be that little, rubber-hooded girl whom I picked up two years ago in the storm!”
“I am though.” Jenny’s rose-tinted cheeks were of a deeper hue, “But you also have grown.”
Standing very straight and tall, the boy looked down beamingly upon all three. “I’ll say I have,” he agreed, “but honestly I do hope I’m not going up any higher.” Then after a quick glance across the aisle, where the Granger Place Young Ladies were filing out, he said hastily. “Mrs. Warner, won’t you invite a stranded youth to take dinner with you today? I’ve got to see sister this afternoon, and return to the big city tonight, but I’m pining to have a real visit with you.” Then to Jenny, by way of explanation. “Perhaps you never heard about it, but your Grandma Sue took care of me the first three years of my life and so I shall always consider her a grandmother of mine.” Susan Warner’s mind had flown hastily back to the home larder. What did she have cooked that was fine enough for company. But the youth seemed to understand. “Just anything that you have ready is what I want. No fuss and feathers, remember that. I’ll be there in one hour. Will that be time enough?”
Grandpa Si spoke up heartily. “I reckon you’ll find a dinner waitin’ whenever you get there, Harry-boy.”
Gwynette received her brother with a sneering curve to her mouth that might have been pretty. “Well, didn’t you know that everyone in the church was watching you and criticizing you for making such a fuss over our mother’s servants,” was her ungracious greeting. A dull red appeared in the boy’s cheeks, but he checked the angry words before they were uttered. Instead he said: “Gwynette, may I call at the seminary this afternoon? I have had a letter from Mother and I want to talk it over with you.”
“This afternoon?” a rising inflection of inquiry. “Aren’t you going to take me to The Palms to dine? I’m just starved for a real course dinner and the minute I saw you I made up my mind that was what we would do.”
The boy hesitated. His conscience rebuked him. He knew that their mother would expect him to be chivalrous to his sister. He also knew that a vision in pink and white, a pair of appealing liquid brown eyes had, for the moment caused him to forget his duty. “All right, sis,” he said, trying not to let the reluctance in his heart show in his voice. “Ask your chaperone if you may go with me now.”
As soon as he was alone, Harold hurried around the vine-covered church to the sheds where he hoped to find the Warner family. They were just driving out of the lane, but the old man drew rein when he saw the lad hurrying toward them.
“I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Warner,” he began with a ring of sincerity in his voice, which carried conviction to the listeners. “Gwynette wants me to take her to The Palms for dinner, and, of course, that is what our mother would wish me to do.”
“Wall, wall, that’s all right, Harry,” Grandpa Si put in consolingly. “’Taint as though you can’t come again. You’re welcome over to the farm whenever you’re down this way.”
Harold’s last glance was directed at the girl as also was his parting remark. “I’m going to run down from the city real soon. Good-bye.”
Jenny was truly disappointed as she had hoped to have an opportunity to ask the lad if it were true that his mother planned selling the farm during the summer.
She consoled herself by recalling his promise to come back soon. And then as Dobbin trotted briskly homeward, the girl fell to dreaming of the various things that might happen during the summer.
CHAPTER X.
BROTHER AND SISTER
“The Palms,” architecturally a Mission Inn, was gorgeously furnished and catered only to the ultra-rich. It was located picturesquely on a cliff with a circling palm-edged drive leading to it.
Santa Barbara was both a winter and summer resort and its hostelries were famed the world over.
Gwynette led her brother to the table of her choice in the luxurious dining room, the windows of which, crystal clear, overlooked the ocean. She was fretful and pouting. Harold, after having drawn out her chair, seated himself and looked almost pensively at the shimmering blue expanse, so close to them, just below the cliff.
“You aren’t paying the least bit of attention to me,” Gwynette complained. “I just asked if you weren’t pining to be over in Paris this spring.”
The lad turned and looked directly at the girl, candor in his clear grey eyes.
“Why no, sister, I do not wish anything of the sort,” he replied sincerely. “What I do hope is that our mother will be well enough to return to us, and that the quiet of our country home will completely restore her health.”
Gwynette shrugged her shoulders, but said nothing, until their orders had been given; then she remarked:
“I don’t see why our mother needs to rusticate for three months in this stupid place. If we could have a house party, of course, that would help to make it endurable for me, but in her last letter Ma Mere distinctly said that we were to invite no one, as her nerves were in need of absolute quiet.”
The boy, who had folded his arms looked at his sister penetratingly, almost critically. Suddenly he blurted out:
“Do you know, Gwynette, sometimes I think you do not care, really care, deep in your heart for our mother as much as I do. In fact, I sometimes wonder if you care for anyone except yourself.”
The girl flushed angrily. “Your dinner conversation is most ungracious, I am sure,” she flung at him, but paused and looked at a young man also in uniform, who was hurrying toward their table with an undeniably pleased expression on his tanned face. Harold rose and held out his hand, glad of any interruption.
“Well, Tod, where did you drop from?” Then to the girl he said: “Sister Gwynette, this is a chap from the same San Francisco prison in which I am incarcerated – Lieutenant James Creery by name.”
The girl held up a slim, white hand over which the youth bent with an ardor which had won for him the heart of many a young lady in the past and probably would in the future, but in the present he was welcomed as a much-needed diversion from a most upsetting family quarrel. Having accepted their invitation to make a third at the small table, apart from the others, the young man seated himself, saying to the girl: “Don’t let me interrupt any confidences you two were having. I know you don’t see each other often, since we poor chaps have but one free Sunday a month.”
Gwynette smiled her prettiest and even her brother conceded that if Gwyn would only take the trouble to smile now and then she might be called handsome.
“Our conversation was neither deep nor interesting to anyone but me. I was wishing that we were to spend the summer – well, anywhere rather than in our country home four miles out of this stupid town.”
“Stupid?” the young man, nicknamed Tod, glanced about at the charmingly gowned young women at the small tables near them. “This crowd ought to keep things stirring.”
Gwynette shook her head. “Nothing but weekend guests motored up from Los Angeles or down from San Francisco. From Monday to Friday the place is dead.”
And so the inconsequential talk flowed on, until at last James Creery excused himself, as he had an engagement. Again bowing low over Gwynette’s hand, he departed. The smiling expression in the girl’s eyes changed at once to a hard glint.
“Well, you said that you came down especially to talk over a letter from our mother. You might as well tell me the worst and be done with it.”
The lad made no attempt to hide his displeasure. “There was no worst to it, Gwynette. I merely hoped that you would wish to plan with me some pleasant surprise as a welcome to our mother’s homecoming. I find that I was mistaken. Shall we go now?”
The girl rose with an almost imperceptible fling of defiance to her shapely head. “As you prefer,” she said coldly. “I really cannot say honestly that I feel any great enthusiasm about we three settling down in humdrum fashion in our country place, but, if it is my duty, as you seem to infer, to pretend that I am overjoyed, you may plan whatever you wish and I will endeavor to seem enthusiastic.”
They were again in the small car before the lad replied: “Do not feel that it is incumbent on you in any way to co-operate with me in welcoming my mother.” There was an emphasis on the my which did not escape the notice of the girl, and it but increased her anger. She was convinced that her brother meant it as an implied rebuke, and she was right.
Gwynette bit her lips and turned away to hide tears of self pity. When the seminary was reached, the lad assisted the haughty girl from the car with his never-failing courtesy, accompanied her to the door, ventured a conciliating remark at parting, but was not even rewarded with a glance.
Harold was unusually thoughtful as he rode along the highway. He passed the gate to the lane leading to the farm, assuring himself that he was in no mood for visiting even with friends.
CHAPTER XI.
VIEWS AND REVIEWS
Monday morning dawned gloriously, but it was with great effort that Jenny made her mood match the day. Often her grandparents glanced at her and then at one another as they ate their simple breakfast. At last her grandfather asked: “What be yo’ studyin’ on so hard, dearie? Is it anything about yo’re schoolin’ that’s frettin’ you?”
