Scribner's Magazine/Volume 37/Number 1/The Goddesses from the Machine
By Josephine Daskam Bacon
You see, Norah is one of the upstairs girls at the School and gets around to our hall about eleven o’clock. And Ben’s practice hour is from ten to eleven, and she always comes up to wash her hands, because she comes after Louise Wallin and the keys are always sticky from jujube paste. She hates practicing, Louise does, and it’s all that keeps her up.
So Norah was always there, and Ben got to know her quite well. Ben always knows the servants, somehow, and they are almost always fond of her. Well, one day Norah looked very sad, and the next day she was sadder, and wouldn’t talk at all, and the day after that, when Ben asked her what the matter was, she burst out crying.
It was Charles, who brings the fresh vegetables from up in the country somewhere. They were engaged, and all was bright before them, and then misfortune, like a menacing cloud, blotted out forever all the happiness of their life. Not that Norah said it like that, of course, but it was that way in the novel we began about it. It was named “His Evil Star, or the Mistake of a Life Time,” and it was really very good—parts of it. Connie Van Cott wrote one chapter and of course we might have known she would have them all die, and she did. Elaine and Archibald and the father all said some poetry about heaven and died, and we couldn’t go on with the thing very well after that.
You see, Norah and Charles had quarrelled about something, and while they were quarrelling, another girl, that works in one of the candy-shops in the village, just led him away from Norah. Norah said she—the other girl—wasn’t fit to be spoken to and wore a great big switch of false hair, “But what does that matter, Miss Benigna, when a man once loses his head?” she said. She wrote long letters to Charles, and he sent one of them to Norah and wrote a note that said that the woman who could write letters like that when far apart had more love in her heart than a girl that never sent him a line. And that was why Norah felt so bad, because she couldn’t write except the very plainest things, and of course, plain writing is no use in love letters. She knew that as well as anybody, but what could she do?
Ben asked her to show her the letter the girl wrote, but Norah couldn’t because she had torn it up into little pieces and then chewed up the pieces
Ben wrote the letter. and spit them out in the road for the horses to tread upon, she said.
“It’s this way with me entirely, Miss,” she told Ben, “much as I may feel the heart in my breast beating in sorrow, I couldn’t write it if it was to save my life, at all.”
Which was fortunate for her, because Ben was just the one to write it, though she didn’t feel that way. If you can write such exciting things as Ben can, you don’t have to really mean any of them, you see.
So Ben said: “I’ll write a letter for you, Norah, for I’m sure I can do it beautifully.”
And Norah said: “But that'll be forgery I’m afraid, Miss, and I’m likely to get arrested.”
And Ben said, no, not if she signed her name herself. So Norah thanked her, and Ben wrote the letter. It was a little like one in one of Charles Reade’s books—I can’t remember which one, because we have been reading them all, lately, and they get mixed up in my head. But some of the things in it made Norah cry, Ben said, when she read it to her. She read it to us first, and parts of it were certainly grand. In one place it said:
“You tell me that all must be at an end between us, but how can I submit to such torture? A woman’s heart, my friend, is like the summer sea—a changing surface, but an unplumbed, constant depth!” That last sentence was all out of a novel. I don’t know who by, but the cover is dark green.
Another place was, “Do you remember that last night in the conservatory? Shall I ever forget the waltz they played? You were in white”—I can’t remember any more of it, but even Ben had to admit that it was a pretty fine part. Afterwards we remembered that that was out of a letter to a girl from a man, but Ben couldn't copy it all over again, so we left it in. You see, Norah never was in a conservatory, probably, so it didn’t matter, as I don’t suppose the fresh vegetable man ever was either.
Anyhow she signed it—she had to copy the way Ben wrote her name a million times, I should think—and the vegetable man came to call the next night. Norah wasn’t surprised, she said.
“If it’s letters he wants, Miss, sure that one will lift him right up off his feet, he’ll come runnin’ so quick,” she told Ben, and it was true. He told her he’d never seen a finer letter in his life, let alone got one, and that settled it for him, for he always loved her best. And they got married very soon and we clubbed together and gave her a cut-glass celery dish. And she will always pray for Ben as long as the breath lasts in her.
Well, that was a great success, of course, and it made Ben just crazy to do something else like it, which is the way she always is. But there wasn’t anybody else that needed marrying that we knew of. And I am sure that we should never have thought of Miss Peck all by ourselves. It was the Pie—who is usually called Miss Appleby—that started it. Connie Van Cott happened to be passing Miss Peck’s door, which was open, and she was sort of puttering around and dusting it and patting the couch pillows. And right behind Connie came the Pie and Miss Parrott; and the Pie said (in that nasty patronizing way of hers that makes you crazy to stick out your tongue and contradict):
“There is really an excellent wife lost to somebody in that poor creature: she is the most domestic soul in the world.”
“Is she?” says Polly Cracker (her name is Luella McCracken Parrott).
“Yes, indeed,” says the Pie, “she’d ask nothing better than to sew on buttons for the rest of her life. It’s a pity she hasn’t the opportunity.”
Now of course that was foolishness, because nobody would want to sew on buttons all their life, even if they were as old as Miss Peck, who must have been twenty-five or thirty. But Connie knew that she was willing to sew on some buttons, because she put one on her velvet coat once when Con was in a hurry and couldn’t wait for Miss Demarest. And so she wanted to do her a kindness in turn, to balance in her book. She kept a conduct-book, with all the good deeds on one side and the bad ones on the other, and then a page for the kind things that were done to her and one for those she did back. She used to balance it on Sundays, and whenever there were too many bad deeds she’d even it up by putting down as good deeds all the wicked things that she might have done, but didn’t. She called them Resisted Temptations, but we never believed they really counted, exactly, though it made her awfully mad if we said so.
So she decided that she best thing she could do to pay Miss Peck for the button was to find a husband for her. And she asked Ben to help her with it on account of her experience with Norah and the vegetable man. Well, Ben was interested, of course, but she didn’t see who we could get, because there are so few men that come to the school. And of course it would have to be a gentleman. There was J. Frank Hayward, that teaches singing, but we always thought he must be married, he was so fat. And there was Captain Edgar Millard the fencing master; but though his name sounds well, he is horrid, really, and nobody would want to marry him. He has the riding classes, too, and all the girls are terribly afraid of him, he is so cross and speaks so quick. Pinky West thought at one time she might fall in love with him, but he said that women and horses were the same thing when it came to managing them, and of course she hated him ever after. Then there is M. Duval, who comes for conversation every Tuesday; but if you could hear him sniffle once, it would be enough.
Nobody thought about Mr. Angell for a moment. He is small and he has rather pink cheeks and yellow hair, just like a little baby chicken. It is always mussed and ruffled, and the light shines through it so that every hair shows. He is quite bashful, too, though he isn’t young at all, and blushes quite a good deal. He is very polite—about the politest person I ever saw. One day we counted the number of times he said Excuse me and I beg your pardon and Thank you in one morning, and it was fifteen times for the first of these, and twelve times for the second, and thirty-four times for the third! But he can draw beautifully, just the same, one thing as well as another. Of course, anybody can draw some things—a church with the moon behind it or a well with an old-fashioned sweep; but Mr. Angell can do a little brook winding about, or just a hill going down, which is really very hard.
Well, we were in the assembly room, a lot of us—we go in for an hour on Thursdays, according as our recitations give us time, no matter about the large or small girls—and he bent over to correct one of the girl’s work. She was drawing a banana, and it looked more like a birch-bark canoe than anything else—it was Mary Watterson—and one of the buttons burst off his vest and rolled on the floor. Of course we laughed, and he blushed and ran after it and said, “Excuse me, young ladies; I beg your pardon, I’m sure. Ah, yes, thank you, Miss West,” and put it in his pocket.
Then he went back to Mary, and he was so embarrassed he drew over the whole banana, and put in shading, too, with a stump!
“You see, young ladies,” he said pretty soon, “a poor bachelor has a great many troubles, and not the least one is his buttons—I beg your pardon, are his buttons!”
I looked at Connie and she caught my eye, and we both saw that that was the very thing: Mr. Angel was just made for Miss Peck! By what he said himself, as you see.
Although I think he was all right the first time, and should have said, is his buttons. The least one is: you can’t say, one are. But Connie says no, because you say three are one, when you mean the Trinity. Maybe you can disobey the rules of grammar for anything so important as the Trinity, but not for buttons, I don’t think.
Well, we told Ben about it, and of course she saw at once that it was the very thing. But we didn’t any of us see how it was to be accomplished, because it would never have entered their heads, of course, and in that way it was quite different from Norah and the vegetable man, who were madly in love with each other to begin with, and would certainly have died—at least Norah would—if something hadn’t been done.
But because a thing is hard never stopped Ben from doing it yet, and after she had thought for a while she suddenly remembered just how to manage. It was in a book of Pinky West’s. This is the part: “It was done in the good old-fashioned way, which must have been ancient before Beatrice and Benedick were dreamed of. Somebody told her that he was head over ears in love with her, and somebody told him that she was really in a sad way on his account. It is unoriginal but very practical, and its success is merely a matter of time.”
Ben never forgets little bits like that, which may come in useful later, and it is really surprising how anything you want to do you can find in a book. Even if you are sure you are the first to do it, you just probably haven’t happened to read the book it’s in, that’s all. Even Ben says that, and I should like to know the book she hasn’t read.
So that was the way to do it. Beatrice and Benedick are Shakespeare, which I am sure lots of people would read if they didn’t think they ought to. For a long time I thought it was like “Pilgrim’s Progress” and the Bible and “Ivanhoe,” all of which are very dull, but great. But if you read “Othello” once, you'll see. It’s really very exciting and quite true, I’m sure. It must be grand, when it’s all acted out.
And when you see how easily Beatrice and Benedick fell in love when they simply hated each other before, you will understand that it was nothing to make Miss Peck and Mr. Angell, because they didn’t hate each other at all: they just didn’t care. It was Connie who did the most of it, because she was anxious to reward Miss Peck for her kindness about the button. But it was Ben who thought up the things.
The first thing happened the next Thursday. Some of the old girls draw very well indeed, and every other week they draw some person or other, usually one of the girls, who sits on the platform. It is just like Trilby, in Paris, which is the finest book I ever read, except that they all wear clothes. Well, that Thursday the girl was sick that was going to pose, and there didn’t seem to be anybody that wasn’t busy, that could sit still enough. And Ben, who got in somehow, though she belonged in geography, looked out of the window and saw Miss Peck sitting on the side porch with a book in her hand.
“I think I know some one who could, Mr. Angell,” she said, “I don’t believe Miss Peck is busy. Would she do?”
I don’t believe he had ever heard of Miss Peck before in his life, or else he’d forgotten; because I’m sure he thought she was one of the girls.
“Why, certainly, by all means; thank you very much; it would be very nice, I’m sure, if you could find her,” he said, “might I trouble you ”
“Oh, it won’t trouble me at all,” says Ben. “I’ll get her,” and off she scoots.
Miss Peck was very much surprised when Ben told her that Mr. Angell wanted to know if she would pose for them as a particular favor to him, as of course she might be, especially if she knew anything about Mr. Angell and how he’d never dare say anything like that for a minute.
“Why, Benigna, are you sure that you understood?” she asked her; “he must have meant for me to overlook the class; I thought the girls posed for each other.”
“So they do,” says Ben, “as a usual thing, but he wants you especially, if you are willing to. He thinks you would make a beautiful picture!”
Now you'd think that that would please her to death, wouldn’t you? All the more as it wasn’t so. But it didn’t.
Ben says she looked at her so queerly and turned a kind of dark red, and said very strictly:
“Benigna, what does this mean?”
Ben was pretty scared, but she was plucky.
“I don’t mean beautiful in the common way,” she said kind of reprovingly, as if Miss Peck was very stupid not to see, “but beautiful for a picture. Mr. Angell says it’s a great mistake that the prettiest people make the prettiest pictures. He doesn’t care for them. It’s what’s in the face, he says.”
Which was all true—that Mr. Angell said it, I mean. Not that there is much sense in it, of course. But it worked.
“Oh!” said Miss Peck, looking quite different. “Ah, yes.” Then in a minute she said, “That is quite true. Certainly I will come, if Mr. Angell wants me,” and along she came.
Well, when he saw her he was much surprised, for I don’t think he expected a teacher.
“This—this is a great honor, I’m sure; thank you very much; we are greatly indebted to you,” he said, and anybody would think that he was perfectly crazy to have her and hadn’t dared to ask before, when really he was embarrassed to death.
So Miss Peck sat up on the platform and the advanced girls drew her, and it really did seem as if they did better than usual. They were quite excited at having a teacher, you see, and there were one or two drawings that looked quite a little like her. Mr. Angell noticed this, of course, and when the hour was up, he made a funny little bow and said to the class:
“I feel that we will all agree, young ladies, that we owe a vote of thanks to Miss Peck for a very successful morning. I have never known the drawing from the figure so successful, and I feel sure it is owing to the inspiration of the model—if I may say so.”
Then we all clapped our hands, and Miss Peck blushed, and Mr. Angell blushed, and it was quite exciting. But of course the real reason was that Miss Peck didn’t look like anybody in special: I mean she looked a little like everybody, and if you made her chin go back a little and drew enough hair, it looked like her—it couldn’t help it. You’d think anybody would: see that, wouldn’t you?
There was one drawing that was specially good—Elizabeth Van Horn’s—and Mr. Angell worked a good deal on it and touched it up here and there and complimented her about it and made a kind of cloudy background for it, and advised her to keep it and send it home to her family to show how well she was doing.
Well, of course he didn’t know, but that was about the very last thing in the world that E. Van Horn would do. He—Mr. Angell—is the perfect image of her Cousin Bates, that she simply hates and despises, but he will have a lot of money and her family think that maybe they will be engaged: which will never be, if she has to go into a convent. He is invited to her home for the vacations, and she dreads them. So of course she’d never do anything Mr. Angell said—it would be like pleasing Bates Van Horn. She hates to have him compliment her, and she threw the picture straight into the waste-basket and made a face at Mr. Angell behind his back. But Connie took it out, to keep it, she thought the background was so sweet. And then Ben said,
“Why don’t you send it to Miss Peck and make her think Mr. Angell sent it to her?”
Of course we saw in a moment what a good idea that was, and Connie wrote in the corner “W. P. A.” the way he signs it in his sketches, and rolled it up and laid it on her schoolroom desk. We never saw it again in this life, so I am sure she got it. In fact, we are sure for another reason—namely, that she said so. But not just then.
Now it was time to do something to Mr. Angell, for it was no use having Miss Peck in love with him unless he loved her back. And we couldn’t send him a picture because, in the first place, she couldn’t draw, and in the second place he’s so polite he’d thank her for it, and that would explain. Ben said she wouldn’t thank him, because she’d think he’d rather she wouldn’t; and that must have been the way, because she never did. But we had to do something. Ben couldn’t think of a thing and I don’t know whether we would ever have got any further at all if it hadn’t been for—who do you think? The Pie herself! Mr. Angell had left his umbrella, and came back for it next day, and as he was walking down the main walk the Pie walked along with him and Connie and Ben were hanging around keeping him in sight, hoping something would turn up.
“What fine spring days we are having,” says the Pie, and Mr. Angell said yes, we were. “I wonder that you don’t take your class out of doors on some little sketching tour some day,” says the Pie, just as if he was about six years old and she was his aunt. “I am sure you would benefit in more ways than one;” and she went talking along the way she does, about ten minutes, without saying anything you’d want to hear.
“Why, thank you, that would be very pleasant, Miss Appleby, if there would be no objection, I’m sure,” Mr. Angell said.
“I cannot see how Miss Naldreth could make the slightest objection,” says the Pie; “there would be a teacher, of course, to chaperon them, and there are so many pretty bits about,” and then she went into the gymnasium and he went on by himself.
Well, Ben and Connie came through the hedge and said good afternoon, and sort of walked along with him and talked about drawing—Ben says you don’t have to talk about their classes to the teachers, but we do, of course—and finally he asked them if they thought the young ladies would like to go out in the country sketching, and they said yes, indeed, and Ben said:
“Would one of the teachers go too?”
“Oh, yes,” said he; “why?”
“Then Miss Peck could!” Connie burst right out, and it frightened her so she couldn’t say another word.
“Why, is she so fond of the country?” asked Mr. Angell.
“Not so fond of the country, exactly,” Ben said in an awful hurry, or else she could never have said it at all, “but of—of other things!”
“What do you mean by that?” said Mr. Angell, looking very queerly at her.
Well, she had to go on.
“Of—of—I mean, of you!” she said, sort of gasping. She says it felt as if she had run up a lot of stairs, and she was as red as fire. And Connie too.
“I don’t understand you,” Mr. Angel said; and his voice was quite different, both of them say—low, and very strict.
Now here is a strange thing. Ben was frightened to death—Ben! She says she was going to own up and tell the whole thing, and who do you think stopped her? Why, Connie. She had a kind of feeling what Ben was going to do, and she squeezed her hand hard, and said very fast,
“We—we just thought you might like to know!” and began to run away and dragged Ben with her. And they ran like the wind to a place of safety. Ben says she would never go through that again if nobody ever married anybody in the world. She says if making your own love is anything like making other people’s, she will never, never do it. She says you feel perfectly awful, and yet you have to go on. Her throat got all dry, just like a book. And she and Connie both cried.
They only looked back once and there was Mr. Angell, standing just where they left him, leaning on his umbrella and staring at a tree. He looked strange, but partly pleasant.
Well, you’d think that would have been enough for them, wouldn’t you? And so it was. Ben said that she wouldn’t do another thing about it and that Connie could pay for her buttons by herself, and Connie thought that she’d find some other way of rewarding Miss Peck. But alas! it was of no avail. Would you believe it—they persisted in going on falling in love, long after Ben and Connie stopped!
The very next Thursday Mr. Angell sent up to know if he might take the class out of doors, and Miss Naldreth said yes, and looked it up on the schedule and found out that Miss Peck wasn’t busy, and sent Connie to ask her to please chaperon them! Wasn’t that disgusting?
So Connie had to, and Miss Peck nearly broke her neck hurrying to change her dress; and she pulled her hair out over her ears, too, and really she looked quite pretty. And she blushed, and Mr. Angell blushed, and he had on a new gray suit. Nothing could have been better if Connie hadn’t changed her mind about rewarding Miss Peck that way; but she had, and so it was quite disgusting, as I said. And they talked all the time to each other, and going through the village Miss Peck never noticed the line, and Pinky West and E. Van Horn stopped and had an ice-cream soda and caught up again! What do you think of that?
We went to a kind of a field with a big tree in it and a brook, and lots of the girls had brought candy and things they could get into their pockets, and it was a kind of picnic, though not a good one, as there was, of course, no lemonade nor sandwiches. Still, it was better than nothing. She never noticed what we were eating. I’d like to have seen that happen with the Pie along!
He kept asking her different things about the best place to stop, and what would be the prettiest thing to draw, and a whole lot of things that didn’t make any difference anyway, because nobody did very well. I suppose it was because we weren’t used to drawing out doors. Mr. Angell-drew one himself, and of course that was very good. There was a church-steeple ’way off in the back and a cow in the front, although there really was no cow. There was a steeple, but not in the place he put it.
We were late in getting back and I rather hoped Miss Peck would catch it, and that might stop her being in love; but no—Miss Naldreth herself met us in the hall, and said this open-air work was a fine idea and that she should send them often and she was grateful to Miss Peck and Mr. Angell for giving us rosy cheeks and a fine appetite! Which we didn’t have, as it was cold-meat day, and we’d had so much stuff in the field, anyway. But they blushed and Ben saw Mr. Angell give Miss Peck the picture he’d drawn, just before she went upstairs.
Well, it went on from bad to worse, and finally he invited her to a concert in the village, and then everybody talked about it. She curled her hair every day, and once when one of the other teachers was walking the older girls out they met them taking a walk, and the girls all giggled and they both blushed like anything. She had on her striped silk and a new lace collar—a grand one, Pinky said.
And Connie was the maddest thing you ever saw. She seemed to take a kind of spite at them, and you’d think to hear her talk that they did it just to hurt her feelings. She kept a watch on everything Miss Peck did, and then told us about it, and scolded away like anything. She got a headache the day we went out sketching, from sitting in the sun, and she said that if she had brain fever and died it would lie at Miss Peck’s door.
Ben wanted to hear him propose, because she never had heard anybody, and I’m sure I wish she had had my chance, for it was the stupidest thing in the world. If anybody proposed to me that way, I shouldn’t count it, because he didn’t do one thing properly. That is, I shouldn’t count it very much—nor Connie either. Of course if he had done it in any proper place—a conservatory, or at a ball, or in the woods, like so many people, we should never have known about it, most probably. But he didn’t. I shouldn’t suppose he ever read a novel in his life, from he way he acted.
I was in a private place in the cellar of the gym, reading a book Pinky West lent me. She did it to pay me for letting her use my room for something and keeping still about it. This place is behind the storm doors that are piled up there and some ladders and stands for flower-pots. I have cleaned it out and it is like a very little room with walls about up to your shoulders. I found an old rug and put it down, and I usually have some apples and a book there, and it is very snug and pleasant, being near the furnace in the winter, and damp and cool in the summer. In the book that I was reading—“Captive Queenie” is the name of it—I was just at the proposal part, and I copied a little of it afterward, just to show you the difference between a real love-making and what Mr. Angell did.
“Only the throbbing of the distant violins and the musical drip of a fountain over the costly ferns disturbed the stillness of the perfumed atmosphere. Evesham glanced down at the great tear-filled violet eyes, the tangled mesh of sunny hair and the quivering rose--leaf chin pressed to his breast, and strong man as he was, trembled with passion and despair.
“‘Ah, Queenie,’ he cried hoarsely, ‘beautiful little Queenie, how have you bewitched me? Sweetheart, my own little sweetheart, will you leave all and come with me? Bound as I am by every tie of honor to another, I would break those bonds like straws at one touch of your dimpled finger! I have little to offer but a name that has been handed down from father to son for as many generations of noble service as years have passed over your golden head; but that and my two hands must ever be yours, as my heart has been since that day I first saw you in the orchard—a blossom among the fruit!?”
Well, of course that made it worse, when Mr. Angell began:
The first thing I heard was Miss Peck’s voice saying,
“This is very welcome after the glare,” and then Mr. Angell said:
“Yes, and I don’t think we shall be disturbed here. Won’t you sit down?”
Mr Angell worked a good deal on it.—Page 22.
So she sat on an old flower-pot and he stood up in front of her. He had his hat stuffed under his arm and his hair looked more like a chicken than ever—it stood up all around his head.
“You must know what I’m going to say,” that’s the way he began. Then he waited awhile and then he stuck his hands into his pockets and teetered back and forth. Of course he didn’t know it, but he did. And then he proposed. You may not believe it, but this is exactly what he said to her. I shouldn’t believe it myself.
“I don’t think I’m very hard to live with,” he said, “‘my sister says not, and she’s a very nice girl—Ethel, you know. I think you’d like each other. The house is my own. I—I hope you will—would you? That is, I mean, do you think you could?”
That was all. And his hands in his pockets all the time, Of course I don’t think it’s necessary to kneel down every time, though Connie does; but I never heard of anybody doing it like that—never. She wasn’t looking at him at all, so perhaps it wasn’t quite so bad.
And what do you think she answered?
“I’m sure you would be very nice to live with,” she said, “and I’d love to meet your sister!”
Well, if you call that making love, all right; but I don’t, that’s all. I was ashamed of both of them.
Then he sat down on the ground by her, all curled up with his legs under him, and they sort of whispered, so I couldn’t hear very well, but it was nothing in particular. They might just as well have talked out loud. He took hold of her hand and patted it, and of course that was something.
Finally he asked her something I couldn’t quite hear, and she said:
“It was when you sent me the picture.”
“Not till then?” said he, and she said,
“Oh, I don’t mean the second one; I mean the first one—of me.”
“The first one? Of you?” he said. “What do you mean?”
“When I posed,” says Miss Peck. “Didn’t you send it? You signed it.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea what you mean,” said he, staring at her. “I never sent you a picture in my life, Katharine.”
She sat up straight and I felt very queer.
“Perhaps you didn’t draw it, either?” she asked him, in a stiff kind of way.
“i certainly didn’t,” he said, just as stiff.
She stood up and looked at him, and I never thought Miss Peck could look so strict and dignified.
“Possibly you do not recall your particular request that I should pose for you on that occasion?” she said. (Her very words.)
“I certainly do not,” says Mr. Angell, as red as a beet, “for I never made any such request. I don’t understand you.”
“There seems to have been a general misunderstanding,” she said, and turned her back on him and started off.
“Good-by, Mr. Angell.”
He jumped up and ran after her.
“Don’t go, Katharine, don’t go!”’ he said. “It’s some mistake; somebody has played a very silly trick on us, but I—we—it’s just the same, isn’t it ?”
“Certainly not,” she told him. “Do you think I can endure such a disgraceful thing as this? I am going to have this matter thoroughly sifted, and then shall leave the school immediately.”
Well, I was awfully scared. Of course we didn’t suppose they’d get talking this way. I wished Ben had been there, but she wasn’t. So I had to think what to do myself. I jumped out of the little place and caught hold of Miss Peck’s skirt and said very fast,
“You needn’t have it sifted because I can tell you all about it and we didn’t mean any harm. It was Elizabeth Van Horn’s picture. And it was Connie’s idea, to pay you for the button you sewed on.”
Mr. Angell grabbed hold of my arm. “What are you doing here? What do you know about this?” he said.
“Did Miss Van Horn have the impertinence to send me that picture?” said Miss Peck.
“No indeed, she didn’t,” I told her. “She threw it away and Connie picked it up and”
“Wait a moment,” said Mr. Angell, “is Connie a little girl with a long braid and blue eyes?”
“Yes, sir,” said I.
“Ah,” said he. And he thought a minute and looked at me very quick and then away.
“Now listen,” he said, “and answer me carefully. Why did Miss Connie save the picture?”
“She thought it was too nice to throw away,” I said.
“Ah, yes,” said he, “I begin to see. And she thought Miss Peck would like to have it, because I had said it was such a good piece of work?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“And you thought Miss Peck would have more respect for it if she thought I had drawn it?”
“Yes, sir,” I said again.
“So you signed my name?”
“Initials,” I said—“W. P. A. It was forging, of course. But you did the background and the pompadour.”
“That is true,” said he, “I went over it very carefully.”
“This is no explanation whatever,” Miss Peck “I must ask you to let me go.”
“Katharine, I beg you to stay,” said Mr. Angell. “I have not finished. Please sit down.”
Really, it seems foolish, but anybody would have minded him. He looked tall, somehow, and different. He stood up just as straight, and you didn’t mind about his hair a bit. I thought he was more important than Captain Millard.
Ben says it is because he is a gentleman and Captain Millard is not, though very grand.
So she sat down and began to cry.
“What did you say about paying for a button?” he asked me.
“Miss Peck sewed on a button for Connie, and she wanted to pay her back,” I said.
“Oh! by giving her that picture ?” said he.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“You see, Katharine,” he said to her, “this is not so bad as you think. Are you satisfied?”
He kept asking her what would be the prettiest thing to draw.—Page 24.
“No, I am not,” she said; “you told me yourself that you never sent for me to pose, and I thought—I thought” and then she cried so hard I felt sorry for her. He got quite red.
“I swear I can’t remember what I did say,” he sort of muttered, and he looked at me.
“You did ask for her,” I said, “only you didn’t pay much attention. There wasn’t anybody to pose and you said, ‘by all means,’ and”
“Why, of course—I remember perfectly,” he said. “The child is quite right, Katharine.”
“And I suppose you don’t remember that you said ‘the prettiest face didn’t make the prettiest picture—it was what was in the face’?” she said, right into her handkerchief.
He jumped and gave me the strangest look. I felt almost afraid of him.
“I haven’t forgotten it at all,” he said, very calm; “I did say it.”
She looked at him a minute then, and smiled a little.
“Really?” she asked him, and then she began to cry again.
“But why should you think of me?” she said. “I thought you did all those things, but what did you think I did? What made you” And then she cried so hard she couldn’t talk plain.
“You wait here,” he told me. Then he went over and kneeled down by her and took hold of her hand. (You see he did know something.) I felt so bad by that time I wished I’d never been born. It was dreadful and solemn and all mixed up.
“Katharine,” he said to her, and I’ll never forget a word of what he said if I live to be thirty or forty, “I don’t want to begin our life together by lying to you. Suppose that we do owe our happiness to the mistakes and stupidities of some ignorant children, is it any the less happiness? Are you very wise to scorn it for that reason? What difference does it make how I came to think you the sweetest woman I know, so that I do think so? And you know I do. Do you wish me to believe that your love was not real?”
“No,” she said, sort of gulping; and so did I.
“Then do you wish me to leave you, in spite of the fact that we love each other?” he said, very low down, but very plain.
“Oh, no! Oh, no!” she said, and she put her arms around his neck and I began to cry too—I couldn’t help it.
He held out his hand to me, and I came over by them. I just loved him.
“Now,” he said, “I am going to ask you both to promise me something. I want you, Katharine, to make me a present of this promise to show your trust in me. Will you promise never to mention this matter to me or to anyone again under any circumstances, and not to pursue it further, directly or indirectly, in the slightest degree?”
“Oh, I can’t,” she said. “Don’t ask me!”
“You must,” said he, and shut his mouth tight, “and you will, if you care enough for me.”
“Then I will,” she said, very soft. “I promise you, Walter.”
“And I promise the same to you,” he said, “and do you, my dear child, promise the same?”
It was like the catechism. Connie would have liked it.
“Yes, but can’t I tell Connie?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said, “you may explain to Miss Connie that I have been at work for some time on a portrait—better, I hope, than the one she presented. You are both old enough to know that you did very wrong in that matter, and that you might have made a great deal of trouble. People have gone to prison for signing other people’s initials. (Which is quite true.) In this case, if I had drawn the picture I should have given it to Miss Peck, so you were not so far out of the way; but you might have made great trouble. Did anyone else know about the picture?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, “Benigna Hewitt.”
“Has she black eyes and straight brown hair?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Ah, yes. Well, explain it to her, too, and I think that’s all,” he said. “You understand that Miss Peck could easily have you expelled from the school if she chose, but she does not choose. I only tell you this to make you understand the situation. Do you think you do?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and got out. I tell you, I was surprised to find it was the same afternoon outside, so much had happened.
Connie was scared to death, and Ben was, too—more than she pretended. For of course it was forging Ben said it would evermore be a lesson to us, and so it will.
The teachers gave her a mahogany desk and the girls in her classes a chafing-dish. And now I suppose she is sewing on all his buttons.
But Connie never dared to put it on her page of good deeds.
Behind some ladders and stands for flower-pots.—Page 24.