The White Lady (14 page)

H
olly Beech stood with his feet wide apart, his rough, freckled hands on the hips of his jean overalls, his red hair ruffled in its usual carroty mist over his large head, his shaggy yellow eyebrows drawn in a good-natured frown, as he studied the neat white card that Jimmy had tacked up at the station. Holly was the truck driver for the freight station. If anyone moved into Rushville, Holly handled all their goods, and his road shoulders upheld cherished pianos and heavy old lounges and desks.

His usual haunts were the station and the drugstore, but he was attracted by the new tearoom. He had noted Norah’s clean capability when he moved the furniture.

Jimmy sidled up behind Holly. Jimmy wished to promote custom. He had just seen his six associates march homeward with six large tales of the new tearoom and the ice cream, and he felt that the ball had commenced to roll. But he had passed through the kitchen not three minutes ago, and the odors that greeted his nostrils had been comparable to none that had ever entered his experience, not excepting the time when he went with his brother to the town twenty miles away and passed by a candy kitchen where molasses candy was being made.

Jimmy felt that it would be an everlasting pity if that delicious dinner should be allowed to go uneaten and unknown in the village of Rushville. He determined this should not be, not if he had to go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in, as it were. No drummer could have been more enthusiastic than Jimmy.

“Ever ben thur to dinner?” he ventured to ask Holly, which, considering it was the first opportunity that anyone had had to go there to dinner, was a rather daring question for such as Jimmy to ask such of Holly.

“You speak’s if you had, youngster,” said Holly shortly, half ashamed to be caught reading the advertisement.

“Wal, not ’xactly to dinner sence the openin’,” said Jimmy knowingly, “but I ben over fer a lunch this mornin’ already. They hev the best eyes cream I’ve ever et. Most enny kind you care to call for.”

“You don’t say,” said Holly, looking at the boy with some interest. “Well, wot do you make of all this stuff? T-a-b—”

“Oh, tab doat!” said Jimmy gleefully. “That means the hull shootin’ match at one settin’. Dinner all the way through, you know, soup an’ pie an’ eyes cream the same day, an’ pay fer ’t all ’t oncet.”

“H’m! Sounds good! ’Spensive?”

“Dollar fer the round trip!” said Jimmy indifferently, as if dollars grew on blackberry bushes along the road. He had neglected to ask the exact price, but he thought it would be well to put it high. Holly drew a whistle.

“Must be good!” he said, sarcastically.

“ ’Tis!” responded Jimmy, growing warm. “ ’Tis worth it, every cent. You jest ought to smelt the things I smelt over there in the kitchen awhile back. You’d think you never seen a dinner before.”

“You don’t say!” said Holly, studying the boy’s face intently. “But what’s this other kind? A lay carty! What does thet mean?”

“Thet there? Ah lah card. It’s when you picks out what you want on a card she has, and takes your chances on what you gets.”

“Wal, I suspicion I better go the whole figger. I’m purty hungry an’ don’t want to run no chances. What time does they hev dinner, son? Run over an’ tell ’em I’m comin’, and see if they’se ready fer me. Then when you call, I’ll come.”

Jimmy obediently went; and though he walked in staid manner until he was out of sight behind the cedars, he arrived in the kitchen breathless.

“Got one man to dinner,” he announced to Norah. “He wants a dollar’s worth. Give him three helpin’s, ef he asks fer it, of everything. He’ll send some other fellers, mebbe. He wants to know how soon it’s ready.”

“Luncheon is served from twelve till it’s gone,” said Norah with a wink, and Jimmy was off again.

Jimmy had the commercial instinct strong. His ways might not have been the ways of the young proprietor of the tearoom, perhaps, but they worked well in Rushville. He was a self-constituted salesman for the new place of business, and he worked hard that first day. After that, he made himself so indispensable to the place that he was regularly engaged and did not have to depend on stray dimes to get his ice cream.

For the next three hours, Jimmy hung about the station and did good service. He sent over a salesman from the noon train, and a woman agent for a new kind of hose supporter, and last, but by no means least according to his own estimate of people and things, he accosted the minister, who was driving home in a borrowed car about three o’clock in the afternoon, from a funeral far in the country.

Endicott had no very hopeful prospect that Mrs. Bartlett would have saved lunch for him till that time of day. He would have to wait till evening for something, very likely. Jimmy’s announcement about the tearoom gave him an idea. He returned the borrowed car and promptly walked into the gate of the Cedars.

Constance, meanwhile, was having an exciting day. She felt as if she must go down to the gate and watch the road each way to see whether her venture was to be a success, and it was hard to restrain herself from at least going to the front window every five minutes to see whether anyone was coming up the walk. She was glad that her grandmother was comfortably and happily seated in her favorite rocking chair with a book and would not be likely to want any attention until dinnertime.

Constance was free to give her attention to business. Norah, of course, had the eatables well in hand. She was a marvelous cook and had been baking, boiling, and brewing for two days. Early as the morning light, two large ice-cream freezers had ground their steady way, and there was as much food prepared as the highest hopes the trio could expect would be needed the first day. The house was well stocked with all kinds of material for preparing any dish that was ever heard of, and there was not much likelihood that they would be sold out immediately. Rushville was much too conservative for that, in spite of its name.

Constance happened to be standing at the front hall window when Jimmy came through the gate and up the path heading the files of his six “fellers,” and her eyes danced with merriment at her first customers. She could not keep herself from stealing downstairs and peeping through the crack of the great doors at them as they sat, wholly engrossed in ice cream. She wondered whether this was a sample of what her clientele was to be.

Promptly at twelve o’clock Holly appeared, ushered by Jimmy. Holly had felt shy at the last minute and told Jimmy he had better show him the way in; he might “get mixed on the doors.”

Norah was arrayed in the trim cap, cuffs, and apron of a waitress, and Constance, having received thorough instructions, was to stay in the kitchen, “dish up,” and keep things from burning. With many an anxious injunction to Constance “not to bourn thim purty fingers o’ yourn,” Norah took her tray and departed to serve.

Holly stood with his feet squarely planted on a Kermanshah rug, his hands behind him holding his old straw hat, his head tipped back, surveying the great ocean painting that hung over the mantel.

“Wal, I swow!” he exclaimed, turning to Norah with a grin. “Thet there’s right naterul, ain’t it? I thought when I just seen it I was lookin’ through some sort of a spyglass down to the Atlantic Coast. Wal, where shell I set? I want one o’ them there tab dinners you advertise fer a dollar. Fetch it on quick, fer I’m mighty hungry.”

The tables were set in New York’s best style, the only style about which Constance knew anything. The linen was of the finest, and the silver was of the heaviest and solidest. It is safe to say that Holly had never in all his life before sat down to a table so spread.

Constance need not have had a troubled conscience over charging him a dollar for his dinner. He got his money’s worth, and he enjoyed himself. From the soup, of which he ordered three portions, and of which he partook with long swishing inhalations of enjoyment, down to the dessert, consisting of pie, pudding, or ice cream with cakes, his pleasure showed no abatement. He promptly ordered all three, cheerfully assenting to the extra charge. He looked with satisfaction upon the three dishes of dessert, put them in a row in front of him, and went straight through them, first pudding, then pie, then ice cream. When the tiny cup of black coffee was brought him, he looked puzzled for a moment and then made a triumphant dive after a little after-dinner coffee spoon, exclaiming, “Wal, I swow! Thet’s what the little feller was for, ain’t it?” For he had been much bewildered by the array of silver, being accustomed to a steel knife and tined fork and a single tin spoon.

Constance, hovering in the hall to see that all was going right, fled precipitately into the room on the other side of the house and sat down to laugh.

In spite of herself, Constance was interested by the small boys and the uncouth man who were her first patrons. There was something pleasant, too, about seeing that each one had good things to eat and enjoyed what he got. It was to her more like an amusement than a business, for sometimes it went sorely against the grain to think of having to get her livelihood from such people as these.

John Endicott was weary in body and soul when he entered the long dining room. The funeral had been a particularly trying one, for it reminded him so keenly of his own recent loss. His very flesh seemed sore, and even a deep breath was a weariness. He sank into a chair at a table near the back of the room and dropped his head into his hands for a moment, rumpling back his curly chestnut chair.

Norah entered quietly, handed him a menu card, and went deftly about waiting upon him, filling the delicate cut glass with ice water, getting him a large, fine napkin. As she worked, she cast furtive glances toward the first customer in whom she had taken the slightest interest. All the others had been beneath her notice. It humiliated her to think of her dear young mistress serving people so much beneath her in every way. But this man bore a look of refinement and ease that came only with contact with the outside world in some way. Norah knew that he was, as she termed it, “edoocated.” That term included all culture to her way of thinking.

John Endicott took the bill of fare and studied it with interest. The letters, fine and clear and delicate, every one the same height, every line showing a careful, skillful hand. Fried potatoes never seemed so attractive before as when their name gleamed from this card. He studied the card thoughtfully and at last looked up to Norah with a smile of almost boyish pleasure.

“You may give me a beefsteak, if you please, and some fried potatoes.”

Norah went into the kitchen and remarked to Constance as she prepared to broil a tender bit of sirloin steak, “There’s a man in there now, Miss Connie, as looks like he had been starved fer foive year. He’s ordered a beefsteak, an’ he’s expectin’ to enj’y it, an’ I’m goin’ to see as he gits a good un. He’s edoocated, too, an’ Oi b’leeve he knows a good un when he sees it. He looks loike he’d seen a soight o’ thrubble. Beats awl how you find the thrubble in folks whin you’ve hed it yersel’.”

Constance, her warm heart touched at once, set about helping Norah. She took a dainty china dish and put two or three olives in it. Olives did not go with beefsteak on the bill of fare, but what of that? They were her olives, and the man might like them. Then, with a bright thought, she slipped out the back door and down between the nodding grasses to the little brook that trailed away from the pond, where grew watercress. She had discovered it growing luxuriantly there a few days before on one of her walks, and she hastily picked a handful now and came back in time to wash them and fringe the little platter for the beefsteak. On the whole, the dinner that Norah brought to the minister a few minutes later was enough to make a weary, hungry man revive. The beefsteak was done to that perfect, exquisite brown on both sides, with just the right shade of juicy pink in the middle. The fried potatoes were like unto none that John Endicott had ever eaten in a restaurant before, and they made him think of those his mother used to cook when he was a little boy and came home winter afternoons cold and hungry to find a nice supper all ready for him.

John Endicott ate that meal with a zest he had not known for years. Every shred of beefsteak, every morsel of the sweet white bread. He enjoyed it fully as much as Holly enjoyed his dinner, if not more, and that is saying a great deal.

He did not order ice cream or pudding. The state of his pocketbook did not admit of such delicacies. But the memory of that beefsteak lingered with him for many a day. Its juiciness and tenderness put to shame all such humble imitations of its kind as had ever appeared upon Mrs. Bartlett’s table.

But he had to pay for it with a glum supper. Mrs. Bartlett pursed her thin lips together shortly after they sat down to their evening repast, with an alacrity that showed she had been preparing her remarks for at least two hours.

“I hear you’ve been tryin’ the new tearoom. Ain’t our things good enough fer you anymore?”

Her next-door neighbor’s niece, who was visiting in the village for a month, had happened to be passing the Cedars as he came out. She kindly ran in to tell Mrs. Bartlett of the offense.

“Why, Mrs. Bartlett, I came home so late from the funeral, I knew lunch would all be cleared away; and as I was very hungry, I just ran in there to get a bite to stay me till suppertime.”

“I could have given you a piece, if you had asked me,” she answered in an injured tone, “but it makes no difference. I s’pose there are attractions there that we haven’t got.” After that she closed her lips, and for the remainder of the meal no remarks from the boarder could coax to her face any relaxation, nor draw from her lips other than monosyllables with regard to the tea and gingerbread. The minister was in ill favor, and he knew by former experience that he would be punished for several days before he would feel that his old place was his own again. He sighed as he went up to his lonely room that night to hard work, but his thoughts during the evening were not of Sister Bartlett, nor of her whims and moods, but of a slender, white-robed girl, who sat in a large leather chair by a low table in the room across from the dining room as he came out from his afternoon meal.