Turn About Eleanor.

by Ethel M. Kelley.

CHAPTER I

ENTER ELEANOR

A child in a faded tam-o'-shanter that had once been baby blue, and a shoddy coat of a glaring, unpropitious newness, was sitting uncomfortably on the edge of a hansom seat, and gazing soberly out at the traffic of Fifth Avenue.

The young man beside her, a blond, sleek, narrow-headed youth in eye-gla.s.ses, was literally making conversation with her. That is, he was engaged in a palpable effort to make conversation--to manufacture out of the thin crisp air of that November morning and the random impressions of their progress up the Avenue, something with a general resemblance to tete-a-tete dialogue as he understood it. He was succeeding only indifferently.

"See, Eleanor," he pointed brightly with his stick to the flower shop they were pa.s.sing, "see that building with the red roof, and all those window boxes. Don't you think those little trees in pots outside look like Christmas trees? Sometimes when your Aunts Beulah and Margaret and Gertrude, whom you haven't met yet--though you are on your way to meet them, you know--sometimes when they have been very good, almost good enough to deserve it, I stop by that little flower shop and buy a chaste half dozen of gardenias and their accessories, and divide them among the three."

"Do you?" the child asked, without wistfulness. She was a good child, David Bolling decided,--a sporting child, willing evidently to play when it was her turn, even when she didn't understand the game at all.

It was certainly a new kind of game that she would be so soon expected to play her part in,--a rather serious kind of game, if you chose to look at it that way.

David himself hardly knew how to look at it. He was naturally a conservative young man, who had been brought up by his mother to behave as simply as possible on all occasions, and to avoid the conspicuous as tacitly and tactfully as one avoids a new disease germ.

His native point of view, however, had been somewhat deflected by his a.s.sociations. His intimate circle consisted of a set of people who indorsed his mother's decalogue only under protest, and with the most stringent reservations. That is, they were young and healthy, and somewhat overcharged with animal spirits, and their reactions were all very intense and emphatic.

He was trying at this instant to look rather more as if he were likely to meet one of his own friends than one of his mother's. His mother's friends would not have understood his personal chaperonage of the shabby little girl at his elbow. Her hair was not even properly brushed. It looked frazzled and tangled; and at the corner of one of her big blue eyes, streaking diagonally across the pallor in which it was set, was a line of dirt,--a tear mark, it might have been, though that didn't make the general effect any less untidy, David thought; only a trifle more uncomfortably pathetic. She was a nice little girl, that fact was becoming more and more apparent to David, but any friend of his mother's would have wondered, and expressed him or herself as wondering, why in the name of all sensitiveness he had not taken a taxicab, or at least something in the nature of a closed vehicle, if he felt himself bound to deliver in person this curious little stranger to whatever mysterious destination she was for.

"I thought you'd like a hansom, Eleanor, better than a taxi-cab, because you can see more. You've never been in this part of New York before, I understand."

"No, sir."

"You came up from Colha.s.sett last Sat.u.r.day, didn't you? Mrs. O'Farrel wrote to your grandmother to send you on to us, and you took the Sat.u.r.day night boat from Fall River."

"Yes, sir."

"Did you travel alone, Eleanor?"

"A friend of Grandpa's came up on the train with me, and left me on the vessel. He told the colored lady and gentleman to see if I was all right,--Mr. Porter and Mrs. Steward."

"And were you all right?" David's eyes twinkled.

"Yes, sir."

"Not sea sick, nor homesick?"

The child's fine-featured face quivered for a second, then set again into impa.s.sive stoic lines, and left David wondering whether he had witnessed a vibration of real emotion, or the spasmodic twitching of the muscles that is so characteristic of the rural public school.

"I wasn't sea sick."

"Tell me about your grandparents, Eleanor." Then as she did not respond, he repeated a little sharply, "Tell me about your grandparents, won't you?"

The child still hesitated. David bowed to the wife of a Standard Oil director in a pa.s.sing limousine, and one of the season's prettiest debutantes, who was walking; and because he was only twenty-four, and his mother was very, very ambitious for him, he wondered if the tear smudge on the face of his companion had been evident from the sidewalk, and decided that it must have been.

"I don't know how to tell," the child said at last, "I don't know what you want me to say."

"I don't want you to say anything in particular, just in general, you know."

David stuck. The violet eyes were widening with misery, there was no doubt about it. "Game, clean through," he said to himself. Aloud he continued. "Well, you know, Eleanor.--Never say 'Well,' if you can possibly avoid it, because it's a flagrant Americanism, and when you travel in foreign parts you're sure to regret it,--well, you know, if you are to be in a measure my ward--and you are, my dear, as well as the ward of your Aunts Beulah and Margaret and Gertrude, and your Uncles Jimmie and Peter--I ought to begin by knowing a little something of your antecedents. That is why I suggested that you tell me about your grandparents. I don't care what you tell me, but I think it would be very suitable for you to tell me something. Are they native Cape Codders? I'm a New Englander myself, you know, so you may be perfectly frank with me."

"They're not summer folks," the child said. "They just live in Colha.s.sett all the year round. They live in a big white house on the depot road, but they're so old now, they can't keep it up. If it was painted it would be a real pretty house."

"Your grandparents are not very well off then?"

The child colored. "They've got lots of things," she said, "that Grandfather brought home when he went to sea, but it was Uncle Amos that sent them the money they lived on. When he died they didn't have any."

"How long has he been dead?"

"Two years ago Christmas."

"You must have had some money since then."

"Not since Uncle Amos died, except for the rent of the barn, and the pasture land, and a few things like that."

"You must have had money put away."

"No," the little girl answered. "We didn't. We didn't have any money, except what came in the way I said. We sold some old-fashioned dishes, and a little bit of cranberry bog for twenty-five dollars. We didn't have any other money."

"But you must have had something to live on. You can't make bricks without straw, or grow little girls up without nourishing food in their tummies." He caught an unexpected flicker of an eyelash, and realized for the first time that the child was acutely aware of every word he was saying, that even his use of English was registering a poignant impression on her consciousness. The thought strangely embarra.s.sed him. "We say tummies in New York, Eleanor," he explained hastily. "It's done here. The New England stomick, however, is almost entirely obsolete. You'll really get on better in the circles to which you are so soon to be accustomed if you refer to it in my own simple fashion;--but to return to our muttons, Eleanor, which is French for getting down to cases, again, you must have had something to live on after your uncle died. You are alive now. That would almost seem to prove my contention."

"We didn't have any money, but what I earned."

"But--what you earned. What do you mean, Eleanor?"

The child's face turned crimson, then white again. This time there was no mistaking the wave of sensitive emotion that swept over it.

"I worked out," she said. "I made a dollar and a half a week running errands, and taking care of a sick lady vacations, and nights after school. Grandma had that shock, and Grandpa's back troubled him. He tried to get work but he couldn't. He did all he could taking care of Grandma, and tending the garden. They hated to have me work out, but there was n.o.body else to."

"A family of three can't live on a dollar and a half a week."

"Yes, sir, they can, if they manage."

"Where were your neighbors all this time, Eleanor? You don't mean to tell me that the good, kindly people of Cape Cod would have stood by and let a little girl like you support a family alone and unaided.

It's preposterous."

"The neighbors didn't know. They thought Uncle Amos left us something.

Lots of Cape Cod children work out. They thought that I did it because I wanted to."

"I see," said David gravely.

The wheel of their cab became entangled in that of a smart delivery wagon. He watched it thoughtfully. Then he took off his gla.s.ses, and polished them.

"Through a gla.s.s darkly," he explained a little thickly. He was really a very _young_ young man, and once below the surface of what he was pleased to believe a very worldly and cynical manner, he had a profound depth of tenderness and human sympathy.