A Daily Rate (13 page)

“Thank you,” he said, looking up and smiling, “I have had plenty and it has been so good. I have been boarding where they had miserable fare, and I did not know how hungry I was. This meal has tasted like my mother’s cooking.”

Celia’s eyes danced as she said demurely she was very glad. As she went back to the kitchen with the dishes, she could not help thinking what handsome eyes that man had, and how they were lit up by his smile. He was tall and thin with an intellectual face which many persons would have called homely, but of the style which Celia always designated to herself and aunt Hannah as “homely handsome.”

The new boarder went out after his meal was finished. He had told his landlady that he would bring his belongings when he returned later in the evening, and she had promised to have his room ready for him.

Celia went upstairs to see if she could do anything. She was bubbling over with delight over the house and its inmates and all she wished to do. No child in a fairy tale ever had such delightful possibilities put into her hands, she thought, as had been given to her.

“Now,” said aunt Hannah, “that room must be fixed for that man, for he will come back by and by, and what shall we do with it to make it more habitable? Poor fellow! He must have been hard put to it indeed for shelter to have taken it looking like that, or perhaps he doesn’t know any better. But it did look so desolate I couldn’t bear to take him to it.”

“Yes, he does know better, aunt Hannah,” said Celia, laughing. “I know he does. He has a mother—and,” she added half ashamed, “he has a smile.”

“Well, I’m glad he has that,” said Miss Hannah, pulling the bedclothes off in a gingerly way and extracting the sheets and pillow-cases from the mass. “He’ll need it to keep cheerful in this room to-night, I think. Celia, I do wish I could get into my grandmother’s linen and blanket closet for a little while to-night. I should like to burn this quilt.” She held it out by her finger and thumb and examined it carefully.

“Burn it, then,” said Celia solemnly. “Haven’t we got an allowance? We’ll buy another.” Then she went to work to try and make that room less dreary.

When the bed was made up with the cleanest things aunt Hannah could find, the wash bowl and pitcher and soap dish immaculate, and two copies of those flaring chromos called “Wide Awake” and “Fast Asleep” framed in varnished coffee berries had been removed from the walls, there was not much more to do. It was too late to do more at the paint than to wipe it off with a damp cloth, and the floor needed only brushing up. Aunt Hannah found a kitchen-table in Mrs. Morris’ room which had done duty for a dressing-table. She had Molly carry this upstairs for a writing-table, and sighed that there was no cover for it. Celia meditated a moment, and then went up to her own back-room and took the embroidered denim cover from her trunk which she had made for a Christmas present for aunt Hannah and brought it. It was a little sacrifice but the table needed it. It’ wasn’t too fine for use, and it would cause the bare room to look more habitable.

“There, aunt Hannah,” she said, “I made it for you, but you may do what you like with it.”

Then aunt Hannah took Celia’s face between her hands and kissed her and said, “My dear girl!” and put the pretty cover on the table.

“I don’t know as I should have done that,” meditated Celia later, “if it hadn’t been for that smile and his speaking about his mother.”

She looked around the room once more as she was about to leave it. Aunt Hannah had gone down to the kitchen to help Molly prepare for breakfast. Her eyes fell upon the two rickety chairs. She thought of Harry Knowles. A moment’s reflection and she ran down to the parlor and beckoned him to come into the hall.

“Harry,” said she (they had already gotten well enough acquainted so that she could call him by his first name; she exercised that prerogative which a girl a little older than a young man likes to use and which the young man seems to be proud to have exercised sometimes. It was a pleasant brotherly and sisterly way to treat one another), “did you know there was a new boarder? I was passing the room just now. It looked awfully dreary before it was fixed up. The worst thing is the chairs. I wonder if you couldn’t bring up your hammer and fix them a little. It seems too bad for a new boarder to find things all run down on the first night he comes.”

“All right, I’m with you, Miss Murray,” said Harry, interested at once. “I know how it feels myself. Besides that good dinner has given me a longing to do something for somebody else.”

They went upstairs to the chairs, and as they went Harry said in a confiding tone, “Say, Miss Murray, I believe that Miss Grant is going to be great, don’t you? She seems kind of like a woman who knew how, don’t you know? Sometimes she makes me think of my mother just a little.”

Celia smiled and said she thought so, and they went to work. 

It was after the room was all in order, and some delicious cakes set rising in the yellow bowl downstairs for the morning breakfast, set with buckwheat that smelled of the waving fields it came front The lights were out and everything quiet and Celia, lying awake to think over all that had happened, suddenly became aware that her aunt Hannah was awake also. Upon questioning her she at last ferreted out the reason for her wakefulness.

“Well, you see, Celia, I suppose I’m rather tired to-night, though I don’t feel it one bit, I’ve been so interested in it all. But somehow I’ve just begun to think that maybe I ought not to have let you undertake this scheme. It is all very nice and benevolent, but what if it shouldn’t succeed? If it should run behind and take a good deal of your money and you have to work hard for your living again, I should never get over blaming myself. Then too, I’m a little worried about that new man. I don’t know as I ought to have taken him into the house without knowing the first thing about him, and I’ve always heard a city was an awful place to get taken in. He may be a robber, or some dreadful kind of a man, though to be sure he didn’t look it. I must confess that I liked his looks very much, but you know, Celia dear, Satan sometimes appeared as an angel of light. I have heard that gamblers arc often mistaken for ministers. I know perfectly well that I am ‘green,’ as the boys used to say, and perhaps I have been deceived. He was very late getting in and he looked pale. It may be he is dissipated, though I cannot really think that.”

”Now, auntie dear,” laughed Celia, putting her arms about her, “that isn’t a bit like you. You must be overtired or you never would talk like that. Just remember your own words to me ‘Charge not thyself with the weight of a year’ and ‘Bend not thine arm for to-morrow’s load. Thou mayst leave that to thy gracious Lord.’ Don’t you fret one bit. What if he is a gambler or a robber? He can’t do us any harm. We’ve nothing to gamble and nothing to rob. Perhaps we’ll do him some good, and anyway I don’t believe he’s anything but good—he talked to me—that is he said he had a mother and she cooked like that, and then he smiled.”

Then they both laughed and Miss Hannah kissed her niece and thanked her for the reminder that she need not bear burdens. After that they fell asleep.

THE minister was very weary when he went up to his new room that night, and he put down his satchel and looked around him hoping the bed would be more inviting than when last he saw it, though he had grown accustomed to sleeping soundly on any bed no matter how hard or uneven. He drew a long sigh of relief. It looked clean anyway. He turned down the covering and smoothed the sheets. They had no appearance of having been slept in before. He drew another sigh. That was one fear off his mind. He noticed next the table with its pretty cover. He was not accustomed to fancy work. He did not know whether this was done by hand or machinery. He only knew that it was a touch of beauty in his dreary room and felt gladdened by it. He went over to the table and awkwardly felt of the material, passed his hand over the embroidery and smiled. He said to himself he would write to his mother about it and she would be pleased. Then he knelt down beside the table and bowed his head in prayer upon it asking that he might receive and give a blessing in that house where he had come to take up his abode, and that if possible, it might be such a place that he would feel it was right and best that he should remain for a time.

About that same time Harry Knowles stood before the bureau in his room and looked at his mother’s picture. His face was grave and sad. He looked into the pictured eyes with a questioning longing as if he would have her with him again that he might ask her advice. He looked into her face till the tears started in his own eyes. He let them drop unheeded on the bureau and on the little velvet frame. She seemed to him to be looking into his life, and asking him what he had done with his time since she left him. At last he turned away his head and said aloud, “Well, I’m glad I didn’t go to-night anyway. I s’pose the boys’ll give me no end of chaff about backing out, but I’ve proved to myself that I can stay at home once when I say so. I wish mother was here. I’d tell her all about it, I believe, and promise her to start over again. I wonder if it would be any use! If a fellow only had someone to help him!” and he sighed and went to bed.

It is not quite certain what time Molly Poppleton arose the next morning. Celia told her if she had only gotten up a very little earlier, she might have met herself going to bed. The range unused to such treatment brightened up early too, and was soon baking and boiling away to please the most fastidious cook. The oatmeal had been cooking slowly all night, and was getting ready to be a delicious porridge, such as is found in its perfection only in the land of Scotland. Molly had coaxed the milk by all the arts she knew, till it actually gave forth a thin yellow cream for the oatmeal. True, she scoffed at it and said it wasn’t as rich as skim milk in Cloverdale, but then the boarders were not used to Cloverdale milk, and they called this cream. She picked and shredded the codfish to a degree of fineness that would have made the departed Maggie stand in amaze at such a waste of labor, and then with all the skill of long experience, she mixed just the right proportion of potatoes for the most delectable codfish balls, when they should be browned to a crisp, that ever any one tasted.

“Codfish balls are good, and anybody that doesn’t like ’em when they are made just right doesn’t know, that’s all. Besides one can’t have beefsteak every day and there’s plenty else to eat.” So said Molly.

Then she tested the buckwheat cakes to be sure there was exactly the right amount of soda and enough milk to make them brown on both sides, and set the coffee where it would get its finishing-off, and rang the bell. Just one minute ahead of time that bell rang. Molly Poppleton did love to get ahead of time, even if it was but one minute.

“I say,” said Harry Knowles, holding a golden-brown fish-ball up on his fork and admiring it, “if that is a fish-ball, then I never saw one before. It is a libel on that pretty thing to call it by that name, or else all the ones I ever tried to eat were very poor imitations.” Molly, coming in just then with a generous supply of hot buckwheats heard the remark, and her soul swelled with joy and pride, and thereafter Harry Knowles was her favorite of all the boarders unless it was the minister who grew into her good graces by another way not long after. He had come in just a moment before, and was enjoying his dish of oatmeal and wondering what made the difference between it and all the other oatmeal he had tried to eat in the weeks since he came to Philadelphia to live. Was it possible that he had at last found a place where things were really good to eat, or was he getting a good appetite from working so hard? He resolved, at any rate, to ask the cook, sometime when he was well enough acquainted, if he might take a dish of this to the old Scotch woman who was lying sick in an attic and longing for her dear home across the seas.

That breakfast was a pleasant surprise to more than one of the boarders. The brakeman, coming in a little late from his all-night run, having taken his dinner the night before at the other end of his line, and therefore not being prepared for changes except the mere fact that Mrs. Morris had gone away, and someone else was to supply her place for a while, was dumbfounded. He drew his chair up to the table with his usual familiar assurance, and then looked around in almost embarrassment a moment. He was not quite sure what made him feel so. Was it the pleasant-faced, white-haired woman at the head of the table, who smiled a good-morning to him in a tone which was cordial and yet had a note in it that made him feel she was from another world than his own? Or was it the few flowers in the tiny vase in the centre of the table? Or? But he was unable to detail the rest of the changes, they seemed to him so subtle. He turned his attention to the breakfast which certainly was good. Maggie had improved, evidently.

In short, those boarders went to their day’s work well fed and comfortable for the first time in many weeks, and were therefore better workers, and better human beings

in every way, because they were not all day troubled by the demands and complaints of nature in consequence of what they had eaten, or what they had not eaten.

Just as Celia was going out of the door, Miss Hannah, who had ‘followed her, put her hand on her arm and drew her into the parlor for a moment.

“Celia, dear,” she said, “we must have a talk to-night as soon after dinner as possible, and find out how this house is to be run and decide some questions. You know we cannot go ahead blindly and get into debt as Mrs. Morris did.”

“I’ll risk you, auntie dear,” Celia said, as she kissed her behind the red chenille curtain. “But we’ll have our talk, and I’ll get home just as early as I can to help, if you need me. Then after dinner we’ll have a cozy time and do a lot of figuring. I’ve done some already. Good-bye. Don’t try to reform everything to-day, leave just a little for tomorrow. Do you want me to stop at some employment office and get another servant?”

“No, not yet, dear. There’s too much to be done before we introduce any new elements, and besides we don’t know yet whether we can afford another servant. We mustn’t run behind, you know.”