The Prodigal Girl (26 page)

So she slipped to her mother’s side and whispered that she was very sleepy and must be excused to go to bed.

Everything was all ready for her flight. Her own little suitcase that she always carried when she went to visit some girl for the weekend was all packed in the closet, hidden under an old sweater beside her little overnight bag, also fully packed. A coil of clothesline was tied through their handles. She meant to let them down through the window after the family came upstairs and have them already there for morning.

Quickly she undressed and put on the frail undergarments she meant to wear on her trip, scorning the heavy flannel underwear her mother had brought along, which she had gladly been wearing to keep out the unusual cold.

Then she put on the heavy flannel nightgown over her underwear and crept into bed shivering. Coming as she had from the warm, cheery room downstairs, the room seemed colder than usual, even with the stovepipe hot enough to burn to the touch. A rim of light around the stovepipe seemed to bring her in close touch with the room below.

Yes, she was right, she had come away just in time. They were singing that strange old song that Chester loved, just because his mother used to sing it, likely:

“Rock of ages, cleft for me
,

Let me hide myself in Thee
,

Let the water and the blood

From Thy riven side which flowed
,

Be of sin the double cure
,

Save me from its guilt and power.”

Rocks and blood! An odd old song. How could Chester bear to sing it? Sin! As if anybody believed in it anymore. There wasn’t any such thing. Sin was supposed to be something that God had said you mustn’t do, and if there wasn’t any God, if there was only a force of nature or whatever you called it, what bunk it all was, and why did anybody want to put anything like that over on the world anyway in the first place?

Betty covered up her ears and shut her eyes, trying to draw her spirit away from the consciousness of it all, but the words sang clearly up the old stovepipe and seemed not to mind the bed quilts at all.

“Nothing in my hand I bring,

Simply to Thy cross I cling.”

As if a cross could do anything for anybody! Such superstition!

“Naked come to Thee for dress,

Helpless look to Thee for grace; Foul

I to the fountain fly;

Wash me Saviour or I die.”

There! There was that horrid word,
foul
. Chester had used that when he spoke of Dudley. He said he was a foulmouthed rascal! Betty shivered again and drew her head farther under the sheets. Foul! That meant unclean. Dirty! That was ridiculous! Just because people were frank and spoke of things that everybody knew. Just because they happened to be younger than a few other people, they were called dirty! Well, that wasn’t fair! That was injustice, and the young people of today were not taking anything like that handed out to them.
Not on your life
, thought Betty!

There, there was that other horrid verse, the worst of them all:

“While I draw this fleeting breath,

When my eyelids close in death!”

A shudder passed over her, and she put her fingers in her ears. But still there came faintly, because she had to listen in spite of herself, the words,

“When I soar to worlds unknown,

See Thee on thy—”

She stuffed the blanket into her ears, but she knew the rest was “judgment throne,” and she hated it! Why did she have to be judged? Just because she was following out her nature! She didn’t! She wouldn’t! And she didn’t want to hide in any rock no matter how many ages it had lived and fooled people.

The singing died away, and now she had to listen again, and she heard them kneeling down. She might as well have stayed, for she could hear every word that Chester said. And, great cats! He was praying for her. By
name!
“Our little Betty!” He had no right! He had no
right!
“Give her a meek and quiet spirit. Help her to learn to do right!”

This was the limit!

And there were tears on her face, very wet tears, that made the sheet and pillow damp and would not stop. Oh, she was frantic! This was poisonous! Perfectly poisonous! Would Chester never stop? It would have been almost better if she had stayed down. He would not have made it so personal then. But if he had she would have cried right there before them all, and that would have been awful! Nobody cried anymore. It wasn’t the thing to do at all. Everybody would howl if they knew she cried at old sob stuff like that! And the strange part about it was that she hadn’t gained a thing by coming upstairs, for there was God, out here in her bedroom looking at her, just the same as He had done downstairs when she knelt with the rest. God! Just an idea! But there He stood looking at her with such strange, wistful, almost loving eyes, the way Chester looked at her sometimes, only more so. And she couldn’t get away from Him even with her eyes shut. She couldn’t get away from Him even with all the sheets over her head. Well, she would get away from Him when she went with Dudley, that was certain. Dudley hadn’t much in common with God!

Now they were rising from their knees, and the vision of God was gone. She felt great relief and turned over her pillow, arranging the spot where her tears had wet the sheet so Eleanor would not feel it if she came in to say good night. She lay down and tried to breathe very regularly, her face turned away from the door. They were coming up now. Chester was banking down the fire on the hearth and locking the door. The key turned with a grating sound. She had meant to put a drop of oil in that lock and had forgotten it.

She could hear Jane tiptoeing by the door, and now Eleanor opened it softly and looked in. Her father was coming up the stairs with the lamp in his hand. She could see the flare of the light on her opposite wall through the fringes of her lashes.

“She seems to be sound asleep,” she heard Eleanor say in a whisper. “Poor child, she was tired! I guess I won’t go in, it might wake her!”

She closed the door softly, and Betty missed her mother’s kiss.

Cautiously she stole out of bed and lifted her window. The night air bit at her thin garments like ice. The old-fashioned catch slipped from her excited fingers once and the window slid down with a thump. She held her breath, but no one seemed to notice. She could hear her mother talking in low tones in the room across the hall. She tried the catch once more and this time it held, and the cold air poured in about her again, bitterly, romping with the flannel nightdress and chilling her bare feet.

She went softly to the closet, brought out the suitcase and bag, let them down till they touched on the crisp snow below and slid a little way before catching in the stalks of a tall old lilac bush. She looked at them for an instant, half-frightened. There they were! They had started! And soon she, too, would be on her way, very, very early in the morning.

She cast a fearful eye at the sky. It was clear as a bell. The stars seemed larger than she had ever seen them before, and a new moon hung like a silver boat in a sapphire sea. Across the distance the mountains were dimly shadowed against the night. It was a wonderful scene, almost formidable in its cold, sparkling beauty. There was one star that was larger than the rest, looking down straight at her. It seemed to pierce her like an eye. She remembered that idea of God coming into her room and watching her, and she turned quickly away from the window and crept into bed, pulling the blankets over her head again. She must get some sleep. This was no way to pull off a stunt. What would Dud think of her if he knew? It was weird. It was perfectly fusty.

She deliberately set herself to go to sleep, but sleep seemed far from her. She seemed to be holding her body up from the bed, holding her breath, somehow imagining that her secret would make itself known if she breathed aloud.

Chester and Eleanor were still talking. She could hear their pleasant tones. It was good to go away when they were happy. Perhaps Chester had had some good word about business.

Then she remembered that she had meant to put the rest of her clothes by the bed so that she would make less noise leaving when the time came, and she slid out in the cold air again and brought her dress, the pretty jersey dress she had worn to school the last day, and her shoes and placed them on a chair by the bed. She went back to the closet and got her fur coat and hat, and on second thought her galoshes, and put them where she could reach them without moving about on the floor, for she did not trust the old flooring. Some boards creaked horribly under the least step.

All these excursions with the window open chilled her to the bone, and she crept back to bed with her teeth chattering and finally fell asleep.

Chapter 19

I
t was still dark with the stars shining when she awoke, but she could see a streak of dawn over against the horizon, and she knew it must be getting toward day. She listened and soon the old clock in the hall that Chester had put in running order the first day they arrived chimed out four.

Betty had heard that four o’clock was the time that sleep was the deepest, so she had chosen that hour for her going.

It took all the courage she had to even reach out into the cold and pull in her dress under the covers. She had not realized it would be so cold. She ought to have closed her window.

Neither was it an easy thing to put on her dress under the sheets without making the bed creak wildly in the still, old house. The clock had struck the half hour before she was really ready, hat on, fur coat buttoned. She stuffed her shoes inside her galoshes and stole out upon the floor in her stocking feet. Slowly she reached the door, step by step, with intervals between, lifted the latch with infinite pains, released it as carefully, and moved with almost fairy tread into the hall, down the stairs, half leaning on the railing and sliding down. It seemed an age till she reached the door, and another till she had slid back the rusty old bolt, turned the key, and was out at last with the door shut behind her.

She stopped an instant and listened. The house was as still as if it were empty. The branches of the maple tree stirred with the wind and hit against the upper hall window, clashing like sabers. They startled her. Surely, someone would wake at that sound! But all was silent.

The stars were still out, though the sky was paling, and off to the east a rosy light was appearing now. She must get on her way at once.

She had put on her shoes and galoshes before she opened the door. She stepped out upon the snowy path, and her footsteps crunched like the little lumps of confectioner’s sugar under the rolling pin when she was making that butter icing for the cake yesterday. She only dared take one step at a time, and wait between lest someone would wake and hear her.

Slowly she made her way to the side of the house where the bags waited under her window, reached out on the smooth crust for the end of the rope, which she had purposely flung as far toward the path as she could from her window, and drew it toward her. The bags were caught in the lilac, but she finally managed to free them and draw them slowly toward her. At last she was out on the open path that led to the lane.

She drew a long breath when she finally turned into the lane and the shelter of the thickly grouped birch trees. She was hidden now by the shadows at least, and no one could see her here from the house. She would have to make a detour around the log house by the highway, but she had planned that all out. Besides, no one there would be up yet, and she felt reasonably sure that she would beat the milkman down by a full hour at least. No one else would know her, and anyway, by the time they could get word to her family she would be safely hidden in the station, or in the train if it was on time.

But it was hard walking on the rough snow, with baggage to carry, and the three miles to the village loomed ahead like a trip around the world. Her back soon ached, her arms grew heavy, her feet were very cold, and her hands in their thin kid gloves were frozen numb. She had to stop several times and take off her gloves and put her hands inside her fur coat to get any feeling into them at all. She wished she had brought her mittens along, but it was too late to go back now. So she wound a couple of handkerchiefs around her hands over her gloves and took up her heavy suitcase again. If she had only brought that rope along she might have dragged it on the snow, but that was now too far away.

She tried walking on the crust of the snow, but in places it was soft, and once she went through and floundered around, getting snow inside her clothing until she was most uncomfortable. She wished she had worn her thick underwear until she got to the station at least. She might have thrown it away afterward. She had no idea it would be so mortally cold at this hour in the morning.

She was on the verge of tears when at last she staggered into the highway and began the long hard walk down the hill. If it had been up the hill she could not have managed it, for the suitcase and even the little overnight bag were growing heavier every minute.