“COPELAND FARM PRODUCTS” in blue letters against a white background swung over Nan’s head on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings in the city market-house. On those days she left Mrs. Copeland’s farm at five o’clock with the day’s offerings and by six the stand was in order.
An endless, jostling throng surged by, and every sale she effected, every negotiation for the future delivery of an order, had all the joy of an adventure. Her immediate neighbors were a big-fisted German gardener and a black-eyed Italian girl who sold fruits and vegetables. When business lagged, the German chaffed her about her wares or condoled with her when some frugal marketer priced her butter, sniffed, and departed. Nan commanded a meager knowledge of Italian and flung a phrase at her dark-eyed neighbor now and then in the spirit of comradeship which the place encouraged. She liked her “job.” She assured herself that she had never had so much fun in all her life, and that never again would she eat the bread of idleness.
But it had not proved so easy as she imagined it would be to slip out of her old life into the new. If she had left the Farley house preceded by a brass band and had marched round the monument and the length of Washington Street before taking her place in the market, her flight could hardly have attracted more attention.
The town buzzed. The newspapers neglected no phase of Nan’s affairs, nor did they overlook her as she stood behind the counter dispensing “Copeland Farm Products.” She was surprised and vexed by her sudden notoriety. A newspaper photographer snapped her, in her white sweater and blue-and-white tam o’shanter, passing eggs over the counter. The portrait bore the caption, “Miss Nancy Farley in a New Rôle,” and was supplemented by text adorned with such sub-headings as “Renounces her Fortune” and “Throws Away a Million Dollars.” To be thus heralded was preposterous; she had merely gone to work for reasons that were, in any view of the matter, her own private affair. But public sentiment was astonishingly friendly; even those who had looked askance at her high flights with the Kinney crowd said it was an outrage that Farley had failed to provide for her decently.
Fanny, thinking at first it was only a joke, a flare of temperament (references to her temperament had begun to pall upon Nan!), had welcomed Nan to her house and given her charge of the market-stand; but it was not without difficulty that she persuaded the girl to occupy her guest-room and share her meals.
“You’d better scold me when I make mistakes, for if I find I don’t suit I’ll fire myself,” Nan declared. “And if I have to leave you, I’ll go to clerking in a department store. I just mention this so you won’t be too polite. This isn’t any grandstand play, you see; I’m serious for the first time in my life!”
It was certain, at any rate, that Copeland Farm Products were sold with amazing ease. When it became known that Nan Farley had become Mrs. Copeland’s representative “on market,” there was lively competition for the privilege of purchasing those same “products.” Fanny complained ruefully that the jellies, jams, and pickles created by the young women in her industrial house would be exhausted before Christmas and that nothing would remain to sell but butter and eggs. Nan suggested orange marmalade and a cake-baking department to keep the girls at work during the winter, and on the off days she set herself to planning the preparation of these “specialties.” Mrs. Farley’s cooking lessons had not gone for naught; Nan could bake a cake in which there was no trace of “sadness,” and after some experiments with jumbles and sand-tarts she sold her first output in an hour and opened a waiting list.
Mrs. Copeland told Eaton at the end of the second week that she had never known the real Nan till now. There was no questioning the girl’s sincerity; she had cut loose from her old life, relinquished all hope of participating in Farley’s fortune, and addressed herself zealously to the business of supporting herself. She became immediately the idol of the half-dozen young women in the old farmhouse, who thought her an immensely “romantic” figure and marveled at her industry and resourcefulness.
“Splendid! Give her all the room she wants,” Eaton urged Mrs. Copeland. “She’s only finding herself; we’ll have the Nan she was meant to be the first thing we know.”
“I didn’t know all these nice church-going people would come to condole with me, or I’d have left town,” Nan confided to Fanny. “These women who wouldn’t let their daughters associate with me a year ago can’t buy enough eggs now to show how much they sympathize with me. If they don’t keep away, I’m going to raise the price of their eggs, and that will break their hearts—and the eggs! But do you know,” she went on gravely, “I’ve never been so happy in my life as I am now! And I wouldn’t have anybody think it was out of pique, or with any unkind feeling toward papa,”—tears shone in her eyes as the word slipped from her tongue,—“but I tell you nobody ever could have made a nice, polite girl out of me. I was bound to get into scrapes as long as I hadn’t anything really to do but fill in time between manicuring and hair-washing dates. There’s a whole lot in that old saying about making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear: it can’t be did!”
“If you talk that way,” Fanny laughed, “I shall turn you out of my house. I don’t want you to think I approve of what you’re doing. I’m letting you do it because I’m scared not to!”
“You’d better be—for if you hadn’t taken me in, I should have gone on the stage,—honestly, I should,—in vaudeville, most likely, doing monologues right between the jugglers and the trained seals.”...
On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays Mr. Jeremiah A. Amidon found it convenient to visit the market-house as early as seven-thirty (in spite of pressing duties at the store), to make sure, he said, that Nan, and the farmhand who drove her in and helped arrange the stock, had safely passed all the railroad crossings on the way to town. Jerry was a consoling person and unobtrusively thoughtful and helpful. And in his way he was almost as keen as Eaton. Jerry did not require explanations, and nothing is so wholly satisfactory as a friend who understands without being told.
“Little girl, if your eggs are guaranteed under the Pure Food Act, I’ll take one—the large size.”
“You’ll find the hard-boiled eggs at the lunch counter in the next aisle, little boy,” Nan answered. “How is John Cecil?”
“Working himself to death. You’ve driven him to it!”
“I hope you two are not abusing me; how about it?”
“No; not vocally. Cecil’s shut up in his office every night, getting ready to clean up those cousins of Farley’s down on the river, but he doesn’t say anything. Look here, Nan, we’ve got a line of cold cream and other toilet marvels—stuff you could handle here as a side line. Let us send you up a bunch to put next to that pink jelly. It’s high grade and we’ll make it to you at the right price.”
“Not on your life, Jerry. Drugs and hand-made country butter can’t associate. You’d better run down to your own little shop now and go to work.”
After his morning inspection he was likely to reappear at lunch time, to see her for a moment before she left for the farm; and he assisted in balancing her cash when she confessed that it wouldn’t “gee.” His pride in her was enormous; he was satisfied that there was no other girl to compare with her.
Jerry’s admiration was so obviously genuine and supported by so deep an awe and reverence that no girl could have helped liking it. And Jerry was unfailingly amusing; his airs and graces, his attempts to wear a little learning lightly, were wholly transparent and invited the chaff he welcomed. Nan’s feeling, dating from the beginning of their acquaintance, that their common origin in the back streets of Belleville established a tie between them had grown steadily. In all her late perplexities and self-questioning she had found herself wondering constantly what Jerry would say, and he had supported her warmly in her rejection of the estate.
He had from the first confided his ambitions to her and they were worthy ones. He not only meant to get on, but he meant to overcome as far as possible his lack of early advantages. He steadfastly spent an hour at his Latin every night before he went to bed, with only an occasional lift from the busy Eaton. “As long as I’ve tackled it, I might as well keep it up,” he remarked apologetically. “Cecil says my English is so bad, I’d better learn a few foreign languages to make me respectable!”
One noon Nan was munching an apple while waiting for Mrs. Copeland’s man to carry out the empty crates and boxes, when Jerry appeared, looking unusually solemn.
“What’s wrong with the world? You’re not out of work, are you?” she demanded.
“I hoped you’d ask me,” he replied, with mock dejection. “The boss has been making a few changes at the store and I’ve got a new job.”
“Better or worse?” she asked, with feigned carelessness.
This was the first time he had referred to Copeland since her removal to the farm; and there were still vast areas of ignorance and uncertainty in his mind as to her feeling toward Copeland.
“Better for me; I don’t know about the house,” he answered. “Hasn’t anybody told you everything that’s happened down our way?” He seated himself on the counter and clasped one knee with his gloved hands. “Well, we’ve reorganized; just about everything’s changed except the sign. Boss steady as a rock; things rather coming his way now. You heard about Kinney Cement? There was never any doubt about Cecil winning the patent cases; and now the boss has sold out his interest—quit cement for good and all; concentrating on drugs. I guess he got a good price for his cement stock, too.”
He waited to see how she was affected by these confidences.
“The drug business was in a bad way, wasn’t it?” she asked carelessly.
“Um, well; it did look for a few minutes as though we mightn’t pull through.”
She laughed at his lightly emphasized “we.”
“What are you doing now?—counting money or running the elevator?”
“Tease me some more! Say, Nan, I’m not kidding you. The boss made a new job for me; I’m sales manager—going to start out with a suit-case next week and shake hands with all our customers, just to get in touch. Not to interfere with our regular salesmen; oh, no! Just asking about the babies down the line and making the lowly retailer feel that we live only to please him. Do you get me?”
“A gleam or two. So Mr. Copeland got out of his troubles, did he? Well, I’m glad to hear it. He’s too good a fellow to go to the bad.”
This was spoken carelessly, but with a note of sincerity. Her world had turned upside-down since her last meeting with Billy. She waited for Jerry to enlighten her further.
“He’s all right now; you can bet on that; he’s not going to fool with his luck any more. It’s funny”—he was finding it difficult to conceal his embarrassment in speaking of Copeland to Nan—“but the boss and Cecil are getting chummy. When the pinch came, Cecil was right there; walked on to the scaffold and saved him after the black cap had been pulled on and tied under his chin. This is marked private—I don’t know anything—not a thing!”
Nan nodded. She did not see very clearly what he was driving at, but she refused to ask questions.
“The boss and Cecil are lunching together every day now, and they spend an hour together. That tickles me,” he ended softly. “I always wished they’d hit it off together.”
He glanced at her for her approval of this new combination, which was hardly more surprising than his own manifestation of feeling. He evidently derived the deepest satisfaction from the new intimacy between Eaton and Copeland. The fleeting tenderness and wistfulness in his candid, humorous eyes touched her.
“Well!” he exclaimed cheerily, as the driver announced that the wagon was ready, “do you fly back to the farm, or will you join me in refreshments at a one-arm sandwichorium? I’ve only got twenty minutes.”
“I’ll fool you by accepting,” she laughed. “I have some errands to do and can just about catch the three o’clock interurban.”
They walked to a lunch room, where he found seats and brought her the sandwich and coffee she insisted was all she wanted. He was observing her narrowly for signs of discontent, but she had never seemed happier. He understood perfectly that she wished her new activities to be taken as a matter of course, and he carefully refrained from expressing his great pride in her. As long as she continued to countenance him, he was satisfied, and she had shown in countless ways that she liked him and believed in him.
He introduced her to a bank clerk who paused in his hurried exit to speak to him and incidentally to have a closer look at Nan. A girl nodded to him across the room; he explained that she was one of the smartest girls in town—“the whole show in an insurance office; the members of the firm don’t turn round unless she says so.”
“Just think,” Nan remarked, “I might have died without knowing how it feels to be a poor working girl.”
“Well, don’t die now that you’ve found it out! It would be mighty lonesome on earth without you. Have a chocolate eclair,” he added hastily,—“‘business girl’s special.’”
“No, thanks. If I don’t turn up to-night with an appetite for dinner Mrs. Copeland will be scared and send for the doctor.”
“By the way, I wish you’d casually mention me to that gifted lady; I’d like to hop off at Stop 3 some evening without being consumed by the dog. How about it?”
“Oh, she’ll stand for it! She’ll stand for ’most anybody who shows up with a clean face and a kind heart. She’s an angel, Jerry. She’s the finest woman that ever lived!”
“I’d sort o’ figured that out for myself, just passing her on the boulevards. I thought I’d try for a rise out of Cecil the other night and just mentioned her with a gentle o. k. I’d gone up to his office to see if I could shine his shoes or do any little thing like that for him, and he looked at me so long I nearly had nervous prostration, and then he said: ‘My dear boy, the poverty of your vocabulary is a constant grief to me!’—just like that. I guess he likes her all right.”
“She has a good many admirers,” Nan replied noncommittally, as she crumpled her paper napkin. “She can’t help it.”
“Well, anything Cecil wants he ought to have.”
“Well, I hope—I should hate to think he couldn’t get anything he wanted in this world,” said Nan.
Jerry had been deeply troubled at times by the fear that his adored Cecil might be interested in Nan, and the smile that accompanied her last remark was the least bit ambiguous. With all his assurance he was at heart a humble person, and he never ceased to marvel at Nan’s tolerance of him. It was not for him to question the ordinances of Heaven. If Cecil and Nan—
Nan began drawing on her gloves. When they reached the street she explained that she was going to the Farley house to gather up some of her traps that she had left behind. Fully conscious of his sudden soberness and perhaps surmising the cause of it, she lightened his burdened spirit by asking him to come out soon to see her, and boarded a street car....
This was her first visit “home” since she had left the house to go to Fanny Copeland’s. In her hurried flight she had taken only a trunk and a suit-case, but her summer gowns and a number of odds and ends remained to be packed and moved.
The colored maid, who had only vaguely grasped the meaning of Nan’s sudden departure, admitted her with joyous exclamations.
“About time yo’ ’s comin’ back, Miss Nan. Mistah Thu’ston came up heah and tole me and Joshua to stay right along. I guess Mistah Fa’ley’s been turnin’ ovah in his grave ’bout yo’ runnin’ away. He was mighty ca’less not to fix his will the way it ought t’ been. Yo’ ’ll find yo’ room just the way yo’ left it. Mistah Thu’ston said fo’ me to keep things shined up just the way they always was.”
Nan explained that she had merely come to pack her remaining things and asked Joshua to bring up a trunk from the cellar. She filled the trunk and added to the summer frocks articles from her desk and other personal belongings that she wished to keep for their various associations.
When she had finished, she crossed the hall to Farley’s room, rather from force of habit than by intention. She ran her hand across the shelves that represented his steadfast literary preferences that had never been altered in her recollection: “Pickwick,” Artemus Ward; a volume of Petroleum V. Nasby’s writings; Franklin’s “Autobiography”; Grant’s “Memoirs”; Mark Twain, in well-worn original first editions, including the bulky “Innocents Abroad” and “Roughing It.” She resolved to take the “Life on the Mississippi,” from which she had so often read to him in his last year. She rummaged in the closet for an album containing crude old-fashioned likenesses of Mr. and Mrs. Farley and a series of photographs of herself that marked the swift-moving years from the time she became a member of their household.
In a last slow survey of the room her eyes fell upon the portrait of Mrs. Farley that had arrested her with its kind motherly glance on the night of her temptation. She reflected that her right to remove anything from the house was questionable, but she meant to ask Thurston to give her the portrait when the house was finally disposed of.
As she lifted the frame and shook the wire loose from the hook, a paper that had been thrust behind the picture slipped over the mantel-edge with a soft rustling and fell at her feet. She laid the portrait on the bed and picked up the paper.
A glance sufficed to tell her that she had found another of Farley’s wills—possibly the last, for which Thurston had inquired so particularly.
She opened it hurriedly and glanced at the last sheet. The spaces for the signatures of testator and witnesses were blank. It was only worthless paper, of no value to any one. It seemed a plausible assumption that Farley, having decided finally that he would have no use for the earlier wills, had begun to destroy them after first placing the last one behind the picture to avoid the chance of confusing it with the others.
As Nan folded it, a name caught her attention and she began to read.
I hereby give and bequeath to Frances Hillard Copeland, as trustee, the sum of five hundred thousand dollars, the same to be held by said Frances Hillard Copeland, as such trustee, with the following powers and for the following purposes: ... To pay to my said daughter upon her marriage the principal of said fund, together with all accretions thereto; provided, however, that the marriage of my said daughter shall be with the approval and express consent of said Frances Hillard Copeland....
The room swayed as the meaning of this proviso sank into her whirling senses. Farley had interposed Fanny between her and Billy—Fanny, Billy’s former wife! The old man’s hatred of Copeland, his warm admiration for Fanny, had thus combined to fashion a device that was almost malevolent in its cunning. She followed Farley’s reasoning clearly. He had assumed that his own feeling toward Copeland was shared by Fanny, and that she would never consent to a marriage which, in the vague prospect, had given him so much concern. He had presumably promoted the friendly relations between Fanny and her with this end in view.
As the first shock of the revelation passed, Nan laughed bitterly.
“Poor papa!” she murmured.
He little knew how near she had come to marrying Billy! She gasped as it occurred to her that Farley might have discussed the matter with Fanny and persuaded her to accept the trust; but she quickly decided against this. It was unlikely that Farley had ever spoken to her about it; and it was inconceivable that Fanny would have consented, when the purpose was so clearly to make use of her, as Billy’s divorced wife, to stand between Billy and Farley’s money....
She told the servants she would send for her trunk and instructed them to wrap up Mrs. Farley’s portrait and hold it until she could ask Thurston’s permission to remove it. She hurried to the car, carrying the will with her. She must, of course, show it to Thurston, but that could wait a day....
First she would tell Fanny! It was only fair that Mrs. Copeland should know. Copeland had never been mentioned in their intercourse, but she would now confess everything that had ever passed between her and Billy. She would not spare herself. She should have done it earlier—before Fanny threw the mantle of her kindness and generosity about her.
For a month she had been happy in the thought that she had escaped from all her troubles, and that she was free of the wreckage of her old life. Now it was necessary to readjust herself to new conditions, and she resented the necessity that compelled it. Her resolution to tell Fanny of this last will and of all that lay back of it remained unshaken as the car bore her homeward. It was the only “square” thing to do, she repeated to herself over and over again, as she looked out of the car window upon the gray winter landscape.