Zelda’s days ran on now much like those of other girls in Mariona. Between Mrs. Forrest and Mrs. Carr, she was well launched socially, and her time was fully occupied. She overhauled the house and changed its furnishings radically,—while her father blinked at the expenditures. Rodney Merriam, dropping in often to chaff Zelda about her neglect of himself and to beg a little attention, rejoiced at the free way in which she contracted bills. The old mahogany from the garret fitted into the house charmingly. The dingy walls were brightened with new papers; the old carpets were taken up, the floors stained, to save the trouble of putting down hardwood, and rugs bought.
Some of the Mariona merchants, finding Ezra Dameron’s name entered on their ledgers for the first time in years, marveled; but after they had seen Zelda, often with her aunt or uncle, making purchases, they were not anxious about the accounts contracted in Dameron’s name. A girl who could spend money with so little flourish but with so fine an air in demanding exactly what she wanted, received their best attention without question. No one had ever denied Zelda Dameron anything in her life; and she had formed the habit of asking for things in a way that made denial impossible. When her aunt complained that the shopkeepers wouldn’t do anything for her, Zelda brought them to time by telephone. She knew by experience that her aunt’s methods were ineffective. Zelda’s way was to ask quite casually that the shades she had bought be hung the same day, as any other time would be inconvenient; and no one ever seemed to have the heart to disappoint her.
Ezra Dameron’s greatest shock was the installing of the telephone in his house; but every one else in Mariona, so Zelda assured him, had one; and it would undoubtedly be of service to her in many ways. Her real purpose was to place herself in communication with her aunt and uncle, whose help she outwardly refused but secretly leaned on.
Zelda did not disturb the black woman in the kitchen, though she employed a housemaid to supplement her services; but she labored patiently to correct some of the veteran Polly’s distressing faults. Polly was a good cook in the haphazard fashion of her kind. She could not read, so that the cook-books which Zelda bought were of no use to her. She shook her head over “book cookin’,” but Zelda, who dimly remembered that her mother had spent much time in the kitchen, bought a supply of aprons and gave herself persistently to culinary practice. Or, she sat and dictated to Polly from one of the recipe books while that amiable soul mixed the ingredients; and then, after the necessary interval of fear and hope, they opened the oven door and peered in anxiously upon triumph or disaster.
The horse was duly purchased at Lexington, on an excursion planned and managed by Mrs. Carr. They named the little Hambletonian Xanthippe, which Zelda changed to Zan, at her uncle’s suggestion. It was better, he said, not to introduce any more of the remoter letters of the alphabet into the family nomenclature; and as they already had Z it would be unwise to add X. Moreover, it was fitting that Zee should own Zan!
The possession of the pretty brown mare and a runabout greatly increased Zelda’s range of activities. Her uncle kept a saddle horse and he taught her how to ride and drive. He also, under Ezra Dameron’s very eyes, had the old barn reconstructed, to make a proper abiding-place for a Kentucky horse of at least decent ancestry, and employed a stable-boy.
Zelda became daily more conscious of her father’s penurious ways, that were always cropping out in the petty details of the housekeeping. One evening when he thought himself unobserved, she saw him walking down the front stairway, avoiding the carpet on the treads with difficult care. Zelda did not at first know what he was doing; but she soon found this to be only one of his many whimsical economies. He overhauled the pantry now and then, making an inventory of the amount of flour, sugar and coffee in stock, and he still did a part of the marketing. Zelda had given the black stable-boy orders that Zan was to be fed generously; and when she found that her father was giving contrary directions she said nothing, but connived with the boy in the purchase of hay and corn to make good the deficiency caused by her indulgence.
Late one afternoon she drove to a remote quarter of town in pursuit of a laundress that had failed her. She concluded her errand and turned Zan homeward, but lost her way in seeking to avoid a railway track on which a line of freight cars blocked her path. She came upon a public school building, which presented a stubborn front to a line of shops and saloons on the opposite side of a narrow street. Two boys were engaged in combat on the sidewalk at the school-house entrance, surrounded by a ring of noisy partizans. A young woman, a teacher, Zelda took her to be, hurried toward the scene of trouble from the school-house door, and at her approach the ring of spectators dispersed in disorder, leaving the combatants alone, vainly sparring for an advantage before they, too, yielded the field. Zelda unconsciously drew in her horse to watch the conclusion of matters. The young woman stepped between the antagonists without parley, catching the grimy fists of one of the boys in her hands, while the other took to his heels amid the jeers of the gallery. Zelda heard the teacher’s voice raised in sharp reprimand as she dismissed the lad with a wave of her hand that implied an authority not to be gainsaid.
“Pardon me—” Zelda brought her horse to the curb—“but I’ve lost my way. Can you tell me—”
The young teacher paused.
“Please don’t come back—” began Zelda.
The girl stepped to the curb and described the easiest way across town. She was small and trim of figure and had very blue eyes.
“Thank you,” said Zelda, and Zan started forward.
“You are Miss Dameron,” the teacher said hesitatingly.
“Yes.” Zelda turned toward her in surprise.
“It’s been a long time since I saw you,—as many as a dozen years.” The girl smiled and Zelda smiled, too.
“I wish I could remember. I’m sorry, but won’t you help me?”
“It was when you were a little girl—so was I, but I was older—and my mother took me to see your mother, and we played, you and I, that is, in the yard, while our mothers talked. You wore a red dress and I thought you were very grand.”
The blue eyes were looking into the dark ones. There was a moment of hesitation and scrutiny. Then Zelda put out her hand.
“You are my cousin. Olive—is it—Merriam?—please don’t tell me that isn’t right!”
“Yes; that is just right.”
Zan, meanwhile, was pawing the dirty street impatiently.
“I’m going to take you home, if you’re ready to go, Cousin Olive. I’m badly lost and don’t remember the way you told me to go. It’s so exciting meeting a long-lost cousin!”
Olive Merriam debated an instant, in which she surveyed her new-found cousin doubtfully. She had started home when the battle at the school-house door gave her pause. There was no excuse for refusing. Zelda had gathered up the reins, and waited.
“Do come! Zan isn’t dangerous—and neither am I.”
“Thank you. I’ll have to come now to show that I’m not afraid.”
The boys lingered at a safe distance, and as Zelda drove past them at the corner, several of them snatched off their caps and grinned, and Olive Merriam called good night to them.
As Zelda followed the route indicated by her cousin, she was busy trying to find a lost strand of family history that proved elusive. She did not at all remember her mother’s brother, Thomas Merriam. She had never heard her aunt or uncle speak of the relationship, and she surmised, now that she thought of it, that here must be another of those breaks in the family connection that had already revealed ragged edges. It was growing late, and she put Zan to her best paces, until presently they came out upon a broad paved thoroughfare which offered an open course to Jefferson Street.
“That’s better,” said Zelda. “I’m sure I should never have found the way out alone. I don’t believe I was ever down there before.”
“Probably not. It isn’t considered highly fashionable.”
“It looks interesting, though,” said Zelda, remembering that this girl spent her days there at the school-house in the slums. “And I liked the boys.”
“I like them,” said Olive. “But I don’t get a chance at them. I have girls only. I teach—” she laughed in a cheery way that warmed Zelda’s heart—“I teach what they call domestic science.”
“That sounds very serious.”
“But it isn’t; it’s just cooking!”
“Cooking!” The runabout grazed the fender of a trolley car while the motorman stared and swore as he pounded his gong. They were crossing Jefferson Street where High intersects it. The traffic was always congested here at this hour, and the crowd and noise caused Zan to prick up her ears and toss her head. A stalwart policeman stationed in the middle of the street dodged in an undignified fashion and waved his club after them threateningly.
“You may let me out here anywhere,” said Olive, “and I’ll take the car.”
“Not unless you’re frightened. Please let me drive you home. I haven’t the least idea where that is, so if I’m going wrong—”
“It’s Harrison Street.” She described the route. “You’re taking a lot of trouble about me.”
“No. It’s the other way around. I’d never have seen the court-house clock again if it hadn’t been for you. And then—” they approached a cross street, and Zelda checked the flight of Zan and bent forward to see whether the coast was clear—“and then”—she loosened the rein and the animal sped forward again—“I’ve been looking awfully hard for a friend, Cousin Olive, and I want you!”
Olive’s blue eyes, that gazed straight ahead over Zan’s back, filled with tears.
“It’s a dreadful thing in this world to be lonesome—lonesome—lonesome!”
Zelda seemed to be talking to herself. She snapped her whip and Zan’s nimble feet struck the asphalt sharply in response.
“You are kind—but you don’t understand—a lot of things,” said Olive Merriam. “You and I can’t be friends. There are reasons—”
“I don’t care for any reasons,” said Zelda.
“But they’re not my reasons—they’re other people’s! That’s our house there, where the shades are up and a light is in the window.”
“I don’t care what other people say about anything,”—and Zelda brought Zan to a stand at the curb in front of Olive’s door.
“I’d ask you to stop—” began Olive.
“I’m going to stop,” said Zelda—“to see you quite on your threshold. Zan stands without hitching, usually. I’ll take my chances.”
Harrison is only a street in miniature. It lies not far from the heart of town, but so hidden away and with so little communication with the outer world that the uninitiated have difficulty in finding it. It is only a block long, and breathes an air of inadvertence,—of having strayed away from the noise of the city to establish for itself an abode of peace. A poet—the poet that all the people love—wrote a song about it that made it the most famous street in Mariona. The houses there are chiefly one-story-and-a-half cottages, and in one of these, which was saved from intrusive eyes in summer by a double line of hollyhocks, and which had at its back door at seasonable times a charming old-fashioned garden, lived Olive Merriam and her mother.
Olive threw open the door and Zelda stepped into a sitting-room—the house had no hall—where a coal fire burned cozily in a grate. The room ran the length of the house; the woodwork was white; the floor was pine, stained a dull red and covered with rugs made of old carpet. A student lamp with a green shade stood on a table in the center of the room. There were magazines and books on the table, and shelves in the corners held other books. An elderly woman looked up from the paper she had been reading as the door opened. A cane lay on the floor beside her and told the story of the lines of pain in her face.
“Mother, this is Zelda Dameron. She has brought me home,” said Olive.
“She didn’t want me to at all, but I made her let me,” said Zelda, crossing the room and taking Mrs. Merriam’s hand.
The woman bent her eyes—they were blue like Olive’s—upon the girl with a grave questioning.
“You are Margaret’s daughter—you are Ezra Dameron’s daughter,” she said.
“Yes; and I didn’t know about you at all until I found Olive to-day. And I didn’t know that any Merriams anywhere lived in a house like this. Why, it’s a home!”
Olive had brought a chair for Zelda, and stood watching her mother anxiously.
“Please—I’m going—but tell me—that I may come back again.”
There was something so sincere and wistful in Zelda’s tone as she spoke, standing between the firelight and the lamplight; something, too, in the glance of appeal she gave the little room, that broke down the antagonism in Mrs. Merriam’s eyes. She put out her hand again.
“Yes; I hope you will come. We shall be glad to see you.”
“Et vous?” Zelda turned to Olive with a quick gesture. “You must say it, too!”
“Certainly—Cousin Zelda! Saturday or Sunday, always—in the afternoons.”
“Saturday—that’s three days to wait—please don’t forget! Good night!”
Olive followed Zelda to the steps, and saw the runabout turn in the narrow street and whirl away. She watched it until Zelda’s erect figure passed like a flash under the electric light at the corner and disappeared into the dark beyond.
“What miracle is this?” asked Mrs. Merriam of Olive. “Nothing short of a miracle would account for it.”
“I met her down at the school-house. She had lost her way and asked me how to find Jefferson Street. I called her by name,—she seemed to remember me, and then she insisted on bringing me home. She seemed rather pitiful; she said she was lonesome and wanted a friend.”
Olive sat down on a stool at her mother’s feet. She was afraid to show too much interest in this new-found cousin. Her mother was clearly puzzled and troubled; the moment was difficult; but she felt that it was important to determine their future relations with Zelda Dameron now.
“She is so very like her mother. It gave me a shock to see her. Margaret had that same impulsive way. In any one else it would have seemed strained and theatrical, but no one ever thought of it in Margaret. Every one always said, when she did anything a little odd, that it was just like Margaret Dameron. Your father hadn’t any of that; he wasn’t like the rest of the Merriams. He tried to be on good terms with Ezra Dameron, though Ezra never appreciated it; and the rest of them dropped us for countenancing him. But Zelda,—what do you think of her?”
“She didn’t give me time to think. She charmed me! I never saw anybody like her in the world. She has such an air of mystery,—that doesn’t seem just the word, but I don’t know what to call it. She’s adorable! And when we were driving along in the dark and she said she was ‘lonesome, lonesome, lonesome,’ just that way, it made me cry.”
“I’ve heard that she has gone to live with her father. They can have nothing in common. She will hardly be happy with him.”
“I should think not! I can’t imagine her living with him. Yes,—I can imagine her doing anything!”
“I believe I can, too,” said Mrs. Merriam, smiling. “And if she’s disposed to be friendly we mustn’t repel her.”
“No one could refuse an appeal like hers. I’m only afraid she’ll never come back. She’s like a fairy princess. I don’t remember that anything so interesting ever happened to me before. But I must come down to the realities and go and get tea.”
Zelda appeared in a rain-storm early Saturday afternoon. Olive had spent the morning at a teachers’ meeting and hurried through luncheon to be prepared for Zelda in case she should come. Zelda appeared afoot, wrapped in a long rain-coat.
“Don’t be alarmed about me! I’m neither sugar, salt nor anybody’s honey. I never had a cold in my life,” she declared, as the two women exclaimed at her drenched appearance. Olive helped her out of the coat and bore it away to the kitchen, and then took Zelda to her own room, where there was more white woodwork, with draperies of pink and white in the dormer-windows.
“I know; I see through it all; you didn’t really want me to fix my dripping locks, but to see this. Isn’t it too good to be true? It’s like a little room I had once at a place in Italy, only better. It’s very bad form to look; but I’m looking.” Zelda went about peering at pictures, touching draperies swiftly with her hands; and at Olive’s dresser she availed herself of comb and brush and restored her hair with a few strokes. “Now, Cousin Olive, I don’t know what girls have to say to each other when they’re all alone. This is a new experience. So you begin.”
She took a rocking-chair that was covered with chintz of the same pattern as the curtains, and faced Olive, who sat down in a little window seat where there were cushions that matched the chintz. The room was small and cozy. The rain beat on the shingles overhead and against the windows with a soothing monotony.
“Mine are the brief and simple annals of the poor,” said Olive.
“That sounds like poetry. I don’t know any poetry. Tell me”—Zelda bent forward in her chair and dropped her voice to a whisper—“tell me, Cousin Olive, are you educated?”
Olive laughed aloud.
“I’m sorry to admit it, but I went to Drexel Institute, where they teach girls to be practical; I didn’t go for fun; I went for business. They teach the useful arts, and I learned, among other things, to be humble.”
“I don’t believe you learned humility. Maybe humility was,—what do they call it,—a snap course?”
“I’m not sure that I learned it,” said Olive.
“You must get over it if you did. Now, go on, and don’t let me interrupt you any more.”
“Then I came home and began to teach in the public schools what they call, as I told you, domestic science,—which means cooking.”
“Wonderful!”
“Not very. Nothing could be simpler. They’re trying it on to see how it goes; so there’s a certain responsibility in my work. It will mean a lot to the children of the poor if they can learn how to do things decently and in order; and if I don’t make my slum cooking go the powers will cut it off. I thought for a while about becoming a trained nurse, though mother protested against it. But I was cured of that. I went down to St. Luke’s Hospital to see if they would take me. The boss nurse, whatever they call her, looked me over and asked if I wanted to learn nursing because I had been disappointed in love! Think of it! It seems that many girls do go in for it when they’ve been disappointed. But that didn’t apply to me; so they refused to take me because I was so little. I suppose I am rather undersized,” said Olive, ruefully. “I should like to be a nurse. The girls look so stunning in their uniform. But that’s all there is about me. Mother is often ill and never very strong. We live alone here and don’t see many people and nothing ever happens.”
“It seems to me that a good deal happens. Now nothing really ever does happen to me. And I’m most shamelessly ignorant. They didn’t send me to school; my Aunt Julia kept me moving. I’ve lived in a trunk so long that it seems to me the lid is always crowding down on top of my head.”
She shrugged her shoulders and put up her hands as though to protect herself from an imaginary trunk-lid.
“Oh, but to see things and places and people!”
“But you don’t see them,—when you’re traveling with your aunt! Then you go boldly into a beautiful city and are taken in a closed carriage to a hotel, or worse yet, a pension, and you are warned not to speak to any one, particularly to any one that looks interesting, for the interesting people usually have something wrong with them. Isn’t it strange that the interesting people are always wicked? I know that from personal experience.”
Olive was listening to her cousin’s talk with a happy light in her eyes and the smile that forever hovered about her pretty mouth.
“It isn’t so funny, I would have you know! to be dragged around, always in a carriage, mind you, to look at only the most respectable ruins, and statues of people that labored for some noble cause and had so little sense they lost their heads. I worked for weeks in Paris before Aunt Julia would let me see Napoleon’s tomb. And all because his domestic life was not what it should be! As though that mattered, when he made those silly old dynasties over there gasp for breath.”
Zelda’s voice,—its depth and music, and the elusive disappearing note in it, wove an enchantment for Olive. Her own life had been colorless and practical; but she had her dreams, and her cousin Zelda seemed a realization of some of them.
“Anything is better than not going at all!”
“Maybe so. But I had tutors—queer people that came to teach me French and German. That was odious, most odious.”
“I’m sure you know a lot. You can’t help knowing a lot.”
“I don’t know a thing,—not a single blessed thing. And if you won’t tell any one—if you will let this be an awful secret between you and me, a compact to end only with death,—I’ll confide to you that I don’t care! I’m very, very wicked, Cousin Olive. I always want to do things I’m told not to. When my dear charming father—he’s perfectly dear and lovely—talks to me about politics and tells me that the Republicans stand for the holy principles on which this glorious republic was founded, I decide at once that I’m a Democrat. George Washington must have been an awful bore. If the English weren’t the dullest and stupidest people in the world they would have whipped him out of his boots. Now, don’t you see what an impossible person I am? My father’s the kindest, best man in the world,—he’s always so thoughtful,—always doing things for me, and yet sometimes his very goodness makes this same kind of wickedness rise up in me! Some day, some day, Cousin Olive, I’m going to be good myself; but just now goodness,—goodness makes me very tired. And now,” she went on with a change of manner and waiting for no comment from her intent and puzzled listener, “would you mind telling me how you get white woodwork like this? Do you have to get the plumber or whatever-his-name-is to do that?”
“The way I did that,” said Olive, “was to take twenty-five cents down to a shop where they sell paint all ready for the feminine hand to apply, and buy a can of it and do the painting myself. It’s rather fun.”
“Perfectly delicious! My room is all black walnut, and I loathe it. And things like these,” she indicated the curtains,—“how do you find them?”
“I’ll tell you my system, but it won’t appeal to you. I go to the cheapest shop in town, where no carriages ever stop at the front door, and where the women go in with their market baskets. I ask to see the cheapest chintz they have; and then I pick out the least ugly stuff in the bunch and carry it home.”
“Tremendous! It isn’t polite at all for me to be asking; but Aunt Julia is as ignorant as I am. She sends her maid to do her shopping.”
“That’s real luxury.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s no fun at all. You can’t imagine what it means to me to learn a little about how human beings live. Ever since I grew up I’ve lived on the outside of things, and I’m tired of it.”
“You ought to be very happy,” said Olive.
“That’s what I detest about things,—the oughts. That’s why the oughtn’ts seem so attractive. But you won’t mind, will you, all this queer rigmarole of mine? Please don’t tell your mother,—I want her to like me, too, and she never could if she knew what wild ideas I have.”
“We like you very much, Cousin Zelda,” said Olive, gravely. She rose from her seat and crossed to where Zelda stood and put her hands on her cousin’s shoulders. Zelda seemed to look down on Olive from an ampler ether; but her little kinswoman offered anchorage and security. She brushed the soft light hair from Olive’s brow caressingly and bent and kissed her.
“We understand, don’t we?” she said happily, stepping back and catching both her cousin’s hands.
“And now,” said Olive, “Let us go down and make some tea and drink to the compact.”