Mrs. Dud's Sister

They were having tea on the terrace. As Varian strolled up to the group he wished that Hunter could see the picture they made--Hunter, who had not been in America for thirty years, and who had been so honestly surprised when Varian had spoken of Mrs. Dud's pretty maids--she always had pretty ones, even to the cook's third assistant.

“Maids? Maids? It used to be 'help,'” he had protested. “You don't mean to say they have waitresses in Binghamville now?”

Varian had despaired of giving him any idea.

“Come over and see Mrs. Dud,” he had urged, “and do her portrait. We've moved on since you left us, you know. She's a wonder--she really is. When you remember how she used to carry her father's dinner to the store Saturday afternoons--”

“And now I suppose she sports real Mechlin on her cap,” assented Hunter, anxious to show how perfectly he caught the situation.

Varian had roared helplessly. “Cap? Cap!” he had moaned finally. “Oh, my sainted granny! Cap! My poor fellow, your view of Binghamville must be like the old maps of Africa in the green geography, that said 'desert' and 'interior' and 'savage tribes' from time to time. I should like awfully to see Mrs. Dud in a cap.”

Hunter had looked puzzled.

“But, dear me! she might very well wear one, I should think,” he had murmured defensively. “I don't wish to be invidious, but surely Lizzie must be--let's see; 'eighty, 'ninety--why, she must be between forty-five and fifty now.”

Varian had waved his hand dramatically. “Nobody considers Mrs. Dud and time in the same breath. If you could see her in her golf rig! Or on a horse! She even sheds a lustre on the rest of us. I forget my rheumatism!”

But Hunter, retreating behind his determination to avoid a second seasickness--it might have been sincere; nobody ever knew--had stayed in Florence, and Varian had been obliged to come without him to the house-party.

On a straw cushion, a cup in her strong white hand, a bunch of adoring young girls at her feet, sat Mrs. Dud. Rosy and firm-cheeked, crisp in stiff white duck, deliriously contrasted with her fluffy Parisian parasol, she scorned the softening ruffles of her presumable contemporaries; her delicately squared chin, for the most part held high, showed a straight white collar under a throat only a little fuller than the girlish ones all around her.

Old Dudley himself strolled about the group, gossiping here and there with some pretty woman, sending the grave servants from one to another with some particularly desirable sandwich, “rubbing it in,” as he said to the men who had failed to touch his score on the links, tantalizingly uncertain as to which one of the young women he would invite to lead the cotillon with him at the club dance that week: none of the young men could take his place at that, as they themselves enviously admitted.

What a well-matched couple it was! What a lot they got out of life! Varian walked quietly by the group, to enjoy better the pretty, modish picture they made. Their quick chatter, their bursts of laughter, the sweet faint odor of the tea, the gay dresses and light flannels, with the quiet, sombrely attired servants to add tone, all gave him, fresh from Hunter's quick sense of the effective, an appreciation that gained force from his separateness; he walked farther away to get a different point of view.

He was out of any path now, and suddenly, hardly beyond reach of their voices, he found himself in a part of the grounds he had never approached before. A thick high hedge shut in a kind of court at the side and back of the great house, and a solid wooden door, carefully matched to its green, left open by accident, showed a picture so out of line with the succession of vivid scenes that dazzled the visitor at Wilton Bluffs that he stopped involuntarily. The rectangle was carpeted with the characteristic emerald turf of the place, divided by intersecting red brick paths into four regular squares. In the farther corner of each of these a trim green clothes-tree was planted, all abloom with snowy fringed napkins that shone dazzling white against the hedge. One of the squares was a neat little kitchen-garden; parsley was there in plenty, and other vaguely familiar green things, curly-leaved and spear-pointed. A warm gust of wind brought mint to his nostrils. A second plot held a small crab-apple tree covered with pink and orange globes. A great tortoise-shell cat with two kittens ornamented the third, and in the middle of the fourth, beside a small wooden table, a woman sat with her back toward the intruder. On the table were one or two tin boxes and a yellow earthen dish; in her left hand, raised to the shoulder-level, was a tall thin bottle, from which an amber fluid dripped in an almost imperceptibly thin stream; her right arm stirred vigorously. She was a middle-aged woman with lightly grayed hair--a kind of premonitory powdering. Over her full skirt of lavender-striped cotton stuff fell a broad, competent white apron. Except for the thudding of the spoon against the bowl, and a faint, homely echo of clashing china and tin, mingled with occasionally raised voices and laughter from some farther kitchen region, all was utterly, placidly still.

Varian stood chained to the open gate. Something in the calm sun-bathed picture tugged strongly at his heart. He thought suddenly of his mother and his Aunt Delia--he had been very fond of Aunt Delia. And what cookies she used to make! Molasses cookies, brown, moist, and crumbly, they had sweetened his boyhood.

What was it, that delighted sense of congruity that filled him, every passing second, with keener familiarity, so strangely tinged with sorrow and regret? Ah, he had it! He bit his lip as it came clear to him. His little namesake nephew, dead at eight years old, and dear as only a dearly loved child can be, had delighted greatly in the Kate Greenaway pictures that came in “painting-books,” with colored prints on alternate pages and corresponding outlines on the others. Dozens of those books the boy had cleverly filled in with his little japanned paint-box and mussy, quill-handled brushes; and the scene before him, the rich tints of the hedge, the symmetrical little tree brilliant with hundreds of tiny globes, the big white apron, the lazy yellow cats, and everywhere the prim rectangular lines so amusingly conventional to accentuate the likeness, almost choked him with the suddenness of the recognition. They must have colored that very picture a dozen times, Tommy and he.

Half unconsciously he rested his arms on the top of the gate and drifted into revery. He forgot that he was at Wilton Bluffs, one of the greatest of the country palaces, and lived for a while in a mingled vision of his boyhood on the old farm and in the land of the Greenaway painting-books.

Suddenly a door opened into the green.

A housemaid advanced to the table, bearing in both red hands a long tray covered with a napkin. On the napkin lay, heaped in rich confusion, a great pile of spicy, smoking brown cookies.

“They're just out o' the oven,” she began, but Varian could contain himself no longer. He could not be deceived: he would have known those cookies in the Desert of Sahara. He crossed the little plot in three long steps, and faced the astonished maid.

“I beg your pardon,” he said firmly, “but it is very necessary that I should have one of those cookies! I hope you can spare one?”

She giggled convulsively.

“I--I guess you can, sir,” she murmured, laying down the tray and retreating toward the house door.

Varian faced the older woman, and, with hat still in hand, instinctively bowed lower; for this was no housekeeper--he was sure of that. Even as she met his eyes a great flood of pink rushed to her smooth forehead, and she dropped her lids as she bowed slightly. He reflected irrelevantly that he had never seen Mrs. Dudley blush in his life.

“You are very welcome to all you wish, I am sure,” she said graciously. “I--I didn't know any one liked them but me. I always have them made for me--I taught her the rule. I always call them”--she laughed nervously, and it dawned on him that this woman was really shy and “talking against time,” as they said--“I always call them 'Aunt Delia's cookies.' They--”

“Aunt Delia's cookies!” he interrupted. “What Aunt Delia?”

“Aunt Delia Parmentre,” she returned, a little surprised, evidently, at this stranger, who, with a straw sailor-hat in one hand and a warm molasses cooky in the other, stared so intently at her. “She wasn't really my aunt, of course--”

“But she was mine!” he burst out, “and these are her cookies, and no mistake. Who are you?”

Again she flushed, but more lightly.

“I am Miss Redding,” she said with a gentle dignity, “Mrs. Wilton's sister.”

He stared at her vaguely.

“Mrs. Wilton--oh! you're her sister? I didn't know--” He stopped abruptly. As his confusion grew, her own faded away.

“You didn't know she had one?” she asked, almost mischievously.

“I didn't know you were here,” he recovered himself. “You've never been with Mrs. Dud before, have you?”

“No, not here when there was company,” she said.

He hardly noticed the words; his mind was groping among past histories.

“Her sister--her sister,” he muttered. “Why, then,” with an illuminating smile, “I used to go to school with you! I'm Tom Varian!”

She smiled and held out her hand.

“I'm very glad to see you,” she said cordially. “Won't you--” She looked about for a chair, but he dropped on the grass at her feet.

“You've changed since we met last,” he remarked, biting into his cooky. She looked at his bronzed face and thick silvered hair and nodded thoughtfully.