“That’s so,” assented the dress-maker. “Have you got the back breadths run together, Miss Bunner? Here’s the sleeves. I’ll pin ‘em together.” She drew a cluster of pins from her mouth, in which she seemed to secrete them as squirrels stow away nuts. “There,” she said, rolling up her work, “you go right away to bed, Miss Evelina, and we’ll set up a little later to-morrow night. I guess you’re a mite nervous, ain’t you? I know when my turn comes I’ll be scared to death.”
With this arch forecast she withdrew, and Ann Eliza, returning to the back room, found Evelina still listlessly seated by the table. True to her new policy of silence, the elder sister set about folding up the bridal dress; but suddenly Evelina said in a harsh unnatural voice: “There ain’t any use in going on with that.”
The folds slipped from Ann Eliza’s hands.
“Evelina Bunner—what you mean?”
“Jest what I say. It’s put off.”
“Put off—what’s put off?”
“Our getting married. He can’t take me to St. Louis. He ain’t got money enough.” She brought the words out in the monotonous tone of a child reciting a lesson.
Ann Eliza picked up another breadth of cashmere and began to smooth it out. “I don’t understand,” she said at length.
“Well, it’s plain enough. The journey’s fearfully expensive, and we’ve got to have something left to start with when we get out there. We’ve counted up, and he ain’t got the money to do it—that’s all.”
“But I thought he was going right into a splendid place.”
“So he is; but the salary’s pretty low the first year, and board’s very high in St. Louis. He’s jest got another letter from his German friend, and he’s been figuring it out, and he’s afraid to chance it. He’ll have to go alone.”
“But there’s your money—have you forgotten that? The hundred dollars in the bank.”
Evelina made an impatient movement. “Of course I ain’t forgotten it. On’y it ain’t enough. It would all have to go into buying furniture, and if he was took sick and lost his place again we wouldn’t have a cent left. He says he’s got to lay by another hundred dollars before he’ll be willing to take me out there.”
For a while Ann Eliza pondered this surprising statement; then she ventured: “Seems to me he might have thought of it before.”
In an instant Evelina was aflame. “I guess he knows what’s right as well as you or me. I’d sooner die than be a burden to him.”
Ann Eliza made no answer. The clutch of an unformulated doubt had checked the words on her lips. She had meant, on the day of her sister’s marriage, to give Evelina the other half of their common savings; but something warned her not to say so now.
The sisters undressed without farther words. After they had gone to bed, and the light had been put out, the sound of Evelina’s weeping came to Ann Eliza in the darkness, but she lay motionless on her own side of the bed, out of contact with her sister’s shaken body. Never had she felt so coldly remote from Evelina.
The hours of the night moved slowly, ticked off with wearisome insistence by the clock which had played so prominent a part in their lives. Evelina’s sobs still stirred the bed at gradually lengthening intervals, till at length Ann Eliza thought she slept. But with the dawn the eyes of the sisters met, and Ann Eliza’s courage failed her as she looked in Evelina’s face.
She sat up in bed and put out a pleading hand.
“Don’t cry so, dearie. Don’t.”
“Oh, I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it,” Evelina moaned.
Ann Eliza stroked her quivering shoulder. “Don’t, don’t,” she repeated. “If you take the other hundred, won’t that be enough? I always meant to give it to you. On’y I didn’t want to tell you till your wedding day.”
IX
Evelina’s marriage took place on the appointed day. It was celebrated in the evening, in the chantry of the church which the sisters attended, and after it was over the few guests who had been present repaired to the Bunner Sisters’ basement, where a wedding supper awaited them. Ann Eliza, aided by Miss Mellins and Mrs. Hawkins, and consciously supported by the sentimental interest of the whole street, had expended her utmost energy on the decoration of the shop and the back room. On the table a vase of white chrysanthemums stood between a dish of oranges and bananas and an iced wedding-cake wreathed with orange-blossoms of the bride’s own making. Autumn leaves studded with paper roses festooned the what-not and the chromo of the Rock of Ages, and a wreath of yellow immortelles was twined about the clock which Evelina revered as the mysterious agent of her happiness.
At the table sat Miss Mellins, profusely spangled and bangled, her head sewing-girl, a pale young thing who had helped with Evelina’s outfit, Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins, with Johnny, their eldest boy, and Mrs. Hochmuller and her daughter.
Mrs. Hochmuller’s large blonde personality seemed to pervade the room to the effacement of the less amply-proportioned guests. It was rendered more impressive by a dress of crimson poplin that stood out from her in organ-like folds; and Linda, whom Ann Eliza had remembered as an uncouth child with a sly look about the eyes, surprised her by a sudden blossoming into feminine grace such as sometimes follows on a gawky girlhood. The Hochmullers, in fact, struck the dominant note in the entertainment. Beside them Evelina, unusually pale in her grey cashmere and white bonnet, looked like a faintly washed sketch beside a brilliant chromo; and Mr. Ramy, doomed to the traditional insignificance of the bridegroom’s part, made no attempt to rise above his situation. Even Miss Mellins sparkled and jingled in vain in the shadow of Mrs. Hochmuller’s crimson bulk; and Ann Eliza, with a sense of vague foreboding, saw that the wedding feast centred about the two guests she had most wished to exclude from it. What was said or done while they all sat about the table she never afterward recalled: the long hours remained in her memory as a whirl of high colours and loud voices, from which the pale presence of Evelina now and then emerged like a drowned face on a sunset-dabbled sea.
The next morning Mr. Ramy and his wife started for St. Louis, and Ann Eliza was left alone. Outwardly the first strain of parting was tempered by the arrival of Miss Mellins, Mrs. Hawkins and Johnny, who dropped in to help in the ungarlanding and tidying up of the back room. Ann Eliza was duly grateful for their kindness, but the “talking over” on which they had evidently counted was Dead Sea fruit on her lips; and just beyond the familiar warmth of their presences she saw the form of Solitude at her door.
Ann Eliza was but a small person to harbour so great a guest, and a trembling sense of insufficiency possessed her. She had no high musings to offer to the new companion of her hearth. Every one of her thoughts had hitherto turned to Evelina and shaped itself in homely easy words; of the mighty speech of silence she knew not the earliest syllable.
Everything in the back room and the shop, on the second day after Evelina’s going, seemed to have grown coldly unfamiliar. The whole aspect of the place had changed with the changed conditions of Ann Eliza’s life. The first customer who opened the shop-door startled her like a ghost; and all night she lay tossing on her side of the bed, sinking now and then into an uncertain doze from which she would suddenly wake to reach out her hand for Evelina. In the new silence surrounding her the walls and furniture found voice, frightening her at dusk and midnight with strange sighs and stealthy whispers. Ghostly hands shook the window shutters or rattled at the outer latch, and once she grew cold at the sound of a step like Evelina’s stealing through the dark shop to die out on the threshold. In time, of course, she found an explanation for these noises, telling herself that the bedstead was warping, that Miss Mellins trod heavily overhead, or that the thunder of passing beer-waggons shook the door-latch; but the hours leading up to these conclusions were full of the floating terrors that harden into fixed foreboding. Worst of all were the solitary meals, when she absently continued to set aside the largest slice of pie for Evelina, and to let the tea grow cold while she waited for her sister to help herself to the first cup. Miss Mellins, coming in on one of these sad repasts, suggested the acquisition of a cat; but Ann Eliza shook her head. She had never been used to animals, and she felt the vague shrinking of the pious from creatures divided from her by the abyss of soullessness.