Davenport’s an emerald,” said Selina, quickly, and rather surprised to find herself saying it.
“Yes. That’s it.”
“And—and Julie Hempel’s father—he’s wheat.”
“By golly, Sele!” shouted Simeon Peake. “You’re a shrewd little tyke!”
It was after reading “Pride and Prejudice” that she decided to be the Jane Austen of her time. She became very mysterious and enjoyed a brief period of unpopularity at Miss Fister’s owing to her veiled allusions to her “work”; and an annoying way of smiling to herself and tapping a ruminative toe as though engaged in visions far too exquisite for the common eye. Her chum Julie Hempel, properly enough, became enraged at this and gave Selina to understand that she must make her choice between revealing her secret or being cast out of the Hempel heart. Selina swore her to secrecy.
“Very well, then. Now I’ll tell you. I’m going to be a novelist.” Julie was palpably disappointed, though she said, “Selina!” as though properly impressed, but followed it up with: “Still, I don’t see why you had to be so mysterious about it.”
“You just don’t understand, Julie. Writers have to study life at first hand. And if people know you’re studying them they don’t act natural. Now, that day you were telling me about the young man in your father’s shop who looked at you and said——”
“Selina Peake, if you dare to put that in your book I’ll never speak——”
“All right. I won’t. But that’s what I mean. You see!”
Julie Hempel and Selina Peake, both finished products of Miss Fister’s school, were of an age—nineteen. Selina, on this September day, had been spending the afternoon with Julie, and now, adjusting her hat preparatory to leaving, she clapped her hands over her ears to shut out the sounds of Julie’s importunings that she stay to supper. Certainly the prospect of the usual Monday evening meal in Mrs. Tebbitt’s boarding house (the Peake luck was momentarily low) did not present sufficient excuse for Selina’s refusal. Indeed, the Hempel supper as sketched dish for dish by the urgent Julie brought little greedy groans from Selina.
“It’s prairie chickens—three of them—that a farmer west of town brought Father. Mother fixes them with stuffing, and there’s currant jell. Creamed onions and baked tomatoes. And for dessert, apple roll.”
Selina snapped the elastic holding her high-crowned hat under her chignon of hair in the back. She uttered a final and quavering groan. “On Monday nights we have cold mutton and cabbage at Mrs. Tebbitt’s. This is Monday.”
“Well then, silly, why not stay!”
“Father comes home at six. If I’m not there he’s disappointed.”
Julie, plump, blonde, placid, forsook her soft white blandishments and tried steel against the steel of Selina’s decision.
“He leaves you right after supper. And you’re alone every night until twelve and after.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with it,” Selina said, stiffly.
Julie’s steel, being low-grade, melted at once and ran off her in rivulets. “Of course it hasn’t, Selie dear. Only I thought you might leave him just this once.”
“If I’m not there he’s disappointed. And that terrible Mrs. Tebbitt makes eyes at him. He hates it there.”
“Then I don’t see why you stay. I never could see. You’ve been there four months now, and I think it’s horrid and stuffy; and oilcloth on the stairs.”
“Father has had some temporary business setbacks.”
Selina’s costume testified to that. True, it was modish, and bustled, and basqued, and flounced; and her high-crowned, short-rimmed hat, with its trimming of feathers and flowers and ribbons had come from New York. But both were of last spring’s purchasing, and this was September.
In the course of the afternoon they had been looking over the pages of Godey’s Ladies’ Book for that month. The disparity between Selina’s costume and the creations pictured there was much as the difference between the Tebbitt meal and that outlined by Julie. Now Julie, fond though defeated, kissed her friend good-bye.
Selina walked quickly the short distance from the Hempel house to Tebbitt’s, on Dearborn Avenue. Up in her second-floor room she took off her hat and called to her father, but he had not yet come in. She was glad of that. She had been fearful of being late. She regarded her hat now with some distaste, decided to rip off the faded spring roses, did rip a stitch or two, only to discover that the hat material was more faded than the roses, and that the uncovered surface showed up a dark splotch like a wall-spot when a picture, long hung, is removed. So she got a needle and prepared to tack the offending rose in its accustomed place.
Perched on the arm of a chair near the window, taking quick deft stitches, she heard a sound. She had never heard that sound before—that peculiar sound—the slow, ominous tread of men laden with a heavy inert burden; bearing with infinite care that which was well beyond hurting. Selina had never heard that sound before, and yet, hearing it, she recognized it by one of those pangs, centuries old, called woman’s instinct. Thud—shuffle—thud—shuffle—up the narrow stairway, along the passage. She stood up, the needle poised in her hand. The hat fell to the floor. Her eyes were wide, fixed. Her lips slightly parted. The listening look. She knew.
She knew even before she heard the hoarse man’s voice saying, “Lift ’er up there a little on the corner, now. Easy—e-e-easy.” And Mrs. Tebbitt’s high shrill clamour: “You can’t bring it in there! You hadn’t ought to bring it in here like this!”
Selina’s suspended breath came back. She was panting now. She had flung open the door. A flat still burden partially covered with an overcoat carelessly flung over the face. The feet, in their square-toed boots, wobbled listlessly. Selina noticed how shiny the boots were. He was always very finicking about such things.
Simeon Peake had been shot in Jeff Hankins’s place at five in the afternoon. The irony of it was that the bullet had not been intended for him at all. Its derelict course had been due to feminine aim. Sped by one of those over-dramatic ladies who, armed with horsewhip or pistol in tardy defence of their honour, spangled Chicago’s dull ’80s with their doings, it had been meant for a well-known newspaper publisher usually mentioned (in papers other than his own) as a bon vivant. The lady’s leaden remonstrance was to have been proof of the fact that he had been more vivacious than bon.
It was, perhaps, because of this that the matter was pretty well hushed up. The publisher’s paper—which was Chicago’s foremost—scarcely mentioned the incident and purposely misspelled the name. The lady, thinking her task accomplished, had taken truer aim with her second bullet, and had saved herself the trouble of trial by human jury.
Simeon Peake left his daughter Selina a legacy of two fine clear blue-white diamonds (he had had the gambler’s love of them) and the sum of four hundred and ninety-seven dollars in cash. Just how he had managed to have a sum like this put by was a mystery. The envelope containing it had evidently once held a larger sum. It had been sealed, and then slit. On the outside was written, in Simeon Peake’s fine, almost feminine hand: “For my little daughter Selina Peake in case anything should happen to me.” It bore a date seven years old. What the original sum had been no one ever knew. That any sum remained was evidence of the almost heroic self-control practised by one to whom money—ready money in any sum at all—meant only fuel to feed the flames of his gaming fever.
To Selina fell the choice of earning her own living or of returning to the Vermont village and becoming a withered and sapless dried apple, with black fuzz and mould at her heart, like her aunts, the Misses Sarah and Abbie Peake. She did not hesitate.
“But what kind of work?” Julie Hempel demanded. “What kind of work can you do?” Women—that is, the Selina Peakes—did not work.
“I—well, I can teach.”