The Other Girls by Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney (little red riding hood ebook .TXT) 📕

leaves browning and crumbling at the edges,--some daphnes struggling into green tips, having lost their last growth of leaf and dropped all their flower buds, and several calmly enduring orange and lemon trees, gave all the suggestion of foliage that the place afforded, and served, much like the painter's inscription at the bottom of his canvas merely to signify by the scant glimpse through the drawing-room draperies,--"This is a conservatory."

Mrs. Argenter asked Rodney something about the best arrangement for the open beds, and wanted to know what would be surest to do well for the rockery, and whether it was in a good part of the house,--sufficiently shaded? Meanwhile, Amy and Sylvie were turning over music, and when they all gathered together again the call had extended to a two hours' visit.

"It is really unpardonable," Amy Sherrett was saying, and picking up the pretty little hat which she had thrown down upon a chair,--"it had been so warm to wear anything a minute that one need not." And then Mrs. Argenter said so easily and of course, that they "certainly would not think of going now, when it would soon be really pleasant for a twilight drive; tea would be ready early, for she and Sylvie were alone, and all they had cared for to-day had been a cold lunch at one. They would have it on the north veranda;" and she touched a bell to give the order.

Perhaps Amy Sherrett would hardly have consented, but that Rodney gave her a look, comical in its appeal, over Sylvie's shoulder, as she stood showing him a great scarlet Euphorbia in a portfolio of water-colors, and said with a beseeching significance,--

"Consider Red Squirrel, Amy. He really did have a pretty hard pull; and what with the heat and the flies, I dare say he would take it with more equanimity after sundown,--since Mrs. Argenter is so very kind."

And so they stayed; and Mrs. Argenter laid another little brick in her "House that Jack built."

* * * * *

At this same time,--how should she know it?--something very different was going on in one of the rooms of a great hotel in New York. Somebody else who had meant before now to have left for home, had been delayed till after sundown. Somebody else would go over the road by dark instead of by daylight. By dark,--though there should be broad, beating sunshine over the world again when the journey should be made.

While Mrs. Argenter's maid was bringing out the tray with delicate black-etched china cups, and costly fruit plates illuminated with color, and dainty biscuits, and large, rare, red berries, and cream that would hardly pour for richness in a gleaming crystal flagon,--and ranging them all on the rustic veranda table,--something very different,--very grim,--at which the occupants of rooms near by shuddered as it passed their open doors,--was borne down the long, wide corridor to Number Five, in the Metropolitan; and at the same moment, again, a gentleman, very grave, was standing at the counter of the Merchants' Union Telegraph Company's Office, writing with rapid hand, a brief dispatch, addressed to "Mrs. I.M. Argenter, Dorbury, Mass.," and signed "Philip Burkmayer, M.D."

Nobody knew of any one else to send to; at that hour, especially, when the office in State Street would be closed. Closed, with that name outside the door that stood for nobody now.

The news must go bare and unbroken to her.

Something occurred to Doctor Burkmayer, however, as he was just handing the slip to the attendant.

"Stop; give me that again, a minute," he said; and tearing it in two, he wrote another, and then another.

"Send this on at once, and the second in an hour," he said; as if they might have been prescriptions to be administered. "They may both be delivered together after all," he continued to himself, as he turned away. "But it is all I can do. When a weight is let drop, it has got to fall. You can't ease it up much with a string measured out for all the way down!"

The young woman operator at the little telegraph station at Dorbury Upper Village heard the call-click as she unlocked the room and came in after her half-hour supper time. She set the wires and responded, and laid the paper slip under the wonderful pins.

"Tick-tick-tick; tick-tick; tick-tick-tick-tick," and so on. The girl's face looked startled, as she spelled the signs along. She answered back when it was ended; then wrote out the message rapidly upon a blank, folded, directed it, and went to the open street door.

"Sim! Here--quick!" she called to a youth opposite, in a stable-yard.

"This has got to go down to the Argenter Place. And mind how you give it. It's bad news."

"How can _I_ mind?" said Sim, gruffly. "I spose I must give it to who comes."

"You might see somebody on the way, and speak a word; a neighbor, or the minister, or somebody. 'Tain't fit for it to go right to her, _I_ know. Telegraphs might as well be something else when they can, besides lightning!"

"Donno's I can go travellin' round after 'em, if that's what you mean," said Sim, putting the envelope in his rough breast pocket, and turning off.

Sylvie was standing on the stone steps, bidding the Sherretts good-by; Amy was just seated in the gig, and Rodney about to spring in beside her, when Sim Atwill drove up the avenue in the rusty covered wagon that did telegraph errands. Red Squirrel did not quite like the sudden coming face to face, as Sim reined up in a hurry just below the door, and Rodney had to pause and hold him in.

"A tellagrim for Mrs. Argenter," said Sim, seizing his opportunity, and speaking to whom it might concern. "Eighty cents to pay, and I 'blieve it's bad news."

"O, Mr. Sherrett, stop, please!" cried Sylvie, turning white in the dim light. "What shall I do? Won't you wait a minute, Miss Sherrett, until I see? Won't you come in again? Mother will be frightened to death, and I'm all alone."

"Jump out, Amy; I'll take Squirrel round," was Rodney's answer. "Go right up; I'll come."

And as Sylvie took the thin envelope that held so much, and the two girls silently passed up into the piazza again, he paid Sim the eighty cents which nobody thought of at that moment or ever again, and sent him off.

Sylvie and Amy stopped under the softly bright hall lantern. Mrs. Argenter was up-stairs in her dressing room, quite at the end of the long upper hall, changing her lace sack for a cashmere, before coming out into the evening air again.

"I think I shall open it myself," whispered Sylvie, tremulously; "it would seem worse to mother, whatever it is, coming this way. She has such a horror of a telegram." She looked at it on both sides, drew a little shivering breath, and paused again.

"Is it wicked, do you think, to wish it may be--only grandma, perhaps? Do you suppose it could _possibly_ be--my _father_?"

And by this time there was a hysterical sound in poor little Sylvie's voice.

"Wait a minute," said Amy, kindly. "Here's Rod."

"OFFICE OF WESTERN UNION TELEGRAPH CO., NEW YORK, _July_ 24_th_, 187-.

"To MRS. I. M. ARGENTER, Dorbury, Mass.

"Mr. Argenter has had a sunstroke. Insensible. Very serious. Will telegraph again.

"PHILIP BURKMAYER, M.D."

Sylvie's eyes, so roundly innocent, so star-like in their usual bright uplifting, were raised now with a wide terror in them, first to Rodney, then to Amy; and "O--O!" broke in short, subdued gasps from her lips.

Then they heard Mrs. Argenter's step up-stairs.

"What is the matter, Sylvie? What are you doing? Who is with you down there?" she said, over the baluster, from the hall above.

"O, mother!" cried Sylvie, "they aren't gone! Something has _come_! Go up and tell her, Amy, please!" And forgetting all about Amy as "Miss Sherrett," and all her fear of "nice girls," she dropped down on the lower step of the staircase after Amy had passed her upon her errand, put her face between her hands and caught her breath with frightened sobs.

Rodney, leaning against the newel post, looked down at her, and said, after the manner of men,--"Don't cry. It mayn't be very bad, after all. You'll hear again in an hour or two. Can't I do something? I'll go to the telegraph office. I'll get somebody for your mother. Whom shall I go for?"

"O, you are very kind. I don't know. Wait a minute. They didn't say any place! We ought to go right to New York, and we don't know where! O, dear!" She had lifted her head a little, just to say these broken sentences, and then it went down again.

Rodney did not answer instantly. It occurred to him all at once what this "not saying any place" might mean.

Just as he began,--"You couldn't go until to-morrow,"--came Mrs. Argenter's sharp cry from her room above. Amy had walked right on into the open, lighted apartment, Mrs. Argenter following, not daring to ask what she came and did this strange thing for, till Amy made her sit down in her own easy chair, and taking her hands, said gently,--

"It is a telegram from New York. Mr. Argenter--is very ill." Then Mrs. Argenter cried out, "That's not all! I know how people bring news! Tell me the whole." And Sylvie sprang to her feet, hearing the quick, excited words, and leaving Rodney Sherrett standing there, rushed up into the dressing-room.

This was the way the same sort of news came to Sylvie Argenter as had come to the baker's daughter. Did it really make any difference--the different surrounding of the two? The great house--the lights--the servants--the friends; and the open bake-shop door, the village street, the blunt, common-spoken neighbor-woman, and the boy with the brick loaf?

These two were to be fatherless: their mothers were both to be widows: that was all.

Did it happen strangely with the two--in this same story? Who know, always, when they are in the same story? These things are happening every day, and one great story holds us all. If one could see wide enough, one could tell the whole.

These things happen: and then the question comes,--alike in high and low places,--alike with money and without it,--what the women and the girls are to do?

Rodney Sherrett took his sister home; drove three miles round and brought Mrs. Argenter's sister to her from River Point, and then turned toward Dorbury Upper Village and the telegraph office. But he met Sim Atwill on the way, received the telegram from him, and hurried back.

It was the dispatch of the hour later, and this was it:--

"Mr. Argenter died at