Laughing Last - Jane Abbott (portable ebook reader .txt) 📗

Trude read Issy’s letter aloud, not noticing in her high pitch of anxiety that Dugald Allan had lingered.

“—I am going to tell something now concerning which I have given no hint in my former letters. It’s something that means so much to me that I have not dared write about it until it was decided. And now it is decided. Professor Deering has asked me to stay on with him as his secretary. And I have accepted. The salary will not be so very big though it will seem big to me and I am happy among books and bookish people and working right here in the college will give me opportunities I never had before.

“But Trude dear, I feel like a deserter! To think that I who used to preach the loudest of our duty to Dad’s memory and the tradition of his genius should be the first to break from it! I believe now that Sidney, that morning she had her little flare-up and we promised her the Egg, broke down restraints that have been holding us all. Certainly, ever since then, rebellious thoughts have been growing in me. I have come to see our lives differently and to believe that we’ve been silly. We thought we had to go on living the same kind of lives we led when Dad was with us, that we had to submerge our own personalities to his because his was so great. Maybe the League frightened us into thinking that; they bought us or thought they did. But Trude, they couldn’t! They can buy the house and the atmosphere and Dad’s coat and chair and pens and all that but they can’t buy Dad’s children! Dad wouldn’t want it that way. Why, we are his greatest creation and our lives are his gift to us and he would want us to make something fine of those gifts—something that would be our own. Sidney said that she wanted to be something besides Joseph Romley’s daughter and that was simply her real self crying for escape. I hope the dear child has found it in a happy summer and has had her fill of the adventure she craved.

“Happy as I am I cannot bear thinking of leaving you with the responsibilities of Vick and Sidney and the League, except that you have always carried the responsibility anyway. But it seems too much for even shoulders like yours. So I’ve been making schemes. Vick will be sure to marry soon, bless her pretty face, and then with my salary and the royalties we can send Sidney away to school and you can plan something for yourself just as I have done. It’s a wonderful feeling, Trude, I am just beginning to live! I don’t mind a bit now thinking of being an old maid—”

Trude folded the letter, suddenly conscious of her listeners. Sidney caught at it as though to make certain it had actually been written by her sister Isolde.

“Think of it. Trude! A hope-to-die secretary with a salary! I do believe it’s old Issy who’s going to laugh last.”

“What do you mean Sidney?” asked Trude; but she did not wait for Sidney to answer. Her thoughts were elsewhere. “I believe Issy has torn a veil from us all. We were silly. We held to the ties of Dad as a poet and were losing the sweet real ones of him as a father. Of course he’d want us—the father part of him—to live our own lives, make of them what we can—”

“Would he?” cried Dugald Allan from his corner. And at the sound of his voice Trude started, her face flushing crimson. “Then, Trude Romley, will you please withdraw that answer you gave me out on the breakwall? It can’t hold good now.”

“Oh, hush! Don’t! Not here—now—”

Sidney, alert to some deeper meaning, took up his question.

“What answer?” she demanded.

Mr. Dugald threw his arm about her shoulder. “Sid, I asked your sister to marry me. You see I found out that you needed a big brother, someone with a stern eye and a hard heart and I rather want the job. And that’s the only way I can think of. And she says she cannot, that she must keep the little household together in return for what the League has done and cook and sew and sweep and keep accounts. I think there was a lot more—”

Sidney threw out an imploring hand to her sister.

“Oh, Trude, please! I do need a big brother. And Mr. Dugald’s grand! And rich. Pola said so. And dear. And it’d be such fun having him in the family! I’ll go away to school and Vick can work and we can give the old house over to the League. Issy said they couldn’t buy us! And—why, there are just loads of women trying to get Mr. Dugald—”

“Sidney Romley, stop!” Trude stamped her foot in confused exasperation. She refused to meet Dugald’s yearning eyes.

“No League can mortgage your heart or your happiness!” he pleaded softly. “It belongs to you—to give—”

“I object to being courted in this—public—manner,” Trude broke in, her hands flying to her face. But Dugald Allan caught the surrender in her eyes. He seized her hand.

“All right. We’ll go out in the garden. Excuse us, Sid. When I come back I think I’ll be your big brother.”

Sidney’s eyes followed them longingly until they disappeared behind a hedge of hollyhocks. She wanted to laugh and to cry all at once she was so strangely happy; her girl heart stirred with a vicarious thrill to the look she had seen in Trude’s face. Well, Trude would laugh last! Dear old Trude. Trude a bride when everyone had thought that she would never marry, just because she had no beaus like Vick or languishing poets like Issy.

Sidney stood still in the center of the dusk gray room. She did not know what she wanted to do next—or even think of. She would like to plan the wedding at once with herself as a beautiful bridesmaid in shimmery white and Mart and Pola and Lavender and Aunt Achsa there to see, and she would like just to think of Mrs. Milliken’s face when she heard about everything and—

Suddenly her eyes fell upon Vick’s forgotten letter. What had Vick written? No ordinary letter could come on this momentous day! Perhaps Vick had written that she had eloped—she had read that sometimes even nice girls did that, girls oppressed by things like the League. She opened the letter without any hesitation and carried it to the door that she might read it by the fading light.

It was not neatly margined like Issy’s; the