



Produced by David Widger






MRS. DUD'S SISTER

By Josephine Daskam

Copyright, 1903, by Charles Scribner's Sons


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