Sisters

“O, Miss O’Hara, won’t you let me? I’m just wild to have a chance to be near enough to them to hear what they say. It would be awfully interesting to me. Please say that I may?”

The cook stared her amazement. “Well, now, what do you know about waitin’?” she inquired.

“Nothing at all,” was the merry reply, “but my teacher has often said that I have a good intelligence, and I do believe, if you’d tell me what ought to be done, I could remember enough to get through.”

The cook’s troubled face broke into a pleased smile. “Jenny Warner,” she commented, “you’re as good as a pinch of soda in sour milk. Somehow mountain-sized troubles dwindle down to less’n nothin’ when you take a hand in them.” She glanced at the clock.

“Lunch is served at twelve-thirty,” she continued. “We’ll have to both pitch in and get things on the table, and, while we’re doin’ it, I’ll tell you what you’ll have to know about servin’.”

* * * * * * * *

Jenny was in a flutter of excitement half an hour later as she donned the white cap and apron of the waitress uniform. They were really very becoming, and soft brown ringlets peeped out from under the dainty band-like cap which was tied about her head.

“There’s very little waitin’-on to be done at noon, thanks for that,” Miss O’Hara said. “Most things are on the table, but you’ll have to go around and pour the chocolate and do the things as I told you. There now! The bell’s ringing and I hear those silly girls laughing, so they’re all in the dining room. Here’s the chocolate pot. I haven’t filled it full, fearin’ it might be too heavy. You’ll have to come back and get more when that’s gone.”

With cheeks flushed and eyes shining, as though she were about to do something which pleased her extremely, Jenny entered the dining room, where four tables, surrounded by girls, stood along the walls. Few there were who even noticed her as she went from place to place filling the dainty cups with steaming liquid.

At the first table the girls were chattering about a theatre party to which they were going with Miss Granger, and not one of them gave the waitress more than a fleeting glance. But at the second table Jenny found the girl she sought. The sister of Harold P-J, and the daughter of the proud owner of Rocky Point Farm.

The little waitress knew at once which she was, for a companion spoke her name. Jenny was disappointed when she heard her speak. There was a fretful, discontented note in her voice. And why should there be, she wondered, as she slowly approached the end of the table where Gwynette Poindexter-Jones sat with an intimate friend from San Francisco at each side.

Surely she had everything her heart could desire. But evidently this was not true, for, as Jenny drew nearer, she could hear what was being said.

“Patricia Sullivan, you make me weary! You certainly do!” she addressed the girl on her right. “How can you say that this is a pleasant place? When I think of my mother in France luxuriating in the sort of life I most enjoy, it makes me rebellious. Sometimes I feel that I just can’t forgive her. What right has a mother to send her daughter to an out-of-the-way country boarding school if the girl prefers to be educated abroad?”

The friend who had been called “Patricia” now put in, almost apologetically: “But I merely said that it is a beautiful country, and I repeat that it is. I think that it is wonderful to be so high up on a foothill and have a sweeping view of the ocean from one side of the school and a view of the mountains from the other side.”

A shrug, accompanied by an utterance of bored impatience, then Gwynette’s reply: “Scenery isn’t what I want, and if I did, I prefer it in France.”

After glancing critically from one table to another, she continued:

“There isn’t a single girl in this room who belongs to our class, really. They are all our social inferiors.”

But Beulah Hollingsworth, the friend on Gwynette’s left, leaned forward to say in a low voice, which was audible to Jenny merely because she had reached the trio and was filling Patricia’s cup:

“I’ve heard that there is a girl in this school whose father is a younger son of some titled English family. She ought to be in our class, don’t you think?”

Patricia, whose back was toward the room, could not turn to look at the other pupils, but suddenly she recalled one of them, and so, leaning forward, she also said in a low voice:

“Look at Clare Tasselwood. She’s stiff enough at least to be a somebody.” Gwynette and Beulah agreed.

They both glanced at a tall blonde girl at the table across the room, whose manner was neither disagreeable nor pleasant, expressing merely bored endurance of her present existence. Gwynette’s face brightened. “I believe you are right. Let’s cultivate her!”

Jenny could hear no more of their conversation as she had to go back to the kitchen to refill the silver pot, and when she returned she began to fill cups at a third table, the one at which sat the supposed daughter of a “younger son.” Clare Tasselwood was so deeply engrossed in her own thoughts that she seemed scarce aware that the timid girl at her left was offering her a platter of cold meat. She took it finally with a brief nod; absently helped herself to a slice and passed it to the neighbor on her right.

Jenny found herself feeling sorry for the little girl whom she had noticed at the recreation hour; the one so simply dressed in brown with whom no one had been talking, and about whom Gwynette and her friends had evidently been making uncomplimentary comment. When the new waitress poured that girl’s cup full of chocolate, the little maid smiled up at her and said, “Thank you.”

More than ever Jenny’s heart warmed toward her. “Poor thing! I’d like to be friends with her if she were not a pupil of this fashionable school. She looks more like real folks than some of them do.”

Then, having completed the round with the chocolate pot, the waitress went out to the kitchen to get the tray on which were to be heaped the plates after the first course had been finished. Jenny really dreaded this task, fearing that she would break something, and was relieved to find that the upstairs maid who had been cleaning had come down and was ready to assist.

“Here, Jenny,” Miss O’Hara said, “you follow and give each girl her dessert. Then you come out and eat your own lunch. After that you can go. Tomorrow, being Sunday, I can get along alone, and probably by Monday the new helper’ll be here.”

An hour later Jenny drove away, laughing to herself over her amusing adventure and eager to tell Grandma Sue and Granddad Si all about it.

CHAPTER VII.

JENNY’S TEACHER

It was two o’clock when Jenny skipped to the side porch of the Rocky Point farmhouse. Her grandmother, who was sitting there with her mending basket at her side, looked up with the welcoming smile that she always had for the girl. Dropping down on the wooden bench, back of which hung a blossom-laden garland of Cecil Brunner rose vine, Jenny took off her wide, flower-wreathed straw hat and began fanning her flushed face. The sparkle in her soft brown eyes told the watcher at once that something of an unusual nature had occurred. The old woman dropped her sewing on her lap, pushed her spectacles up under her lavender-ribboned cap and then said with a rising inflection: “Well, Jenny dearie, what have you been up to?”

A peal of amused laughter was the girl’s first answer, followed by a series of little chuckles that tried to form themselves into words but couldn’t. Mirth is contagious and the old woman laughingly said: “Tut! Tut! Jenny, don’t keep all the fun of it to yourself. What happened over to the seminary that was so amusing? I reckoned you’d have sort of a hard tune making things straight with Miss O’Hara, if she’s as snappy as poor Etta Heldt said she was.”

Jenny became serious at once, and, leaning forward, she began earnestly: “Miss O’Hara is kindhearted, Granny Sue, but she does seem to have a powerful lot to worry her. Etta didn’t try to be real helpful, I know that, although I was so sorry for her, and when I told Miss O’Hara all about the poor orphan, there were tears in her eyes, honestly there were, Granny, and she said that when the next orphan came, she’d try to make that kitchen more homelike.”

Her listener was pleased and nodded many times, as she commented: “Well, well, that’s somethin’ now that my Jenny gal has brought to pass, but it wasn’t about that you were having such a spell of laughin’, I reckon.”

Again there were twinkles in the brown eyes as the girl confessed: “No, Granny Sue, it wasn’t, and in as many years as Rip Van Winkle slept, you couldn’t guess what it was.”

The old woman looked puzzled, as she always did when Jenny quoted from some of her “readin’ books.” “Wall, I reckon I couldn’t, bein’ as I don’t know how long the lazy fellow slept, so I reckon you’d better tell me what you’ve been up to over to the seminary.”

She had replaced her glasses and was again sewing a patch on an old shirt of Grandpa Si’s, but she looked up when the girl said: “You’ll be astonished as can be, because you never even guessed that your granddaughter knew how to wait on table, stylish-like, with all the flourishes.”

Down went the sewing, up went the glasses, and an expression of shocked displeasure was in the sweet blue eyes of the old woman.

“Jenny Warner, am I hearin’ right? Are yo’ tellin’ me that my gal waited on table over to the seminary?”

The girl looked puzzled. Grandma Sue was taking almost tragically what Jenny had considered in the light of a merry adventure.

“Why, yes, Granny, I did. You don’t mind, do you? You have always wanted me to help where help was needed, and surely poor Miss O’Hara needed a waitress. If we hadn’t spirited Etta away, she would have been there. You see, don’t you, Grandma, that I just had to help?”

“Yes, yes, I reckon like as not you did, but don’t do it again, Jenny, don’t! Promise, just to please your old Grandma Sue.”

The girl placed her hat on the bench and went to her grandmother’s side and knelt, her head nestled lovingly against the old woman’s shoulder. “Why, Granny, dearie,” she said contritely, “I didn’t suppose you’d mind. Why is it that you do?” She was plainly perplexed.

But the old woman had no intention of telling the girl she so loved that she could not bear the thought of having her act as a servant to her own sister, Gwynette. And so she replied with an assumed cheeriness: “Just a notion, dearie, like as not. I feel that our gal is as good, and heaps better’n a lot of them seminary pupils, and I guess I sort of don’t like the idea of you waitin’ on ’em.” Then anxiously: “It won’t happen again, will it, Jenny?”

The girl kissed her grandmother lovingly. Then rising, she put her hat on her sun-glinted head as she replied: “It won’t be necessary, because Peg, the real waitress, will be well again tomorrow. She had one of her blind headaches today, but I did promise to go over Monday after school and do Etta’s work, preparing vegetables. You don’t mind that, do you, Granny dear. The new orphan will be there by Tuesday surely.”

“Well, well, you do whatever you think right. That heart o’ yourn won’t take you far wrong. You’re goin’ over to your school-teacher’s now, aren’t you, dearie? She’ll be expectin’ you.”

The girl nodded, skipped into the house to get a book, returned, saying as she went down the path: “This is our mythology lesson day. Good-bye, Granny dear. I’ll be home in time to get supper.”

As Jenny drove Dobbin along the coast highway, she wondered why her grandmother had objected so seriously to the act of kindness that she had done. Her teacher, Miss Dearborn, had so often said: “Jeanette, it isn’t what we do that counts, it is what we are.” Surely Jenny had been no different from what she really was when she had been filling cups with steaming golden brown chocolate. Moreover, Granny Sue hadn’t minded in the least that time, last year, when Jenny had gone over to the cabin home of the poor forlorn squatter family in the sycamore woods and had cleaned it out thoroughly.

She had found the mother sick in bed and the three children almost spoiling for a bath. Jenny smiled as she recalled how she had taken them, one after another, down to the creek in the canon below the cabin, and had washed them, showing the oldest, Rosa, who was eight, how to give future baths to Sara, aged five, and Elmer, aged two. And after that she had driven, at Miss Dearborn’s suggestion, into Santa Barbara to tell the Visiting Nurse’s Association about the poor squatter family. Grandma Sue had been pleased, then, to have Jenny serve others. Why did she object to a similar service for Miss O’Hara? This being unanswerable, the girl decided to drive through the Sycamore Canon Road, as it was really but a little out of her way, and see how the squatter’s family was progressing.

It became very cool as she turned out of the sunshine of the broad highway, and the deeper she drove into the canon, the damper and more earth fragrant the air. Great old sycamore trees that had grown in most picturesque angles were on either side of the narrow dirt road, and crossing and recrossing, under little rustic bridges, rambled the brook which in the spring time danced along as though it also were brimming over with the joy of living. The cabin in which the Pascoli family lived had been long abandoned when they had taken possession. It stood in a more open spot, where, for a few hours each day, the sunlight came. It was partly adobe (from which its former white-washed crust had broken away in slabs) and partly logs. A rose vine, which Jenny had given to the older girl, was bravely trying to climb up about the door, and along the front of the cabin were ferns transplanted from the brookside.