Sisters

When Jenny hallooed, there was a joyful answering cry from within, and three children, far cleaner than when they had first been found, raced out, their truly beautiful Italian faces beaming their pleasure. They climbed up on the sides of the wagon shouting, in child-like fashion, “O, Miss Jenny, did you fetch us any honey?”

“No, dearies. I didn’t! And I don’t believe you’ve eaten all that I brought you last week, have they, Mrs. Pascoli?” the girl looked over Sara’s head to the dark-eyed woman who appeared in the open door carrying a wee baby wrapped in a shawl. She replied: “No, ma’am! The beggars they are!” Then came a rebuking flow of Italian which had the effect desired, for the three youngsters climbed down and said in a subdued chorus, “No’m, we ain’t et it, and thanks for it till it’s gone.” the latter part of the sentence being added by Sara alone. Jenny smiled at them, then said to the woman:

“You’re quite well again, Mrs. Pascoli. I’m so glad! Grandpa tells me that your husband is working steadily now. Next week I’ll bring some more honey and eggs. Good-bye.”

The girl soon turned out of the canon on to a foothill road and after a short climb came suddenly upon a low built white house that had a wonderful view of the ocean and islands.

She turned in at the drive, the gate posts of which were pepper trees, and at once she saw her beloved teacher, Miss Dearborn, working in her garden.

The woman, who was about thirty-five, looked up with a welcoming smile which she reserved for this her only pupil. “Jenny Warner, you’re an hour late,” she merrily rebuked. “Hitch Dobbin and come in. I have some news to tell you.”

“O, Miss Dearborn, is it good news? I’m always so dreading the bad news that, some day, I just know you are going to tell me. It isn’t that, yet?”

The woman, whose strong, kind, intelligent face was shaded with a wide-brimmed garden hat, smiled at the girl, then more seriously she said: “Shall you mind so very much when the call comes for me to go back East?”

Jenny nodded, unexpected tears in her eyes. “East is so far, so very far away, and you’ve been here for – well – for as many years as I have been going to school.”

“Ten, to be exact,” was the reply. “But that isn’t my news today. It is something about you, and you’ll be ever so excited when you hear it.”

Miss Dearborn led the way into a long, cool living room which extended entirely across the front of the house. In one end of it was a large stone fireplace, on either side of which were glassed-in book shelves. There were Navajo rugs on the hardwood floor, a piano at the opposite end, deep, cozily cushioned seats under the wide plate-glass windows that framed such wonderful views of sea, rocky promontory and islands, mist-hung.

In the middle was a long library table and everywhere were chairs inviting ease. Great bowls of glowing yellow poppies stood in many places about the long room. This had been Jenny Warner’s second home, and Miss Dearborn a most beneficial influence in her development.

Having removed her garden hat, a mass of soft, light brown hair was revealed. Seating herself at one end of the table, the older woman motioned the girl to a chair at her side.

For a long moment she looked at her earnestly. “Jenny,” she said at last, “I believe you are old enough to be told something about me, but since it is not nearly as important as the something about you, I will begin with that.”

Jenny, not in the least understanding why, felt strangely excited. “Oh, Miss Dearborn, if only it hasn’t anything to do with your going back East.”

A strong white hand was placed over the smaller one that was lying on the table, and for a searching moment the gray eyes met the brown. “I believe, after all, I will have to tell you the part about myself first in order that you may more clearly understand the part about you,” Miss Dearborn said. “I never told you why I came West ten years ago. It was this way. When I was fifteen, I went to a boarding school in Boston and met there a girl, Beatrice Malcolm, who became, through the four years that followed, as dear to me as an own sister would have been. She was not strong and she never had been able to bear disappointment. I always gave in to her and tried to shield her whenever I could. She clung to me, depended on me and loved me, if not quite as devotedly as I loved her, at least very dearly. When we left boarding school we visited each other for weeks at a time. She came to my Cape Cod home in the summer, and I went to her New York home in the winter, and so we shared the same friends and were glad to do so, until Eric Austin came into our lives. Eric and I were unusually companionable. He loved books and nature and especially the sea. He had come to Cape Cod to write a group of poems and I met him at our Literary Club. He came often to my home and we read together day after day. Then Beatrice came for her annual summer visit, and, after that there were three of us at the readings. Eric’s voice was deep, musical and stirringly expressive. I began to notice that Beatrice hung on every word that he uttered as though he were a young god. There was something poetically beautiful about his fine face. Then, one day, she confessed to me that if she could not win Eric Austin’s love, she would not care to live. This was cruelly hard for me, because I also loved Eric and he had told me that my love was returned. Indeed, I had not allowed myself to really care, until I knew that he cared, but I had told him that I wanted to wait until we had known each other at least through one summer.”

Miss Dearborn paused and gazed out of the window at the blue sea shimmering in the distance, then turned and smiled into the sensitive, responsive face of the girl at her side. Almost tearfully, Jenny said: “Oh, Miss Dearborn, I know what you did. You gave up the man you loved for that selfish girl.”

The woman shook her head. “Not selfish! Just spoiled, and I had helped, for I had always given up to her, and that is what I did. I pretended not to care. I left them much alone, and then, when the summer was over, I closed my Cape Cod home and came West. Eric was deeply hurt, and wrote me that, although he never could care for anyone as he did for me, he was going to marry Beatrice and would try to make her as happy as he had hoped to make me. That was all. They were married while I was settling in this new home. Year after year Beatrice has written that some day she wants me to come and visit them, and she has named her oldest girl after me. Little Catherine is now eight. That is all about me. Now I will tell the something about you.”

Jenny, deeply affected by what she had heard, said with a little half sob: “Oh, Miss Dearborn, it makes my heart ache to think that you have lived all these years so alone when you might have had the companionship of that man who really loved you. I just know he never could have loved your friend Beatrice. She must have known you cared and she let you make that cruel sacrifice.”

Before answering the older woman took the girl’s hand and held it in a close clasp as she said earnestly: “Jenny, dear, I gave up much, very much, but think what I won. You, for instance. I had thought that I might have a daughter, as I suppose all girls, growing into young womanhood, dream that, some day, they will marry and have children, and that daughter, I now believe, would have been like you. So you see I gained something very precious.” There were tears in Jenny’s tender brown eyes as she replied: “Oh. Miss Dearborn, I am the one who has gained. I just can’t picture life without you. I remember so well when you first came. You heard that our little schoolhouse down on the coast highway was to be closed because the board of education was not allowed to pay a teacher’s salary unless there were eight pupils to attend the school. There were only five of us, the four from the Anderson Bean Ranch and me. You offered to teach us for nothing, saying that you wanted to do something for children. I didn’t know that until long afterwards, then Grandma told me how it had all come about. We were too little to go on the bus to the big schools in Santa Barbara.”

“I’m glad indeed that I did it,” Miss Dearborn put in, “but, of course, when the Andersons moved back to their Iowa farm and you were the only pupil we closed that coast highway school and had our lessons here, and such an inspiration as they have been to me, Jenny Warner! I just know that you are leading up to an expression of gratitude. I’ve heard it time and again and I do appreciate it, dear girl, but now that you know the great loneliness that was in my heart when I came West, you will readily understand that having you to teach filled a void, filled it beautifully, and so, I also have a deep sense of gratitude toward you.”

“And two years ago,” Jenny continued retrospectively, “when we completed the work of the sixth grade, you can’t think how unhappy I was, for I supposed that at last I would have to leave you and go by bus each day to the Santa Barbara Junior High, and I never shall forget that wonderful day when you told me you had received permission to teach me through the eighth grade.”

Miss Dearborn laughed happily. “What I never told you, Jenny, was that the board of education insisted that I take an examination at their State Normal to prove to them that I knew enough to teach one lone pupil the higher grade work. I brushed up evenings and passed creditably.”

Impulsively the girl pressed the woman’s hand to her cheek. “Oh, Miss Dearborn,” she exclaimed tremulously, “to think that you did all that just for me.”

“Wrong you are, Jenny girl!” the woman sang out. “I did it first of all for Catherine Dearborn. I felt a panic in my heart I had not dreamed possible when I thought that I was to be left all alone, day in and day out, with only memory for company. I wanted to keep you, to teach you, to love you, and I did keep you, but now along comes a letter from the same board of education. If we thought they had forgotten us, we are mistaken. That’s my news about you.”

Opening a small drawer in the end of the table, Miss Dearborn took out a letter and read:

“Miss Jenny Warner will be required to take the entrance examination in all the subjects at the High School of Santa Barbara during the week of June 10th. The results of these tests will determine where she is to continue her studies.”

The girl’s lovely face was the picture of dismay. “Oh, Miss Dearborn, I can’t! I can’t! I’d be simply frightened to death to even enter the door of that imposing building, and if any of the pupils as much as spoke to me, I’d simply expire.” Her teacher laughed. “Nonsense!” she declared. “Not only must my pupil enter the door but she must pass the tests with high grades if I am to be permitted to teach her another year.”

Then to change the girl’s thought, Miss Dearborn continued brightly: “Saturday is our mythology day, isn’t it? But since you came late and we have spent so much time visiting, we will not go up into the hills as we usually do for this lesson. Let me see. Weren’t you to write something about Apollo, Diana and Echo that I might know if you fully understand just what each stands for in poetry and art?”

“Oh, Miss Dearborn,” Jenny laughed as she drew a paper from her book, “I don’t know what you will say about the composition I tried to write. It isn’t good, I know, but I ever so much wanted to write it in verse. Shall you mind my trying?” The girl’s manner was inquiring and apologetic at the same time.

“Of course not,” was the encouraging reply. “We all reach an age when we want to write our thoughts in rhyme. Read it to me.”

And so timidly Jenny began:

At Sunrise

Gray mists veil the dawn of day,
Silver winged they speed away,

When across a road of gold
In his shining chariot rolled

Young Apollo. Day’s fair King
Bids the birds awake and sing!

Robin, skylark, linnet, thrush
From each glen and flower-glad bush

Burst their throats with warbles gay
To welcome back the King of Day.

Diana, huntress, Apollo’s twin,
Standing in a forest dim,

A quiver on one shoulder fair
Filled with arrows. (In her hair

A moonlike crescent.) Calls her hounds
To new adventures with them bounds,

While lovely Echo in the hill,
Though grieving for Narcissus still,

Must need call back their song or bay,
And so is dawned a glad new day.

Miss Dearborn smiled as she commented: “Dear girl, there is no need to blush about this, your first effort at verse. I am going to suggest that you write all of your compositions on this poetical subject in rhyme. Keep them and let us see how much better the last will be than the first.” Then after a thoughtful moment: “Dawn is a subject much loved by the poets.”

Then she quoted from Byron: