The Beloved Stranger - By Grace Livingston Hill Page 0,69
been a bit of landscape.
But the ugly house had been smothered in quick-growing vines. The ugly picket fence that also needed painting had been covered with rambler roses now beginning to bud; the yard had a neat patch of well-cut lawn, with trim borders where young plants were beginning to give a good showing; and a row of pansy plants showed bright faces along the neat brick walk. The pansies winked brightly up at her like old acquaintances.
An ugly narrow court between houses had been concealed by tall privet hedge trained into an arched gateway, and there were nice white starched curtains at the windows upstairs and down. They might be only cheesecloth, but they made the house stand out like a thing of beauty in the midst of squalor.
“Hmm!” said Aunt Pat appreciatively. “Pretty, isn’t it? I don’t know why I never thought to come here before.”
The mother opened the door, wiping her hands on her apron, which was an old towel girded about her waist. There was a fleck of soapsuds on her arm, and her face, though the morning was only half gone, looked weary and worn.
“Oh, Miss Catherwood!” she said to Aunt Pat, her tone a bit awed.
She opened the door wide and welcomed them in, casting a troubled eye over the room behind her to see if it was surely all in order.
“But you oughtn’t to be washing!” objected Aunt Pat as she reached the top step and looked into the neat front room. “I thought you were sick. I heard you ought to go to the hospital.”
The woman gave a helpless amused little laugh, not discourteous.
“No, I’m not sick,” she said rather hopelessly. “I’m not near as bad off as some. I’ll be all right when Father gets well. Come in, won’t you?”
Aunt Pat marched in cheerfully.
“Now, I’m not going to take up any more of your time than is necessary,” she said as she sat down in the big old stuffed chair. “You go and shut off your dampers or gas or whatever it is that’s worrying you, and I’ll talk to you just five minutes, and then you can get back and finish up what you’ve started. I suppose that’s got to be done in spite of everything, but I’ve got something to say that’s even more important.”
The woman cast a sort of despairing look at her caller and with a half-deprecatory glance toward Sherrill, who had settled down on the old haircloth sofa, she vanished into the back room where they could hear her turning on water, lifting dripping clothes from one tub to another, pulling a tin boiler across the top of an old-fashioned iron range, and slamming the dampers back and forth.
She returned, pulling down her neat print sleeves and fastening a clean apron over her wet dress.
Sherrill meanwhile had been looking around the little room, noting carefully the pretty trifles that Lutie had used to make the place homelike. There was even a little snapshot of herself that Sherrill recognized as one she had thrown in the wastebasket. It was framed in glass with a black paper binding and stood under the lamp on the small center table. Poor Lutie! Sherrill was deeply touched.
“Well,” said Aunt Pat, “I’ll get right to the point. My niece found out from Lutie that your husband is sick. How is he? Getting well fast?”
“No,” said the woman sadly, “he doesn’t improve at all now. He’s pretty well discouraged. He said last night he guessed he had got to the end, and the sooner it came the better off we’ll all be.”
The woman was blinking the tears back and swallowing hard. Her lips quivered as she spoke.
“Fiddlesticks!” said Aunt Pat briskly. “We’ll see if something can’t be done about that. Have you got a good doctor? Who is your doctor?”
“We haven’t any doctor now,” said the woman with a hopeless note in her voice. “We’ve tried three, and he only got worse. He would not hear to having any more bills run up that we never can pay.”
“Hmm!” said Aunt Pat. “What doctors did you have?”
“Oh, we had the company doctor where he worked first, and he went on for two months and didn’t make a mite of difference. And then we got Dr. Green. He was the doctor that examined him for his insurance several years ago, but he said just out plain he couldn’t do him any good. And then we tried a specialist somebody recommended at the office where my