Laughing Last, Jane Abbott [the false prince .txt] 📗

The Romley house stood two stories and a half high, heavy-beamed, thick-walled, of square spacious rooms with deep-set windows and cavernous fireplaces under low marble mantels. Joseph Romley had chosen it because he said it was so big a man could think in it; he liked the seclusion, too, that the surrounding wall promised. If his wife faltered before the care it presented she had given no sign but had bravely spread their limited possessions through some of the rooms and had sensibly closed off others.

There had never been a time since the Romleys took possession when the house had not needed painting and shingling, when the guarding wall was not crumbling and the gate swinging on one hinge, when the furnace was not needing cleaning and the plumbing overhauling. But the wind sang cheerily down the great chimneys and the sun poured in through the windows and the ancient elms housed hosts of birds and the hollyhocks bloomed early and late against the wall so that Joseph Romley knew only the beauty of the place and was content and his family, perforce, was content because he was.

There had never been enough of the fine old furniture Mrs. Romley had collected in her bridehood to furnish a separate room for each one of the girls. Isolde and Trude had always shared a sunny room over the study. In a back room Victoria and Sidney still used the narrow beds of nursery days. Only lately Victoria had painted them gray with a trim of pink rose buds but the effect had suffered so sharply from Sidney’s “truck” that Sidney had been coerced into taking her precious belongings to the attic where she established a kingdom of her own.

It was a beautiful attic. Its rafters, shiny and brown, were so low that Sidney, by standing very straight, could touch them with the top of her head. It had mysterious crannies and shadowy corners and deep dusty holes. Sidney had walled off one end by piling one trunk upon another and pushing an old wardrobe next to them. There she had her possessions, a flat-topped desk with long wobbly legs which she reached by a box balanced on an old stool, the skeleton of a sofa on which sat five dusty and neglected dolls, a scrap of carpeting, amazing as to red roses but sadly frayed about its edges, one boastful rocker in complete possession of arms and legs, which Trude had smuggled up to her, and a conglomeration of her favorite books scattered everywhere, for in the seclusion of the attic she could pore over them without risk of some Lady Leaguer discovering her love of them.

To this sanctuary Sidney retreated now from Vick and the Leaguers and her luckless lot. Swinging open the door of the wardrobe so as to shut off any unannounced approach to her den, she tiptoed to a corner, knelt down and cautiously lifted a board from the floor, thereby revealing a space two feet square between the beams.

From among the treasures concealed there she drew out an old ledger on the first page of which was printed in large type: “Dorothea, friend and confidante of Sidney Romley.” Jerking herself closer to the window she opened the book across her knees and began to write in it with the stub of a pencil she extracted from the pocket of her middy blouse.

“Dearest Dorothea:

“Today I stand at a crossroad of life. I am fifteen. It is not my birthday for I had my birthday as you will see if you turn back to page 64 but I am fifteen today in the eyes of the world for I have come into my legal and just rights. I am to have the next Egg. I had to make a scene before I got them to promise I could have it but it was ever thus with rights. I swear solemnly now to you, dear Dorothea, that I shall never cry again in front of Victoria Romley. Never. I hate her when she laughs. I do not hate Isolde even though she does not understand me and that is hard. And I adore Trude as I have told you on many other pages. However, I am to have the Egg.

“But that is not all that happened this morning. I have talked to the most beautiful girl I ever saw. Her name is Pola and she goes to Grace Hall, which is a boarding school for very rich girls who have horses. Her father makes candy in a big factory and it is sold all over the world. When I get the Egg I shall buy a great deal of Betty Sweets. That is it. Pola has traveled so much that it bores her to think of it. When she talked she lifted a curtain and let me peep into a wonderful world. I think she liked me. She’s going to put me in a theme only she is going to make me like Isolde who just to be mean made me receive the Leaguers this morning and went upstairs and did things as though it was not Saturday at all. But for that I must love her just as if she had not done it to be mean for I would not have met Pola. Pola—is that not the most romantic name you ever heard?—feels sorry for me because my father was a poet and she knew right off how I hate having the Leaguers own us and the house. She was wonderful. I shall never see anyone like her again. My life is doomed to be sad and lonely.

“But though I never see Pola again I shall try to live to be like her. Inside of me, of course. It would be no use to try to be like her outside on account of my horrid hair. Pola’s hair is curly and short and she wears it caught with a ‘bonny bright ribbon.’ My eyes are plain blue and hers are a mysterious gray like an evening sky. Her skin is like creamy satin touched with rose petals and I think it is natural for it is not a bit like Josie Walker’s who uses rouge for Nancy caught her putting it on one day at school in the toilet. Pola is as brave as she is beautiful. She dares anything. She would despise me if she knew that I just let my fate close over my head and do nothing.

“But now that I am fifteen before the world I must take my life in my hands. As adventure will never come to this house on account of the League I must go forth to meet adventure. I will not let the others know what I am planning for, as I said heretofore, Isolde does not understand me and Victoria would only laugh. And as I said heretofore, I hate her when she laughs. But, Victoria Romley, remember the words of the prophet: ‘He who laughs last laughs loudest.’

“In case I pass to the Great Beyond and strange eyes read these confidences, let me add that I only hate Vicky when she laughs. At all other times I love her dearly. She is so beautiful that sometimes when I look at her I feel all queer and gaspy inside. Pola is not quite as beautiful as Vic but Pola is a girl like me.

“Dear Dorothea, friend of my inner spirit, as I close this page who knows what the future holds for me? I shall probably be very busy with my plans and may neglect you, my comforter, but as I go forth on my quest I shall often think of you, waiting, faithful, in my secret cranny. And I shall think of Isolde and Trude for I gleaned from something Isolde said to me this morning when she was mad that she and Trude long to escape from the League the way I do. But they think they have to stay here the rest of their lives. Mayhap I can bring escape to them. Vick will marry of course, but Isolde’s beaux look too poor to get married and they are mostly poets as I have told you. And Trude has only her one Lost Love. Dear Dorothea, farewell. ‘Mid pleasures and palaces though I may roam, my heart will come to thee in thy deep and secret chamber.’”

Sidney liked the last line so well that she paused to read it over, aloud.

She closed the book simply because her thoughts were racing ahead so fast that to write them became a torture. She restored “Dorothea” rather carelessly to her “deep and secret chamber.” Having secured the loose planking she rose and turned her agile mind to the consideration of a desire that had began shaping when Trude said she could go around the world with the Egg. Of course the Egg would not take her that far but if it would only just take her somewhere on a train she’d be satisfied.

Travel in the Romley family had always been limited. One shabby bag had done comfortable duty for them all. Joseph Romley had never wanted to go away; if the girls’ mother ever yearned for other horizons she had hidden it behind a smiling contentment. Neither Isolde nor Trude had gone further than fifty miles from Middletown until the two trustees, after their father’s death, had summoned them to New York. Victoria, seemingly born to more fortune than the others, had been whisked away on several trips with Godmother Jocelyn, traveling luxuriously in a stateroom with a maid but she had returned from even the most prolonged of these so silent and dispirited that Sidney suspected traveling with Godmother Jocelyn, fat and fussy, was not the unalloyed pleasure Vick would have them believe.

To how much Sidney longed to vision the world that lay beyond the level horizons of Middletown an old map of the United States and Canada, tacked to one of the rafters, attested. Upon this Sidney had marked with various signs that meant much to her and nothing to any one else, the different localities of which she read in books or newspapers. When a Leaguer introduced some devotee from some far-off city Sidney promptly noted the visit on the map. In consequence she had a vicarious acquaintance scattered from coast to coast. It was the only way she had ever expected to “know” the world until Trude had said that about the Egg.

She did not count as “traveling” going once to Cascade Lake, twenty miles to the South, and spending a week there with Nancy. They had not gone on a train; they had driven down with Nancy’s father in the automobile. Though in anticipation the visit had appeared like an adventure, in later retrospection it was stupid. It had been just like being at Nancy’s house in Middletown; Nancy’s father and mother and Snap, the dog, and Caroline, the colored cook, and much of the furniture were all there. It had rained all week and they had had to play in the house and Nancy had had a cold in her head which had made her cross and horrid-looking. No, that had not been “going” somewhere, the way Trude went to New York and Isolde to Chicago.

Crouched low in the sound rocker Sidney stared at the old map with speculative eyes. One could not, when one was the youngest sister, simply pack