Read Online Beauty for Ashes by Grace Livingston Hill - Free Book Online
Authors: Grace Livingston Hill
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Hastings cooked them. They came on the table a delicious crisp brown, and nothing ever tasted so good as they did, eaten with the white homemade bread and the delicious fresh butter.
There were photograph albums for the evenings, when Gloria got acquainted with a lot of relatives whom she had never heard of before, albums that she pored over again and again, until she felt she knew each one—Aunt Abby, Uncle Abner’s wife, and Cousin Joab and his daughter Kate, little Anne who died just as she was growing into sweet womanhood, and young pretty Aunt Isabella who married the foreigner and went to live abroad in a castle, almost breaking her mother’s heart going so far away, that mother who had been her grandmother, who had washed and mended and cooked and lived in this sweet old home. Oh, how could pretty Isabella go away from this home and marry any man? How could any girl? How had she been going to trust herself to Stan and go out of her father’s care? Stan who had died with another girl!
She shivered as she turned the pages of the album and went up to bed to listen to the silence and try to forget.
She learned a number of things in her father’s old home. She learned to make her bed and make it well. Ever since she had come up to her room and found Emily Hastings with deft fingers turning down the sheets smoothly over the candlewick spread and plumping the pillows into shape, she had made it herself. At first with clumsy fingers that could not get the blankets to spread smooth nor make the counterpane hang evenly. And finally she had humbly asked to be shown how. Before this, she had never thought about beds being made. They might spread themselves up as soon as one went out of the room for all the notice she had ever taken of them. Her bed was always made at home and her room in order when she came back after ever so brief an absence. But she discovered that it made a difference to have no servants. It seemed funny to her that she had never thought about it before.
Sunday morning they went to the church with the white spire, the old church the Sutherlands had attended for years. There was even a tablet up by the pulpit in memory of Great-Grandfather Sutherland, the one who had been taken away from his old wife only a few months before she went herself. The old red cushions on the family pew had faded from red to a deep mulberry, and the ingrain carpet was threadbare in places and drearily dull in its old black and red pattern. Gloria sat with her toes on the wooden footstool that was covered with ingrain of a later vintage and didn’t quite match. She watched the red and purple and green lights from the old stained glass windows fade and travel from the minister’s nose, across his forehead, and twinkle on the wall in prisms and patterns, under the solemn sentence done in blue and gold: “T HE L ORD I S IN H IS H OLY T EMPLE . L ET A LL THE E ARTH K EEP S ILENCE BEFORE H IM .” It did not seem a happy thought to her. It seemed to her like a challenge from a grim and angry person. She looked around on the shabby little church that so sorely needed refurbishing and couldn’t make it seem a holy temple for a great God to enter. Yet when she looked at her father, she realized there was something sacred here, some memory perhaps, that brought a softened light to his worldly-wise face and a tenderness to his eyes, and she looked around again less critically.
There was a cabinet organ played by an elderly woman who touched the keys tenderly and dragged the hymns, and the singers were mostly older people with voices whose best days were over, yet she recognized that there was something in it all that held these people to a thought, a standard perhaps, and bound them together in a common aim. Else why should they come here? Why should they keep on coming here Sunday after Sunday, year after year?
She looked around at their faces, old and tired and over-worked; yet they were in a way enjoying this dull service.
There were photograph albums for the evenings, when Gloria got acquainted with a lot of relatives whom she had never heard of before, albums that she pored over again and again, until she felt she knew each one—Aunt Abby, Uncle Abner’s wife, and Cousin Joab and his daughter Kate, little Anne who died just as she was growing into sweet womanhood, and young pretty Aunt Isabella who married the foreigner and went to live abroad in a castle, almost breaking her mother’s heart going so far away, that mother who had been her grandmother, who had washed and mended and cooked and lived in this sweet old home. Oh, how could pretty Isabella go away from this home and marry any man? How could any girl? How had she been going to trust herself to Stan and go out of her father’s care? Stan who had died with another girl!
She shivered as she turned the pages of the album and went up to bed to listen to the silence and try to forget.
She learned a number of things in her father’s old home. She learned to make her bed and make it well. Ever since she had come up to her room and found Emily Hastings with deft fingers turning down the sheets smoothly over the candlewick spread and plumping the pillows into shape, she had made it herself. At first with clumsy fingers that could not get the blankets to spread smooth nor make the counterpane hang evenly. And finally she had humbly asked to be shown how. Before this, she had never thought about beds being made. They might spread themselves up as soon as one went out of the room for all the notice she had ever taken of them. Her bed was always made at home and her room in order when she came back after ever so brief an absence. But she discovered that it made a difference to have no servants. It seemed funny to her that she had never thought about it before.
Sunday morning they went to the church with the white spire, the old church the Sutherlands had attended for years. There was even a tablet up by the pulpit in memory of Great-Grandfather Sutherland, the one who had been taken away from his old wife only a few months before she went herself. The old red cushions on the family pew had faded from red to a deep mulberry, and the ingrain carpet was threadbare in places and drearily dull in its old black and red pattern. Gloria sat with her toes on the wooden footstool that was covered with ingrain of a later vintage and didn’t quite match. She watched the red and purple and green lights from the old stained glass windows fade and travel from the minister’s nose, across his forehead, and twinkle on the wall in prisms and patterns, under the solemn sentence done in blue and gold: “T HE L ORD I S IN H IS H OLY T EMPLE . L ET A LL THE E ARTH K EEP S ILENCE BEFORE H IM .” It did not seem a happy thought to her. It seemed to her like a challenge from a grim and angry person. She looked around on the shabby little church that so sorely needed refurbishing and couldn’t make it seem a holy temple for a great God to enter. Yet when she looked at her father, she realized there was something sacred here, some memory perhaps, that brought a softened light to his worldly-wise face and a tenderness to his eyes, and she looked around again less critically.
There was a cabinet organ played by an elderly woman who touched the keys tenderly and dragged the hymns, and the singers were mostly older people with voices whose best days were over, yet she recognized that there was something in it all that held these people to a thought, a standard perhaps, and bound them together in a common aim. Else why should they come here? Why should they keep on coming here Sunday after Sunday, year after year?
She looked around at their faces, old and tired and over-worked; yet they were in a way enjoying this dull service.
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