“Well, ladies, dat clock’s all right,” he pronounced.
“I’m sure we’re very much obliged to you,” said Evelina, throwing a glance at her sister.
“Oh,” Ann Eliza murmured, involuntarily answering the admonition. She selected a key from the bunch that hung at her waist with her cutting-out scissors, and fitting it into the lock of the cupboard, brought out the cherry brandy and three old-fashioned glasses engraved with vine-wreaths.
“It’s a very cold night,” she said, “and maybe you’d like a sip of this cordial. It was made a great while ago by our grandmother.”
“It looks fine,” said Mr. Ramy bowing, and Ann Eliza filled the glasses. In her own and Evelina’s she poured only a few drops, but she filled their guest’s to the brim. “My sister and I seldom take wine,” she explained.
With another bow, which included both his hostesses, Mr. Ramy drank off the cherry brandy and pronounced it excellent.
Evelina meanwhile, with an assumption of industry intended to put their guest at ease, had taken up her instruments and was twisting a rose-petal into shape.
“You make artificial flowers, I see, ma’am,” said Mr. Ramy with interest. “It’s very pretty work. I had a lady-vriend in Shermany dat used to make flowers.” He put out a square fingertip to touch the petal.
Evelina blushed a little. “You left Germany long ago, I suppose?”
“Dear me yes, a goot while ago. I was only ninedeen when I come to the States.”
After this the conversation dragged on intermittently till Mr. Ramy, peering about the room with the shortsighted glance of his race, said with an air of interest: “You’re pleasantly fixed here; it looks real cosy.” The note of wistfulness in his voice was obscurely moving to Ann Eliza.
“Oh, we live very plainly,” said Evelina, with an affectation of grandeur deeply impressive to her sister. “We have very simple tastes.”
“You look real comfortable, anyhow,” said Mr. Ramy. His bulging eyes seemed to muster the details of the scene with a gentle envy. “I wisht I had as good a store; but I guess no blace seems homelike when you’re always alone in it.”
For some minutes longer the conversation moved on at this desultory pace, and then Mr. Ramy, who had been obviously nerving himself for the difficult act of departure, took his leave with an abruptness which would have startled anyone used to the subtler gradations of intercourse. But to Ann Eliza and her sister there was nothing surprising in his abrupt retreat. The long-drawn agonies of preparing to leave, and the subsequent dumb plunge through the door, were so usual in their circle that they would have been as much embarrassed as Mr. Ramy if he had tried to put any fluency into his adieux.
After he had left both sisters remained silent for a while; then Evelina, laying aside her unfinished flower, said: “I’ll go and lock up.”
IV
Intolerably monotonous seemed now to the Bunner sisters the treadmill routine of the shop, colourless and long their evenings about the lamp, aimless their habitual interchange of words to the weary accompaniment of the sewing and pinking machines.
It was perhaps with the idea of relieving the tension of their mood that Evelina, the following Sunday, suggested inviting Miss Mellins to supper. The Bunner sisters were not in a position to be lavish of the humblest hospitality, but two or three times in the year they shared their evening meal with a friend; and Miss Mellins, still flushed with the importance of her “turn,” seemed the most interesting guest they could invite.
As the three women seated themselves at the supper-table, embellished by the unwonted addition of pound cake and sweet pickles, the dressmaker’s sharp swarthy person stood out vividly between the neutral-tinted sisters. Miss Mellins was a small woman with a glossy yellow face and a frizz of black hair bristling with imitation tortoiseshell pins. Her sleeves had a fashionable cut, and half a dozen metal bangles rattled on her wrists. Her voice rattled like her bangles as she poured forth a stream of anecdote and ejaculation; and her round black eyes jumped with acrobatic velocity from one face to another. Miss Mellins was always having or hearing of amazing adventures. She had surprised a burglar in her room at midnight (though how he got there, what he robbed her of, and by what means he escaped had never been quite clear to her auditors); she had been warned by anonymous letters that her grocer (a rejected suitor) was putting poison in her tea; she had a customer who was shadowed by detectives, and another (a very wealthy lady) who had been arrested in a department store for kleptomania; she had been present at a spiritualist seance where an old gentleman had died in a fit on seeing a materialization of his motherin-law; she had escaped from two fires in her night-gown, and at the funeral of her first cousin the horses attached to the hearse had run away and smashed the coffin, precipitating her relative into an open man-hole before the eyes of his distracted family.
A sceptical observer might have explained Miss Mellins’s proneness to adventure by the fact that she derived her chief mental nourishment from the Police Gazette and the Fireside Weekly; but her lot was cast in a circle where such insinuations were not likely to be heard, and where the title-role in blood-curdling drama had long been her recognized right.
“Yes,” she was now saying, her emphatic eyes on Ann Eliza, “you may not believe it, Miss Bunner, and I don’t know’s I should myself if anybody else was to tell me, but over a year before ever I was born, my mother she went to see a gypsy fortune-teller that was exhibited in a tent on the Battery with the green-headed lady, though her father warned her not to—and what you s’pose she told her? Why, she told her these very words—says she: ‘Your next child’ll be a girl with jet-black curls, and she’ll suffer from spasms.’”
“Mercy!” murmured Ann Eliza, a ripple of sympathy running down her spine.
“D’you ever have spasms before, Miss Mellins?” Evelina asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” the dressmaker declared. “And where’d you suppose I had ‘em? Why, at my cousin Emma McIntyre’s wedding, her that married the apothecary over in Jersey City, though her mother appeared to her in a dream and told her she’d rue the day she done it, but as Emma said, she got more advice than she wanted from the living, and if she was to listen to spectres too she’d never be sure what she’d ought to do and what she’d oughtn’t; but I will say her husband took to drink, and she never was the same woman after her fust baby—well, they had an elegant church wedding, and what you s’pose I saw as I was walkin’ up the aisle with the wedding percession?”
“Well?” Ann Eliza whispered, forgetting to thread her needle.
“Why, a coffin, to be sure, right on the top step of the chancel—Emma’s folks is ‘piscopalians and she would have a church wedding, though HIS mother raised a terrible rumpus over it- -well, there it set, right in front of where the minister stood that was going to marry ‘em, a coffin covered with a black velvet pall with a gold fringe, and a ‘Gates Ajar’ in white camellias atop of it.”
“Goodness,” said Evelina, starting, “there’s a knock!”
“Who can it be?” shuddered Ann Eliza, still under the spell of Miss Mellins’s hallucination.
Evelina rose and lit a candle to guide her through the shop. They heard her turn the key of the outer door, and a gust of night air stirred the close atmosphere of the back room; then there was a sound of vivacious exclamations, and Evelina returned with Mr. Ramy.
Ann Eliza’s heart rocked like a boat in a heavy sea, and the dressmaker’s eyes, distended with curiosity, sprang eagerly from face to face.
“I