you was all mistaken,” said Mr. Ramy obstinately.
“I’m so sorry.”
He rose, pushing back his chair.
“You’d better think it over,” he said, in the large tone of a man who feels he may safely wait.
“Oh, no, no. It ain’t any sorter use, Mr. Ramy. I don’t never mean to marry. I get tired so easily—I’d be afraid of the work. And I have such awful headaches.” She paused, racking her brain for more convincing infirmities.
“Headaches, do you?” said Mr. Ramy, turning back.
“My, yes, awful ones, that I have to give right up to. Evelina has to do everything when I have one of them headaches. She has to bring me my tea in the mornings.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear it,” said Mr. Ramy.
“Thank you kindly all the same,” Ann Eliza murmured. “And please don’t—don’t—” She stopped suddenly, looking at him through her tears.
“Oh, that’s all right,” he answered. “Don’t you fret, Miss Gunner. Folks have got to suit themselves.” She thought his tone had grown more resigned since she had spoken of her headaches.
For some moments he stood looking at her with a hesitating eye, as though uncertain how to end their conversation; and at length she found courage to say (in the words of a novel she had once read): “I don’t want this should make any difference between us.”
“Oh, my, no,” said Mr. Ramy, absently picking up his hat.
“You’ll come in just the same?” she continued, nerving herself to the effort. “We’d miss you awfully if you didn’t. Evelina, she—” She paused, torn between her desire to turn his thoughts to Evelina, and the dread of prematurely disclosing her sister’s secret.
“Don’t Miss Evelina have no headaches?” Mr. Ramy suddenly asked.
“My, no, never—well, not to speak of, anyway. She ain’t had one for ages, and when Evelina IS sick she won’t never give in to it,” Ann Eliza declared, making some hurried adjustments with her conscience.
“I wouldn’t have thought that,” said Mr. Ramy.
“I guess you don’t know us as well as you thought you did.”
“Well, no, that’s so; maybe I don’t. I’ll wish you good day, Miss Bunner”; and Mr. Ramy moved toward the door.
“Good day, Mr. Ramy,” Ann Eliza answered.
She felt unutterably thankful to be alone. She knew the crucial moment of her life had passed, and she was glad that she had not fallen below her own ideals. It had been a wonderful experience; and in spite of the tears on her cheeks she was not sorry to have known it. Two facts, however, took the edge from its perfection: that it had happened in the shop, and that she had not had on her black silk.
She passed the next hour in a state of dreamy ecstasy. Something had entered into her life of which no subsequent empoverishment could rob it: she glowed with the same rich sense of possessorship that once, as a little girl, she had felt when her mother had given her a gold locket and she had sat up in bed in the dark to draw it from its hiding-place beneath her night-gown.
At length a dread of Evelina’s return began to mingle with these musings. How could she meet her younger sister’s eye without betraying what had happened? She felt as though a visible glory lay on her, and she was glad that dusk had fallen when Evelina entered. But her fears were superfluous. Evelina, always self-absorbed, had of late lost all interest in the simple happenings of the shop, and Ann Eliza, with mingled mortification and relief, perceived that she was in no danger of being cross-questioned as to the events of the afternoon. She was glad of this; yet there was a touch of humiliation in finding that the portentous secret in her bosom did not visibly shine forth. It struck her as dull, and even slightly absurd, of Evelina not to know at last that they were equals.
PART II
VIII
Mr. Ramy, after a decent interval, returned to the shop; and Ann Eliza, when they met, was unable to detect whether the emotions which seethed under her black alpaca found an echo in his bosom. Outwardly he made no sign. He lit his pipe as placidly as ever and seemed to relapse without effort into the unruffled intimacy of old. Yet to Ann Eliza’s initiated eye a change became gradually perceptible. She saw that he was beginning to look at her sister as he had looked at her on that momentous afternoon: she even discerned a secret significance in the turn of his talk with Evelina. Once he asked her abruptly if she should like to travel, and Ann Eliza saw that the flush on Evelina’s cheek was reflected from the same fire which had scorched her own.
So they drifted on through the sultry weeks of July. At that season the business of the little shop almost ceased, and one Saturday morning Mr. Ramy proposed that the sisters should lock up early and go with him for a sail down the bay in one of the Coney Island boats.
Ann Eliza saw the light in Evelina’s eye and her resolve was instantly taken.
“I guess I won’t go, thank you kindly; but I’m sure my sister will be happy to.”
She was pained by the perfunctory phrase with which Evelina urged her to accompany them; and still more by Mr. Ramy’s silence.
“No, I guess I won’t go,” she repeated, rather in answer to herself than to them. “It’s dreadfully hot and I’ve got a kinder headache.”
“Oh, well, I wouldn’t then,” said her sister hurriedly. “You’d better jest set here quietly and rest.”
*** A summary of
Part 1
of “Bunner Sisters” appears on page 4 of the advertising pages.
“Yes, I’ll rest,” Ann Eliza assented.
At two o’clock Mr. Ramy returned, and a moment later he and Evelina left the shop. Evelina had made herself another new bonnet for the occasion, a bonnet, Ann Eliza thought, almost too youthful in shape and colour. It was the first time it had ever occurred to her to criticize Evelina’s taste, and she was frightened at the insidious change in her attitude toward her sister.
When Ann Eliza, in later days, looked back on that afternoon she felt that there had been something prophetic in the quality of its solitude; it seemed to distill the triple essence of loneliness in which all her after-life was to be lived. No purchasers came; not a hand fell on the door-latch; and the tick of the clock in the back room ironically emphasized the passing of the empty hours.
Evelina returned late and alone. Ann Eliza felt the coming crisis in the sound of her footstep, which wavered along as if not knowing on what it trod. The elder sister’s affection had so passionately projected itself into her junior’s fate that at such moments she seemed to be living two lives, her own and Evelina’s; and her private longings shrank into silence at the sight of the other’s hungry bliss. But it was evident that Evelina, never acutely alive to the emotional atmosphere about her, had no idea that her secret was suspected; and with an assumption of unconcern that would have made Ann Eliza
