The Heart of Rachael

Inside were three rooms; there was no bathroom, no light but the

kerosene lamps the old hands tended daily, no warmth but the small

kitchen stove. All the furniture was old and shabby and cheap, and

the antimacassars and pictures and teacups old Mrs. Mumford prized

so dearly were of no value except for association's sake.

Rachael's great-grandmother lived upon tea and toast and fruit

sauce; sometimes she picked a dish of peas in her own garden and

sometimes made herself a rice pudding, but if her children brought

her in a chicken or a bowl of soup she always gave it away to some

poorer neighbor who was ill, or who was "nursing that great

strapping baby."

She read the Bible to Rachael and exhorted the half-believing,

half-ashamed child to lay its lessons to heart.

"Your life will be full of change and of pleasure, there will be

many temptations and much responsibility," said the sweet, stern,

thin old voice. "Arm yourself against the wickedness of the

world!"

Rachael, pulling the old collie's silky ears, thought nothing of

the wickedness of the world but much of possible change and

pleasure. She hoped her aged relative was right; certainly one

would suppose Granny to be right in anything she said.

The time would have swiftly come when the child's changing heart

would have found no room for this association, but before Rachael

was twelve Granny was gone, the little house, with its few poor

treasures shut inside it, was closed and empty. And only a year or

two later a far more important change came into the girl's life.

She had always disliked Los Lobos, had schemed and brooded and

fretted incessantly through her childhood. It was with astonished

delight that she heard that her parents, who had never, in a

financial sense, drawn a free breath since their marriage, who had

worried and contrived, who had tried indifference and bravado and

strictest economy by turns, had sold their ranch for almost two

thousand dollars more than its accumulated mortgages, and were

going to England.

It was a glorious adventure for Rachael, even though she was too

shrewd not to suspect the extreme hazard of the move. She talked

in Los Lobos of her father's "people," hinted that "the family,

you know, thinks we'd better be there," but she knew in her heart

that a few months might find them all beggars.

Her father bought her a loose, big, soft blue coat in San

Francisco, and a dashing little soft hat for the steamer. Rachael

never forgot these garments throughout her entire life. It

mattered not how countrified the gown under the coat, how plain

the shoes on her slender feet. Their beauty, their becomingness,

their comfort, actually colored her days. For twenty dollars she

was transformed; she knew herself to be pretty and picturesque.

"That charming little girl with the dark braids, going to

England," she heard some man on the steamer say. The ranch, the

chickens, weeds, and preserving, the dusty roads and shabby stores

of Los Lobos were gone; she was no longer a gawky child; she was a

young lady in a loose, soft, rough blue coat, with a black quill

in her soft blue hat.