Robert Barr - A Rock in the Baltic

THREE women occupied the sewing-room with the splendid outlook: a mother and her two daughters. The mother sat in a low rocking-chair, a picture of mournful helplessness, her hands listlessly resting on her lap, while tears had left their traces on her time-worn face. The elder daughter paced up and down the room as striking an example of energy and impatience as was the mother of despondency. Her comely brow was marred by an angry frown. The younger daughter stood by the long window, her forehead resting against the pane, while her fingers drummed idly on the window sill. Her gaze was fixed on the blue Bay, where rested the huge British warship “Consternation,” surrounded by a section of the United States squadron seated like white swans in the water. Sails of snow glistened here and there on the bosom of the Bay, while motor-boats and what-not darted this way and that impudently among the stately ships of the fleet.

In one corner of the room stood a sewing-machine, and on the long table were piles of mimsy stuff out of which feminine creations are constructed. There was no carpet on the floor, and no ceiling overhead; merely the bare rafters and the boards that bore the pine shingles of the outer roof; yet this attic was notable for the glorious view to be seen from its window. It was an ideal workshop.

The elder girl, as she walked to and fro, spoke with nervous irritation in her voice.

“There is absolutely no excuse, mamma, and it’s weakness in you to pretend that there may be. The woman has been gone for hours. There’s her lunch on the table which has never been tasted, and the servant brought it up at twelve.”

She pointed to a tray on which were dishes whose cold contents bore out the truth of her remark.

“Perhaps she’s gone on strike,” said the younger daughter, without removing her eyes from H.M.S. “Consternation.” “I shouldn’t wonder if we went downstairs again we’d find the house picketed to keep away blacklegs.”

“Oh, you can always be depended on to talk frivolous nonsense,” said her elder sister scornfully. “It’s the silly sentimental fashion in which both you and father treat work-people that makes them so difficult to deal with. If the working classes were taught their place—”

“Working classes! How you talk! Dorothy is as much a lady as we are, and sometimes I think rather more of a lady than either of us. She is the daughter of a clergyman.”

“So she says,” sniffed the elder girl.

“Well, she ought to know,” replied the younger indifferently.

“It’s people like you who spoil dependents in her position, with your Dorothy this and Dorothy that. Her name is Amhurst.”

“Christened Dorothy, as witness godfather and godmother,” murmured the younger without turning her head.

“I think,” protested their mother meekly, as if to suggest a compromise, and throw oil on the troubled waters, “that she is entitled to be called Miss Amhurst, and treated with kindness but with reserve.”

“Tush!” exclaimed the elder indignantly, indicating her rejection of the compromise.

“I don’t see,” murmured the younger, “why you should storm, Sabina. You nagged and nagged at her until she’d finished your ball-dress. It is mamma and I that have a right to complain. Our dresses are almost untouched, while you can sail grandly along the decks of the ‘Consternation’ like a fully rigged yacht. There, I’m mixing my similes again, as papa always says. A yacht doesn’t sail along the deck of a battleship, does it?”

“It’s a cruiser,” weakly corrected the mother, who knew something of naval affairs.

“Well, cruiser, then. Sabina is afraid that papa won’t go unless we all have grand new dresses, but mother can put on her old black silk, and I am going if I have to wear a cotton gown.”

“To think of that person accepting our money, and absenting herself in this disgraceful way!”

“Accepting our money! That shows what it is to have an imagination. Why, I don’t suppose Dorothy has had a penny for three months, and you know the dress material was bought on credit.”

“You must remember,” chided the mother mildly, “that your father is not rich.”

“Oh, I am only pleading for a little humanity. The girl for some reason has gone out. She hasn’t had a bite to eat since breakfast time, and I know there’s not a silver piece in her pocket to buy a bun in a milk-shop.”

“She has no business to be absent without leave,” said Sabina.

“How you talk! As if she were a sailor on a battleship—I mean a cruiser.”

“Where can the girl have gone?” wailed the mother, almost wringing her hands, partially overcome by the crisis. “Did she say anything about going out to you, Katherine? She sometimes makes a confidant of you, doesn’t she?”

“Confidant!” exclaimed Sabina wrathfully.

“I know where she has gone,” said Katherine with an innocent sigh.

“Then why didn’t you tell us before?” exclaimed mother and daughter in almost identical terms.

“She has eloped with the captain of the ‘Consternation,’” explained Katherine calmly, little guessing that her words contained a color of truth. “Papa sat next him at the dinner last night, and says he is a jolly old salt and a bachelor. Papa was tremendously taken with him, and they discussed tactics together. Indeed, papa has quite a distinct English accent this morning, and I suspect a little bit of a headache which he tries to conceal with a wavering smile.”

“You can’t conceal a headache, because it’s invisible,” said the mother seriously. “I wish you wouldn’t talk so carelessly, Katherine, and you mustn’t speak like that of your father.”

“Oh, papa and I understand one another,” affirmed Katherine with great confidence, and now for the first time during this conversation the young girl turned her face away from the window, for the door had opened to let in the culprit.

“Now, Amhurst, what is the meaning of this?” cried Sabina before her foot was fairly across the threshold.

All three women looked at the newcomer. Her beautiful face was aglow, probably through the exertion of coming up the stairs, and her eyes shone like those of the Goddess of Freedom as she returned steadfastly the supercilious stare with which the tall Sabina regarded her.

“I was detained,” she said quietly.

“Why did you go away without permission?”

“Because I had business to do which could not be transacted in this room.”

“That doesn’t answer my question. Why did you not ask permission?”

The girl slowly raised her two hands, and showed her shapely wrists close together, and a bit of the forearm not covered by the sleeve of her black dress.

“Because,” she said slowly, “the shackles have fallen from these wrists.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said Sabina, apparently impressed in spite of herself, but the younger daughter clapped her hands rapturously.

“Splendid, splendid, Dorothy,” she cried. “I don’t know what you mean either, but you look like Maxine Elliott in that play where she—”

“Will you keep quiet!” interrupted the elder sister over her shoulder.

“I mean that I intend to sew here no longer,” proclaimed Dorothy.

“Oh, Miss Amhurst, Miss Amhurst,” bemoaned the matron. “You will heartlessly leave us in this crisis when we are helpless; when there is not a sewing woman to be had in the place for love or money. Every one is working night and day to be ready for the ball on the fourteenth, and you—you whom we have nurtured—”

“I suppose she gets more money,” sneered the elder daughter bitterly.

“Oh, Dorothy,” said Katherine, coming a step forward and clasping her hands, “do you mean to say I must attend the ball in a calico dress after all? But I’m going, nevertheless, if I dance in a morning wrapper.”