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.