CHAPTER VIIA DESPERATE RESOLVE
Very soon Posey heard dishes clattering sharply on the table, for in Mrs. Hagood’s state of mind she handled even the plates and cups as though they had been guilty of offense, and presently the little brass bell rang out with an energy that warned Mr. Hagood it would not be wise to linger in obeying its summons. A moment later and his steps sounded on the porch, he was wiping his hands on the towel that hung by the door, they were sitting down at the table, and then came his question, “Where’s Posey to-night?”
There was but a thin door between her room and the kitchen, and Posey had no need to strain her ears to hear Mrs. Hagood as with loud and forceful emphasis she poured forth the story of Posey’s misdoings, to which the kindly old man who had taken the friendless child to a tender place in his heart,listened sorrowfully. As Mrs. Hagood ended she also heard his mild tone, “Why, now, Almiry, I wouldn’t be too hard on Posey; if she is quick-tempered she’s soon over it, an’ she’s always ready an’ willin’. As for her bein’ disappointed about not goin’ to school, she oughtn’t to have did what she did, but I s’posed you did mean to send her part of the time; it don’t seem quite right not to, now really, Almiry, an’ there’s the law, you know.”
It was a good deal of a protest for Mr. Hagood to make on any subject—more than he would have uttered for himself, as Posey well knew; but the grim silence in which his wife had listened was only the hush before the storm which he had drawn on his own head. “Oh, yes, Elnathan Hagood,” with a biting sarcasm of tone, “that’s right and just what I might have expected of you; take up against your own wife and for a vile, impudent, little street-beggar. You needn’t think you two have been so hand in glove all summer without my seeing it, and this is the upshot, and you uphold her in it.”
“Oh, Almiry!”
“But then I’ve done nothing for you, nothing at all. I didn’t make you all you are, and earn for you all you have. I haven’t worked my fingers off day in and day out for you. Oh, no; but you don’t owe me anything for that, certainly not. Only I’d like to know where you’d be now if it hadn’t been for me, and where you’d go now if it wasn’t for me, wanting to give to every missionary and shiftless creature you can hear of, and to dress a pauper up in silk and make a lady of her! One thing I guess, you’d find the poor-house at the end, and that pretty soon. But then that’s all the thanks I get.”
“Now, Almiry, you know better,” expostulated Mr. Hagood.
“But I’ll tell you one thing,” she continued cutting him short, “it won’t be healthy for you to be a-settin’ her up against me, and I’ll see that you don’t have much chance to do it. And I’ll tell you another thing you may both depend on, she shall never go to school now, not a single day. I taught once, I can teach her, and I’ll begin to-morrow. And one thing more, as long as I have my health and strength I don’t propose to berun over in my own house by any miserable little upstart, as she’ll find out to her sorrow if she ever tries it again.”
Mrs. Hagood had raised her voice with the intention that the words should reach Posey’s ears, who in return shook her small clenched fist towards the closed door, and was only restrained from calling out the words which rose to her lips by the lesson she had recently and painfully gained, that in a contest of strength she was no match for Mrs. Hagood, and was sure to be the sufferer.
Mr. Hagood sighed as he rose from his almost untasted meal and went out about his evening chores. And as Posey’s gust of passion ebbed away she sighed also, not only for the supper she had been deprived of, whose savory whiffs had intensified her always healthy appetite, but from the realization, of which this going supperless was an evidence, how mortally she had angered Mrs. Hagood. For, as she well knew, the battle between them was not over; instead it was just begun; that dominant will would not rest till it had crushed and broken the will which had dared to oppose it, and Posey achingand smarting, but rebellious and unyielding, lay and looked at the ceiling and felt that it was indeed a painful way on which she must enter with the morrow, and in which her one friend, however innocent, must also suffer.
These gloomy forebodings of the future grew as the darkness thickened in her little room; then a slight sound at her window attracted her attention, and softly raising the sash she found on the sill outside, a long row of juicy harvest apples. Tears filled her eyes, but they were such as she had not shed before that day, and she kissed the red-cheeked apples and with a rush of love and gratitude for the unspoken kindness they expressed.
Poor, hasty, undisciplined Posey! That she had not been blameless she well knew. “But Mrs. Hagood was so mean,” so she justified herself, “or I’d never have done so, and I don’t believe anybody else would have stood it either. O dear!” and she sighed very deeply as she munched an apple, “how I wish Mr. Hagood and I could go away somewhere and live all by ourselves; I’m sure with himI’d never get angry and ugly, and feel like fighting.”
For most of all it was love and tenderness that her lonely little heart longed for, and having these she thought to be good would be easy. “Oh, mamma,” was the whispered plaint that rose to her lips, “if you had only lived I might have been good, but how can I now? You told me that God would love me, but I don’t think He can for nobody else does.” The wind was rising, and as Posey leaned against the frame of the still open window and listened to it rushing and murmuring through the tall trees around the house, and watched the dim, shadowy motion of the waving branches, to her excited fancy the one seemed to urge, “Come away, come away,” and the other like inviting hands to beckon, “Come, come.” And as she looked and listened an impulse, a sudden resolve sprang in her heart, and setting her teeth firmly she murmured as if in answer, “I will come, I will!”
Posey did not undress when she lay down again, though first she knelt down by the bed and repeated her,
“Now I lay me down to sleep,”
“Now I lay me down to sleep,”
“Now I lay me down to sleep,”
“Now I lay me down to sleep,”
as usual. But to-night she felt that this was not enough, that she needed something to give fuller expression to the tumult of feeling within her. At the Refuge she had been taught the Lord’s prayer, but instinctively she shrank from that clause of forgiveness of others, for she well knew that the spirit throbbing so hotly in her heart was anything but a forgiving one, so for want of something better she added a petition of her own, “O Lord, I haven’t anybody in the world, unless it is you. Take care of me; show me what to do; help me, please do! Amen.”
It was the first time in her life that Posey had ever really prayed—all which had gone before had been a form, a habit. But now in the hour of her heart-sinking and loneliness, in the stress of her anger and resentment, shaken by the mingled impulses of fear and the courage which comes of desperation, with no earthly support to lean on, her tumultuous young soul reached out, feebly it is true, but still with real longing, for a guidance and strength higher than her own.
Posey was too excited by all that had happened, too thrilled with her new, wild determination, to sleep much or soundly. Nearly every hour she heard the old clock in the kitchen strike, and when she counted three she slipped noiselessly out of bed. Her room was no longer dark; a great yellow moon had risen and made it, as well as the outer world, almost as light as day. Indeed it is safe to say that but for that flood of softly illuminating brightness Posey would never have dared to put her rash impulse to the test. As it was, her fingers shook as she gathered together a few articles from her scanty wardrobe and tied them up in a gingham apron, not forgetting the few mementos of her mother which through everything she had clung to, and were the first to be thought of now. Then putting on her coarse straw hat, and wrapping about her an old cape that chanced to be hanging in the room, she took her shoes in her hand, cautiously raised the window, and carefully crept out, something easily done as it was but a few feet from the ground.
As Posey stole around the corner of thehouse old Rover saw her, and after a brief sniff came toward her wagging his tail in friendly recognition. Many a time had she been comforted by the voiceless sympathy in the soft eyes of this dumb friend, and now as she stroked his head, and felt the touch of his warm tongue on her hand, her sense of utter desolation was for the moment relieved.
When she reached the pantry window Posey put down her bundle and stretching on tiptoe slipped her slender hand between the slats of the blind, and easily lifted the latch, and then with the help of a stool on the back porch quickly crept in. Mr. and Mrs. Hagood slept quite on the other side of the house, and moving quietly she had no fear of being heard by them, while the bright moonlight gave her light enough.
She had come to the pantry for two reasons: to make up for the supper she had lost the night before, and to get supplies for the enterprise on which she was entering. Nor did she hesitate to take the best she could find. “I’ve done enough here to earn it,” was her reasoning, as she helped herself plentifullyand without a scruple to the company cake kept sacredly in a tin box. She appropriated the cold chicken set aside for the morning’s breakfast, with a naughty chuckle at the thought of Mrs. Hagood’s wrath when she should discover its absence, and she spread her thick bread and butter with the best peach preserves that were only brought out on especial occasions. And having satisfied her appetite she next packed full a small-handle basket she found on a shelf, adding as its crowning delicacy a saucer pumpkin pie, she by chance discovered.
This done, as she was turning to leave, her eye fell on a memorandum book with pencil attached in which Mrs. Hagood kept her egg account. The sight suggested an idea, and tearing out a blank leaf she wrote on it as best she might by the uncertain light, in a sprawling, childish hand:
“Dear Mr. Hagood,“You have been so good to me that I awfully hate to leave you, and I hope you won’t blame me for running away, for I couldn’tstay any longer, no more at present, good by with love,“Posey.”
“Dear Mr. Hagood,
“You have been so good to me that I awfully hate to leave you, and I hope you won’t blame me for running away, for I couldn’tstay any longer, no more at present, good by with love,
“Posey.”
With that she climbed out of the window, closed the blind so that all should be secure again and tiptoeing around into the woodhouse laid the folded note on his basket of kindlings, where Mr. Hagood would find it the first thing in the morning. This done, she put on her shoes and hat, took up her bundle and basket, to go she knew not where; her one thought that it would be away from Mrs. Hagood and the renewed contest which the morning would be sure to bring. As she moved toward the gate the old dog followed her with a wistful whine, as if he was puzzled by and questioned this strange action. “Dear old Rover,” Posey whispered, throwing her arms around his neck, while her tears fell thick on the white star on his forehead, “dear old doggie, you must go back; I can’t take you with me. I wish I could and Mr. Hagood, too, so go back, old fellow, and stay with him,” and with one last hug she shutthe gate between them, with a real pain in her heart; and also shut the gate to the only place in the wide world that she could call home.
Already she had thought, “When Mrs. Hagood misses me she will think I’ve started back to the Refuge (as I’d like to), and so I must go just the other way,” and so it was in this opposite direction that she hurried. And what a strange world this was into which she had come, the world of night, of mystery, of strange quiet, of brooding peace. All the well-known objects took on a new and unfamiliar look, as though they had different faces for the day and the night. In the solemn stillness sounds unheard by day became strangely distinct—for the first time she heard the spring at the foot of the hill falling into its rocky basin; the cry of a hidden cricket, the rustle in the wind of the already fallen leaves, the crow of a rooster in a neighboring barn—sounds all that in the day she would hardly have noticed, how loud and eerie they were now!
In all the village but one light was burning, in the room of an old man who had been longsick and was near death. As Posey saw it she wondered if when people died they went out into the night alone, and felt strange and perhaps afraid. A few hours before she had almost wished she could die, but now she shivered a little at the thought as well as the chill of the night air, and the strange sensation of being out alone. Yes, she was glad to be alive, even if there did not seem to be any place anywhere for her.
Few girls of her age would have dared to do what she was doing. But Posey was not timid by nature, and much of her courage came from the tension of her feverish excitement. Still, when she had passed through the village, where all was familiar and there was a certain sense of companionship in the clustered houses and the thought of the sleeping people inside, and leaving the last house behind, from the hill-top on which she stood, she saw the open fields and dark woods stretch away till they melted in dimness, her heart beat fast and almost failed. For with the sight a sudden sense of desolation rushed over her, a realization of how alone and young, and weak and helpless she was.
For the first time, too, she began to be troubled by thoughts of the future. She had heard of runaways who had to sleep nights in old barns and under haystacks. Boys from the Refuge had sometimes run away, and when brought back had told such stories. Very likely she would have to also, and it seemed to her that it would be dreadful to sleep in an old barn, especially if there should be rats. Besides when her little store of provision was gone, how would she live unless she begged? She had often seen ragged children in the city going from door to door with baskets, but that was a degradation she had never known—one her whole nature shrank from. She would rather starve, she felt, than to beg at doors, and perhaps be turned away, as she knew beggars so often were.
As all these things rose before her Posey almost wished herself back safe in the little room she had left. Almost but not quite, for a memory of Mrs. Hagood’s face as she had last seen it, and Mrs. Hagood’s voice as it had last reached her ear stayed her wavering.“I won’t go back now, if I die,” she pledged herself, setting her teeth firmly, and bracing herself with dogged resolution. “But oh, how I do wish I could have brought Rover!”