"'Colours seen by candle-lightNever look the same by day.'"
"TO BARLEY-BRIGHT."
Thenext few days went by happily for the Little Colonel, for Betty took her to all her favourite haunts, and kept her entertained from morning till night. Once they stayed all day in the woods below the barn, building a playhouse at the base of a great oak-tree, with carpets of moss, and cups and saucers made of acorns.
Scott and Bradley joined them, and for once played peaceably, building a furnace in the ravine with some flat stones and an old piece of stove pipe. There they cooked their dinner. Davy was sent to raid the garden and spring-house, and even Lee and Morgan were allowed a place at the feast, when one came in with a hatful of guinea eggs that he had found in the orchard, and the other loaned his new red wheelbarrow, to add to the housekeeping outfit.
"Isn't this fun!" exclaimed the Little Colonel, as she watched Betty, who stood over the furnacewith a very red face, scrambling the eggs in an old pie-pan. "I bid to be the cook next time we play out here, and I'm going to make a furnace like this when I go back to Locust."
High above them, up the hill, on the back porch of the farmhouse, Molly stood ironing sheets and towels. Whenever she glanced down into the shady hollow, she could see Lloyd's pink dress fluttering along the ravine, or Betty's white sunbonnet bobbing up from behind the rocks. The laughing voices and the shouts of the boys came tantalisingly to her ears, and the old sullen pout settled on her face as she listened.
"It isn't fair that I should have to work all day long while they are off having a good time," she muttered, slapping an iron angrily down on the stove. "I s'pose they think that because I'm so big I oughtn't to care about playing; but I couldn't help growing so fast. If Iamnearly as big as Mrs. Appleton, that doesn't keep me from feeling like a little girl inside. I'm only a year older than Scott. Ihatethem! I wish that little Sherman girl would fall into a brier patch and scratch her face, and that a hornet would sting Betty Lewis smack in the mouth!"
By and by a tear sizzled down on the hot iron in herhand. "It isn't fair!" she sobbed again, "for them to have everything and me nothing, not even to know where my poor little sister is. Maybe somebody's beating her this very minute, or she is shut up in a dark closet crying for me." With that thought, all the distressing scenes that had made her past life miserable began to crowd into her mind, and the tears sizzled faster and faster on the hot iron, as she jerked it back and forth over a long towel.
There had been beatings and dark closets for Molly many a time before she was rescued by the orphan asylum, and the great fear of her life was that there was still the same cruel treatment for the little sister who had not been rescued, but who had been hidden away by their drunken father when the Humane Society made its search for her.
Three years had passed since they were lost from each other. Molly was only eleven then, and Dot, although nearly seven, was such a tiny, half-starved little thing that she seemed only a baby in her sister's eyes. Many a night, when the wind moaned in the chimney, or the rats scampered in the walls, Molly had started up out of a sound sleep, staring fearfully into the darkness, thinking that she had heard Dot calling to her. Then suddenly rememberingthat Dot was too far away to make her hear, no matter how wildly she might call, she had buried her face in her pillow, and sobbed and sobbed until she fell asleep.
The matron of the asylum knew why she often came down in the morning with red eyes and swollen face, and the knowledge made her more patient with the wayward girl. Nobody taxed her patience more than Molly, with her unhappy moods, her outbursts of temper, and her suspicious, jealous disposition. She loved to play, and yelled and ran like some wild creature, whenever she had a chance, climbing the highest trees, making daring leaps from forbidden heights, and tearing her clothes into ribbons. But she rebelled at having to work, and in all the time she was at the asylum the matron had found only one lovable trait in her. It was her affection for the little lost sister that made her gentle to the smaller children on the place and kind to the animals.
She had been happier since coming to the Appleton farm, where there were no rules, and the boys accepted her leadership admiringly. She found great pleasure in inventing wild tales for their entertainment, in frightening them with stories of ghosts and hobgoblins, and in teaching them newgames which she had played in alleys with boot-blacks and street gamins.
All that had stopped with the arrival of the visitors. Their coming brought her more work, and left her less time to play. The sight of Lloyd and Betty in their dainty dresses aroused her worst jealousy, and awoke the old bitterness that had grown up in her slum life, and that always raged within her whenever she saw people with whom fortune had dealt more kindly than with herself. All that day, while the seven happy children played and sang in the shady woodland, she went around at her work with a rebellious feeling against her lot. Everything she did was to the tune of a bitter refrain that kept echoing through her sore heart: "It isn't fair! It isn't fair!"
Late in the afternoon a boy came riding up from the railroad station with a telegram for Mrs. Sherman. It was the first one that had ever been sent to the farm, and Bradley, who had gone up to the house for a hatchet, waited to watch Mrs. Sherman tear open the yellow envelope.
"Take it to Lloyd, please," she said, after a hurried reading. "Tell her to hurry up to the house." Thrusting the message into his hand, she hurried out of the room, to find Mrs. Appleton. Bradley feltvery important at being the bearer of a telegram, and ran down the hill as fast as his bare feet could carry him over the briers and dry stubble. He would have teased Lloyd awhile by making her guess what he had, before giving it to her, if it had not been for Mrs. Sherman's request to hurry.
Lloyd read the message aloud. "Aunt Jane alarmingly ill; wants to see you. Come immediately." "Oh, how provoking!" she exclaimed. "I s'pose we'll have to start right off. We always do. We nevah plan to go anywhere or do anything without Aunt Jane gets sick and thinks she's goin' to die. She's an old, old lady," she hastened to explain, seeing Betty's shocked face. "She's my great-aunt, you know, 'cause she's my grandmothah's sistah. I wouldn't have minded it so much when we first came," she confessed, "but I don't want to leave now, one bit. We've had a lovely time to-day, and I hate to go away befo' I've seen the cave you promised to take me to and the Glenrock watahfall, and all those places."
It never occurred to the Little Colonel that she might be left behind, until she reached the house and found her mother with her hat on, packing her satchel.
"I've barely time to catch the next train," shesaid, as Lloyd came running into the room. "It is a two-mile drive to the station, you know, and there's not time to get you and all your things ready to take with me. It wouldn't be wise, anyhow, for everything is always in confusion at Aunt Jane's when she is ill. Mrs. Appleton will take good care of you, and you can follow me next week if Aunt Jane is better. Betty will come with you, and we'll have a nice little visit in the city while she does her shopping and gets ready for her journey. I'll write to you as soon as I can decide when it will be best for you to come. Aunt Jane's illness is probably half scare, like all her others, but still I feel that I must never lose a moment when she sends for me, as she might be worse than we think."
Mrs. Sherman packed rapidly while she talked, and almost before Lloyd realised that she was really to be left behind, a light buckboard was at the door, and Mr. Appleton was standing beside the horse's head waiting. There was not even time for Lloyd to cling around her mother's neck and be petted and comforted for the sudden separation. There was a hasty hug, a loving kiss, and a whispered "Good-bye, little daughter. Mother's sorry to go without her little girl, but it can't be helped. The time will soon pass—only a week, and rememberthis is one of your school days, and the lesson set for you to learn isPatience."
Lloyd smiled bravely while she promised to be good and not give Mrs. Appleton any trouble. Her mother, looking back as they drove away, saw the two little girls standing with their arms around each other, waving their handkerchiefs, and thought thankfully, "I am glad that Lloyd is here with Betty instead of at Locust. She'll not have time to be lonesome with so many playmates."
It was hard for Lloyd to keep back the tears as the carriage passed out of sight around the corner of the graveyard. But Bradley challenged her to a race down-hill, and with a loud whoop they all started helter-skelter back to the ravine to play. She had been busy making some pine-cone chairs for the little parlour at the roots of the oak-tree, when the telegram called her away, and now she went back to that delightful occupation, working busily until the supper-horn blew to call the men from the field. It was always a pleasure to Lloyd to hear that horn, and several times she had puffed at it until she was red in the face, in her vain attempts to blow it herself. All the sound she could awaken was a short dismal toot. It was a cow's horn, carved and polished, that had been used for nearly forty years to call the menfrom the field. When Mrs. Appleton puckered her lips to blow it, her thin cheeks puffed out until they were as round and pink as the baby's, and the long mellow note went floating across the fields, clear and sweet, till the men at work in the farthest field heard it and answered with a far-away cheer.
"Let's get Molly to play Barley-bright with us to-night," said Bradley, as they trudged up the hill. "It is a fine game, and if we help her with the dishes, she'll get done in just a few minutes, and we'll have nearly an hour to play before it gets dark."
The same thought was in Molly's mind, for after supper she called the boys aside and whispered to them. She wanted to slip away from the girls and not allow them to join in the game; but Bradley would not listen to such an arrangement. He insisted that the game would not be any fun without them.
Then Molly, growing jealous, turned away with a pout, saying that she might have known it would be that way. They had had plenty of fun before the girls came, but to go ahead and do as they pleased. It didn't make any difference toher.Shecould get on very well by herself.
Lloyd had gone down to the spring-house with Mrs. Appleton, but Betty heard the dispute and put an end to it at once. "Here!" she cried, catchingup a towel. "Everybody come and help, and we'll be through before you can say Jack Robinson. Pour out the hot water, Molly. Get another towel, Bradley. We'll wipe, and Davy can carry the dishes to the pantry. We'll be through before Scott has half filled the wood-box."
Molly could not keep her jealous mood and sulky frowns very long in the midst of the laughing chatter that followed, and in a very few minutes Betty had talked her into good humour with herself and all the world. Such light work did the many hands make of the dish-washing, that the sky was still pink with the sunset glow when they were ready to begin the game.
"We always go down to the hay-barn to play Barley-bright," said Bradley. "I never cared for it when we played it at school in the day-time, but when we play it Molly's way it is the most exciting game I know. We usually wait till it begins to get dark and the lightning-bugs are flying about.
'Witch' jumping out from behind a haystack toward group of young people seated on the ground"TO THEIR EXCITED FANCY SHE SEEMED A REAL WITCH."
"Molly and I will stand the crowd, this time. Our base will be here at the persimmon-tree in front of the barn, and yours will be the pasture bars down yonder. The barn will be Barley-bright, and after we call out the questions and answers, you're to try to run around our base to the barn, and back again toyours, without being caught by a witch. There are six of you, so you can have six runs to Barley-bright and back, and if by that time we have caught half of you the game is ours. The witch has the right to hide and jump out at you from any place she chooses, but I can't touch you except when you pass my base. Now shut your eyes till I count one hundred, while the witch hides."
Six pairs of hands were clasped over six pairs of eyes, while Bradley slowly counted, and Molly, darting away from his side, hid behind the straw-stack.
"One—hun-dred—all eyes open!" he shouted. They looked around. The fireflies were flashing across the pasture and the dusk was beginning to deepen. Then six voices rang out in chorus, Bradley's shrill pipe answering them.
"How many miles to Barley-bright?""Three score and ten!""Can I get there by candle-light?""Yes, if your legs are long and light—There and back again!Look out! The witches will catch you!"
Molly was nowhere in sight, so with a delicious thrill of excitement, not knowing from what ambush they would be pounced upon, the six pilgrims to Barley-bright started off at the top of their speed.Across the pasture they rushed, around Bradley's base at the persimmon-tree, and up to the big barn door, which they were obliged to touch before they could turn and make a wild dash back to the pasture bars.
Just as they reached the barn door, Molly sprang out from behind the straw-stack; but they could not believe it was Molly, she was so changed. To their excited fancy she seemed a real witch. Her black hair was unbraided, and streamed out in elfish wisps from under a tall pointed black hat. A hideous mask covered her face, and she brandished the stump of an old broom with such effect that they ran from her, shrieking wildly.
Some heavy wrapping paper, a strip of white cotton cloth, and coal-soot from the bottom of a stove lid had changed an ordinary girl of fourteen into a nameless terror, from which they fled, shrieking at the top of their voices. The boys had been through the performance many times, but they enjoyed the cold thrill it gave them as much as Betty and Lloyd, who were feeling it for the first time.
Lee was caught in that first mad race, and Morgan in the second, and they had to go over to the enemy's base, where Bradley stood guard under the persimmon-tree. As they came in from the thirdrun, Lloyd leaned against the pasture bars, out of breath.
"Oh, I believe I should drop dead," she panted, "if that awful thing should get me. I can't believe that it is only Molly. She seems like a real suah 'nuff witch." She glanced over her shoulder again with a little nervous shudder as the others began calling again:
"How many miles to Barley-bright?"
Betty was caught this time, and Lloyd, to whom the game was becoming a terrible reality, stood with her heart beating like a trip-hammer and her eyes peering in a startled way through the dusk. This time the witch popped up from behind the pasture bars, and Lloyd, giving a startled look over her shoulder as she flew, saw that the broomstick was flourished in her direction, and the hideous black and white mask was almost upon her. With an ear-splitting scream she redoubled her speed, racing around and around the barn, instead of touching the door and turning back, when she saw that she was followed.
Finally, with one sharp scream of terror after another, she darted into the great dark barn, in a blind frenzy to escape. She heard the voices of thechildren outside, the bang of the broomstick against the door, and then plunging forward, felt herself falling—falling!
There was just an instant in which she seemed to see the faces of her mother and Papa Jack. Then she remembered nothing more, for her head struck something hard, and she lay in a little heap on the floor below. She had fallen through a trap-door into an empty manger.
A TIME FOR PATIENCE.
Theythought at first that she was hiding in the barn, afraid to come out, lest Molly might be lying in wait to grab her. So they began calling: "Come on, Lloyd! King's X! King's excuse! Home free! You may come home free!" But there was no answer, and Betty, suddenly remembering the trap-door, grew white with fear.
The children played in the barn so much that Mr. Appleton's first order, when he hired a new man, was that the trap-door must always be closed and fastened the moment he finished pitching the hay down to the manger below. The children themselves had been cautioned time and again to keep away from it, but Lloyd, never having played in the barn before, was not aware of its existence.
"Lloyd, Lloyd!" called Betty, hurrying into the twilight of the big barn. There was no answer, and peering anxiously ahead, Betty saw that the trap-door was open, and on the floor below wasthe gleam of the Little Colonel's light pink dress, shining white through the dusk.
Betty's startled cry brought the other children, who clattered down the barn stairs after her, into the straw-covered circle where the young calves were kept. They met Mr. Appleton, coming in from the corn-crib with a basket on his shoulder, and all began to talk at once. The words "Lloyd" and "trap-door" were all he could distinguish in the jumble of excited exclamations, but they told the whole story.
Hastily dropping his basket, he strode across to the manger that Betty pointed out, with a look of grave concern on his face. They all crowded breathlessly around him as he bent over the quiet little figure, lifting it gently in his arms. It was a solemn-faced little company that followed him up the hill with his unconscious burden. A cold fear seized Betty as she walked along, glancing at the Little Colonel's closed eyes, and the tiny stream of blood trickling across the still white face.
"Oh, if godmother were only here!" she groaned.
"There's no telling how badly Lloyd is hurt. Maybe she'll be a cripple for life. Oh, I wish I'd never heard of such a game as Barley-bright."
If the accident had happened at Locust, a doctorwould have been summoned to the spot, as fast as telephones and swift horses could bring him, and the whole household would have held its breath in anxiety. But very little fuss was made over accidents at the Cuckoo's Nest. It was a weekly occurrence for some of the children to be brought in limp and bleeding from various falls. Bradley had once sprained his neck turning somersaults down the hay-mow, so that he had not been able to look over his shoulder for two weeks. Scott had been picked up senseless twice, once from falling out of the top of a walnut-tree, and the other time because a high ladder broke under him. Every one of the boys but Pudding had at some time or another left a trail of blood behind him from barn to house as he went weeping homeward with some part of his body to be bandaged. So Lloyd's fall did not cause the commotion it might have done in a less adventurous family.
"Oh, she's coming around all right," said Mr. Appleton, cheerfully, as her head stirred a little on his shoulder, and she half opened her eyes.
"Here you are," he added a moment later, laying her on the bed in the parlour. "Scott, run call your mother. Bring a light, Molly. We'll soon see what is the matter."
There were no bones broken, and in a little while Lloyd sat up, white and dizzy. Then she walked across the room, and looked at herself in the little mirror hanging over a shelf, on which stood a bouquet of stiff wax flowers. It was hung so high and tilted forward so much, and the wax flowers were in the way, so that she could not get a very satisfactory view of her wounds, but she saw enough to make her feel like an old soldier home from the wars, with the marks of many battles upon her.
A bandage wet with arnica was tied around her head, over a large knot that was rapidly swelling larger. Several strips of court-plaster covered the cut on her temple. One cheek was scratched, and she was stiff and sore from many bruises.
"But not half so stiff as you'll be in the morning," Mrs. Appleton assured her, cheerfully. "All that side of your body that struck against the manger is black and blue."
"I think I'll go to bed," said the Little Colonel, faintly. "This day has been long enough, and I don't want anything else to happen to me. Fallin' through a trap-doah and havin' my mothah leave me is enough fo' one while. I think I need her moah than Aunt Jane does. You'll have to sleep with me to-night, Betty. I wouldn't stay down heah alone fo' anything."
It was very early to go to bed, scarcely more than half-past seven, when Betty blew out the candle and climbed in beside the Little Colonel. She lay for a long time, listening to the croaking of the frogs, thinking that Lloyd had forgotten her troubles in dreamland, until a mournful little voice whispered, "Say, Betty, are you asleep?"
"No; but I thought you were."
"I was, for a few minutes, but that dreadful false face of Molly's woke me up. I dreamed it was chasing me, and I seemed to be falling and falling, and somebody screamed at me 'Look out! The witches will catch you!' It frightened me so that I woke up all a tremble. I know I am safe, here in bed with you, but I'm shaking so hard that I can't go to sleep again. Oh, Betty, you don't know how much I want my mothah! I'll nevah leave her again as long as I live. My head aches, and I'm so stiff and soah I can't tu'n ovah!"
"Do you want me to tell you a story?" asked Betty, hearing the sob in Lloyd's voice, and divining that her pillow had caught more than one tear under cover of the darkness.
"Oh, yes!" begged the Little Colonel. "Talk to me, even if you don't say anything but the multiplication table. It will keep me from hearin' thosedreadful frogs, and seein' that face in the dark. I'm ashamed to be frightened at nothing. I don't know what makes me such a coward."
"Maybe the fall was a sort of shock to your nerves," said Betty, comfortingly, reaching out to pat the trembling shoulders with a motherly air. "There, go to sleep, and I'll stay awake and keep away the hobgoblins. I'll recite the Lady Jane, because it jingles so beautifully. It goes like a cradle."
A little groping hand reached through the darkness and touched Betty's face, then buried itself in her soft curls, as if the touch brought a soothing sense of safety. In a slow, sing-song tone, as monotonous as the droning of a bee, Betty began, accenting every other syllable with a sleepy drawl.
"Thela-dyJanewastallandslim,Thela-dyJanewasfair.SirThomasherlordwasstoutoflimb,Hiscoughwasshortand hiseyesweredim,And heworegreenspecswith atortoiseshellrim,And hishatwas re-mark-ablybroadin thebrim,Andshewas un-common-lyfondofhim,Andtheywere alov-ingpair.And thenameand thefameof thisknightand hisdameWereevery-wherehailedwith theloud-est ac-claim."
But it took more than the Lady Jane to put the restless little listener to sleep that night. Maud Muller was recited in the same sing-song measure, and Lord Ullin's daughter followed without a pause, till Betty herself grew sleepy, and, like a tired little mosquito, droned lower and lower, finally stopping in the middle of a sentence.
They woke in the morning, to hear thunder rumbling in the distance. Betty, peeping through the curtains, announced that the sky was gray with clouds, and she thought that it must surely begin to rain soon. Lloyd, so stiff and sore from the effects of her fall that she could scarcely move, sat up with a groan.
"Oh, deah!" she exclaimed. "What is there to do heah on rainy days? No books, no games, no piano! Mothah said that the lesson set fo' me to learn was patience, but I'd lose my mind, just sitting still in front of a clock and watching the minutes go by. I don't see how Job stood it."
"Job didn't do that way," said Betty, soberly, as she looked up from lacing her shoes. "They didn't have any clocks in those days, and besides, patience isn't just sitting still all day without fidgeting. It's putting up with whatever happens to you, withoutmaking a fuss about it. The best way to do it is not to think about it any more than you can help."
"I'd like to know how I'm goin' to keep from thinkin' about my bruises and cuts," groaned the Little Colonel, limping stiffly across the room to look again in the little mirror, at her bandaged forehead, her scratched cheek, and her temple, criss-crossed with strips of court-plaster. "WhatwouldPapa Jack say if he could see me now?"
She repeated Betty's definition of patience to her reflection in the mirror, making a wry face as she did so. "'Puttin' up with whatevah happens to you, without makin' a fuss about it.' Well, I'll try, but it's mighty hard to do when one of the happenings is fallin' through a trap-doah, and gettin' as stiff and soah as I am."
She thought about the definition more than once during the long morning that followed; when the hash was too salty at breakfast, and the oatmeal was scorched; when Betty was busy in the spring-house, and she was left all alone for awhile with nothing to entertain herself with but the almanac and a week-old paper. The thunder, that had been only a low muttering over the distant hills when they awoke, was coming nearer, and the damp air was heavy with the approaching storm.
"I'll have one little run out-of-doahs befo' it begins to rain," thought Lloyd, and started up to skip across the porch; but her skipping changed to a painful walk as her aching muscles reminded her of her fall, and she limped slowly down the lane toward the gate.
A strong wind suddenly began lashing the cherry-trees that lined the lane, and sent a gust of dust and leaves into her face. She stopped a moment to rub her eyes, and as she did so something fluttering on the hedge-row broke loose from the thorns that held it, and came blowing toward her. It was something soft and gray, and it fluttered along uncertainly, like a bit of fleecy thistledown, as the wind bore it to her feet.
"Oh, it's mothah's gray veil!" she exclaimed. "It was on the back of the seat when she waved good-bye to me, and they were drivin' so fast it must have blown away."
She picked up the dainty piece of silk tissue, soft and filmy as a cloud, and held it against her cheek. Then she hurried into the house with it, lest some of the boys should see her and notice the tears in her eyes. But inside the dark closet, where she climbed to lay the veil on a shelf, the lonely feeling was too strong for her to overcome. Crouching down in acorner, with her face hidden in the soft violet-scented veil, she cried quietly for a long time.
Then something came to her mind that had happened when she was only five years old, before she had gone to Locust to live. It was that first lonesome evening when she had been left to spend the night at her grandfather's, and she grew so homesick as twilight fell that she decided to run away. And while she stood with her hand on the latch of the great gate, peering through the bars at the darkening world outside, Fritz (the wisest little terrier that ever peeped through tangled bangs) found something in the dead leaves at her feet. It was a little gray glove that her mother had dropped, when she stooped to kiss her good-bye. Lloyd remembered how she had squeezed it, and cried over it, and fondled it as if it held the touch of her mother's hand, and then, baby though she was, she had tucked it into her tiny apron pocket as a talisman to help her be brave. Then she walked back to the house without another tear.
"That visit had a beautiful ending," thought Lloyd, tenderly folding the veil. "Then I had only Fritz for company, but now I have Betty. I'll just stop wishin' I could run away from the Cuckoo's Nest, and I'll have all the good times that I can get out of this visit."
She felt better now. The tears seemed to have washed away the ache in her throat. Bradley was calling her, and only stopping at the wash-stand a moment to bathe her red eyes, she went out to see what he wanted.
His freckled face was all alight with a beaming smile, as if he were the bearer of good news. His hands were behind his back, and as he came toward her he called out, in the pleasantest of voices, "Which will you take, Lloyd, right or left?"
Forgetting that Betty had cautioned her about his love of teasing, and remembering the apples he had brought her the day before, she answered, with a friendly smile, "I choose what's in the right hand."
"Then shut your eyes, and hold fast all I give you."
Squinting her eyelids tightly together, Lloyd held out her unsuspecting little hand, only to receive a squirming bunch of clammy, wriggling fishing worms. She gave a loud shriek, and wrung the hand that the worms had touched, as if it had been stung.
"Oo-ooh! Bradley Appleton! You horrid boy!" she cried. "How could you be so mean? There's nothing Ihatelike worms. I could touch a mouse or even a snake soonah than those bare crawly things! Oh, I'll nevah, nevah be able to get the feelof them off my hands, even if I should scrub them a week. I don't mind things with feet, but the feel of the squirmin' is awful!"
Bradley laughed so loudly over the success of his joke, that Betty came out smiling to see what was the matter, and was surprised to see Lloyd marching indignantly into the house, her head held high and her face very red.
"Well, I didn't do anything but give her a handful of angleworms," said Bradley, in reply to Betty's demand for an explanation. "Molly heard her say that she despised worms, and that nothing could make her touch one or put it on a hook. I was just showing her for her own good that there is nothing to be afraid of in a harmless little fishing-worm, and she had to go off and get mad. Girls are such touchy things. They make me tired."
Long experience had taught Betty that the best thing to do, when Bradley was in a teasing mood, was to keep out of his way, so she turned without a word and went in search of Lloyd. As she did so, the rain that they had been expecting all morning came dashing against the window-panes in torrents. Suddenly it grew so dark one could scarcely see to read without lighting a lamp.
"Come up to my room, Lloyd," called Betty, stoppingat the parlour door, with Davy tagging behind her. "It's lighter up there, and I love to be close up under the roof when the rain patters on it."
"Wait till I finish washing my hands," answered Lloyd, looking up with a disgusted face. "Ugh! I can't wash away that horrid squirmin' feelin', even with a nail-brush."
As Davy climbed the stairs after them he caught Lloyd by the dress. "Say!" he exclaimed in a half whisper, "it was Molly that told Bradley to put those worms on you. She dared him to, and they're laughing about it now, down in the kitchen."
It was on the tip of Lloyd's tongue to say, "They're both of them mean, hateful things, and I'll get even with them if it takes all the rest of my visit to do it." But before the words could slip out she remembered the definition, "Putting up with anything that happens to you without making a fuss about it."
"There couldn't anything nastier happen than fishin'-worms," she said to herself, "so this must be one of the times I need patience the very most."
Although the lesson was remembered in time to keep her from getting into a rage, it did not put her into a good humour. It was a very unhappy little face that looked out of the gable window, against which the autumn rain was dashing. Her headached from all its bumps and bruises, and her eyes wore as forlorn an expression as if she were some unhappy Crusoe, cast away on a desert island with no hope of rescue.
Davy perched himself on the trunk and awaited developments. Betty looked around the room in search of something to brighten the dull day; but the bare walls offered no suggestion of entertainment. Lloyd's fingers drumming restlessly on the window-pane, and the patter of the rain on the roof, were the only sounds in the room.
"I wondah if it's rainin' where Joyce and Eugenia are," said the Little Colonel, after awhile, breaking the long silence.
"Oh, let's write to them," cried Betty, eagerly. "One can write East and one can write West, and we'll tell them all that has happened in the Cuckoo's Nest since we came back to it."
Davy slid off the trunk in silent disapproval when the writing material was brought out, and the girls began their letters. The scratching of the pens across the paper and the dismal dripping of the rain was too monotonous for him, and he felt forced to go below in search of livelier companionship.
MOLLY'S STORY.
Theyhad been writing a long time, when the Little Colonel looked up with a mischievous smile. "Joyce will think that this is a wondahful place," she said. "I've told her all about my bein' chased by a Barley-bright witch, and how ugly she was, and what Davy said about her goin' through keyholes. It sounds so real when I read it ovah that I could half-way make myself believe that she is one. I'm goin' to slip across into her room now, and see if I can't find the broomstick that she rides around on at night. If there'd just be a black cat sittin' on her pillow, I could almost believe what Davy said about her hoodoo word. Wouldn't she be mad if she knew what was in this letter? I told Joyce how mean she'd acted about the fishin'-worms too, and how she's scowled at us evah since we came."
Betty looked up with a preoccupied smile, for she had long ago finished her letter to Eugenia and was busy with some verses that she was trying to writeabout the rain. The rhymes were falling into place almost as easily and musically as the rain-drops tinkling down the eaves, and her face was flushed with the pleasure of it. She was so wrapped up in her own thoughts that she did not understand what Lloyd was saying, and smiled a reply without the faintest idea of what it was that she proposed to do.
Lloyd laid down her pen, and, tiptoeing across the narrow passage that divided Betty's room from Molly's, opened the door and looked in. She had thought that the parlour bedroom down-stairs was queer, and that Betty's room was pitifully bare and common, but such cheerlessness as this she had certainly never seen before, and scarcely imagined.
It was an attic-like room over the kitchen, with such a low sloping ceiling that she could touch it with her hand, except when she stood in the middle of the room. There was a rough, unpainted floor, a cot, a dry-goods box covered with newspaper, on which stood a tin basin and a broken-nosed water-pitcher. Some nails, driven along the wall, held a row of clothes, and a chair with both rockers broken off was propped against the wall. Lloyd looked around her with a shiver. The only bright spot in the room was a bunch of golden-rod in a bottle,and the only picture, a page torn from an illustrated newspaper, and pinned to the wall.
Wondering what kind of a picture such a creature as the Barley-bright witch would choose to decorate her room, Lloyd walked across to examine it. It was the front page from an oldHarper's Weekly. The date caught her eye first: December 25, 1897. And then she found herself looking into a room still more pitiful than the one in which she stood, for the pictured room was part of an old New York tenement, and sobbing in the corner was a ragged, half-starved little waif, heartbroken because Santa Claus had passed her by, and she had found an empty stocking on Christmas morning.
Lloyd could not see the face hidden in the tattered apron, which the disappointed little hands held up. She could not hear the sobs that she knew were shaking the thin little shoulders, but she felt the misery of the scene as forcibly as if the real child stood before her. As she stood and looked, she knew that if all the troubles and disappointments of her whole life could be put together, they would be as only a drop compared to the grief of the poor little creature in the picture.
"Oh, Betty!" she called. "Come heah quick! I want to show you something."
The distress in Lloyd's voice made Betty hurry across the passage with her pen in her hand, wondering what could be the matter.
"Look!" exclaimed Lloyd, pointing to the picture. "How can Molly keep such a thing in her room? Do you s'pose she was evah like that? It's enough to make her cry every time she looks at it."
"Maybe she used to be like that," said Betty, examining the picture carefully, "and maybe she keeps it here to remind her how much better off she is now than she used to be."
"I can't see that her room is much nicer," said Lloyd, looking around with an expression of disgust.
"It always has been used as a sort of storeroom," explained Betty. "This is the first time I've been in here since I came back, and I didn't know how it had been fixed for Molly. Cousin Hetty hasn't any time or money to spend making it look nice. Besides, she is only in here for a little while. She is to have my room when I go away. If I'm abroad all winter, and with Joyce next summer, and at Locust going to school the year after, as godmother has planned, I suppose I'll never be back here again to really live. I'm going to make a new pincushion and a cover for my bureau, and put a white curtain at the window before I leave. Maybe it will look as fine toMolly as my white and gold room did to me at the House Beautiful. It isn't any wonder she feels jealous of us, when she hasn't a single nice thing in the whole world."
"Maybe I oughtn't to have written such spiteful things about her to Joyce," said Lloyd, whose heart began to soften and whose conscience pricked as she turned again to the picture.
But even while they were planning the changes they would make in the gable room for Molly, there was a stealthy step on the stairs, and Molly herself stood in the door, glaring at them like an angry tigress.
"Howdareyou!" she cried, stamping her foot in a furious rage. "How dare you come in here spying on me and making fun of my things and looking at my picture! You sha'n't look at my little Dot when she is so miserable. You sha'n't put eyes on her again!"
With a white angry face she dashed past them, tore the picture from the wall, and with it held tightly against her threw herself face downward on the cot.
"We were not spying on you," began Lloyd, indignantly. "We were not making fun of your things!"
"I know better. Get out of this room, both of you! This minute!" cried Molly, lifting her whiteface in which her angry eyes burned like flames. Then she buried her head in her pillow, sobbing bitterly: "If y-you were an or-orphan—and hadn't but one thing in the world, you wouldn't want p-people to come sp-spying onyou, that way."
Puzzled and almost frightened at such an outburst, the girls retreated to the doorway, and then as she continued to storm at them they went back to Betty's room. They could hear her sobbing even with the door shut. Presently Betty said: "I'm going in there again, and see if I can find out what's the matter. I am an orphan, too, and maybe I can coax her to tell me, when she knows how sorry I am for her."
People wondered sometimes at Betty's way of walking into their hearts; but sympathy is an open sesame to nearly all gates, and sympathy was Betty's unfailing key. It was always ready in her loving little hand.
Presently, when Molly's wild burst of angry sobbing had subsided somewhat, Betty ventured back to her. Lloyd heard a low murmuring of voices, first Betty's and then Molly's, as one little orphan poured out her story to the other. It was nearly an hour before Betty came back to her room. Lloyd had written another letter while she waited, and now satleaning against the window-sill, listening to the monotonous drip-drop-drip-drop from a leaky spout above the window.
"Well, what was it?" she asked, eagerly, as Betty opened the door.
"Oh, you never heard anything so pitiful," exclaimed Betty, sitting down on her bed and drawing her feet up under her comfortably before she began. "It is just like a story in a book.
"Molly says that when she was little her father was a railroad conductor, and she and her mother and grandmother and baby sister lived in a little house at the edge of town. It was near enough the railroad track for them to wave to her father, from the front door, whenever his train passed. He could come home only once a week. She and Dot thought he was the best father anybody ever had, for he never came home without something in his pockets for them, and he rode them around on his shoulders and played with them all the time he was in the house. He was always bringing things to their mother, too, a pretty cup and saucer or a pot of flowers, or something to wear; and as for the old grandmother, she spent her time telling the neighbours how good her son was to her.
"But Molly says one summer they moved awayfrom the house by the railroad track and took a smaller one in town, where there wasn't any garden and trees, and where there wasn't even any grass, except a narrow strip in the front yard. Her father had lost his place as a conductor, and was out of work for a long time. By and by they sold their piano and the carpets and the nicest chairs. Then they moved again. This time it was to a cottage without even a strip of grass. The front door opened out on the pavement and there was no place for them to play except on the streets. Their father never brought anything home to them any more, and never played with them. They couldn't understand what made him so cross, or what made their mother cry so much, until one day she heard some of their neighbours talking.
"She and Dot were waiting in the corner grocery for a loaf of bread, and she heard one woman say to another, in a low tone, 'Those are Jim Conner's children, poor little kids. My man says he used to be one of the best conductors on the road, but he lost his job when he took to getting drunk every Saturday night. He's going down-hill now, fast as a man can go. Heaven only knows what'll become of his family if he doesn't put on the brakes soon.'
"Then Molly knew what was the matter, and shedidn't make her mother cry by asking any more questions when they moved again the next week. That time they had only two rooms up-stairs over a barber shop, and Molly's mother died that summer. Then her father drank harder than ever, and never brought any money home, and by fall they had sold nearly everything that was left, and moved into one room in an old tenement-house, up two flights of stairs.
"Their grandmother had to go away every morning to look for work. She was too old to wash, or she might have had plenty to do. Sometimes she got odd jobs of cleaning, and sometimes she made buttonholes for a pants factory. It took nearly all the money she could make to pay the rent of that room, and often and often, Molly said, there were days when they had nothing but scraps of stale bread to eat. Sometimes there wasn't even that, and she and Dot would be so cold and hungry that they would huddle together in a corner and cry. She said it made her feel so awful to hear poor little Dot sobbing for something to eat, that she would have gone out on the streets and begged, but their grandmother always locked them up when she went away."
"What for?" interrupted Lloyd, who was listening with breathless attention.
"She was afraid that their father would come homedrunk and find them alone. He didn't live with them any more, but several times, before she began locking them up, he staggered in, and frightened them dreadfully. Their ragged clothes and their half-starved looks seemed to make him furious. It hurt his conscience, I suppose, and that made him want to hurt somebody. Molly says he beat them sometimes till the neighbours interfered. More than once he shut them up in a dark closet, trying to make them tell where their grandmother kept her money. They couldn't tell him, for she didn't have any money, but he kept them shut up in the dark, hours at a time.
"One night he came in crosser than they had ever seen him, and threw things around dreadfully. He struck his old mother in the face, beat Molly, and threw a stick of wood at little Dot. It just missed putting out her right eye, and made such a deep cut over it that they had to send for a doctor to sew it up. He said she would carry the scar all her life, and he could not see how the blow had missed killing her.
"It nearly broke the old grandmother's heart. She sat up all night, and Molly says she remembers that time like a dreadful dream. Half the time the old woman was rocking Dot in her arms, crying over her, and half the time she was walking the floor.
"Molly says that now, when she shuts her eyes at night, she can hear her saying, over and over, 'Oh, my Jimmy! My Jimmy! To think that my only child should come to this! Oh, my Jimmy! The baby boy that was my sunshine, how can it be thatyou'vebecome the sorrow of my life!' Then she'd walk up and down the room as if she were crazy, calling out, 'But it's the drink that did it! It's the drink, and a curse be on everything that helps to bring it into the world.'
"Molly says that she looked so terrible, with her white hair streaming over her shoulders, and her eyes staring, that she hid her face in the bedclothes. But she couldn't shut out the words. She shouted them so loud that the family in the next room couldn't sleep, and knocked on the wall for her to stop. But she only went on walking and wringing her hands and calling, 'A curse on all who buy and all who brew! A curse on every distiller! On every saloon-keeper! On every man who has so much as a finger in this business of death! May all the shame and the sin and the sorrow they have sown in other homes be reaped a hundredfold in their own!'
"I suppose it made such a strong impression on Molly, hearing her grandmother take on so terribly,that she remembered every word, and will as long as she lives. She said the rain poured that night till it leaked down on the bed, and she and Dot had to snuggle up together at the foot, to keep dry. Her grandmother walked the floor till daylight. The neighbours complained of her, and said that her troubles had unsettled her mind, and that she would have to be sent some place to be taken care of. All she could talk about was the drink that had ruined her Jimmy, and the awful things she prayed would happen to anybody who had anything to do with making or selling whiskey.
"She couldn't work any longer, and they were almost starving. One day she was taken to the almshouse, and the family in the next room took care of Molly and Dot until arrangements could be made to send them to an orphan asylum. It was hard to get them into one, you know, because their father was living.
"They stayed several weeks with those people, and Molly helped take care of the baby, for she was a big girl, eleven years old, then. Dot was seven, but so little and starved that she looked scarcely half that old. She couldn't do much to help, but they sent her on errands sometimes.
"One day she went to the meat-shop around thecorner, andshe never came back. Molly hunted in all the alleys and courtyards for her, until some one brought her a message from her father, that he had taken Dot away to another town. He didn't care what became of Molly, he said. She had been saucy to him, but no orphan asylum should have his baby. He'd hide her where she wouldn't be found in a hurry.
"Molly says she would have liked it at the asylum if Dot could have been with her, but because she couldn't it made her hate everything and everybody in the world. There was a big distillery in sight of her window. She could see the roof the first thing in the morning, when she opened her eyes, and the last thing at night. Many a time before she got out of bed she'd think of her grandmother's words and repeat them just like it was her prayers. She'd think 'It's drink that put me here, and it's what separated me from Dot,' and then she'd say, 'A curse on those who sell, and those who make it, and on every hand that helps to bring it into the world! Amen.'"
"How dreadful!" exclaimed the Little Colonel, with a shudder. "She is as bad as a heathen."
"But you can't wonder at it," said Betty. "We would have felt the same way in her place. Supposeit was your Papa Jack that had been made a drunkard, and that he'd begin to be mean to you, and make so much trouble that godmother would die, and you'd have to leave the House Beautiful and be sent to an asylum, and all on account of the saloons. Wouldn'tyouhate them and everything that helped keep them going?"
Lloyd only shivered at the thought, without answering. It was not possible for her to suppose such a horrible thing about her beloved father, but she felt the justice of Betty's view.
"While she was at the asylum," continued Betty, "some one sent a pile of old magazines, and among them she found the picture that we saw. She says that it looks exactly like Dot, and that is the way she used to stand and cry sometimes when she was cold and hungry, and there wasn't anything in the house to eat. It makes her perfectly miserable whenever she looks at it, but it is so much like Dot that she can't bear to give it up. Now you see why she didn't like us. It didn't seem fair to her that we should have so much to make us happy, when she has so little. She has had a hard enough time to spoil anybody's disposition, I think."
Lloyd was in tears by this time, and reaching across the table for the letter she had written aboutthe Barley-bright witch, she began tearing it into pieces.
"Oh, if I'd only known," she said, "I never would have written those things about her. I'll write another one this afternoon, and tell Joyce all about her. Is she still crying in there, Betty?"
"No, she stopped before I left. I told her we would all try to find her little sister, and that I was sure godmother could do it, even if everybody else failed. But she didn't seem to think that there was much hope."
"Did you tell her about Fairchance?" asked Lloyd, "or Joyce's finding Jules's great-aunt Desiré, that time she went to the Little Sisters of the Poor?"
"No," said Betty.
"Then let me tell her," cried the Little Colonel, starting up eagerly.
She ran on into Molly's room, while thoughtful Betty slipped down-stairs to offer her services in Molly's place, that she might listen undisturbed to Lloyd's tale of comfort,—all about Jonesy and his brother, and the bear, who had found a fair chance to begin life again, in the home that the two little knights built for them, in their efforts to "right thewrong and follow the king." All about old great-aunt Desiré, who had been found in a pauper's home and brought back to her own again, through the Gate of the Giant Scissors, on Christmas Day in the morning.
"It is too good to be true," sighed Molly, when Lloyd had finished. "It might happen to some people, but it's too good to happen to me. It sounds like something out of a story-book."
"Most of the things in story-books had to happen first before they were written about," answered the Little Colonel. "You've got so many friends now that surely some of them will be able to do something to find her."
Presently Molly looked up, saying, in a hesitating way, "Several people have been good to me before, but I never thought about them doing it because they were myfriends. I thought they treated me kindly just because they pitied me, and that made me cross."
Lloyd was turning the little ring that Eugenia had given her around on her finger, and something in the touch of the little lover's knot of gold recalled all that she had resolved about the "Road of the Loving Heart." It was the ring that made her say, gently, "You mustn't think that about Betty and me. We'llbe your really truly friends just as we are Joyce's and Eugenia's."
Then to Molly's great surprise the Little Colonel's pretty face leaned over hers an instant, and she felt a quick kiss on her forehead. She lay there a moment longer without speaking, and then sat up, a bright smile flashing across her tear-swollen face. "Somehow the whole world seems different," she cried. "It seems so queer to think I've really gotfriendslike other people."
There was a warm glow in the Little Colonel's heart when she went back to Betty's room. The consciousness that she had carried comfort and sunshine into another's life brightened the rainy day until it no longer seemed dark and dreary. That comfortable consciousness was still with her in the afternoon, when she sat down to write another letter to Joyce,—a letter, not filled this time with her own mishaps and misfortunes, but so full of sympathy for Molly's troubles that no one who read it could fail to be touched and interested.