[41]CHAPTER IVA WINTER SUNDAYOnSunday evenings it had always been the custom for the little girls to gather round their mother, and talk of their funny little plans, tell of their past week’s naughtinesses, make high resolutions with earnest eyes for future weeks, and generally disburden themselves. Of late the time had been very precious to both mother and children, for all week-days had been so brimmed with work, the mother had scarcely any time to pause to watch the wings of their young souls develop, and prune them, and pluck out the dark feathers that creep in so readily.The elder boys and girls had often scoffed and laughed at the quiet hour that was always taken on that one evening of the week, but nothing had made the mother relinquish it.This Sunday evening when the great news was first told, the house seemed strangely quiet and lonely. Outside a noiseless fall of snow was making the garden and road all gleaming white, and an[42]icy-handed wind tapped at the window-pane and rattled the doors as if eager to get inside to the warmth and comfort.Harriet had just taken away the tea-tray, and poked up the fire of the cosy little breakfast-room, which, apart from the bedrooms, was the only room they used now.The sense of peacefulness was very exquisite to Phyl and Dolly; they lay on the hearthrug side by side and gazed into the fire. The very tea they had just finished had in some strange way appealed to them—the round table with its spotless cloth, the delicate pale-green china cups and plates, the thin bread-and-butter, the amber jelly, the limpid honey, the toasted Sally-lunn. It was even a dreamy pleasure to watch the tea being made in the silver tea-pot with a wide spout like a dragon’s mouth, and to remember that mother’s mother’s mother’s mother had once poured out from it.Their thoughts shrank away from the five years that had just finished, the noisy, rough, nursery meals, the teasing and boisterous raillery, the unmerciful ridicule that had been heaped on their ways of talk and play. This tender firelit evening seemed like a bit of the dreamy past come back.“I’ve been twite good, haven’t done anysin’ or anysin’ for twenty hundred days,” announced Weenie, sitting up straight on her mother’s knee and commencing operations.[43]“It’s my turn to say first,” said Phyl, and she also sat up and looked business-like; “let’s be quick to-night.” She never settled quite comfortably to the evening until she had acknowledged the week’s transgressions.“Well,” said Mrs. Conway, “I hope no one has a big list to-night, for I want to do most of the talking myself. Phyl, darling, I hope you have been trying harder this week.”Phyllida looked thoughtful. “Really on Monday and Tuesday I did, mother,” she said; “Weenie was dreadfully tiresome, and I hardly said anything to her. But on Wednesday Iwasbad. I made you cry, Weenie, didn’t I, when you broke the doll’s saucepan? And I know she really didn’t do it on purpose.”“The handle of the old thing was broken before, it just comed off in my hand,” said Weenie, with a look of injured innocence.“You know we have forbidden you to touch our things,” Phyl said, severity taking the place of penitence in her voice.“It would have lasted for long enough,” Dorothy said; “it would have been quite good enough to make the soup in,—the handle was only the tiniest bit cwacked.” She looked perilously near being angry again at the recollection.“Come, come,” the mother said, “it will be no use for you to tell me these things, if you feel naughty[44]again immediately. Anything else, Phyl?” Phyl’s eyes fell. “On Thursday I teased Harriet again,” she said, and recounted the details of the sinfulness, “and I was sorry all the time,” she added in a vague sort of wonder at herself. “I knew I was horrid, but every minute things kept popping into my head that I knew would vex her, and I couldn’t help doing them.I even got on her backwhile she was washing the floor, and youknowhow that makes her rage.”[Illustration]“I got on her back while she was washing the floor.”The mother was glad her hand was hiding her mouth; she had witnessed this reprehensible scene two or three times, and had been girlish enough to see the humorous side of it. But she spoke gravely of the kindness and consideration one owes to dependants,[45]and of Harriet’s sterling goodness, till Phyl wanted to rush off and kiss the ill-used girl for compensation.“I hope that is all, Phyl,” Mrs. Conway said.“No,” Phyl said in a shamed whisper; “in church this morning I thought about the carpet for the dolls-house, and I couldn’t help pretending Miss Keating and the little girl in her pew were Ellen Montgomery and Alice Humphreys.”Then Dolly rose up from her lowly position and recited similar sins with similar sadness in her eyes.She too had been cross with Weenie on Wednesday, because of the doll’s saucepan, and on Thursday because she would keep making a noise just when Jennie and Suey were going to sleep.“Pooh,” said Weenie, “they’s nosing but old dolls. If forty thousand earfquakes camed, they wouldn’t hear.”“Anything else, Dolly?” interposed Mrs. Conway, swift to avert the heated discussion that would otherwise have followed this statement. “I suppose you too made Harriet’s life a burden, and also sat on her back while she washed the floor.”Strange to relate, Dolly had not kept close to Phyl in this.“No, I didn’t, mama,” she said in surprise; “don’t you remember I was helping you put the silver in tissue-paper?” Then her head dropped a little.[46]“But in the afternoon I called her a demon,” she said.Mrs. Conway was much startled, though she knew of the strange little bursts of anger that sometimes possessed her second small daughter.“Oh, Dolly,” she said in a grieving voice, “that a word like that should come from the lips of one of my little girls!”Dorothy in her turn was horrified.“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t weally say it with my tongue, mama—Ha’yat didn’t hear at all; I said it down in my thwoat.”“That is nearly as bad,” said the mother, and called upon the young person to account for such a word rising even to her throat.Dorothy spoke of the circumstances that caused the heinous offence in low tones. It seemed Jennie and Suey were dangerously ill in bed with consumption and “appleplexy,” and of course they ought to have been kept very warm, and the counterpane being thin, they had covered the bed over with one of their sealskin jackets. And just as the “crisis” came, Harriet had dragged the jacket away to hang it up, and all the clothes were pulled off Jennie, too.“She hadn’t a thing left on but her night-gown, and her flannel jacket,” said the child.“She had a frightful relapse,” said Phyl darkly, “and it turned to heart disease.”The children had lately picked up the words[47]“crisis,” “relapse,” and “convalescent,” and their application of them was a trifle amusing. Jennie was subject to as many as seven “relapses” in one day, while the “crisis” of hers and Suey’s various complaints occurred as often as three times in a morning. If you met a doll wrapped up to its eyes, being slowly wheeled up and down the drive, you would know the “convalescent” stage was reached.“Now, my Weenie one,” said the mother, after a wise little talk on the wrongfulness of saying “demon” in one’s throat.Weenie untucked herself deliberately.“I took the biggest piece of cake to-night,” she said, “but if I hadn’t took it, Phyl would, or Dolly; then they would have been greedy ’stead.”“That’s one,” said Mrs. Conway.“There was lots and crowds of tarts in the pantry on Sursday, ’bout thirty hundred,—I only took one.”“That’s two,” said the mother, adding one more finger to the hand she was holding up to number the crimes.Weenie looked carefully away from the elder sisters while she confessed the next item.“On Wesenday I gave Jennie and Suey a frashing,” she said. “Well, Phyl and Dolly should have played with me—serves them right.”Phyl and Dolly sprang to their feet, a wrathful scarlet rushing into their faces; this was the first intimation they had had that the bodies of their[48]darlings had been so maltreated, and they looked as if they could have fallen on the offender and “frashed” her in retaliation.But Weenie blinked at them mildly from her secure position.“An uzzer time,” she said, “p’raps you will let me play with you.”Again the mother shielded her face as if from the fire.“That was very, very naughty,” she said, when she could trust her voice; she knew the hearts of the two little mothers were bleeding for the unmerited sufferings of their darlings. “What should you think, Weenie, if auntie and I quarrelled, and then when I was out of the way, auntie came and thrashed you?”But Weenie looked more supercilious than repentant.“They’s only got sawdust in their ole bodies, they’s nosing but dolls,” she said; “it didn’t hurt them.”“But it hurt poor Phyl and Dolly,” the mother said.“Um,” said Weenie’s lips. Her eyes added that they had brought it entirely upon themselves.Three accusing fingers were standing up against her.“Anything else?” said Mrs. Conway.“Fordet what else,” said her babyship, and tucked herself up again to dismiss the subject. Then she untucked herself half-an-inch. “Le’s have a lump of iggy to put in mine pocket,” she said. Phyl laughed[49]at her. In her haste to proffer this request, the small one had fallen back into the baby word she had called “sugar” during the first year or two of her initiation into speech and language.“Yes, it sud have some iggy, it sud, poor little baby,” Phyl said teasingly.Weenie blushed painfully.“Well, I can say my R’s and Dolly can’t,” she said excusingly. “Dolly says Yobbin Yedbwest.”It was Dolly’s turn to grow pink. She was very sensitive about this defect in her speech.“You are both dreadful little babies,” said Phyl, with a superior smile.“I knew a still more dreadful baby,” said the mother. “Weenie, there never was such a silly little girl as Phyl when she was even bigger than you. Why, what do you think she called my silver thimble even when she was five?”Phyl blushed in her turn now, but Weenie was eager.“Oh, tell’s,” she said.“Simby-fimby,” said the mother; “that’s quite as bad as ‘iggy,’ isn’t it?”Weenie laughed chucklingly.“Tell’s some more,” she said.“Sometimes,” said the mother, “when I was working the machine she used to play with the tools in the drawer. And she always called the screw-driver ‘mama’s coy-guiby.’”[50]Dolly laughed derisively this time to vindicate the R’s her tongue couldnotbring straight.“Coy-guiby, coy-guiby,” she echoed mockingly.The mother smiled.“Dolly could not say pinafore,” she continued, “until she was quite a great girl. ‘Pindispy’ she used to call it—‘banty my pindispy, mama,’ meant ‘button my pinafore,’ but no one would have guessed it, would they, Phyl?”But Phyl gave Dolly a sudden loving kiss just where the pink had sprung again on her cheek, and the intricacies of language were no longer dwelt upon.“Dear ones,” the mother said, growing suddenly grave, “in two more days I may have a very great piece of news to tell you. But I have something to tell you even now. In just one month we shall go away for ever from this house. We are very, very poor now, so poor I am almost afraid to think about it. But that you knew, didn’t you?”They had just known without comprehending. True, they had said good-bye to the servants, and had known they were being sent away because the mother could no longer afford to pay them. And they knew Mr. Conway’s children were all gone to make ways for themselves in the world.They tried hard to realize the fact now and console their mother at the same time, so grave and sad was her face.[51]“We don’t care, darling,” Phyl said, “we’ll wear our old frocks; we shan’t want new ones for long enough, shall we, Dolly? And those last boots we had will last us a long time yet.”Mrs.Conway smiled sadly.“There are other things besides frocks and boots,” she said.Dolly nodded wisely.“Meat and puddings and things, of course,” she said. “Couldn’t we go without meat, mama? We all like puddings better, and Ha’yat says meat is a fwightful pwice.”The mother smiled and sighed again.“There are even other things besides meat, my daughter,” she said.“You can have my silver mug to make shillings wif,” said Weenie, grasping as well as she could at the idea that there was no money for any of them.“Go away in a month?” echoed Phyl; “wherever shall we go?—Oh, we can’t go and leave this house, mother, think how long we’ve been living here.”But Dolly gave a sudden joyful skip.“Shall we have a dear little weeney-teeney cottage like Mrs. Meredith’s, all covered with ivy and things?” she said.At that Phyl lost her apprehension and skipped too. The dwelling of Mrs. Meredith, a naval officer’s widow, was like a tiny fairy house to them.“Howlovely!” she said, “and no servants;[52]Mrs. Meredith has only a little girl. Oh,letme have whitening the steps for my work, mummie darling?”“I’ll wash the floors,” Dolly cried joyously.Weenie clambered higher on her mother’s knee.“She isn’t to do them all, is she, mama?—le’s wash some, won’t you?”Mrs. Conway kissed her and set her down.“We shall be far poorer than Mrs. Meredith,” she said, “but don’t worry, darlings—mother will see you don’t quite starve.”She went to bed that Sunday night comforted in some strange way by the uncrushable spirits of childhood.
OnSunday evenings it had always been the custom for the little girls to gather round their mother, and talk of their funny little plans, tell of their past week’s naughtinesses, make high resolutions with earnest eyes for future weeks, and generally disburden themselves. Of late the time had been very precious to both mother and children, for all week-days had been so brimmed with work, the mother had scarcely any time to pause to watch the wings of their young souls develop, and prune them, and pluck out the dark feathers that creep in so readily.
The elder boys and girls had often scoffed and laughed at the quiet hour that was always taken on that one evening of the week, but nothing had made the mother relinquish it.
This Sunday evening when the great news was first told, the house seemed strangely quiet and lonely. Outside a noiseless fall of snow was making the garden and road all gleaming white, and an[42]icy-handed wind tapped at the window-pane and rattled the doors as if eager to get inside to the warmth and comfort.
Harriet had just taken away the tea-tray, and poked up the fire of the cosy little breakfast-room, which, apart from the bedrooms, was the only room they used now.
The sense of peacefulness was very exquisite to Phyl and Dolly; they lay on the hearthrug side by side and gazed into the fire. The very tea they had just finished had in some strange way appealed to them—the round table with its spotless cloth, the delicate pale-green china cups and plates, the thin bread-and-butter, the amber jelly, the limpid honey, the toasted Sally-lunn. It was even a dreamy pleasure to watch the tea being made in the silver tea-pot with a wide spout like a dragon’s mouth, and to remember that mother’s mother’s mother’s mother had once poured out from it.
Their thoughts shrank away from the five years that had just finished, the noisy, rough, nursery meals, the teasing and boisterous raillery, the unmerciful ridicule that had been heaped on their ways of talk and play. This tender firelit evening seemed like a bit of the dreamy past come back.
“I’ve been twite good, haven’t done anysin’ or anysin’ for twenty hundred days,” announced Weenie, sitting up straight on her mother’s knee and commencing operations.
[43]“It’s my turn to say first,” said Phyl, and she also sat up and looked business-like; “let’s be quick to-night.” She never settled quite comfortably to the evening until she had acknowledged the week’s transgressions.
“Well,” said Mrs. Conway, “I hope no one has a big list to-night, for I want to do most of the talking myself. Phyl, darling, I hope you have been trying harder this week.”
Phyllida looked thoughtful. “Really on Monday and Tuesday I did, mother,” she said; “Weenie was dreadfully tiresome, and I hardly said anything to her. But on Wednesday Iwasbad. I made you cry, Weenie, didn’t I, when you broke the doll’s saucepan? And I know she really didn’t do it on purpose.”
“The handle of the old thing was broken before, it just comed off in my hand,” said Weenie, with a look of injured innocence.
“You know we have forbidden you to touch our things,” Phyl said, severity taking the place of penitence in her voice.
“It would have lasted for long enough,” Dorothy said; “it would have been quite good enough to make the soup in,—the handle was only the tiniest bit cwacked.” She looked perilously near being angry again at the recollection.
“Come, come,” the mother said, “it will be no use for you to tell me these things, if you feel naughty[44]again immediately. Anything else, Phyl?” Phyl’s eyes fell. “On Thursday I teased Harriet again,” she said, and recounted the details of the sinfulness, “and I was sorry all the time,” she added in a vague sort of wonder at herself. “I knew I was horrid, but every minute things kept popping into my head that I knew would vex her, and I couldn’t help doing them.I even got on her backwhile she was washing the floor, and youknowhow that makes her rage.”
[Illustration]“I got on her back while she was washing the floor.”
“I got on her back while she was washing the floor.”
The mother was glad her hand was hiding her mouth; she had witnessed this reprehensible scene two or three times, and had been girlish enough to see the humorous side of it. But she spoke gravely of the kindness and consideration one owes to dependants,[45]and of Harriet’s sterling goodness, till Phyl wanted to rush off and kiss the ill-used girl for compensation.
“I hope that is all, Phyl,” Mrs. Conway said.
“No,” Phyl said in a shamed whisper; “in church this morning I thought about the carpet for the dolls-house, and I couldn’t help pretending Miss Keating and the little girl in her pew were Ellen Montgomery and Alice Humphreys.”
Then Dolly rose up from her lowly position and recited similar sins with similar sadness in her eyes.
She too had been cross with Weenie on Wednesday, because of the doll’s saucepan, and on Thursday because she would keep making a noise just when Jennie and Suey were going to sleep.
“Pooh,” said Weenie, “they’s nosing but old dolls. If forty thousand earfquakes camed, they wouldn’t hear.”
“Anything else, Dolly?” interposed Mrs. Conway, swift to avert the heated discussion that would otherwise have followed this statement. “I suppose you too made Harriet’s life a burden, and also sat on her back while she washed the floor.”
Strange to relate, Dolly had not kept close to Phyl in this.
“No, I didn’t, mama,” she said in surprise; “don’t you remember I was helping you put the silver in tissue-paper?” Then her head dropped a little.[46]“But in the afternoon I called her a demon,” she said.
Mrs. Conway was much startled, though she knew of the strange little bursts of anger that sometimes possessed her second small daughter.
“Oh, Dolly,” she said in a grieving voice, “that a word like that should come from the lips of one of my little girls!”
Dorothy in her turn was horrified.
“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t weally say it with my tongue, mama—Ha’yat didn’t hear at all; I said it down in my thwoat.”
“That is nearly as bad,” said the mother, and called upon the young person to account for such a word rising even to her throat.
Dorothy spoke of the circumstances that caused the heinous offence in low tones. It seemed Jennie and Suey were dangerously ill in bed with consumption and “appleplexy,” and of course they ought to have been kept very warm, and the counterpane being thin, they had covered the bed over with one of their sealskin jackets. And just as the “crisis” came, Harriet had dragged the jacket away to hang it up, and all the clothes were pulled off Jennie, too.
“She hadn’t a thing left on but her night-gown, and her flannel jacket,” said the child.
“She had a frightful relapse,” said Phyl darkly, “and it turned to heart disease.”
The children had lately picked up the words[47]“crisis,” “relapse,” and “convalescent,” and their application of them was a trifle amusing. Jennie was subject to as many as seven “relapses” in one day, while the “crisis” of hers and Suey’s various complaints occurred as often as three times in a morning. If you met a doll wrapped up to its eyes, being slowly wheeled up and down the drive, you would know the “convalescent” stage was reached.
“Now, my Weenie one,” said the mother, after a wise little talk on the wrongfulness of saying “demon” in one’s throat.
Weenie untucked herself deliberately.
“I took the biggest piece of cake to-night,” she said, “but if I hadn’t took it, Phyl would, or Dolly; then they would have been greedy ’stead.”
“That’s one,” said Mrs. Conway.
“There was lots and crowds of tarts in the pantry on Sursday, ’bout thirty hundred,—I only took one.”
“That’s two,” said the mother, adding one more finger to the hand she was holding up to number the crimes.
Weenie looked carefully away from the elder sisters while she confessed the next item.
“On Wesenday I gave Jennie and Suey a frashing,” she said. “Well, Phyl and Dolly should have played with me—serves them right.”
Phyl and Dolly sprang to their feet, a wrathful scarlet rushing into their faces; this was the first intimation they had had that the bodies of their[48]darlings had been so maltreated, and they looked as if they could have fallen on the offender and “frashed” her in retaliation.
But Weenie blinked at them mildly from her secure position.
“An uzzer time,” she said, “p’raps you will let me play with you.”
Again the mother shielded her face as if from the fire.
“That was very, very naughty,” she said, when she could trust her voice; she knew the hearts of the two little mothers were bleeding for the unmerited sufferings of their darlings. “What should you think, Weenie, if auntie and I quarrelled, and then when I was out of the way, auntie came and thrashed you?”
But Weenie looked more supercilious than repentant.
“They’s only got sawdust in their ole bodies, they’s nosing but dolls,” she said; “it didn’t hurt them.”
“But it hurt poor Phyl and Dolly,” the mother said.
“Um,” said Weenie’s lips. Her eyes added that they had brought it entirely upon themselves.
Three accusing fingers were standing up against her.
“Anything else?” said Mrs. Conway.
“Fordet what else,” said her babyship, and tucked herself up again to dismiss the subject. Then she untucked herself half-an-inch. “Le’s have a lump of iggy to put in mine pocket,” she said. Phyl laughed[49]at her. In her haste to proffer this request, the small one had fallen back into the baby word she had called “sugar” during the first year or two of her initiation into speech and language.
“Yes, it sud have some iggy, it sud, poor little baby,” Phyl said teasingly.
Weenie blushed painfully.
“Well, I can say my R’s and Dolly can’t,” she said excusingly. “Dolly says Yobbin Yedbwest.”
It was Dolly’s turn to grow pink. She was very sensitive about this defect in her speech.
“You are both dreadful little babies,” said Phyl, with a superior smile.
“I knew a still more dreadful baby,” said the mother. “Weenie, there never was such a silly little girl as Phyl when she was even bigger than you. Why, what do you think she called my silver thimble even when she was five?”
Phyl blushed in her turn now, but Weenie was eager.
“Oh, tell’s,” she said.
“Simby-fimby,” said the mother; “that’s quite as bad as ‘iggy,’ isn’t it?”
Weenie laughed chucklingly.
“Tell’s some more,” she said.
“Sometimes,” said the mother, “when I was working the machine she used to play with the tools in the drawer. And she always called the screw-driver ‘mama’s coy-guiby.’”
[50]Dolly laughed derisively this time to vindicate the R’s her tongue couldnotbring straight.
“Coy-guiby, coy-guiby,” she echoed mockingly.
The mother smiled.
“Dolly could not say pinafore,” she continued, “until she was quite a great girl. ‘Pindispy’ she used to call it—‘banty my pindispy, mama,’ meant ‘button my pinafore,’ but no one would have guessed it, would they, Phyl?”
But Phyl gave Dolly a sudden loving kiss just where the pink had sprung again on her cheek, and the intricacies of language were no longer dwelt upon.
“Dear ones,” the mother said, growing suddenly grave, “in two more days I may have a very great piece of news to tell you. But I have something to tell you even now. In just one month we shall go away for ever from this house. We are very, very poor now, so poor I am almost afraid to think about it. But that you knew, didn’t you?”
They had just known without comprehending. True, they had said good-bye to the servants, and had known they were being sent away because the mother could no longer afford to pay them. And they knew Mr. Conway’s children were all gone to make ways for themselves in the world.
They tried hard to realize the fact now and console their mother at the same time, so grave and sad was her face.[51]“We don’t care, darling,” Phyl said, “we’ll wear our old frocks; we shan’t want new ones for long enough, shall we, Dolly? And those last boots we had will last us a long time yet.”
Mrs.Conway smiled sadly.
“There are other things besides frocks and boots,” she said.
Dolly nodded wisely.
“Meat and puddings and things, of course,” she said. “Couldn’t we go without meat, mama? We all like puddings better, and Ha’yat says meat is a fwightful pwice.”
The mother smiled and sighed again.
“There are even other things besides meat, my daughter,” she said.
“You can have my silver mug to make shillings wif,” said Weenie, grasping as well as she could at the idea that there was no money for any of them.
“Go away in a month?” echoed Phyl; “wherever shall we go?—Oh, we can’t go and leave this house, mother, think how long we’ve been living here.”
But Dolly gave a sudden joyful skip.
“Shall we have a dear little weeney-teeney cottage like Mrs. Meredith’s, all covered with ivy and things?” she said.
At that Phyl lost her apprehension and skipped too. The dwelling of Mrs. Meredith, a naval officer’s widow, was like a tiny fairy house to them.
“Howlovely!” she said, “and no servants;[52]Mrs. Meredith has only a little girl. Oh,letme have whitening the steps for my work, mummie darling?”
“I’ll wash the floors,” Dolly cried joyously.
Weenie clambered higher on her mother’s knee.
“She isn’t to do them all, is she, mama?—le’s wash some, won’t you?”
Mrs. Conway kissed her and set her down.
“We shall be far poorer than Mrs. Meredith,” she said, “but don’t worry, darlings—mother will see you don’t quite starve.”
She went to bed that Sunday night comforted in some strange way by the uncrushable spirits of childhood.