“I’m twelve years old.” She got up from her chair and walked across the room and stood looking up at Aunt Matilda. “I’m an orphan too, and so is Robin,” she said, “and we have to work. You give us a place to stay in; but—there are other things. We have no one, and we have to do things ourselves; and we are twelve, and twelve is a good age for people who have to do things for themselves. Is there anything in this house or in the dairy or on the farm that would be worth wages, that I could do? I don’t care how hard it is if I can do it.”
If Aunt Matilda had been a woman of sentiment she might have been moved by the odd, unchildish tenseness and sternness of the little figure, and the straight-gazing eyes, which looked up at her from under the thick black hair tumbling in short locks over the forehead. Twelve years old was very young to stand and stare the world in the face with such eyes. But she was not a woman of sentiment, and her life had been spent among people who knew their right to live could only be won by hard work, and who began the fight early. So she looked at the child without any emotion whatever.
“Do you suppose you could more than earn your bread if I put you in the dairy and let you help there?” she said.
“Yes,” answered Meg, unflinchingly, “I know I could. I’m strong for my age, and I’ve watched them doing things there. I can wash pans and bowls and cloths, and carry things about, and go anywhere I’m told. I know how clean things have to be kept.”
“AUNT MATILDA,” SHE SAID, SUDDENLY.“AUNT MATILDA,” SHE SAID, SUDDENLY.
“AUNT MATILDA,” SHE SAID, SUDDENLY.
“Well,” said Aunt Matilda, looking her over sharply, “they’ve been complaining about the work being too much for them, lately. You go in there this morning and see what you can do. You shall have a dollar a week if you’re worth it. You’re right about its being time that you should begin earning something.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Meg, and she turned round and walked away in the direction of the dairy, with two deep red spots on her cheeks and her heart thumping again—though this time it thumped quickly.
She reached the scene of action in the midst of a rush of work, and after their first rather exasperated surprise at so immature and inexperienced a creature being supposed to be able to help them, the women found plenty for her to do. She said so few words and looked so little afraid that she made a sort of impression on them.
“See,” she said to the head woman, “Aunt Matilda didn’t send me to do things that need teaching. Just tell me the little things, it does not matter what, and I’ll do them. I can.”
How she worked that morning—how she ran on errands—how she carried this and that—how she washed and scrubbed milk-pans—and how all her tasks were menial and apparently trivial, though entirely necessary, and how the activity and rapidity and unceasingness of them tried her unaccustomed young body, and finally made her limbs ache and her back feel as if it might break at some unexpected moment, Meg never forgot. But such was the desperation of her indomitable little spirit and the unconquerable will she had been born with, that when it was over she was no more in the mood for giving up than she had been when she walked in among the workers after her interview with Aunt Matilda.
When dinner-time came she walked up to Mrs. Macartney, the manager of the dairy work, and asked her a question.
“Have I helped you?” she said.
“Yes, you have,” said the woman, who was by no means an ill-natured creature for a hard-driven woman. “You’ve done first-rate.”
“Will you tell Aunt Matilda that?” said Meg.
“Yes,” was the answer.
Meg was standing with her hands clasped tightly behind her back, and she looked at Mrs. Macartney very straight and hard from under her black brows.
“Mrs. Macartney,” she said, “if I’m worth it, Aunt Matilda will give me a dollar a week; and it’s time I began to work for my living. Am I worth that much?”
“Yes, you are,” said Mrs. Macartney, “if you go on as you’ve begun.”
“I shall go on as I’ve begun,” said Meg. “Thank you, ma’am,” and she walked back to the house.
After dinner she waited to speak to Aunt Matilda again.
“I went to the dairy,” she said.
“I know you did,” Aunt Matilda answered. “Mrs. Macartney told me about it. You can go on. I’ll give you the dollar a week.”
She looked the child over again, as she had done in the morning, but with a shade of expression which might have meant a touch of added interest. Perhaps her mind paused just long enough to bring back to her the time when she had been a worker at twelve years old, and also had belonged to no one.
“She’ll make her living,” she said, as she watched Meg out of the room. “She’s more like me than she is like her father. Robert wasn’t worthless, but he had no push.”
Having made quite sure that she was not wanted in the dairy for the time being, Meg made her way to the barn. She was glad to find it empty, so that she could climb the ladder without waiting. When she reached the top and clambered over the straw the scent of it seemed delightful to her. It was like something welcoming her home. She threw herself down full length in the Straw Parlor. Robin had not been at dinner. He had gone out early and had not returned. As she lay, stretching her tired limbs, and staring up at the nest in the dark, tent-like roof above her, she hoped he would come. And he did. In about ten minutes she heard the signal from the barn floor, and answered it. Robin came up the ladder rather slowly. When he made his way over the straw to her corner, and threw himself down beside her, she saw that he was tired too. They talked a few minutes about ordinary things, and then Meg thought she would tell him about the dairy. But it appeared that he had something to tell himself, and he began first.
“I’ve been making a plan, Meg,” he said.
“Have you?” said Meg. “What is it?”
“I’ve been thinking about it for two or three days,” he went on, “but I thought I wouldn’t say anything about it until—till I tried how it would work.”
Meg raised herself on her elbow and looked at him curiously. It seemed so queer that he should have had a plan too.
“Have you—tried?” she said.
“Yes,” he answered, “I have been working for Jones this morning, and I did quite a lot. I worked hard. I wanted him to see what I could do. And then, Meg, I asked him if he would take me on—like the rest of the hands—and pay me what I was worth.”
“And what did he say?” breathlessly.
“He looked at me a minute—all over—and half laughed, and I thought he was going to say I wasn’t worth anything. It wouldn’t have been true, but I thought he might, because I’m only twelve years old. It’s pretty hard to be only twelve when you want to get work. But he didn’t, he said, ‘Well, I’m darned if I won’t give you a show;’ and I’m to have a dollar a week.”
“Robin,” Meg cried, with a little gasp of excitement, “so am I!”
“So are you!” cried Robin, and sat bolt upright. “You!”
“It’s—it’s because we are twins,” said Meg, her eyes shining like lamps. “I told you twins did things alike because they couldn’t help it. We have both thought of the same thing. I went to Aunt Matilda, asked her to let me work somewhere and pay me, and she let me go into the dairy and try, and Mrs. Macartney said I was a help, and I am to have a dollar a week, if I go on as I’ve begun.”
Robin’s hand gave hers a clutch, just as it had done before, that day when he had not known why.
“Meg, I believe,” he said, “I believe that we two will always go on as we begin. I believe we were born that way. We have to, we can’t help it. And two dollars a week, if they keep us, and we save it all—we could go almost anywhere—sometime.”
Meg’s eyes were fixed on him with a searching, but half frightened expression.
“Almost anywhere,” she said, quite in a whisper. “Anywhere not more than a hundred miles away.”
They did not tell each other of the strange and bold thought which had leaped up in their minds that day. Each felt an unwonted shyness about it, perhaps because it had been so bold; but it had been in each mind, and hidden though it was, it remained furtively in both.
They went on exactly as they had begun. Each morning Meg went to her drudgery in the dairy and Robin followed Jones whithersoever duty led. If the elder people had imagined they would get tired and give up they found out their mistake. That they were often tired was true, but that in either there arose once the thought of giving up, never! And they worked hard. The things they did to earn their weekly stipend would have touched the heart of a mother of cared-for children, but on Mrs. Jennings’s model farm people knew how much work a human being could do when necessity drove. They were all driven by necessity, and it was nothing new to know that muscles ached and feet swelled and burned. In fact, they knew no one who did not suffer, as a rule, from these small inconveniences. And these children, with their set little faces and mature intelligence, were somehow so unsuggestive of the weakness and limitations of childhood that they were often given work which was usually intrusted only to elder people. Mrs. Macartney found that Meg never slighted anything, never failed in a task, and never forgot one, so she gave her plenty to do. Scrubbing and scouring that others were glad to shirk fell to her share. She lifted and dragged things about that grown-up girls grumbled over. What she lacked in muscle and size she made up in indomitable will power that made her small face set itself and her small body become rigid as iron. Her work ended by not confining itself to the dairy, but extended to the house, the kitchen—anywhere there were tiresome things to be done.
With Robin it was the same story. Jones was not afraid to give him any order. He was of use in all quarters—in the huge fields, in the barn, in the stables, and as a messenger to be trusted to trudge any distance when transport was not available.
They both grew thin but sinewy looking, and their faces had a rather strained look. Their always large black eyes seemed to grow bigger, and their little square jaws looked more square every day; but on Saturday nights they each were paid their dollar, and climbed to the Straw Parlor and unburied the Treasure and added to it.
Those Saturday nights were wonderful things. To the end of life they would never forget them. Through all the tired hours of labor they were looked forward to. Then they lay in their nest of straw and talked things over—there it seemed that they could relax and rest their limbs as they could do it nowhere else. Mrs. Jennings was not given to sofas and easy-chairs, and it is not safe to change position often when one has a grown-up bedfellow. But in the straw they could roll at full length, curl up or stretch out just as they pleased, and there they could enlarge upon the one subject that filled their minds, and fascinated and enraptured them.
Who could wonder that it was so! The City Beautiful was growing day by day, and the development of its glories was the one thing they heard talked of. Robin had established the habit of collecting every scrap of newspaper referring to it. He cut them out of Aunt Matilda’s old papers, he begged them from every one, neighbors, store-keepers, work hands. When he was sent on errands he cast an all-embracing glance ’round every place his orders took him to. The postmaster of the nearest village discovered his weakness and saved paragraphs and whole papers for him. Before very long there was buried near the Treasure a treasure even more valuable of newspaper cuttings, and on the wonderful Saturday nights they gave themselves up to revelling in them.
How they watched it and followed it and lived with it—this great human scheme which somehow seemed to their young minds more like the scheme of giants and genii! How they seized upon every new story of its wonders and felt that there could be no limit to them! They knew every purpose and plan connected with it—every arch and tower and hall and stone they pleased themselves by fancying. Newspapers were liberal with information, people talked of it, they heard of it on every side. To them it seemed that the whole world must be thinking of nothing else.
“While we are lying here,” Meg said—“while you are doing chores, and I am scouring pans and scrubbing things, it is all going on. People in France and in England and in Italy are doing work to send to it—artists are painting pictures, and machinery is whirling and making things, and everything is pouring into that one wonderful place. And men and women planned it, you know—just men and women. And if we live a few years we shall be men and women, and they were once children like us—only, if they had been quite like us they would never have known enough to do anything.”
“But when they were children like us,” said Robin, “they did not know what they would have learned by this time—and they never dreamed about this.”
“That shows how wonderful men and women are,” said Meg. “I believe they can doanythingif they set their minds to it.” And she said it stubbornly.
“Perhaps they can,” said Robin, slowly. “Perhapswecould do anything we set our minds to.”
There was the suggestive tone in his voice which Meg had been thrilled by more than once before. She had been thrilled by it most strongly when he had said that if they saved their two dollars a week they might be able to go almost anywhere. Unconsciously she responded to it now.
“If I could do anything I set my mind to,” she said, “do you know what I would set my mind to first?”
“What?”
“I would set my mind to going to that wonderful place. I would set it to seeing everything there, and remembering all I could hold, and learning all there was to be learned—and I wouldset it hard.”
“So would I,” said Robin.
It was a more suggestive voice than before that he said the words in; and suddenly he got up, and went and tore away the straw from the burying-place of the Treasure. He took out the old iron bank, and brought it back to their corner.
He did it so suddenly, and with such a determined air, that Meg rather lost her breath.
“What are you going to do with the Treasure?” she asked.
“I am going to count it.”
“Why?”
He was opening the box, using the blade of a stout pocket-knife as a screwdriver.
“A return ticket to Chicago costs fourteen dollars,” he said. “I asked at the dépôt. That would be twenty-eight dollars for two people. Any one who is careful can live on a very little for a while. I want to see if we shall have money enough togo.”
“Togo!” Meg cried out. “To the Fair, Robin?”
She could not believe the evidence of her ears—it sounded so daring.
“Nobody would take us!” she said. “Even if we had money enough to pay for ourselves, nobody would take us.”
“Take!” answered Robin, working at his screws. “No, nobody would. What’s the matter with taking ourselves?”
Meg sat up in the straw, conscious of a sort of shock.
“To go by ourselves, like grown-up people! To buy our tickets ourselves, and get on the train, and go all the way—alone! And walk about the Fair alone, Robin?”
“Who takes care of us here?” answered Robin. “Who has looked after us ever since father and mother died? Ourselves! Just ourselves! Whose business are we but our own? Who thinks of us, or asks if we are happy or unhappy?”
“Nobody,” said Meg. And she hid her face in her arms on her knees.
Robin went on stubbornly.
“Nobody is ever going to do it,” he said, “if we live to be hundreds of years old. I’ve thought of it when I’ve been working in the fields with Jones, and I’ve thought of it when I’ve been lying awake at night. It’s kept me awake many and many a time.”
“So it has me,” said Meg.
“And since this thing began to be talked about everywhere, I’ve thought of it more and more,” said Rob. “It means more to people like us than it does to any one else. It’s the people who never see things, who have no chances, it means the most to. And the more I think of it, the more I—I won’t let it go by me!” And all at once he threw himself face downward on the straw, and hid his face in his arms.
Meg lifted hers. There was something in the woful desperation of his movement that struck her to the heart. She had never known him do such a thing in their lives before. That was not his way. Whatsoever hard thing had happened—howsoever lonely and desolate they had felt—he had never shown his feeling in this way. She put out her hand and touched his shoulder.
“Robin!” she said. “Oh, Robin!”
“I don’t care,” he said, from the refuge of his sleeves. “Wearelittle when we are compared with grown-up people. They would call us children; and children usually have some one to help them and tell them what to do. I’m only like this because I’ve been thinking so much and working so hard—and it does seem like an Enchanted City—but no one ever thinks we could care about anything more than if we were cats and dogs. It was not like that at home, even if we were poor.”
Then he sat up with as little warning as he had thrown himself down, and gave his eyes a fierce rub. He returned to the Treasure again.
“I’ve been making up my mind to it for days,” he said. “If we have the money we can buy our tickets and go some night without saying anything to any one. We can leave a note for Aunt Matilda, and tell her we are all right and we are coming back. She’ll be too busy to mind.”
“Do you remember that book of father’s we read?” said Meg. “That one called ‘David Copperfield.’ David ran away from the bottle place when he was younger than we are, and he had to walk all the way to Dover.”
“We shall not have to walk; and we won’t let any one take our money away from us,” said Robin.
“Are we going, really?” said Meg. “You speak as if we were truly going; and itcan’tbe.”
“Do you know what you said just now about believing human beings could doanything, if they set their minds to it? Let’s set our minds to it.”
“Well,” Meg answered, rather slowly, as if weighing the matter, “let’s!”
And she fell to helping to count the Treasure.
Afterwards, when they looked back upon that day, they knew that the thing had decided itself then, though neither of them had said so.
“The truth was,” Robin used to say, “we had both been thinking the same thing, as we always do, but we had been thinking it in the back part of our minds. We were afraid to let it come to the front at first, because it seemed such a big thing. But it went on thinking by itself. That time, when you said ‘We shallneversee it,’ and I said, ‘How do you know?’ we were both thinking about it in one way; and I know I was thinking about it when I said, ‘We are not going to stay here always. That is the first step up the Hill of Difficulty.’”
“And that day when you said you would not let it go by you,” Meg would answer, “that was the day we reached the Wicket Gate.”
It seemed very like it, for from that day their strange, unchildish purpose grew and ripened, and never for an hour was absent from the mind of either. If they had been like other children, living happy lives, full of young interests and pleasures, it might have been crossed out by other and newer things; if they had been of a slighter mental build, and less strong, they might have forgotten it; but they never did. When they had counted the Treasure, and had realized how small it was after all, they had sat and gazed at each other for a while with grave eyes, but they had only been grave, and not despairing.
“Twenty-five dollars,” said Robin. “Well, that’s not much after nearly six years; but we saved it nearly all by cents, you know, Meg.”
“And it takes a hundred cents to make a dollar,” said Meg; “and we were poor people’s children.”
“And we bought the chickens,” said Robin.
“And you have always given me a present at Christmas, Robin, even if itwasonly a little one. That’s six Christmases.”
“We have eight months to work in,” said Robin, calculating. “If you get four dollars a month, and I get four, that will be sixty-four dollars by next June. Twenty-five dollars and sixty-four dollars make eighty-nine. Eighty-nine dollars for us to live on and go to see all the things; because we must see them all, if we go. And I suppose we shall have to come back”—with a long breath.
“Oh, dear!” cried Meg, “howcanwe come back?”
“I don’t know,” said Robin. “We shall hate it, but we have nowhere else to go.”
“Perhaps we are going to seek our fortunes, and perhaps we shall find them,” said Meg; “or perhaps Aunt Matilda won’t let us come back. Rob,” with some awe, “do you think she will be angry?”
“I’ve thought about that,” Robin answered contemplatively, “and I don’t think she will. She would be too busy to care much even if we ran away and said nothing. But I shall leave a letter, and tell her we have saved our money and gone somewhere for a holiday, and we’re all right, and she need not bother.”
“She won’t bother even if she is angry,” Meg said, with mournful eyes. “She doesn’t care about us enough.”
“If she loved us,” Rob said, “and was too poor to take us herself, we couldn’t go at all. We couldn’t run away, because it would worry her so. You can’t do a thing, however much you want to do it, if it is going to hurt somebody who is good to you, and cares.”
“Well, then, we needn’t stay here because of Aunt Matilda,” said Meggy. “That’s one sure thing. It wouldn’t interfere with her ploughing if we were both to die at once.”
“No,” said Rob, deliberately, “that’s just what it wouldnot.” And he threw himself back on the straw and clasped his hands under his head, gazing up into the dark roof above him with very reflective eyes.
But they had reached the Wicket Gate, and from the hour they passed it there was no looking back. That in their utter friendlessness and loneliness they should take their twelve-year-old fates in their own strong little hands was, perhaps, a pathetic thing; that once having done so they moved towards their object as steadily as if they had been of the maturest years was remarkable, but no one ever knew or even suspected the first until the last.
The days went by, full of work, which left them little time to lie and talk in the Straw Parlor. They could only see each other in the leisure hours, which were so few, and only came when the day was waning. Finding them faithful and ready, those about them fell into the natural, easy, human unworthiness of imposing by no means infrequently on their inexperienced willingness and youth. So they were hard enough worked, but each felt that every day that passed brought them nearer to the end in view; and there was always something to think of, some detail to be worked out mentally, or to be discussed, in the valuable moments when they were together.
“It’s a great deal better than it used to be,” Meg said, “at all events. It’s better to feel tired by working than to be tired of doing nothing but think and think dreary things.”
As the weather grew colder it was hard enough to keep warm in their hiding-place. They used to sit and talk, huddled close together, bundled in their heaviest clothing, and with the straw heaped close around them and over them.
There were so many things to be thought of and talked over! Robin collected facts more sedulously than ever—facts about entrance fees, facts about prices of things to eat, facts about places to sleep.
“Going to the Fair yourself, sonny?” Jones said to him one day. Jones was fond of his joke. “You’re right to be inquirin’ round. Them hotel-keepers is given to tot up bills several stories higher than their hotels is themselves.”
“But I suppose a person needn’t go to a hotel,” said Robin. “There must be plenty of poor people who can’t go to hotels, and they’ll have to sleep somewhere.”
“Ah, there’s plenty of poor people,” responded Jones, cheerfully, “plenty of ’em. Always is. But they won’t go to Chicago while the Fair’s on. They’ll sleep at home—that’s where they’ll sleep.”
“That’s the worst of it,” Rob said to Meg afterwards; “you see, we have to sleepsomewhere. We could live on bread and milk or crackers and cheese—or oatmeal—but we have tosleepsomewhere.”
“It will be warm weather,” Meg said, reflectively. “Perhaps we could sleep out of doors. Beggars do. We don’t mind.”
“I don’t think the police would let us,” Robin answered. “If they would—perhaps we might have to, some night; but we are going to that place, Meg—we aregoing.”
Yes, they believed they were going, and lived on the belief. This being decided, howsoever difficult to attain, it was like them both that they should dwell upon the dream, and revel in it in a way peculiarly their own. It was Meg whose imagination was the stronger, and it is true that it was always she who made pictures in words and told stories. But Robin was always as ready to enter into the spirit of her imaginings as she was to talk about them. There was a word he had once heard his father use which had caught his fancy, in fact, it had attracted them both, and they applied it to this favorite pleasure of theirs of romancing with everyday things. The word was “philander.”
“Now we have finished adding up and making plans,” he would say, putting his ten-cent account-book into his pocket, “let us philander about it.”
And then Meg would begin to talk about the City Beautiful—a City Beautiful which was a wonderful and curious mixture of the enchanted one the whole world was pouring its treasures into, one hundred miles away, and that City Beautiful of her own which she had founded upon the one towards which Christian had toiled through the Slough of Despond and up the Hill of Difficulty and past Doubting Castle. Somehow one could scarcely tell where one ended and the others began, they were so much alike, these three cities—Christian’s, Meg’s, and the fair, ephemeral one the ending of the nineteenth century had built upon the blue lake’s side.
“They must look alike,” said Meg. “I am sure they must. See what it says in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’ ‘Now just as the gates were opened to let in the men, I looked in after them, and behold, the City shone like the sun’—and then it says, ‘The talk they had with the Shining Ones was about the glory of the place; who told them that the beauty and glory of it were inexpressible.’ I always think of it, Robin, when I read about those places like white palaces and temples and towers that are being built. I am so glad they are white. Think how the City will ‘shine like the sun’ when it stands under the blue sky and by the blue water, on a sunshiny day.”
They had never read the dear old worn “Pilgrim’s Progress” as they did in those days. They kept it in the straw near the Treasure, and always had it at hand to refer to. In it they seemed to find parallels for everything.
“Aunt Matilda’s world is the City of Destruction,” they would say. “And our loneliness and poorness are like Christian’s ‘burden.’ We have to carry it like a heavy weight, and it holds us back.”
“What was it that Goodwill said to Christian about it?” Robin asked.
Meg turned over the pages. She knew all the places by heart. It was easy enough to find and read how “At last there came a grave person to the gate, named Goodwill,” and in the end he said, “As to thy burden, be content to bear it until thou comest to the place of deliverance; for there it will fall from thy back itself.”
“But out of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’” Robin said, with his reflecting air, “burdens don’t fall off by themselves. If you are content with them they stick on and get bigger. Ours would, I know. You have to do something yourself to get them off. But—” with a little pause for thought, “I like that part, Meg. And I like Goodwill, because he told it to him. It encouraged him, you know. You see it says next, ‘Then Christian began to gird up his loins and address himself to his journey.’”
“Robin,” said Meg, suddenly shutting the book and giving it a little thump on the back, “it’s not only Christian’s City that is like our City.Weare like Christian. We are pilgrims, and our way to that place is our Pilgrims’ Progress.”
And the cold days of hard work kept going by, and the City Beautiful grew, and, huddled close together in the straw, the children planned and dreamed, and read and re-read the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” following Christian step by step. And Aunt Matilda became busier every day, it seemed, and did not remember that they were alive except when she saw them. And nobody guessed and nobody knew.
Days so quickly grow to weeks, and weeks slip by so easily until they are months, and at last there came a time when Meg, going out in the morning, felt a softer air, and stopped a moment by a bare tree to breathe it in and feel its lovely touch upon her cheek. She turned her face upward with a half-involuntary movement, and found herself looking at such a limitless vault of tender blueness that her heart gave a quick throb, seemed to spring up to it, and carry her with it. For a moment it seemed as if she had left the earth far below, and was soaring in the soft depths of blueness themselves. And suddenly, even as she felt it, she heard on the topmost branch of the bare tree a brief little rapturous trill, and her heart gave a leap again, and she felt her cheeks grow warm.
“It is a bluebird,” she said; “it is a bluebird. And it is the spring, and that means that the time is quite near.”
She had a queer little smile on her face all day as she worked. She did not know it was there herself, but Mrs. Macartney saw it.
“What’s pleasing you so, Meggy, my girl?” she asked.
Meg wakened up with a sort of start.
“I don’t know—exactly,” she said.
“You don’t know,” said the woman, good-naturedly. “You look as if you were thinking over a secret, and it was a pleasant one.”
That evening it was not cold when they sat in the Straw Parlor, and Meg told Robin about the bluebird.
“It gave me a strange feeling to hear it,” she said. “It seemed as if it was speaking to me. It said, ‘You must get ready. It is quite near.’”
They had made up their minds that they would go in June, before the weather became so hot that they might suffer from it.
“Because we have to consider everything,” was Robin’s idea. “We shall be walking about all the time, and we have no cool clothes, and we shall have no money to buy cool things; and if we should be ill, it would be worse for us than for children who have some one with them.”
In the little account-book they had calculated all they should own on the day their pilgrimage began. They had apportioned it all out: so much for the price of the railroad tickets, so much for entrance fees, and—not so much, but so little—oh, so little!—for their food and lodging.
“I have listened when Jones and the others were talking,” said Robin; “and they say that everybody who has room to spare, and wants to make money, is going to let every corner they have. So you see there will be sure to be people who have quite poor places that they would be obliged to rent cheap to people who are poor, like themselves. We will go through the small side streets and look.”
The first bluebird came again, day after day, and others came with it, until the swift dart of blue wings through the air and the delicious ripple of joyous sound were no longer rare things. The days grew warmer, and the men threw off their coats, and began to draw their shirt-sleeves across their foreheads when they were at work.
One evening when Robin came up into the Straw Parlor he brought something with him. It was a battered old tin coffee-pot.
“What is that for?” asked Meg; for he seemed to carry it as if it was of some value.
“It’s old and rusty, but there are no holes in it,” Robin answered. “I saw it lying in a fence corner, where some one had thrown it—perhaps a tramp. And it put a new thought into my head. It will do to boil eggs in.”
“Eggs!” said Meg.
“There’s nothing much nicer than hard-boiled eggs,” said Robin, “and you can carry them about with you. It just came into my mind that we could take some of our eggs, and go somewhere where no one would be likely to see us, and build a fire of sticks, and boil some eggs, and carry them with us to eat.”
“Robin,” cried Meg, with admiring ecstasy, “I wish I had thought of that!”
“It doesn’t matter which of us thought of it,” said Rob, “it’s all the same.”
So it was decided that when the time came they should boil their supply of eggs very hard, and roll them up in pieces of paper and tuck them away carefully in the one small bag which was to carry all their necessary belongings. These belongings would be very few—just enough to keep them decent and clean, and a brush and comb between them. They used to lie in bed at night, with beating hearts, thinking it all over, sometimes awakening in a cold perspiration from a dreadful dream, in which Aunt Matilda or Jones or some of the hands had discovered their secret and confronted them with it in all its daring. They were so full of it night and day that Meg used to wonder that the people about them did not see it in their faces.
“They are not thinking of us,” said Robin. “They are thinking about crops. I dare say Aunt Matilda would like to see the Agricultural Building, but she couldn’t waste the time to go through the others.”
Oh, what a day it was, what a thrilling, exciting, almost unbearably joyful day, when Robin gathered sticks and dried bits of branches, and piled them in a corner of a field far enough from the house and outbuildings to be quite safe! He did it one noon hour, and as he passed Meg on his way back to his work, he whispered:
“I have got the sticks for the fire all ready.”
And after supper they crept out to the place, with matches, and the battered old coffee-pot, and the eggs.
As they made their preparations, they found themselves talking in whispers, though there was not the least chance of any one’s hearing them. Meg looked rather like a little witch as she stood over the bubbling old pot, with her strange, little dark face and shining eyes and black elf locks.
“It’s like making a kind of sacrifice on an altar,” she said.
“You always think queer things about everything, don’t you?” said Robin. “But they’re all right; I don’t think of them myself, but I like them.”
When the eggs were boiled hard enough they carried them to the barn and hid them in the Straw Parlor, near the Treasure. Then they sat and talked, in whispers still, almost trembling with joy.
“Somehow, do you know,” Meg said, “it feels as if we were going to do something more than just go to the Fair. When people in stories go to seek their fortunes, I’m sure they feel like this. Does it give you a kind of creeping in your stomach whenever you think of it, Rob?”
“Yes, it does,” Robin whispered back; “and when it comes into my mind suddenly something gives a queer jump inside me.”
“That’s your heart,” said Meg. “Robin, if anything should stop us, I believe I should dropdead.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” was Rob’s answer, “but it’s better not to let ourselves think about it. And I don’t believe anything as bad as thatcouldhappen. We’ve worked so hard, and we have nobody but ourselves, and it can’t do any one any harm—and we don’twantto do any one any harm. No, there must besomethingthat wouldn’t let it be.”
MEG LOOKED RATHER LIKE A LITTLE WITCH.MEG LOOKED RATHER LIKE A LITTLE WITCH.
MEG LOOKED RATHER LIKE A LITTLE WITCH.
“I believe that too,” said Meg, and this time it was she who clutched at Robin’s hand; but he seemed glad she did, and held as close as she.
And then, after the bluebirds had sung a few times more, there came a night when Meg crept out of her cot after she was sure that the woman in the other bed was sleeping heavily enough. Every one went to bed early, and every one slept through the night in heavy, tired sleep. Too much work was done on the place to allow people to waste time in sleeplessness. Meg knew no one would waken as she crept down stairs to the lower part of the house and softly opened the back door.
Robin was standing outside, with the little leather satchel in his hand. It was a soft, warm night, and the dark blue sky was full of the glitter of stars.
Both he and Meg stood still a moment, and looked up. “I’m glad it’s like this,” Meg said; “it doesn’t seem so lonely. Is your heart thumping, Robin?”
“Yes, rather,” whispered Robin. “I left the letter in a place where Aunt Matilda will be likely to find it some time to-morrow.”
“What did you say?” Meg whispered back.
“What I told you I was going to. There wasn’t much to say. Just told her we had saved our money, and gone away for a few days; and we were all right, and she needn’t worry.”
Everything was very still about them. There was no moon, and, but for the stars, it would have been very dark. As it was, the stillness of night and sleep, and the sombreness of the hour, might have made less strong little creatures feel timid and alone.
“Let us take hold of each other’s hands as we walk along,” said Meg. “It will make us feel nearer, and—andtwinner.”
And so, hand in hand, they went out on the road together.
It was four miles to the dépôt, but they were good walkers. Robin hung the satchel on a stick over his shoulder; they kept in the middle of the road and walked smartly. There were not many trees, but there were a few, occasionally, and it was pleasanter to walk where the way before them was quite clear. And somehow they found themselves still talking in whispers, though there was certainly no one to overhear them.
“Let us talk about Christian,” said Meg. “It will not seem so lonely if we are talking. I wish we could meet Evangelist.”
“If we knew he was Evangelist when we met him,” said Robin. “If we didn’t know him, we should think he was some one who would stop us. And after all, you see, he only showed Christian the shining light, and told him to go to it. And we are farther on than that. We have passed the Wicket Gate.”
“The thing we want,” said Meg, “is the Roll to read as we go on, and find out what we are to do.”
And then they talked of what was before them. They wondered who would be at the little dépôt and if they would be noticed, and of what the ticket-agent would think when Robin bought the tickets.
“Perhaps he won’t notice me at all,” said Rob. “And he does not know me. Somebody might be sending us alone, you know. We are notlittlechildren.”
“That’s true,” responded Meg, courageously. “If we were six years old it would be different. But we are twelve!”
It did make it seem less lonely to be talking, and so they did not stop. And there was so much to say.
“Robin,” broke forth Meg once, giving his hand a sudden clutch, “we are on the way—we aregoing. Soon we shall be in the train and it will be carrying us nearer and nearer. Suppose it was a dream, and we should wake up!”
“It isn’t a dream!” said Rob, stoutly. “It’s real—it’s as real as Aunt Matilda!” He was always more practical-minded than Meg.
“We needn’t philander any more,” Meg said.
“It isn’t philandering to talk about a real thing.”
“Oh, Rob, just think of it—waiting for us under the stars, this very moment—the City Beautiful!”