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And then came the chestnut-roasting, before the bright red coals. Each girl put down a pair; and I dare say most of them put down some little secret, girlish thought with it. The ripest nuts burned steadiest and surest, of course; but how could we tell these until we tried? Some little crack, or unseen worm-hole, would keep one still, while its companion would pop off, away from it; some would take flight together, and land in like manner, without ever parting company; these were to go some long way off; some never moved from where they began, but burned up, stupidly and peaceably, side by side. Some snapped into the fire. Some went off into corners. Some glowed beautiful, and some burned black, and some got covered up with ashes.
Barbara's pair were ominously still for a time, when all at once the larger gave a sort of unwilling lurch, without popping, and rolled off a little way, right in toward the blaze.
"Gone to a warmer climate," whispered Leslie, like a tease. And then crack! the warmer climate, or something else, sent him back again, with a real bound, just as Barbara's gave a gentle little snap, and they both dropped quietly down against the fender together.
"What made that jump back, I wonder?" said Pen Pennington.
"O, it wasn't more than half cracked when it went away," said Stephen, looking on.
Who would be bold enough to try the looking-glass? To go out alone with it into the dark field, walking backward, saying the rhyme to the stars which if there had been a moon ought by right to have been said to her:—
"Round and round, O stars so fair!Ye travel, and search out everywhere.I pray you, sweet stars, now show to me,This night, who my future husband shall be!"
Somehow, we put it upon Leslie. She was the oldest; we made that the reason.
"I wouldn't do it for anything!" said Sarah Hobart. "I heard of a girl who tried it once, and saw a shroud!"
But Leslie was full of fun that evening, and ready to do anything. She took the little mirror that Ruth brought her from up stairs, put on a shawl, and we all went to the front door with her, to see her off.
"Round the piazza, and down the bank," said Barbara, "and backward all the way."
So Leslie backed out at the door, and we shut it upon her. The instant after, we heard a great laugh. Off the piazza, she had stepped backward, directly against two gentlemen coming in.
Doctor Ingleside was one, coming to get his supper; the other was a friend of his, just arrived in Z——. "Doctor John Hautayne," he said, introducing him by his full name.
We knew why. He was proud of it. Doctor John Hautayne was the army surgeon who had been with him in the Wilderness, and had ridden a stray horse across a battle-field, in his shirt-sleeves, right in front of a Rebel battery, to get to some wounded on the other side. And the Rebel gunners, holding their halyards, stood still and shouted.
It put an end to the tricks, except the snap-dragon.
We had not thought how late it was; but mother and Ruth had remembered the oysters.
Doctor John Hautayne took Leslie out to supper. We saw him look at her with a funny, twinkling curiosity, as he stood there with her in the full light; and we all thought we had never seen Leslie look prettier in all her life.
After supper, Miss Pennington lighted up her Dragon, and threw in her snaps. A very little brandy, and a bowl full of blaze.
Maria Hendee "snapped" first, and got a preserved date.
"Ancient and honorable," said Miss Pennington, laughing.
Then Pen Pennington tried, and got nothing.
"You thought of your own fingers," said her aunt.
"A fig for my fortune!" cried Barbara, holding up her trophy.
"It came from the Mediterranean," said Mrs. Ingleside, over her shoulder into her ear; and the ear burned.
Ruth got a sugared almond.
"Only akernel," said the merry doctor's wife, again.
The doctor himself tried, and seized a slip of candied flag.
"Warm-hearted and useful, that is all," said Mrs. Ingleside.
"And tolerably pungent," said the doctor.
Doctor Hautayne drew forth—angelica.
Most of them were too timid or irresolute to grasp anything.
"That's the analogy," said Miss Pennington. "One must take the risk of getting scorched. It is 'the woman who dares,' after all."
It was great fun, though.
Mother cut the cake. That was the last sport of the evening.
If I should tell you who got the ring, you would think it really meant something. And the year is not out yet, you see.
But there was no doubt of one thing,—that our Halloween at Westover was a famous little party.
"How do you all feel about it?" asked Barbara, sitting down on the hearth in the brown room, before the embers, and throwing the nuts she had picked up about the carpet into the coals.
We had carried the supper-dishes away into the out-room, and set them on a great spare table that we kept there. "The room is as good as the girl," said Barbara. Itisa comfort to put by things, with a clear conscience, to a more rested time. We should let them be over the Sunday; Monday morning would be all china and soapsuds; then there would be a nice, freshly arrayed dresser, from top to bottom, and we should have had both a party and a piece of fall cleaning.
"How do you feel about it?"
"I feel as if we had had a realownparty, ourselves," said Ruth; "not as if 'the girls' had come and had a party here. There wasn't anybody toshow us how!"
"Except Miss Pennington. And wasn't it bewitchinating of her to come? Nobody can say now—"
"What do you say it for, then?" interrupted Rosamond. "It was very nice of Miss Pennington, and kind, considering it was a young party. Otherwise, why shouldn't she?"
T"That was a nice party," said Miss Pennington, walking home with Leslie and Doctor John Hautayne, behind the Inglesides. "What made it so nice?"
"You, very much," said Leslie, straightforwardly.
"I didn't begin it," said Miss Elizabeth. "No; that wasn't it. It was a step out, somehow Out of the treadmill. I got tired of parties long ago, before I was old. They were all alike. The only difference was that in one house the staircase went up on the right side of the hall, and in another on the left,—now and then, perhaps, at the back; and when you came down again, the lady near the drawing-room door might be Mrs. Hendee one night and Mrs. Marchbanks another; but after that it was all the same. And O, how I did get to hate ice-cream!"
"This was a party of 'nexts,'" said Leslie, "instead of a selfsame."
"What a good time Miss Waters had—quietly! You could see it in her face. A pretty face!" Miss Elizabeth spoke in a lower tone, for Lucilla was just before the Inglesides, with Helen and Pen Pennington. "She works too hard, though. I wish she came out more."
"The 'nexts' have to get tired of books and mending-baskets, while the firsts are getting tired of ice-creams," replied Leslie. "Dear Miss Pennington, there are ever so many nexts, and people don't think anything about it!"
"So there are," said Miss Elizabeth, quietly. "People are very stupid. They don't know what will freshen themselves up. They think the trouble is with the confectionery, and so they try macaroon and pistachio instead of lemon and vanilla. Fresh people are better than fresh flavors. But I think we had everything fresh to-night. What a beautiful old home-y house it is!"
"And what a home-y family!" said Doctor John Hautayne.
"Wehave an old home-y house," said Miss Pennington, suddenly, "with landscape-papered walls and cosey, deep windows and big chimneys. And we don't half use it. Doctor Hautayne, I mean to have a party! Will you stay and come to it?"
"Any time within my two months' leave," replied Doctor Hautayne, "and with very great pleasure."
"So she will have it before very long," said Leslie, telling us about the talk the next day.
It! Well, when Miss Pennington took up a thing shedidtake it up! That does not come in here, though,—any more of it.
The Penningtons are very proud people. They have not a very great deal of money, like the Haddens, and they are not foremost in everything like the Marchbankses; somehow they do not seem to care to take the trouble for that; but they are soestablished; it is a family like an old tree, that is past its green branching time, and makes little spread or summer show, but whose roots reach out away underneath, and grasp more ground than all the rest put together.
They live in an old house that is just like them. It has not a new-fashioned thing about it. The walls are square, plain brick, painted gray; and there is a low, broad porch in front, and then terraces, flagged with gray stone and bordered with flower-beds at each side and below. They have peacocks and guinea-hens, and more roses and lilies and larkspurs and foxgloves and narcissus than flowers of any newer sort; and there are great bushes of box and southernwood, that smell sweet as you go by.
Old General Pennington had been in the army all his life. He was a captain at Lundy's Lane, and got a wound there which gave him a stiff elbow ever after; and his oldest son was killed in Mexico, just after he had been brevetted Major. There is a Major Pennington now,—the younger brother,—out at Fort Vancouver; and he is Pen's father. When her mother died, away out there, he had to send her home. The Penningtons are just as proud as the stars and stripes themselves; and their glory is off the selfsame piece.
They made very much of Dakie Thayne when he was here, in their quiet, retired way; and they had always been polite and cordial to the Inglesides.
One morning, a little while after our party, mother was making an apple-pudding for dinner, when Madam Pennington and Miss Elizabeth drove round to the door.
Ruth was out at her lessons; Barbara was busy helping Mrs. Holabird. Rosamond went to the door, and let them into the brown room.
"Mother will be sorry to keep you waiting, but she will come directly. She is just in the middle of an apple-pudding."
Rosamond said it with as much simple grace of pride as if she had had to say, "Mother is busy at her modelling, and cannot leave her clay till she has damped and covered it." Her nice perception went to the very farther-most; it discerned the real best to be made of things, the best that wasreadymade, and put that forth.
"And I know," said Madam Pennington, "that an apple-pudding must not be left in the middle. I wonder if she would let an old woman who has lived in barracks come to her where she is?"
Rosamond's tact was superlative. She did not say, "I will go and see"; she got right up and said, "I am sure she will; please come this way," and opened the door, with a sublime confidence, full and without warning, upon the scene of operations.
"O, how nice!" said Miss Elizabeth; and Madam Pennington walked forward into the sunshine, holding her hand out to Mrs. Holabird, and smiling all the way from her smooth old forehead down to the "seventh beauty" of her dimple-cleft and placid chin.
"Why, this is really coming to see people!" she said.
Mrs. Holabird's white hand did not even want dusting; she just laid down the bright little chopper with which she was reducing her flour and butter to a golden powder, and took Madam Pennington's nicely gloved fingers into her own, without a breath of apology. Apology! It was very meek of her not to look at all set up.
Barbara rose from her chair with a red ringlet of apple-paring hanging down against her white apron, and seated herself again at her work when the visitors had taken the two opposite corners of the deep, cushioned sofa.
The red cloth was folded back across the end of the dining-table, and at the other end were mother's white board and rolling-pin, the pudding-cloth wrung into a twist out of the scald, and waiting upon a plate, and a pitcher of cold water with ice tinkling against its sides. Mother sat with the deal bowl in her lap, turning and mincing with the few last strokes the light, delicate dust of the pastry. The sunshine—work and sunshine always go so blessedly together—poured in, and filled the room up with life and glory.
"Why, this is the pleasantest room in all your house!" said Miss Elizabeth.
"That is just what Ruth said it would be when we turned it into a kitchen," said Barbara.
"You don't mean that this is really your kitchen!"
"I don't think we are quite sure what it is," replied Barbara, laughing. "We either dine in our kitchen or kitch in our dining-room; and I don't believe we have found out yet which it is!"
"You are wonderful people!"
"You ought to have belonged to the army, and lived in quarters," said Mrs. Pennington. "Only you would have made your rooms so bewitching you would have been always getting turned out."
"Turned out?"
"Yes; by the ranking family. That is the way they do. The major turns out the captain, and the colonel the major. There's no rest for the sole of your foot till you're a general."
Mrs. Holabird set her bowl on the table, and poured in the ice-water. Then the golden dust, turned and cut lightly by the chopper, gathered into a tender, mellow mass, and she lifted it out upon the board. She shook out the scalded cloth, spread it upon the emptied bowl, sprinkled it snowy-thick with flour, rolled out the crust with a free quick movement, and laid it on, into the curve of the basin. Barbara brought the apples, cut up in white fresh slices, and slid them into the round. Mrs. Holabird folded over the edges, gathered up the linen cloth in her hands, tied it tightly with a string, and Barbara disappeared with it behind the damask screen, where a puff of steam went up in a minute that told the pudding was in. Then Mrs. Holabird went into the pantry-closet and washed her hands, that never really came to need more than a finger-bowl could do for them, and Barbara carried after her the board and its etceteras, and the red cloth was drawn on again, and there was nothing, but a low, comfortable bubble in the chimney-corner to tell of house-wifery or dinner.
"I wish it had lasted longer," said Miss Elizabeth. "I am afraid I shall feel like company again now."
"I am ashamed to tell you what I came for," said Madam Pennington. "It was to ask about a girl. Can I do anything with Winny Lafferty?"
"I wish you could," said Mrs. Holabird, benevolently.
"She needs doing with" said Barbara.
"Your having her would be different from our doing so," said Mrs. Holabird. "I often think that one of the tangles in the girl-question is the mistake of taking the rawest specimens into families that keep but one. With your Lucy, it might be the very making of Winny to go to you."
"The 'next' for her, as Ruth would say," said Barbara.
"Yes. The least little thing that comes next is better than a world full of wisdom away off beyond. There is too much in 'general housework' for one ignorant, inexperienced brain to take in. What should we think of a government that gave out its 'general field-work' so?"
"There won't be any Lucys long," said Madam Pennington, with a sigh. "What are homes coming to?"
"Back tohomes, I hope, fromhousesdivided against themselves into parlors and kitchens," said mother, earnestly. "If I should tell you all I think about it, you would say it was visionary, I am afraid. But I believe we have got to go back to first principles; and then the Lucys will grow again."
"Modern establishments are not homes truly," said Madam Pennington.
"We shall call them by their names, as the French do, if we go on," said mother,—"hotels."
"And how are we to stop, or help it? The enemy has got possession. Irishocracy is a despotism in the land."
"Only," said mother, in her sweetest, most heartfelt way, "by learning how true it is that one must be chief to really serve; that it takes the highest to do perfect ministering; that the brightest grace and the most beautiful culture must come to bear upon this little, every-day living, which is all that the world works for after all. The whole heaven is made that just the daily bread for human souls may come down out of it. Only the Lord God can pour this room full of little waves of sunshine, and make a still, sweet morning in the earth."
Mother and Madam Pennington looked at each other with soulful eyes.
"'We girls,'" began mother again, smiling,—"for that is the way the children count me in,—said to each other, when we first tried this new plan, that we would make an art-kitchen. We meant we would have things nice and pretty for our common work; but there is something behind that,—the something that 'makes the meanest task divine,'—the spiritual correspondence of it. When we are educated up to that I think life and society will be somewhat different. I think we shall not always stop short at the drawing-room, and pretend at each other on the surface of things. I think the time may come when young girls and single women will be as willing, and think it as honorable, to go into homes which they need, and which need them, and give the best that they have grown to into the commonwealth of them, as they are willing now to educate and try for public places. And it will seem to them as great and beautiful a thing to do. They won't be buried, either. When they take the work up, and glorify it, it will glorify them. We don't know yet what households might be, if now we have got the wheels so perfected, we would put the living spirit into the wheels. They are the motive power; homes are the primary meetings. They would be little kingdoms, of great might! Iwishwomen would be content with their mainspring work, and not want to go out and point the time upon the dial!"
Mother never would have made so long a speech, but that beautiful old Mrs. Pennington was answering her back all the time out of her eyes. There was such a magnetism between them for the moment, that she scarcely knew she was saying it all. The color came up in their cheeks, and they were young and splendid, both of them. We thought it was as good a Woman's Convention as if there had been two thousand of them instead of two. And when some of the things out of the closets get up on the house-tops, maybe it will prove so.
Madam Pennington leaned over and kissed mother when she took her hand at going away. And then Miss Elizabeth spoke out suddenly,—
"I have not done my errand yet, Mrs. Holabird. Mother has taken up all the time. I want to have somenexts. Your girls know what I mean; and I want them to take hold and help. They are going to be 'next Thursdays,' and to begin this very coming Thursday of all. I shall give primary invitations only,—and my primaries are to find secondaries. No household is to represent merely itself; one or two, or more, from one family are to bring always one or two, or more, from somewhere else. I am going to try if one little bit of social life cannot be exogenous; and if it can, what the branching-out will come to. I think we want sapwood as well as heartwood to keep us green. If anybody doesn't quite understand, refer to 'How Plants Grow—Gray.'"
She went off, leaving us that to think of.
Two days after she looked in again, and said more. "Besides that, every primary or season invitation imposes a condition. Each member is to provide one practical answer to 'What next?' 'Next Thursday' is always to be in charge of somebody. You may do what you like, or can, with it. I'll manage the first myself. After that I wash my hands."
Out of it grew fourteen incomparable Thursday evenings. Pretty much all we can do about them is to tell that they were; we should want fourteen new numbers to write their full history. It was like Mr. Hale's lovely "Ten Times One is Ten." They all came from that one blessed little Halloween party of ours. It means something that thereissuch a thing as the multiplication-table; doesn't it? You can't help yourself if you start a unit, good or bad. The Garden of Eden, and the Ark, and the Loaves and Fishes, and the Hundred and Forty-four Thousand sealed in their foreheads, tell of it, all through the Bible, from first to last. "Multiply!" was the very next, inevitable commandment, after the "Let there be!"
It was such a thing as had never rolled up, or branched out, though, in Westover before. The Marchbankses did not know what to make of it. People got in who had never belonged. There they were, though, in the stately old Pennington house, that was never thrown open for nothing; and when they were once there you really could not tell the difference; unless, indeed, it were that the old, middle wood was the deadest, just as it is in the trees; and that the life was in the new sap and the green rind.
Lucilla Waters invented charades; and Helen Josselyn acted them, as charades had never been acted on West Hill until now. When it came to the Hobarts' "Next Thursday" they gave us "Dissolving Views,"—every successive queer fashion that had come up resplendent and gone down grotesque in these last thirty years. Mrs. Hobart had no end of old relics,—bandbaskets packed full of venerable bonnets, that in their close gradation of change seemed like one individual Indur passing through a metempsychosis of millinery; nests of old hats that were odder than the bonnets; swallow-tailed coats; broad-skirted blue ones with brass buttons; baby waists and basquines; leg-of-mutton sleeves, balloons, and military; collars inch-wide and collars ell-wide with rufflesrayonnantes; gathers and gores, tunnel-skirts, and barrel-skirts and paniers. She made monstrous paper dickeys, and high black stocks, and great bundling neckcloths; the very pocket-handkerchiefs were as ridiculous as anything, from the waiter-napkin size of good stout cambric to a quarter-dollar bit of a middle with a cataract of "chandelier" lace about it. She could tell everybody how to do their hair, from "flat curls" and "scallops" down or up to frizzes and chignons; and after we had all filed in slowly, one by one, and filled up the room, I don't think there ever could have been a funnier evening!
We had musical nights, and readings. We had a "Mutual Friend" Thursday; that was Mrs. Ingleside's. Rosamond was the Boofer Lady; Barbara was Lavvy the Irrepressible; and Miss Pennington herself was Mrs. Wilfer; Mr. and Mrs. Hobart were the Boffins; and Doctor Ingleside, with a wooden leg strapped on, dropped into poetry in the light of a friend; Maria Hendee came in twisting up her back hair, as Pleasant Riderhood,—Maria Hendee's back hair was splendid; Leslie looked very sweet and quiet as Lizzie Hexam, and she brought with her for her secondary that night the very, real little doll's dressmaker herself,—Maddy Freeman, who has carved brackets, and painted lovely book-racks and easels and vases and portfolios for almost everybody's parlors, and yet never gets into them herself.
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Leslie would not have asked her to be Jennie Wren, because she really has a lame foot; but when they told her about it, she said right off, "O, how I wish I could be that!" She has not only the lame foot, but the wonderful "golden bower" of sunshiny hair too; and she knows the doll's dressmaker by heart; she says she expects to find her some time, if ever she goes to England—or to heaven. Truly she was up to the "tricks and the manners" of the occasion; nobody entered into it with more self-abandonment than she; she was so completely Jennie Wren that no one—at the moment—thought of her in any other character, or remembered their rules of behaving according to the square of the distance. She "took patterns" of Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks's trimmings to her very face; she readied up behind Mrs. Linceford, and measured the festoon of her panier. There was no reason why she should be afraid or abashed; Maddy Freeman is a little lady, only she is poor, and a genius. She stepped rightoutof Dickens's story, notintoit, as the rest of us did; neither did she even seem to step consciously into the grand Pennington house; all she did as to that was to go "up here," or "over there," and "be dead," as fresh, new-world delights attracted her. Lizzie Hexam went too; they belonged together; and T'other Governor would insist on following after them, and being comfortably dead also, though Society was behind him, and the Veneerings and the Podsnaps looking on. Mrs. Ingleside did not provide any Podsnaps or Veneerings; she said they would be there.
Now Eugene Wrayburn was Doctor John Hautayne; for this was only our fourth evening. Nobody had anything to say about parts, except the person whose "next" it was; people had simply to take what they were helped to.
We began to be a little suspicious of Doctor Hautayne; to wonder about his "what next." Leslie behaved as if she had always known him; I believe it seemed to her as if she always had; some lives meet in a way like that.
It did not end with parties, Miss Pennington's exogenous experiment. She did not mean it should. A great deal that was glad and comfortable came of it to many persons. Miss Elizabeth asked Maddy Freeman to "come up and be dead" whenever she felt like it; she goes there every week now, to copy pictures, and get rare little bits for her designs out of the Penningtons' great portfolios of engravings and drawings of ancient ornamentations; and half the time they keep her to luncheon or to tea. Lucilla Waters knows them now as well as we do; and she is taking German lessons with Pen Pennington.
It really seems as if the "nexts" would grow on so that at last it would only be our old "set" that would be in any danger of getting left out. "Society is like a coral island after all," says Leslie Goldthwaite. "It isn't a rock of the Old Silurian."
It was a memorable winter to us in many ways,—that last winter of the nineteenth century's seventh decade.
One day—everything has to be one day, and all in a minute, when it does come, however many days lead up to it—Doctor Ingleside came in and told us the news. He had been up to see Grandfather Holabird; grandfather was not quite well.
They told him at home, the doctor said, not to stop anywhere; he knew what they meant by that, but he didn't care; it was as much his news as anybody's, and why should he be kept down to pills and plasters?
Leslie was going to marry Doctor John Hautayne.
Well! It was splendid news, and we had somehow expected it. And yet—"only think!" That was all we could say; that is a true thing people do say to each other, in the face of a great, beautiful fact. Take it in; shut your door upon it; and—think! It is something that belongs to heart and soul.
We counted up; it was only seven weeks.
"As if that were the whole of it!" said Doctor Ingleside. "As if the Lord didn't know! As if they hadn't been living on, to just this meeting-place! She knows his life, and the sort of it, though she has never been in it with him before; that is, we'll concede that, for the sake of argument, though I'm not so sure about it; and he has come right here into hers. They are fair, open, pleasant ways, both of them; and here, from the joining, they can both look back and take in, each the other's; and beyond they just run into one, you see, as foreordained, and there's no other way for them to go."
Nobody knew it but ourselves that next night,—Thursday. Doctor Hautayne read beautiful things from the Brownings at Miss Pennington's that evening; it was his turn to provide; but for us,—we looked into new depths in Leslie's serene, clear, woman eyes, and we felt the intenser something in his face and voice, and the wonder was that everybody could not see how quite another thing than any merely written poetry was really "next" that night for Leslie and for John Hautayne.
That was in December; it was the first of March when Grandfather Holabird died.
At about Christmas-time mother had taken a bad cold. We could not let her get up in the mornings to help before breakfast; the winter work was growing hard; there were two or three fires to manage besides the furnace, which father attended to; and although our "chore-man" came and split up kindlings and filled the wood-boxes, yet we were all pretty well tired out, sometimes, just with keeping warm. We began to begin to say things to each other which nobody actually finished. "If mother doesn't get better," and "If this cold weather keeps on," and "Arewe going to co-operate ourselves to death, do you think?" from Barbara, at last.
Nobody said, "We shall have to get a girl again." Nobody wanted to do that; and everybody had a secret feeling of Aunt Roderick, and her prophecy that we "shouldn't hold out long." But we were crippled and reduced; Ruth had as much as ever she could do, with the short days and her music.
"I begin to believe it was easy enough for Grant to say 'allsummer,'" said Barbara; "butthisis Valley Forge." The kitchen fire wouldn't burn, and the thermometer was down to 3° above. Mother was worrying up stairs, we knew, because we would not let her come down until it was warm and her coffee was ready.
That very afternoon Stephen came in from school with a word for the hour.
"The Stilkings are going to move right off to New Jersey," said he. "Jim Stilking told me so. The doctor says his father can't stay here."
"Arctura Fish won't go," said Rosamond, instantly.
"Arctura Fish is as neat as a pin, and as smart as a steel trap," said Barbara, regardless of elegance; "and—since nobody else will ever dare to give in—I believe Arctura Fish is the very next thing, now, for us!"
"It isn't giving in; it is going on," said Mrs. Holabird.
It certainly was not going back.
"We have got through ploughing-time, and now comes seed-time, and then harvest," said Barbara. "We shall raise, upon a bit of renovated earth, the first millennial specimen,—see if we don't!—of what was supposed to be an extinct flora,—theDomestica antediluviana."
Arctura Fish came to us.
If you once get a new dress, or a new dictionary, or a new convenience of any kind, did you never notice that you immediately have occasions which prove that you couldn't have lived another minute without it? We could not have spared Arctura a single day, after that, all winter. Mother gave up, and was ill for a fortnight. Stephen twisted his foot skating, and was laid up with a sprained ankle.
And then, in February, grandfather was taken with that last fatal attack, and some of us had to be with Aunt Roderick nearly all the time during the three weeks that he lived.
When they came to look through the papers there was no will found, of any kind; neither was that deed of gift.
Aunt Trixie was the only one out of the family who knew anything about it. She had been the "family bosom," Barbara said, ever since she cuddled us up in our baby blankets, and told us "this little pig, and that little pig," while she warmed our toes.
"Don't tell me!" said Aunt Trixie. Aunt Trixie never liked the Roderick Holabirds.
We tried not to think about it, but it was not comfortable. It was, indeed, a very serious anxiety and trouble that began, in consequence, to force itself upon us.
After the bright, gay nights had come weary, vexing days. And the worst was a vague shadow of family distrust and annoyance. Nobody thought any real harm, nobody disbelieved or suspected; but there it was. We could not think how such a declared determination and act of Grandfather Holabird should have come to nothing. Uncle and Aunt Roderick "could not see what we could expect about it; there was nothing to show; and there were John and John's children; it was not for any one or two to settle."
Only Ruth said "we were all good people, and meant right; it must all come right, somehow."
But father made up his mind that we could not afford to keep the place. He should pay his debts, now, the first thing. What was left must do for us; the house must go into the estate.
It was fixed, though, that we should stay there for the summer,—until affairs were settled.
"It's a dumb shame!" said Aunt Trixie.
TThe June days did not make it any better. And the June nights,—well, we had to sit in the "front box at the sunset," and think how there would be June after June here for somebody, and we should only have had just two of them out of our whole lives.
Why did not grandfather give us that paper, when he began to? And what could have become of it since? And what if it were found some time, after the dear old place was sold and gone? For it was the "dear old place" already to us, though we had only lived there a year, and though Aunt Roderick did say, in her cold fashion, just as if we could choose about it, that "it was not as if it were really an old homestead; it wouldn't be so much of a change for us, if we made up our minds not to take it in, as if we had always lived there."
Why, wehadalways lived there! That was just the way we had always been trying to spell "home," though we had never got the right letters to do it with before. When exactly the right thing comes to you, it is a thing that has always been. You don't get the very sticks and stones to begin with, maybe; but what they stand for grows up in you, and when you come to it you know it is yours. The best things—the most glorious and wonderful of all—will be what we shall see to have been "laid up for us from the foundation." Aunt Roderick did not see one bit of how that was with us.
"There isn't a word in the tenth commandment about not coveting yourownhouse," Barbara would say, boldly. And we did covet, and we did grieve. And although we did not mean to have "hard thoughts," we felt that Aunt Roderick was hard; and that Uncle Roderick and Uncle John were hatefully matter-of-fact and of-course about the "business." And that paper might be somewhere, yet. We did not believe that Grandfather Holabird had "changed his mind and burned it up." He had not had much mind to change, within those last six months. When hewaswell, and had a mind, we knew what he had meant to do.
If Uncle Roderick and Uncle John had not believed a word of what father told them, they could not have behaved very differently. We half thought, sometimes, that they did not believe it. And very likely they half thought that we were making it appear that they had done something that was not right. And it is the half thoughts that are the hard thoughts. "It is very disagreeable," Aunt Roderick used to say.
Miss Trixie Spring came over and spent days with us, as of old; and when the house looked sweet and pleasant with the shaded summer light, and was full of the gracious summer freshness, she would look round and shake her head, and say, "It's just as beautiful as it can be. And it's a dumb shame. Don't tellme!"
Uncle Roderick was going to "take in" the old homestead with his share, and that was as much as he cared about; Uncle John was used to nothing but stocks and railway shares, and did not want "encumbrances"; and as to keeping it as estate property and paying rent to the heirs, ourselves included,—nobody wanted that; they would rather have things settled up. There would always be questions of estimates and repairs; it was not best to have things so in a family. Separate accounts as well as short ones, made best friends. We knew they all thought father was unlucky to have to do with in such matters. He would still be the "limited" man of the family. It would take two thirds of his inheritance to pay off those old '57 debts.
So we took our lovely Westover summer days as things we could not have any more of. And when you begin to feel that about anything, it would be a relief to have had the last of it. Nothing lasts always; but we like to have the forever-and-ever feeling, however delusive. A child hates his Sunday clothes, because he knows he cannot put them on again on Monday.
With all our troubles, there was one pleasure in the house,—Arctura. We had made an art-kitchen; now we were making a little poem of a serving-maiden. We did not turn things over to her, and so leave chaos to come again; we only let her help; we let her come in and learn with us the nice and pleasant ways that we had learned. We did not move the kitchen down stairs again; we were determined not to have a kitchen any more.
Arctura was strong and blithe; she could fetch and carry, make fires, wash dishes, clean knives and brasses, do all that came hardest to us; and could do, in other things, with and for us, what she saw us do. We all worked together till the work was done; then Arctura sat down in the afternoons, just as we did, and read books, or made her clothes. She always looked nice and pretty. She had large dark calico aprons for her work; and little white bib-aprons for table-tending and dress-up; and mother made for her, on the machine, little linen collars and cuffs.
We had a pride in her looks; and she knew it; she learned to work as delicately as we did. When breakfast or dinner was ready, she was as fit to turn round and serve as we were to sit down; she was astonished herself, at ways and results that she fell in with and attained.
"Why, where does the dirt go to?" she would exclaim. "It never gethers anywheres."
"GATHERS,—anywhere" Rosamond corrected.
Arctura learned little grammar lessons, and other such things, by the way. She was only "next" below us in our family life; there was no great gulf fixed. We felt that we had at least got hold of the right end of one thread in the social tangle. This, at any rate, had come out of our year at Westover.
"Things seem so easy," the girl would say. "It is just like two times one."
So it was; because we did not jumble in all the Analysis and Compound Proportion of housekeeping right on top of the multiplication-table. She would get on by degrees; by and by she would be in evolution and geometrical progression without knowing how she got there. If you want a house, you must build it up, stone by stone, and stroke by stroke; if you want a servant, you, or somebody for you, mustbuildone, just the same; they do not spring up and grow, neither can be "knocked together." And I tell you, busy, eager women of this day, wanting great work out of doors, this is just what "we girls," some of us,—and some of the best of us, perhaps,—have got to stay at home awhile and do.
"It is one of the little jobs that has been waiting for a good while to be done," says Barbara; "and Miss Pennington has found out another. 'There may be,' she says, 'need of women for reorganizing town meetings; I won't undertake to say there isn't; but I'msurethere's need of them for reorganizingparlormeetings. They are getting to be left altogether to the little school-girl "sets." Women who have grown older, and can see through all that nonsense, and have the position and power to break it up, ought to take hold. Don't you think so? Don't you think it is the duty of women of my age and class to see to this thing before it grows any worse?' And I told her,—right up, respectful,—Yes'm; it wum! Think of her asking me, though!"
Just as things were getting to be so different and so nice on West Hill, it seemed so hard to leave it! Everything reminded us of that.
A beautiful plan came up for Ruth, though, at this time. What with the family worries,—which Ruth always had a way of gathering to herself, and hugging up, prickers in, as if so she could keep the nettles from other people's fingers,—and her hard work at her music, she was getting thin. We were all insisting that she must take a vacation this summer, both from teaching and learning; when, all at once, Miss Pennington made up her mind to go to West Point and Lake George, and to take Penelope with her; and she came over and asked Ruth to go too.
"If you don't mind a room alone, dear; I'm an awful coward to have come of a martial family, and I must have Pen with me nights. I'm nervous about cars, too; I want two of you to keep up a chatter; I should be miserable company for one, always distracted after the whistles."
Ruth's eyes shone; but she colored up, and her thanks had half a doubt in them. She would tell Auntie: and they would think how it could be.
"What a nice way for you to go!" said Barbara, after Miss Pennington left. "And how nice it will be for you to see Dakie!" At which Ruth colored up again, and only said that "it would certainly be the nicest possible way to go, if she were to go at all."
Barbara meant—or meant to be understood that she meant—that Miss Pennington knew everybody, and belonged among the general officers; Ruth had an instinct that it would only be possible for her to go by an invitation like this from people out of her own family.
"But doesn't it seem queer she should choose me, out of us all?" she asked. "Doesn't it seem selfish for me to be the one to go?"
"Seem selfish? Whom to?" said Barbara, bluntly. "We weren't asked."
"I wish—everybody—knew that," said Ruth.
Making this little transparent speech, Ruth blushed once more. But she went, after all. She said we pushed her out of the nest. She went out into the wide, wonderful world, for the very first time in her life.
This is one of her letters:—
DEAR MOTHER AND GIRLS:—It is perfectly lovely here. I wish you could sit where I do this morning, looking up the still river in the bright light, with the tender purple haze on the far-off hills, and long, low, shady Constitution Island lying so beautiful upon the water on one side, and dark shaggy Cro' Nest looming up on the other. The Parrott guns at the foundry, over on the headland opposite, are trying,—as they are trying almost all the time,—against the face of the high, old, desolate cliff; and the hurtling buzz of the shells keeps a sort of slow, tremendous time-beat on the air.
I think I am almost more interested in Constitution Island than in any other part of the place. I never knew until I came here that it was the home of the Misses Warner; the place where Queechy came from, and Dollars and Cents, and the Wide, Wide World. It seems so strange to think that they sit there and write still, lovely stories while all this parade and bustle and learning how to fight are going on close beside and about them.
The Cadets are very funny. They will do almost any thing for mischief,—the frolic of it, I mean. Dakie Thayne tells us very amusing stories. They are just going into camp now; and they have parades and battery-practice every day. They have target-firing at old Cro' Nest,—which has to stand all the firing from the north battery, just around here from the hotel. One day the cadet in charge made a very careful sighting of his piece; made the men train the gun up and down, this way and that, a hair more or a hair less, till they were nearly out of patience; when, lo! just as he had got "a beautiful bead," round came a superintending officer, and took a look too. The bad boy had drawn it full on a poor old black cow! I do not believe he would have really let her be blown up; but Dakie says,—"Well, he rather thinks,—if she would have stood still long enough,—he would have let her be—astonished!"
The walk through the woods, around the cliff, over the river, is beautiful. If only they wouldn't call it by such a silly name!
We went out to Old Fort Putnam yesterday. I did not know how afraid Miss Pennington could be of a little thing before. I don't know, now, how much of it was fun; for, as Dakie Thayne said, it was agonizingly funny. What must have happened to him after we got back and he left us I cannot imagine; he didn't laugh much there, and it must have been a misery of politeness.
We had been down into the old, ruinous enclosure; had peeped in at the dark, choked-up casemates; and had gone round and come up on the edge of the broken embankment, which we were following along to where it sloped down safely again,—when, just at the very middle and highest and most impossible point, down sat Miss Elizabeth among the stones, and declared she could neither go back nor forward. She had been frightened to death all the way, and now her head was quite gone. "No; nothing should persuade her; she never could get up on her feet again in that dreadful place." She laughed in the midst of it; but she was really frightened, and there she sat; Dakie went to her, and tried to help her up, and lead her on; but she would not be helped. "What would come of it?" "She didn't know; she supposed that was the end of her;shecouldn't do anything." "But, dear Miss Pennington," says Dakie, "are you going to break short off with life, right here, and make a Lady Simon Stylites of yourself?" "For all she knew; she never could get down." I think we must have been there, waiting and coaxing, nearly half an hour, before she began tohitchalong; for walk she wouldn't, and she didn't. She had on a black Ernani dress, and a nice silk underskirt; and as she lifted herself along with her hands, hoist after hoist sidewise, of course the thin stuff dragged on the rocks and began to go to pieces. By the time she came to where she could stand, she was a rebus of the Coliseum,—"a noble wreck in ruinous perfection." She just had to tear off the long tatters, and roll them up in a bunch, and fling them over into a hollow, and throw the two or three breadths that were left over her arm, and walk home in her silk petticoat, itself much the sufferer from dust and fray, though we did all we could for her with pocket-handkerchiefs.
"Whathashappened to Miss Pennington?" said Mrs. General M——, as we came up on the piazza.
"Nothing," said Dakie, quite composed and proper, "only she got tired and sat down; and it was dusty,—that was all." He bowed and went off, without so much as a glance of secret understanding.
"A joke has as many lives as a cat, here," he told Pen and me, afterwards, "and that wastoogood not to keep to ourselves."
Dear little mother and girls,—I have told stories and described describes, and all to crowd out and leave to the last cornersucha thing that Dakie Thayne wants to do! We got to talking about Westover and last summer, and the pleasant old place, and all; and I couldn't help telling him something about the worry. I know I had no business to; and I am afraid I have made a snarl. He says he would like to buy the place! And he wanted to know if Uncle Stephen wouldn't rent it of him if he did! Just think of it,—that boy! I believe he really means to write to Chicago, to his guardian. Of course it never came into my head when I told him; it wouldn't at any rate, and I never think ofhishaving such a quantity of money. He seems just like—as far as that goes—any other boy. What shall I do? Do you believe he will?
P.S. Saturday morning. I feel better about that Poll Parroting of mine, to-day. I have had another talk with Dakie. I don't believe he will write; now, at any rate. O girls! this is just the most perfect morning!
Tell Stephen I've got asplendidlittle idea, on purpose for him and me. Something I can hardly keep to myself till I get home. Dakie Thayne put it into my head. He is just the brightest boy, about everything! I begin to feel in a hurry almost, to come back. I don't think Miss Pennington will go to Lake George, after all. She says she hates to leave the Point, so many of her old friends are here. But Pen and I think she is afraid of the steamers.
Ruth got home a week after this; a little fatter, a little browner, and a little merrier and more talkative than she had ever been before.
Stephen was in a great hurry about the splendid little mysterious idea, of course. Boys never can wait, half so well as girls, for anything.
We were all out on the balcony that night before dusk, as usual. Ruth got up suddenly, and went into the house for something. Stephen went straight in after her. What happened upon that, the rest of us did not know till afterward. But it is a nice little part of the story,—just because there is so precious little of it.
Ruth went round, through the brown room and the hall, to the front door. Stephen found her stooping down, with her face close to the piazza cracks.
"Hollo! what's the matter? Lost something?"
Ruth lifted up her head. "Hush!"
"Why, how your face shines! Whatisup?"
"It's the sunset. I mean—that shines. Don't say anything. Our splendid—little—idea, you know. It's under here."
"Be dar—never-minded, if mine is!"
"You don't know. Columbus didn't know where his idea was—exactly. Do you remember when Sphinx hid her kittens under here last summer? Brought 'em round, over the wood-pile in the shed, and they never knew their way out till she showed 'em?"
"Itisn'tabout kittens!"
"Hasn't Old Ma'amselle got some now?"
"Yes; four."
"Couldn't you bring up one—or two—to-morrow morningearly, and make a place and tuck 'em in here, under the step, and put back the sod, and fasten 'em up?"
"What—for?" with wild amazement.
"I can't do what I want to, just for an idea. It will make a noise, and I don't feel sure enough. There had better be a kitten. I'll tell you the rest to-morrow morning." And Ruth was up on her two little feet, and had given Stephen a kiss, and was back into the house, and round again to the balcony, before he could say another word.
Boys like a plan, though; especially a mysterious getting-up-early plan; and if it has cats in it, it is always funny. He made up his mind to be on hand.
Ruth was first, though. She kept her little bolt drawn all night, between her room and that of Barbara and Rose. At five o'clock, she went softly across the passage to Stephen's room, in her little wrapper and knit slippers. "I shall be ready in ten minutes," she whispered, right into his ear, and into his dream.
"Scat!" cried Stephen, starting up bewildered.
And Ruth "scatted."
Down on the front piazza, twenty minutes after, she superintended the tucking in of the kittens, and then told him to bring a mallet and wedge. She had been very particular to have the kittens put under at a precise place, though there was a ready-made hole farther on. The cat babies mewed and sprawled and dragged themselves at feeble length on their miserable little legs, as small blind kittiewinks are given to doing.
"They won't go far," said Ruth. "Now, let's take this board up."
"What—for?" cried Stephen, again.
"To get them out, of course," says Ruth.
"Well, if girls ain't queer! Queerer than cats!"
"Hush!" said Ruth, softly. "Ibelieve—but I don't dare say a word yet—there's something there!"
"Of course there is. Two little yowling—"
"Something we all want found, Steve," Ruth whispered, earnestly. "But I don't know. Do hush! Make haste!"
Stephen put down his face to the crack, and took a peep. Rather a long serious peep. When he took his face back again, "Iseesomething," he said. "It's white paper. Kind of white, that is. Do you suppose, Ruth—? My cracky! if you do!"
"We won't suppose," said Ruth. "We'll hammer."
Stephen knocked up the end of the board with the mallet, and then he got the wedge under and pried. Ruth pulled. Stephen kept hammering and prying, and Ruth held on to all he gained, until they slipped the wedge along gradually, to where the board was nailed again, to the middle joist or stringer. Then a few more vigorous strokes, and a little smart levering, and the nails loosened, and one good wrench lifted it from the inside timber and they slid it out from under the house-boarding.
Underneath lay a long, folded paper, much covered with drifts of dust, and speckled somewhat with damp. But it was a dry, sandy place, and weather had not badly injured it.
"Stephen, I am sure!" said Ruth, holding Stephen back by the arm. "Don't touch it, though! Let it be, right there. Look at that corner, that lies opened up a little. Isn't that grandfather's writing?"