"You're quite sure about the other thing?"
"Unalterably sure. And, Jimmie, dear old Jimmie, there are two things I want you to do for me. The first is, to abandon forever and forever this 'one topic' of which, you are so proud. Will you?"
"I will not," said Jimmie.
"And the second is: to fall in love with a girl on the boat. There is always a girl on a boat. Will you?"
"I will," said Jimmie promptly. "It would be just what you deserve."
Miss Knowles bore the absence of her most persistent and accustomed suitor with a fortitude not predicted by that self-confident young man. She danced and drove, lunched and dined, rode and flirted with undiminished zest, bringing, each day, new energy and determination to the task of enjoying herself.
The enjoyment of her neighbors seemed less important. She preferred that her part in the cotillion should be observed by a frieze of unculled wall-flowers. A drive was always pleasanter if it were preceded by a skirmish with her mother in which Miss Knowles should come off victorious with the victoria, while Mrs. Knowles accepted the coup de grâce and the coupé. A flirtation—if her languid, seeming innocent monopoly of a man's time and thoughts could be called by so gross a name—was more satisfying if it implied the breaking of vows and hearts and the mad jealousy of some less gifted sister; if it had, like a Russian folk song, a sob and a wail running through it.
Jimmie had never approved of these amusements and had never hesitated to express his opinion of them in terms which were intelligible even to her vanity. From the days when they had played together in the park she had dreaded his honesty and feared his judgments. "You're such a poacher, Sylvia," he told her once, "such an inveterate, diabolical Fly-by-Night, Will-o'-the-Wisp poacher. I sometimes think you'd condescend to take a shot at me if you didn't know that I'm fair game. But you like to kill two birds with one stone; smash two hearts with one smile."
During the weeks immediately following the departure of her mentor she devoted herself whole-heartedly to her favorite form of sport. Besides her unscrupulousness she was armed with her grandfather's name, the riches of her dead father, her own beauty, and a mind capable of much better things. And, since Jimmie's presence would have seriously interfered with the pleasures of the chase, she was rather glad than otherwise that he was not there to see—and comment.
Her mother bore his absence with a like stoicism. That astute matron had long and silently deprecated the regularity with which her Louis Quinze had groaned beneath one hundred and eighty pounds of ineligibility, the frequency with which a tall troup horse of spectacular gait and snortings could be descried beside her daughter's English hunter in the park, the strange chain of coincidence by which at theater, house party, dinner, or even church, Jimmie smiling and unabashed, would find his way to her daughter's side and monopolize her daughter's attention.
In the excitement of the first stages of one of her expeditions into another's territory, Jimmie's first letter arrived. It was mailed at Honolulu, and consisted obediently of the cryptic statement: "There is no girl on the boat. She is a widow, but lots of fun." And it changed the character of the invasion from a harmless survey of the land to a determined attack upon its fortresses. And so Gilbert Stevenson, millionaire dock owner, veteran of many seasons and more campaigns, found himself engaged to Miss Sylvia Knowles just when, after a long and careful courtship, he had decided to bestow his hand and name upon the daughter of the retired senior partner of his firm: "that dear little girl of old Marvin's," as he described the lady of his choice, "his only child and a good child, too." He bore his surprise and honors with a courteous pomposity. Miss Knowles bore the situation with restraint and decorum. But that "dear little girl of old Marvin's" could not bring herself to bear it at all and wept away her modest claims to prettiness and spirit in one desolate month.
Like many a humbler poacher, Sylvia Knowles found an embarrassment in disposing of her victims after she had bagged them, and Mr. Gilbert Stevenson was peculiarly difficult in this regard. She did not want to keep him. In fact, the engagement upon which she was enduring congratulations had been as surprising to her as to her fiancé. And the methodical manifestations of his regard contrasted wearyingly with the erratic events in another friendship in which nothing was to be counted upon except the unaccountable. So that when vanquished suitors withdrew discomfited and returned to renew an earlier allegiance or to swear a new one; when "that good child of old Marvin's" had withdrawn her pitiful little face and her disappointment into the remote fastness of settlement work; when her mother resigned all claims upon the victoria and loudly affirmed her preference for the brougham, then things in general—and Mr. Stevenson in particular—began to bore Miss Knowles, and she began to look forward, with an emotion which would have surprised her betrothed, to foreign mails and letters. She considerately spared Mr. Stevenson this disquieting intelligence, having found him in matters of honor and rectitude as archaic and as fastidious as Jimmie himself. "Has a nasty suspicious mind," she reflected, "and a nasty jealous disposition. I wonder if he will expect me to give up all my friends when I marry him."
Yet even Mr. Stevenson could have found no cause for jealousy in the matter of the letters. He might have objected to their being written at all, but beyond that they were innocuous. For all the personality they contained they might have been transcripts of Jimmie's reports to his firm. He clung doggedly to his prescribed topics, and he could not have devised a surer method of arousing the curiosity and the interest of this spoiled young person. She spent hours, which should have been devoted to the contemplation of approaching bliss, in reading between the prosaic lines, in searching for sentiment in a catalogue of railway stations, for tenderness in description of eccentric tables d'hôte. Finding no trace of his old gallantry in all the closely written pages, she attributed its absence to obedience and accepted it as the higher tribute to her power. She was forced to judge her lover's longing by the quantity rather than by the ardor of his words, and to detect the yearning of a true lover's heart through such effectual disguise as:
"Drewitt is a fine old chap; as placid and as bright as this country and a great deal more so than anyone you'll see in the windows of the Union League Club. He received me so cordially that I felt awkward about introducing the object of my visit, but when I had admired everything in sight from the mountains in the distance to the rug I was sitting on, I finally faced the situation and did it.
"'Dear me,' said he, 'are those directors still troubling themselves about their transaction with me?' I admitted apologetically that they were; that their books refused to close over the gap left by the vanishing of $50,000, and that he was earnestly requested to return to New York and to lend his acknowledged business acumen, etc., etc. He never turned a hair. Said they—and I—were very kind. Nothing could give him greater pleasure. But the ladies preferred Japan. Therefore he, etc., etc., etc. But he would be delighted to explain the matter fully to me; to supply me with all the figures and information I desired. (And that, of course, is as much as I am expected to bring back.) But he would have to postpone his return until—and you should have seen the whimsical, quizzical old eye of his—until the nations would agree upon new extradition treaties. Then, of course, etc., etc., etc. Meanwhile, as there was no immediate urgency about the matter, as he hoped that I would stay with them for as long a time as I cared to arrange, he would suggest that we should join Mrs. Drewitt in the garden. She would welcome news of our American friends. 'I need not ask you,' he added as we went out through the wall-like people in a dream or a fairy tale, to be discreet and casual in your conversation with the ladies. My daughter is away this week visiting an old friend of hers who is married to a missionary in a neighboring village. She knows the reason for our being here. My wife does not. It need not be discussed with either of them.' I should think not!
"And there in the garden was Mrs. Drewitt, a fat little old lady in a flaming kimono and spectacles. She wears her hair as your Aunt Matilda does, stuck to her forehead in scrolls. 'Water curls,' I think, is the technical term. She was holding the head of a dejected marigold while a native propped it up with a stick. It seemed she remembered my mother, and we spent a delightful tea-time in a garden which was a part of the same dream as the phantom wall. Then the old gentleman led me off by myself and wanted to hear all about Broadway. Whether Oscar was still at the Waldorf. Whether Fields and Weber made 'a good thing of it' apart. Then the old lady led me off by myself and wanted to know who was now the pastor of the Brick Church, and what was Maude Adam's latest play, and whether skirts were worn long or short in the street.
"'You see this dress,' she said, 'is not really made for a woman of my age. In fact, in this country all the bright and pretty colors are worn by the waitresses. Geishas they call them. But Mr. Drewitt always liked bright colors, and red is very becoming to me.' She was such a wistful, pathetic, and incongruous little figure that I said something about hoping that she would soon be in New York again. 'But,' she said, 'Mr. Drewitt cannot leave his work here. Didn't you know that he is stationed here to report the changes of the weather to Washington? It is very important, and we can't go home until he is recalled. And, besides,'" she went on with a half sob in her voice and a look in her eyes that made her seem as young as her own daughter, 'and, besides, I would much rather be here. In New York my husband was too busy. He had so many calls upon his time, so many people to meet, and so many places to go, that sometimes I hardly felt as though he belonged to me. But now for days and weeks at a time we are together. And he has no business worries. And his salary,' she brightened up to tell me, 'is almost as good here as it used to be in the Trust Company for much harder work.' She's a sweet old thing—must have been quite a beauty once—and I wish you could see old Drewitt's manner with her—so courteous and affectionate—and hers with him—so adoring and confiding. It's wonderful!
"It will take some time to get all the information I want from the old man. He has the papers and he is quite willing to explain everything, but we spend the larger part of every day in entertaining the old lady and keeping her happy and unsuspicious."
A series of such letters covering several placid weeks reduced Miss Knowles to a condition of moodiness and abstraction which all the resources at her command failed to dissipate. In vain were the practical blandishments of Mr. Stevenson; in vain her mother's shopping triumphs; in vain were dinners given in her honor and receptions at which she reigned supreme. None of her other experiments had resulted in an engagement—an immunity which she now humbly attributed to the watchful Jimmie—and she was dismayed at the determined and matter-of-fact way in which she was called upon to fulfil her promise. "If only Jimmie were at home!" she realized, "he would save me." This was when the happy day was yet a great way off. "If only Jimmie would come home," she wailed as the weeks grew to months, and even the comfort of his letters failed her. For two months there had been no news of him, and Fate—and Mr. Stevenson—were very near when, at last, she heard from him again. He sent a telegram nearly as brief as his first letter.
"I am coming home," it announced, "I am coming home, and I'm going to be married."
And the simple little words, waited for so long, remembered so clearly, and coming, at last, so late, did what all Jimmie's more eloquent pleadings had failed to do.
Sylvia Knowles, a creature made of vanities, realized that she loved better than all her other vanities her place in this one man's regard. No contemplation of Mr. Stevenson's estate on the Hudson, his shooting lodge on a Scottish moor, his English abbey, and his Italian villa could nerve her for the first meeting with Jimmie, could fortify her against his first laughing repetition:
"You married to Gilbert Stevenson," or his later scornful, "You married to Gilbert Stevenson."
So she dismissed Mr. Stevenson with as little feeling as she had annexed him, and sought comfort in the knowledge that her mother was furious, her own fortune ample, and that marrying for love was a graceful, becoming pose and an unusual thing to do.
Her rejected suitor bore his disappointment as correctly as he had borne his joy. He stormed the special center of philanthropy in which old Marvin's little girl had buried herself, and she was most incorrectly but refreshingly glad to see him. She destroyed forever his poise and his pride in it when she sat upon his unaccustomed knee, rested her tired head upon his immaculate shirt front, and wept for very happiness.
"And I remember," said Miss Knowles, "that you always take cream."
"Nothing, thank you," Jimmie corrected. "Just plain unadulterated tea. I learned to like it in Japan. But don't bother about it. I haven't long to stay. I came in to tell you—"
"That you're going to be married."
"How did you guess?"
"You didn't leave me to guess. Your telegram."
"Ah, yes!" quoth Jimmie. "I sent a lot of them before I sailed. But in my letters—"
"You mentioned absolutely nothing but that stupid old Drewitt affair. Never a word of the places you saw, the people you met, or even the people you missed. Nothing of the customs, the girls, the clothes. Nothing but that shuffling old Drewitt and his stuffy old wife. Nothing about yourself."
"Orders are orders," quoth Jimmie, "and those were yours to me. I remember exactly how it came about. We had been talking personalities. I have an idea that I made rather a fool of myself, and that you told me so. Then you, wisely conjecturing that I might write as foolishly as I had talked, made out a list of subjects for my letters. My name, I noted with some care, was not upon that list."
"Jimmie," said Miss Knowles, "I was cruel and heartless that day. I've thought about it often."
"You've thought!" cried the genial Jimmie. "How had you time to think? Where were all those 'anothers'?"
"There were none," lied Miss Knowles soulfully with a disdainful backward glance toward Mr. Stevenson. "For a time I thought there was one. But whenever I thought of that last talk of ours—you remember it, don't you?"
"Of course. I told you I was going to be married as soon as I came home. Well, and so I am."
"So you are. But I used to think that if you hesitated to tell me; if you felt that I might still be hard about it and unsympathetic; if you decided to confide no more in me—"
"But you would be sure to know. Even if I had not telegraphed I never could have kept it a secret from you."
"Not easily. I should have been, as you observe, sure to know. Do you remember how I always refused to believe you? It was not until you were in that horrid Japan, where all the women are supposed to be beautiful—"
"Yes," Jimmie acquiesced. "It was when I was in Japan."
"It was then that it began to seem possible that you would be married when you came home. It was then that I began to realize that I didn't deserve to be told of your plans. For I had been a fool, Jimmie. You had been a fool, too, but not in the way you think. And so, if you will sit where I sat that horrid day, we will begin that conversation all over again and end it differently. The first speech was yours. Do you remember it?"
"But I'm going to be married," said Jimmie.
"Good boy. He knows his lesson. And now I say, 'To the most beautiful woman in the world?'"
"To the most beautiful woman God ever made. The dearest, the most clever, the most simple."
"Simple," repeated Miss Knowles with some natural surprise. "Did you say simple?"
"Simple and jolly and unaffected. As true and as bright as the stars. And I'm going to marry her—"
"Now this," Miss Knowles interjected, "is where the difference comes. You are to sit quite still and listen to me because a thing like this—however long and carefully one had thought it out—is difficult in the saying. So, I stand here before you where I can look at you; for four months are long; and where you may, when I have quite finished, kiss my hand again; for again four months are long. And I begin thus: Jimmie, you are going to be married—"
"I told you first," cried Jimmie.
"But I knew it first," she countered, "to a woman who has learned to love you during the past three months, but who could not do it more utterly, more perfectly, if she had practiced through all the years that you and I have been friends."
"So she says," Jimmie interrupted with sudden heat. "So she says. God bless her!"
"And, ah, how she is fond of you. 'Fond' is a darling of a word. It keeps just enough of its old 'foolish' meaning to be human. Proud of you, glad of you, fond of you—I think that this is, perhaps, the time for you to kiss my hand."
"You're a darling," he said as he obeyed. "But what I can't understand—"
"It's not your turn. You may talk after I finish if I leave anything for you to say. See, I go on: You are going to marry—"
"The most beautiful woman in the world."
"That reminds me. What is she like? I've not heard her described for ages."
"Because there was no one in New York who could do justice to her."
"You are the knightliest of knights. Go on. Describe her."
"Well, she is neither very tall nor very small. But the grace of her, the young, surpassing grace of her, makes you know as soon as your eyes have rested on her that her height, whatever it chances to be, is the perfect height for a woman. And then there is the noble heart of her. What other daughter would have buried herself, as she has done, in a little mountain village—"
Miss Knowles looked quickly about the luxurious room, then out upon the busy avenue, then back at him, suspecting raillery. But he was staring straight through her; straight into the land of visions. His eyes never wavered when she moved slowly out of their range and sat, huddled and white-faced, in the corner of a big chair.
"And all," Jimmie went on, "so bravely, so cheerily, that it makes one's throat ache to see. And one's heart hot to see. Then there is the beauty of her. Her hair is dark, her eyes are dark, but her skin is the fairest in the world."
Miss Knowles pushed back a loose lace cuff and studied the arm it had hidden. La reine est morte, she whispered, morte, morte, morte.
"But what puzzles me,", said the genial Jimmie, "is your knowing about it all. I never wrote you a word of it, and as for Sylvia—by the way, did you know that her name, like yours, is Sylvia?"
"Yes," said Miss Knowles, "I had even guessed that her name would be Sylvia."
"You're a wonderful woman," Jimmie protested. "The most wonderful woman in the world."
"Except?"
"Except, of course, Sylvia Drewitt."
"Ah, yes," said Miss Knowles. "Yes, of course."
THE SPIRIT OF CECELIA ANNE
"And all the rest and residue of my estate," read the lawyer, his voice growing more impressive as he reached this most impressive clause, "I give and bequeath to my beloved granddaughter and godchild Cecelia Anne Hawtry for her own use and benefit forever."
The black-clothed relations whose faces had been turned toward the front of the long drawing-room now swung round toward the back where a fair-haired little girl, her hands spread guardian-wise round the new black hat on her knees, lay asleep in her father's arms. For old Mrs. Hawtry's "beloved granddaughter Cecelia Anne" was not yet too big to find solace in sleep when she was tired and uninterested, being indeed but nine years old and exceedingly small of stature and babyish of habit. So she slept on and missed hearing all the provisions which were meant to protect her in the enjoyment of her estate but which were equally calculated to drive her guardian distracted.
"I leave nothing to my beloved son, James Hawtry," the document continued, "because I consider that he has quite enough already. And I leave nothing to his son, James Hawtry, Junior, the twin-brother of Cecelia Anne Hawtry, because, though he and I have met but seldom, I have formed the opinion that he is capable of winning his way in the world without any aid from me."
James Hawtry, Junior, sitting beside the heiress, failed to derive much satisfaction from this clause. If things were being given away, he was not quite certain as to what "rest and residue" might mean, but if things of any kind were being doled out he would fain have enjoyed them with the rest.
Presently the lawyer read the final codicil and gathered his papers together, then addressed the blank and disappointed assemblage with: "As you have seen that all the minor bequests are articles of a household nature—portraits, tableware and the like, 'portable property' as my immortal colleague, Mr. Wemmick, would have said—I should suggest the present to be an admirable time for their removal by the fortunate legatees who may not again be in this neighbourhood. And now I have but to congratulate the young lady who has succeeded to this property, a really handsome property I may say, though the amount is not stated nor even yet fully ascertained. If Miss Cecelia Anne Hawtry is present, I should like to pay my respects to her and to wish her all happiness in her new inheritance. I have never had the pleasure of meeting the principal legatee. May I ask her to come forward and accept my congratulations."
"Take her, Jimmie," commanded Mr. Hawtry, setting Cecelia down upon her thin little black legs, while he tried to smooth her into presentable shape in anticipation of the anxious cross-examination he was sure to undergo when he returned with the children to his New York home and wife.
"She looked as fit as paint," he afterward assured that anxious questioner. "I stood the bow out on her hair and pushed her dress down just as I've seen you do hundreds of times. Jimmie helped, too, and I declare to you, you'd have been as proud of those two kids as I was when that boy led his little sister through the hostile camp. Funny, he felt the hostility instantly, though of course, he didn't understand it. But she—well, you know what a confiding little thing she is, and having been asleep made her eyes look even more babyish than they always do—walked beside him, smiling her soft little smile and looking about three inches high in her little black dress."
"If I had been there," interrupted Mrs. Hawtry warmly, "I should have murdered your sister Elizabeth before I allowed her to put that baby into mourning. The black bow I packed for her hair would have been quite enough."
"Well, she had it on. I saw it bobbing up the room while tenth and fifteenth cousins seven or eight times removed, stared at it and at her. But the person most surprised was old Debrett when Jimmie introduced them."
"'This is her,' remarked your son with more truth than polish, and I'm, well, antecedently condemned, if that dry-as-dust old lawyer didn't stoop and kiss her as he wished her joy."
"Ah, I'm glad he's as nice as that," said Mrs. Hawtry, "since he is to be your co-trustee. However," she added a little wistfully, "I don't like the idea of anybody dictating to us about the baby. It makes her seem somehow not quite so much our very own. And we could have taken care of her quite well without your mother's money and advice."
"Why, my dear," laughed her husband, "that's a novel attitude to adopt toward a legacy. The baby is ours as much as she ever was. The advice is as good as any I ever read. And the money will leave us all the more to devote to Jimmie. There's the making of a good business man in Jimmie."
It was part of what Mrs. Hawtry for a long time considered the interference of Cecelia Anne's grandmother that the child should have a monthly allowance, small while she was small and growing with her growth. She was to be allowed to spend it without supervision and to keep an account of it. At the end of each year the trustees were to examine these accounts and to judge from them the trend of their ward's inclinations. They would be then in a position to curb or foster her leanings as their judgment should dictate.
Now, Cecelia Anne, restored to her friends from a wonderland sort of dream, called going—West—with—papa—on—the—train—and—living—with—Aunt—Elizabeth, was too full of narration and too excited by the envious regard of untraveled playmates to trouble overmuch about that scene in the long drawing-room which she had never clearly understood. The first monthly payment of her allowance failed to connect itself in her mind with the journey. Her predominant emotion on the subject of legacies was one of ardent gratitude to Jimmie. He had given her a quarter out of the change they had received at the toyshop where they had purchased the most beautiful sloop-yacht they had ever seen or dreamed of. A quarter for her very own; Jimmie's generosity and condescension extended even further than this. He also allowed her, the day being warm, to carry the yacht for a considerable part of their homeward journey, and, when the treasure was exhibited upon the topmost of their own front steps, he allowed her twice to pull the sails up and down. When he went to Central Park to sail the Jennie H, that being as near the feminine form of Jimmie Hawtry as their learning carried them, James, Junior, frequently allowed his sister to accompany him and his envious fellows. Then it was her proud privilege to watch the Jennie H's wavering course and to rush around the margin of the lake ready to "stand by" to receive her beloved bowsprit wherever she should dock. Then all proudly would she set the rudder straight again and turn the Jennie H back to the landing-stage where Jimmie, surrounded by his cohorts, all calm and cool in his magnificence, awaited this first evidence of "the trend of Cecelia Anne's inclinations."
Not quite a year elapsed before Mr. Hawtry's genial co-trustee visited his little ward. The reading of the will had taken place in November, and on the last week of the following June, Mr. Debrett, chancing to be in New York, decided to cultivate the acquaintance of Cecelia Anne. Mrs. Hawtry and the twins were by this time settled in their country home in Westchester, and Debrett, driving up from the station in the evening with Mr. Hawtry, found it difficult to accept the freckled, barelegged, blue-jumpered form which he saw in the garden, polishing the spokes of a bicycle, as the ward who had lived all these months in his memory: a fragile little figure in funeral black. Never had he seen so altered a child, he assured Mrs. Hawtry with many congratulations. She seemed taller, heavier, more self-assured. But the smile with which she put a greasy little hand into his extended hand was misty and babyish still.
Presently, while the two men rested with long chairs and long glasses and Mrs. Hawtry ministered to them, Jimmie appeared on the scene and after exchanging proper greetings turned to inspect Cecelia Anne and her work. "I think you've got it bright enough," he said with kindly condescension. "You can go and get dressed for dinner now. And to-morrow morning if I'm not using the wheel maybe I'll let you use it awhile."
"Oh, fank you!" said Cecelia Anne who had never quite outgrown her babyhood's lisp, "and can I have the saddle lowered so's I can reach the pedals?"
"Oh, I s'pose so," said Jimmie grudgingly. "Sometimes you act just like a girl. You give 'em something and they always want, more. Now you run on and open the stable door. I'm goin' to try if I can ride right into the harness-room without getting off. Don't catch your foot in the door and don't get too near Dolly's hind legs."
When the children had vanished around the corner of the house, Mrs. Hawtry turned to Mr. Debrett.
"There's the explanation of Cecelia Anne's ruggedness," said she. "She and Jimmie are inseparable. He has taught her all kinds of boys' accomplishments. And she's as happy as a bird if she's only allowed to trot around after him. It doesn't seem to make her in the least ungentle or hoydenish and I feel that she's safer with him than with the gossipy little girls down at the hotel."
"Not a doubt of it," Debrett heartily endorsed. "She couldn't have a better adviser. Her grandmother, a very clever lady by the way, had a high opinion of your son's practical mind. A useful antidote, I should say, to his sister's extreme gentleness."
He found further confirmation of old Mrs. Hawtry's acumen when Mr. Hawtry proposed that they should look over Cecelia Anne's disbursement account, kept by herself, as the will had specified.
Cecelia Anne was delighted with the idea. Jimmie had wandered out to see about the sports that were going to be held on the Fourth of July, and so the burden of explanation fell upon the little heiress. She drew her account book from its drawer in her father's desk, settled herself comfortably in the hollow of his arm and proceeded to disclose the "trend of her inclinations" as is evidenced by her shopping list:
"One sloop yat Jennie H swoped for hockey skates when it got cold.
One air riffle.
Three Tickets.
One riding skirt.
Two Tickets.
Six white rats two died.
Four Tickets.
Leather Stocking Tales. Three Books.
Three Tickets.
Four Boxing Gloves.
Eight Tickets.
One bull tarrier dog and collar he fought Len Fogerty's dog bit him all up and father sent him away."
"I remember him," said Mr. Hawtry" "a well-bred beast but a holy terror, go on dear."
"One Byccle.
Three Tickets.
Stanley's Darkest Africa two books but not very new.
One printing press.
Two Tickets.
Treasure Island. One Book."
"And that's all the big things," finished Cecelia Anne in evident relief. "Jimmie wrote down the prices, wouldn't you like to see them?"
And she crossed to Mr. Debrett and laid the open book on his knee.
Mr. Debrett, as Cecelia Anne teetered up and down on her heels and toes before him, read the list again, counted up the total expenditure and admitted that his ward had got remarkably good value for her money.
"But what are all these 'tickets,' my dear?" he asked her.
"Eden Musee," answered Cecelia Anne. And the very thought of it drew her to her mother's knee. "Jimmie and the boys used to take me there Saturday afternoons in the winter to try to get my nerve up. They say," she admitted dolefully, "that I haven't got much. So they used to take me to the Chamber of Horrors so's I'd get accustomed to life. That's what Jimmie thought I needed. They used to like it, and I expect I'd have liked it, too, if I could have kept my eyes open, but I never could. I couldn't even get them open when the boys stood me right close to that gentleman having death throes on the ground after he'd been hung on a tree. You can hear him breathing!"
"I know him well," said Mr. Debrett. "He is rather awful I must admit. And now we'll talk about the books. Don't you care at all about 'Little Men' and 'Little Women' or the 'Elsie Books?'"
"Jimmie says," Cecelia Anne made reply, "that 'Darkest Africa' is better for me. It tells me just where to hit an elephant to give him the death throes. He says the 'Elsie Books' wouldn't be any help to us even with a buffalo. We're going to buy 'The Wild Huntress, or Love in the Wilderness' next month. Jimmie thinks that's sure to get my nerve up—being about a girl, you see—"
"And 'Treasure Island' now;" said her guardian, "did you enjoy that? It came rather late in my life, but I remember thinking it a great book."
"It's great for nerve. Jimmie often reads me parts of it after I go to bed at night. There's a poem in it—he taught me that by heart—and if I think to say it the last thing before I go to sleep he says I'll get so's nothing can scare me."
"Recite it for Mr. Debrett," urged Mrs. Hawtry. And Cecelia Anne obediently began, with a jerk of a curtsey and a shake of her delicate embroideries and blue sash.
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"
Mr. Debrett's astonishment at this lullaby held him silent for some seconds.
"You see, sir," Cecelia Anne explained, "if you can go to sleep thinking about that it shows your nerve. I can't. Not yet. But it never makes me cry any more and Jimmie says that's something."
"I should say it was!" he congratulated her. "It's wonderful. And now in the matter of dolls," he went on referring to the list, "no rag babies, eh?"
"Oh, but she has beautiful dolls, Mr. Debrett," interposed her mother. "She'll show them to you to-morrow morning, won't you honey-child? But she did not buy them. They were given to her at Christmas and other times. But really, since we came out here for the summer they've been rather neglected. Their mother has been so busy."
"And Jimmie made me a house for them!" Cecelia Anne broke in. "And furniture! And a front yard stuck right on to the piazza! But I don't know, mother, whether I'd have time to show them to Mr. Debrett in the morning. I'm pretty busy now. It's getting so near the race. And I pace Jimmie every morning."
"Ah! that reminds me," said her father, "Jimmie told me to send you to bed at eight o'clock—one of the rules of 'training', you know—so say good night to us all and put your little book back in the drawer. You've kept it very nicely. I am sure Mr. Debrett agrees with me."
When the elders were alone, Mrs. Hawtry crossed over into the light and addressed her guest.
"I can't have you thinking badly of Jimmie," she began, "or of us, for allowing him to practically spend the baby's income. Every one of the things on that list mark a stage in Cecelia Anne's progress away from priggishness and toward health. I don't know just how much she realizes her own power of veto in these purchases but I am sure she would never exercise it against Jimmie. She's absolutely wrapped up in him and he's wonderfully good and patient with her. Of course, you know, they're twins although no one ever guesses it. They've shared everything from the very first."
"In this combination," laughed Debrett, "the boy is 'father to the girl' and the girl is 'mother to the boy.'"
"Precisely so," Mr. Hawtry replied, "and the mother part comes out strong in this race and training affair. An old chap down at the hotel—one of those old white-whiskered 'Foxey Grandpas' that no summer resort should be without—has arranged a great race for his friends, the children, on Fourth of July morning. The prize is to be the privilege of setting off the fireworks in the evening."
"They'll run themselves to death," commented Debrett, who knew his young America, "and is Jimmie to be one of the contestants?"
"He is," replied Hawtry, "it's a 'free for all' event and even Cecelia Anne may start if Jimmie allows it. She's not thinking much about that though. You see, Jimmie has gone into training and she's his trainer. I went out with them last Saturday morning to see how they manage. They marched me down to an untenanted little farm, back from the road. Jimmie carried the 'riffle' referred to in Cecelia Anne's text and a handful of blank cartridges. Cecelia Anne carried Jimmie's sweater, a bath towel, a large sponge, a small tin bucket and a long green bottle. I carried nothing. I was observing, not interfering."
"Oh, that dear baby!" broke in Mrs. Hawtry, "such a heavy load!"
"She's thriving under it, my dear." Well, presently we arrived at our destination, and I saw that those kids had worn a little path, not very deep of course, all round what used to be rather a spacious 'door yard.' The winning-post was the pump. By its side Cecelia Anne disposed her burden like a theatrical 'dresser' getting things ready for his principal. She hung her tin pail on the pump's snout and pumped it full of water, laid it beside the bath towel, threw the sponge into it, gave a final testing jerk to her tight little braids and divested herself of her jumpers and the dress she wore under them. Then she resumed the jumpers, took the rifle and crossed the 'track.' Jimmie, meanwhile, had stripped to trousers and the upper part of his bathing-suit, had donned his running shoes, set his feet in holes kicked in the ground for that purpose and bent forward, his back professionally hunched and in his hands the essential pieces of cork. Cecelia Anne gabbled the words of starting, shut her eyes tightly, fired the rifle into the air, threw it on the ground and set off after the swiftly moving Jimmie. Early in his first lap she was up to him. As they passed the pump, she was ahead. In the succeeding laps she kept a comfortable distance in the lead, until the end of the third when she sprinted for 'home,' grabbed the towel and, as Jimmie came bounding up, wrapped him in it, rubbed him down, fanned him with it, moistened his brow with vinegar from the long bottle, tied the sweater around his neck by its red sleeves and held the dripping sponge to his lips. Then she found time for me.
"Oh, father," she cried, "did you ever see anybody who could run as fast as Jimmie? Don't you just know he'll win that race?"
"There's but one chance against it," said I. "And really, Mr. Debrett, that boy can run. He's a little bit heavy maybe, but he holds himself well together and keeps up a pretty good pace. I timed him and measured up the distance roughly afterward. It was pretty good going for a little chap. Cecelia Anne is so much smaller that we often forget what a little fellow he is after all. But that baby—whew—I wish you'd seen her fly. It wasn't running. She just blew over the ground and arrived at the pump as cool as a cucumber although Jimmie was puffing like an automobile of the vintage of 1890."
"You see," said Jimmie to me as he lay magnificently on the grass waiting to grow cool while Cecelia still fanned him with the towel, "you see it don't hurt her to pace me round the track."
"Apparently not," said I, and although he's my own boy and I know him pretty well, I couldn't for the life of me decide whether he, as well as Cecelia Anne, had really failed to grasp the fact that she beats him to a standstill every morning. I suppose we'll know on the Fourth. If she runs, then he does not know. But if he refuses to let her run; it will be because he does know."
"I'm not so sure of that," said Mrs. Hawtry.
Cecelia Anne was allowed to run. First, in a girl's race among the giggling, amateurish, self-conscious girls whom she outdistanced by a lap or two and, later, in the race for all winners, where she had to compete with Charlie Anderson, the beau of the hotel, Len Fogarty, the milkman's son, and her own incomparable Jimmie.
The master of ceremonies gave the signal and the event of the day was on. First to collapse was Charlie Anderson. Jimmie was then in the lead with Len Fogarty a close second, and Cecelia Anne beside him. So they went for a lap. Then Jimmie, missing perhaps the blue little figure of his pacemaker, wavered a little, only a little, but enough to allow Len Fogarty to forge past him. Len Fogarty! The blatant, hated Len Fogarty, always shouting defiance from his father's milk-wagon! Then forward sprang Cecelia Anne. Not for all the riches of the earth would she have beaten Jimmie, but not for all the glory of heaven would she allow any one else to beat him. And so by an easy spectacular ten seconds, she outran Len Fogarty.
Then wild was the enthusiasm of the audience and black was the brow of Len Fogarty. A chorus of: "Let a girl lick you," "Call yourself a runner," "Come up to the house an' race me baby brother," has not a soothing effect when added to the disappointment of being forever shut off from the business end of rockets and Roman candles. These things Cecelia Anne knew and so accepted, sadly and resignedly, the glare with which Len turned away from her little attempts at explanations.
But she was not prepared, nothing in her short life could ever have prepared her, to find the same expression on Jimmie's face when she broke through a shower of congratulations and followed him up the road; to expect praise and to meet such a rebuff would have been sufficient to make even stiffer laurels than Cecelia Anne's trail in the dust.
"Why Jimmie," she whimpered contrary to his most stringent rule. "Why Jimmie what's the matter?"
"You're a sneak," said Jimmie darkly and vouchsafed no more. There was indeed no more to say. It was the last word of opprobrium.
They pattered on in silence for a short but dusty distance, Cecelia Anne struggling with the temptation to lie down and die; Jimmie upborne by furious temper.
"Who taught you how to run?" he at last broke out. "Wasn't it me? Didn't I give you lessons every morning in the old lot? And then didn't you go and beat me when Len Fogarty, Charlie Anderson, Billy Van Derwater, and all the other fellows were there?"
Cecelia Anne returned his angry gaze with her blue and loyal eyes.
"I didn't beat you 't all," she answered. "I didn't beat anybody but Len Fogarty."
Her mentor studied her for a while and then a grin overspread his once more placid features.
"I guess it'll be all right," he condescended. "Maybe you didn't mean it the way it looked. But say, Cecelia Anne, if you're afraid of fire-crackers what are you going to do about the rockets and the Roman candles? You know sparks fly out of them like rain. And if the smell of old cartridge shells makes you sick, I don't know just how you'll get along to-night."
The victor stopped short under the weight of this overwhelming spoil.
"I forgot all about it," she whispered. "Oh, Jimmie, I guess I ought to have let Len Fogarty win that race. He could set off rockets and Roman candles and Catherine wheels. I guess it'll kill me when the sparks and the smoke come out. Maybe I'd better go and see Mr. Anstell and ask to be excused."
"Aw, I wouldn't do that," Jimmie advised her, "you don't want everyone to know about your nerve. You just tell him your dress is too light and that you want me to attend to the fireworks for you."
In the transports of gratitude to which this knightly offer reduced her, Cecelia Anne fared on by Jimmie's side until they reached the house and their enquiring parents. Mrs. Hawtry was on the steps as they came up and she gathered Cecelia Anne into her arms. For a moment no one spoke. Then Jimmie made his declaration.
"Cecelia Anne beat Len Fogarty all to nothing. You ought to have been there to see her."
"Was there any one else in the race?" queried Mr. Hawtry in what his son considered most questionable taste.
"Oh, yes," he was constrained to answer. "Charlie Anderson was in it. She beat him, too. And I started with them but I thought it would do those boys more good to be licked by a little girl than to have me 'tend to them myself." And Jimmie proceeded leisurely into the house.
"But I don't have to set off the fireworks," Cecelia Anne explained happily. "Jimmie says I don't have to if I don't want to. He's going to do it for me."
"Kind brother," ejaculated Mr. Hawtry. And across the bright gold braids of her little Atalanta, Mrs. Hawtry looked at her husband.
"Did he know?" she questioned, "or did he not? You thought we could be sure if he let her start."
"Well," was Mr. Hawtry's cryptic utterance, "he knows now."
THEODORA, GIFT OF GOD
"And then," cried Mary breathlessly, "what did they do then?"
"And then," her father obediently continued, "the two doughty knights smote lustily with their swords. And each smote the other on the helmet and clove him to the middle. It was a fair battle and sightly."
But Mary's interest was unabated. "And then," she urged, "what did they do then?"
"Not much, I think. Even a knight of the Table Round stops fighting for a while when that happens to him."
"Didn't they do anything 'tall?" the audience insisted. "You aren't leaving it out, are you? Didn't they bleed nor nothing?"
"Oh, yes, they bled."
"Then tell me that part."
"Well, they bled. They never stinteth bleeding for three days and three nights until they were pale as the very earth for bleeding. And they made a great dole."
"And then, when they couldn't bleed any more nor make any more dole, what did they do?"
"They died."
"And then—"
"That's the end of the story," said the narrator definitely.
"Then tell me another," she pleaded, "and don't let them die so soon."
"There wouldn't be time for another long one," he pointed out as he encouraged his horse into an ambling trot. "We are nearly there now."
"After supper will you tell me one?"
"Yes," he promised.
"One about Lancelot and Elaine?"
"Yes," he repeated. "Anything you choose."
"I choose Lancelot," she declared.
"A great many ladies did," commented her father as the horse sedately stopped before the office of the Arcady Herald-Journal, of which he was day and night editor, sporting editor, proprietor, society editor, chief of the advertising department, and occasionally type-setter and printer and printer's devil.
Mary held the horse, which stood in need of no such restraint, while this composite of newspaper secured his mail, and then they jogged off through the spring sunshine, side by side, in the ramshackle old buggy on a leisurely canvass of outlying districts in search of news or advertisements, or suggestions for the forthcoming issue.
In the wide-set, round, opened eyes of his small daughter, Herbert Buckley was the most wonderful person in the world. No stories were so enthralling as his. No songs so tuneful, no invention so fertile, no temper so sweet, no companionship so precious. And her nine happy years of life had shown her no better way of spending summer days or winter evenings than in journeying, led by his hand and guided by his voice, through the pleasant ways of Camelot and the shining times of chivalry.
Upon a morning later in this ninth summer of her life Mary was perched high up in an apple tree enjoying the day, the green apples, and herself. The day was a glorious one in mid July, the apples were of a wondrous greenness and hardness, and Mary, for the first time in many weeks, was free to enjoy her own society. A month ago a grandmother and a maiden aunt had descended out of the land which had until then given forth only letters, birthday presents, and Christmas cards. And they had proved to be not at all the idyllic creatures which these manifestations had seemed to prophesy, but a pair of very interfering old ladies with a manner of over-ruling Mary's gentle mother, brow-beating her genial father and cloistering herself.
This morning had contributed another female assuming airs of instant intimacy. She had gone up to the last remaining spare chamber, donned a costume all of crackling white linen, and had introduced herself, entirely uninvited, into the dim privacy of Mary's mother's room, whence Mary had been sternly banished.
"Another aunt!" was the outcast's instant inference, as in a moment of accountable preoccupation on the part of the elders she had escaped to her own happy and familiar country—the world of out-of-doors—where female relatives seldom intruded, and where the lovely things of life were waiting.
When she had consumed all the green apples her constitution would accept, and they seemed pitifully few to her more robust mind, she descended from the source of her refreshment and set out upon a comprehensive tour of her domain. She liked living upon the road to Camelot. It made life interesting to be within measurable distance of the knights and ladies who lived and played and loved in the many-towered city of which one could gain so clear a view from the topmost branches of the hickory tree in the upper pasture. She liked to crouch in the elder bushes where a lane, winding and green-arched, crossed a corner of the cornfield, and to wait, through the long, still summer mornings for Lancelot or Galahad or Tristram or some other of her friends to come pricking his way through the sunshine. She could hear the clinking of his golden armor, the whinnying of his steed, the soft brushing of the branches as they parted before his helmet or his spear; the rustling of the daisies against his great white charger's feet. And then there was the river "where the aspens dusk and quiver," and where barges laden with sweet ladies passed and left ripples of foam on the water and ripples of light laughter in the air as, brilliant and fair bedight, they went winding down to Camelot.
This morning she revisited all these hallowed spots. She thrilled on the very verge of the river and quivered amid the waving corn. She scaled the sentinel hickory and turned her eyes upon the Southern city. It was nearly a week since she had been allowed to wander so far afield, and Camelot seemed more than ever wonderful as it lay in the shimmering distance gleaming and glistening beyond the hills. Trails of smoke waved above all the towers, showing where Sir Beaumanis still served his kitchen apprenticeship for his knighthood and his place at the Table Round. Thousands of windows flashed back the light.
"I could get there," pondered Mary, "if God would send me that goat and wagon. I guess there's quite a demand for goats and wagons. I could dress my goat all up in skirts like the ladies dressed their palfreys, an' I'd wear my hair loose on my shoulders—it's real goldy when it's loose—an' my best hat. I guess Queen Guinevere would be real glad to see me. Oh, dear," she fretted as these visions came thronging back to her, "I wish Heaven would hurry up."
Between the pasture and the distant city she could distinguish the roofs of another of the havens of her dear desire—the house where the old ladies lived. Four old ladies there were, in the sweet autumn of their lives, and Mary's admiration of them was as passionate as were all her psychic states. She never could be quite sure as to which of the four she most adored. There was the gentle Miss Ann, who taught her to recite verses of piercing and wilting sensibility; the brisk Miss Jane, who explained and demonstrated the construction of many an old-time cake or pastry; the silent Miss Agnes, who silently accepted assistance in her never-ending process of skeletonizing leaves and arranging them in prim designs upon cardboard, and the garrulous Miss Sabina, who, with a crochet needle, a hair-pin, a spool with four pins driven into it, knitting needles and other shining implements, could fashion, and teach Mary to fashion, weavings and spinnings which might shame the most accomplished spider. Aided by her and by the re-enforced spool above mentioned, Mary had already achieved five dirty inches of red woollen reins for the expected goat. But the house was distant just three fields, a barb-wire fence, a low stone wall, and a cross bull, and Mary knew that her unaccustomed leisure could not be expected to endure long enough for so perilous a pilgrimage.
Her dissatisfied gaze wandered back to her quiet home surrounded by its neatly laid out meadows, cornfield, orchard, barns, and garden. And a shadow fell upon her wistful little face.
"That old aunt," she grumbled, "she makes me awful tired. She's always pokin' round an' callin' me."
Such, indeed, seemed the present habit and intent of the prim lady who was approaching, alternately clanging a dinner-bell and calling in a tone of resolute sweetness:
"Mary, O Mary, dear."
Mary parted the branches of her tree and watched, but made no sound.
"Mary," repeated the oncoming relative, "Mary, I want to tell you something," and added as she spied her niece's abandoned sunbonnet on the grass, "I know you're here and I shall wait until you come to me."
"I ain't coming," announced the Dryad, and thereby disclosed her position, both actual and mental. "I suppose it's something I've done and I don't want to hear it, so there!" Then, her temper having been worn thin by much admonishing, she anticipated: "I ain't sorry I've been bad. I ain't ashamed to behave so when my mamma is sick in bed. And I don't care if you do tell my papa when he comes home to-night."
The intruding relative, discerning her, stopped and smiled. And the smile was as a banderilla to her niece's goaded spirit.
"Jiminy!" gasped that young person, "she's got a smile just like a teacher."
"Mary, dear," the intruder gushed, "God has sent you something."
The hickory flashed forth black and white and red. Mary stood upon the ground.
"Where are they?" she demanded.
"They?" repeated the lady. "There is only one."
"Why, I prayed for two. Which did he send?"
"Which do you think?" parried the lady. "Which do you hope it is?"
Even Mary's scorn was unprepared for this weak-mindedness. "The goat, of course," she responded curtly. "Is it the goat?"
"Goat!" gasped the scandalized aunt. "Goat! Why, God has sent you a baby sister, dear."
"A sister! a baby!" gasped Mary in her turn. "I don't need no sister. I prayed for a goat just as plain as plain. 'Dear God,' I says, 'please bless everybody, and make me a good girl, an' send me a goat an' wagon.' And they went an' changed it to a baby sister! Why, I never s'posed they made mistakes like that."
Crestfallen and puzzled she allowed herself to be led back to the darkened house where her grandmother met her with the heavenly substitute wrapped in flannel. And as she held it against the square and unresponsive bosom of her apron she realized how the "Bible gentleman" must have felt when he asked for bread and was given a stone.
During the weeks that followed, the weight of the stone grew heavier and heavier while the hunger for bread grew daily more acute. Not even the departure of interfering relatives could bring freedom, for the baby's stumpy arms bound Mary to the house as inexorably as bolts and bars could have done. She passed weary hours in a hushed room watching the baby, when outside the sun was shining, the birds calling, the apples waxing greener and larger, and the shining knights and ladies winding down to Camelot. She sat upon the porch, still beside the baby, while the river rippled, the wheatfields wimpled, and the cows came trailing down from the pasture, down from the upland pasture where the sentinel hickory stood and watched until the sun went down, and, one by one, the lights came out in distant Camelot. She listened for the light laughter of the ladies, the jingling of the golden armor, the swishing of the branches and of the waves. Listened all in vain, for Theodora, that gift of God, had powerful lungs and a passion for exercising them so that minor sounds were overwhelmed and only yells remained.
But the deprivation against which she most passionately rebelled was that of her father's society. Before the advent of Theodora she had been his constant companion. They were perfectly happy together, for the poet who at nineteen had burned to challenge the princes of the past and to mold the destinies of the future was, at twenty-nine, very nearly content to busy himself about the occurrences of the present and to edit a weekly paper in the town which had known and honored his father, and was proud of, if puzzled by, their well-informed debonair son. Even himself he sometimes puzzled. He knew that this was not to be his life's work, this chronicling of the very smallest beer, this gossip and friendliness and good cheer. But it served to fill his leisure and his modest exchequer until such time as he could finish his great tragedy and take his destined place among the writers of his time. Meanwhile, he told himself, with somewhat rueful humor, there was always an editor ready to think well of his minor poems and an audience ready to marvel at them, "which is more, my dear," he pointed out to his admiring wife, "than Burns could have said for himself—or Coleridge."
And when his confidence and his hopes flickered, as the strongest of hopes and confidence sometimes will, when his tragedy seemed far from completion, his paper paltry, and his life narrow, he could always look into his daughter's eyes and there find faith in himself and strength and sunny patience.
Formerly these fountains of perpetual youth had been beside him all the long days through. From village to village, from store to farm, they had jogged, side by side, in a lazy old buggy; he smoking long, silent pipes, perhaps, or entertaining his companion with tales and poems of the days of chivalry when men were brave and women fair and all the world was young. And, Mary, inthralled, enrapt, adoring her father, and seeing every picture conjured up by his sonorous rhythm or quaint phrase, was much more familiar with the deeds and gossip of King Arthur's court than with events of her own day and country.
So that while Mary, tied to the baby, yearned for the wide spaces of her freedom, Mr. Buckley, lonely in a dusty buggy, jogging over the familiar roads, thought longingly of a little figure in an irresponsible sunbonnet, and found it difficult to bear patiently with matronly neighbors, who congratulated him upon this arrangement, and assured him that his little play-fellow would now quickly outgrow her old-fashioned ways and become as other children, "which she would never have, Mr. Buckley, as long as you let her tag around with you and filled her head with impossible nonsense."
It was not a desire for any such alteration which made him acquiesce in the separation. It was a very grave concern for his wife's health, and a very sharp realization that, until he could devise some means of increasing his income, he could not afford to engage a more experienced nurse for the new arrival. He had no ideas of the suffering entailed upon his elder daughter. He was deceived, as was every one else, by the gentle uncomplainingness with which she waited upon Theodora, for whose existence she regarded herself as entirely to blame. Had she not, without consulting her parents, applied to high heaven for an increase in live stock, and was not the answer to this application, however inexact, manifestly her responsibility.
"They're awful good to me," she pondered. "They ain't scolded me a mite, an' I just know how they must feel about it. Mamma ain't had her health ever since that baby come, an' papa looks worried most to death. If they'd 'a' sent that goat an' wagon I could 'a' took mamma riding. Ain't prayers terrible when they go wrong!" And in gratitude for their forbearance she, erstwhile the companion, or at least the audience, of fealty knight and ladies, bowed her small head to the swathed and shapeless feet of heaven's error and became waiting woman to a flannel bundle.
Only her dreams remained to her. She could still look forward to the glorious time of "when I'm big." She could still unbind her dun-colored hair and shake it in the sun. She could still quiver with anticipation as she surveyed her brilliant future. A beautiful prince was coming to woo her. He would ride to the door and kneel upon the front porch while all his shining retinue filled the front yard and overflowed into the road. Then she would appear and, since these things were to happen in the days of her maturity, perhaps when she was twelve years old, she would be radiantly beautiful, and her hair would be all goldy gold and curly, and it would trail upon the ground a yard or two behind her as she walked. And the prince would be transfixed. And when he was all through being that—Mary often wondered what it was—he would arise and sing "Nicolette, the Bright of Brow," or some other disguised personality, while all his shining retinue would unsling hautboys and lyres and—and—mouth organs and play ravishing music.
And when she rode away to be the prince's bride and to rule his fair lands, her father and her mother should ride with her, all in the sunshine of the days "when I'm big"—the wonderful days "when I'm big."
Meanwhile, being but little, she served the flannel bundle even as Sir Beaumanis had served a yet lowlier apprenticeship. But she still stormed high heaven to rectify its mistake.
"And please, dear God, if you are all out of goats and wagons, send rabbits. But anyway come and take away this baby. My mamma ain't well enough to take care of it an' I can't spare the time. We don't need babies, but we do need that goat and wagon."
And the powers above, with a mismanagement which struck their petitioner dumb, sent a wagon—only a wagon—and it was a gocart for the baby, and Mary was to be the goat.
With this millstone tied about her neck she was allowed to look upon the scenes of her early freedom, and no inquisitor could have devised a more anguishing torture than that to which Mary's suffering and unsuspecting mother daily consigned her suffering and uncomplaining daughter.
"Walk slowly up and down the paths, dear, and don't leave your sister for a moment. Isn't it nice that you have somebody to play with now?"
"Yes, ma'am," said Mary. "But she ain't what I'd call playful."
"You used to be so much alone," Mrs. Buckley continued. Mary breathed sharply, and her mother kissed her sympathetically. "But now you always have your sister with you. Isn't it fine, dearie?"
"Yes, ma'am," repeated the victim, and bent her little energies to the treadmill task of wheeling the gocart to the orchard gate, where all wonders began, and then, with an effort as exhausting to the will as to the body, turning her back upon the lane, the river, and the sentinel tree, to trundle her Juggernaut between serried rows of cabbages and carrots.
Then slowly she began to hate, with a deep, abiding hatred, the flannel bundle. She loathed the very smell of flannel before Theodora was six short weeks old, and the sight of the diminutive laundry, which hung upon the line between the cherry trees, almost drove her to arson.
The shy, quick-darting creature—half child and half humming bird—was forced to drag that monstrous perambulator on all her expeditions. After a month's confinement to the garden, where knights and ladies never penetrate, she managed to bump her responsibility out into the orchard. But the glory was all in the treetops, and Mary soon grew restless under her mother's explicit directions. "Up and down the walks" meant imprisonment, despair. Theodora should have tried to make her role of Albatross as acceptable as it might be made to the long-suffering mariner about whose neck she hung, but she showed a callousness and a heartless selfishness which nothing could excuse. Mary would sometimes plead with all gentleness and courtesy for a few short moments' freedom.
"Theodora," she would begin, "Theodora, listen to me a minute," and the gift of God would make aimless pugilistic passes at her interlocutor.
"O Theodora, I'm awful tired of stayin' down here on the ground. Wouldn't you just as lieves play you was a mad bull an' I was a lady in a red dress?"
Theodora, after some space spent in apparent contemplation, would wave a cheerful acquiescence.
"An' then I'll be scared of you, an' I'll run away an' climb as high as anything in the hickory tree up there on the hill. Let's play it right now, Theodora. There's something I want to see up there."
Taking her sister's bland smile for ratification and agreement, Mary would set about her personification, shed her apron lest its damaged appearance convict her in older eyes, and speed toward her goal. But the mad bull's shrieks of protest and repudiation would startle every bit of chivalry for miles and miles around.
Several experiences of this nature taught Mary, that, in dealing with infants of changeable and rudimentary mind, honesty was an impossible policy and candor a very boomerang, which returned and smote one with savage force. So she stooped to guile and detested the flannel all the more deeply because of the state to which it was debasing an upright conscience and a high sense of honor.
At first her lapses from the right were all negative. She neglected the gift of God. She would abandon it, always in a safe and shady spot and always with its covers smoothly tucked in, its wabbly parasol adjusted at the proper angle, and always with a large piece of wood tied to the perambulator's handle by a labyrinth of elastic strings. These Mary had drawn from abandoned garters, sling shots, and other mysterious sources, and they allowed the wood to jerk unsteadily up and down, and to soothe the unsuspecting Theodora with a spasmodic rhythm very like the ministrations of her preoccupied nurse.
Meanwhile the nurse would be far afield upon her own concerns, and Theodora was never one of them. The river, the lane, the tall hickory knew her again and again. Camelot shone out across the miles of hill and tree and valley. But the river was silent and the lane empty, and Camelot seemed very far as autumn cleared the air. Perhaps this was because knights and ladies manifest themselves only to the pure of heart. Perhaps because Mary was always either consciously or subconsciously listening for the recalling shrieks of the abandoned and disprized gift of God.
"Stop it, I tell you," she admonished her purple-faced and convulsive charge one afternoon when all the world was gold. "Stop it, or mamma will be coming after us, and making us stay on the back porch." But Theodora, in the boastfulness of her new lungs, yelled uninterruptedly on. Then did Mary try cajolery. She removed her sister from the perambulator and staggered back in a sitting posture with suddenness and force. The jar gave Theodora pause, and Mary crammed the silence full of promise. "If you'll stop yellin' now I'll see that my prince husband lets you be a goose-girl on the hills behind our palace. Its awful nice being a goose-girl," she hastened to add lest the prospect fail to charm. "If I didn't have to marry that prince an' be a queen I guess I'd been a goose-girl myself. Yes, sir, it's lovely work on the hills behind a palace with all the knights ridin' by an' sayin', 'Fair maid, did'st see a boar pass by this way?' You don't have to be afraid—you'd never have to see one. In all the books the goose-girls didn't never see no boars, and the knights gave 'em a piece of gold an' smiled on 'em, and the sunshine shined on 'em, an' they had a lovely time."
Having stumbled into the road to peace of conscience, Mary trod it bravely and joyously. Theodora's future rank increased with the decrease of her present comfort, but her posts, though lofty and remunerative, were never such as would bring her into intimate contact with the person of the queen.
She was betrothed to the son of a noble, and very distant, house after an afternoon when the perambulator, ill-trained to cross-country work, balked at the first stone wall on the way to the old ladies' house. It was then dragged backward for a judicious distance and faced at the obstacle at a mad gallop. Umbrella down, handle up, wheels madly whirring, it was forced to the jump.
Again it refused, reared high into the air, stood for an instant upon its hind wheels and then fell supinely on its side, shedding its blankets, its pillows, and Theodora upon the cold, hard stones.
After that her rise was rapid, and the distance separating her from her sister's elaborate court more perilous and more beset with seas and boars and mountains and robbers. She was allowed to wed her high-born betrothed when she had been forgotten for three hours while Mary learned a heart-rending poem commencing, "Oh, hath she then failed in her troth, the beautiful maid I adore?" until even Miss Susan could only weep in intense enjoyment and could suggest; no improvement in the recitation.
On another occasion Mary was obliged to borrow the perambulator for the conveyance of leaves and branches with which to build a bower withal; and Theodora, having been established in unfortunate proximity to an ant hill, was thoroughly explored by its inhabitants ere her ministering sister realized that her cries and agitation were anything more than her usual attitude of protest against whatever chanced to be going on. By the time the bower was finished and the perambulator ready for its customary occupant that young person was in a position to claim heavy damages.
"Don't you care," said Mary cheerfully, as she relieved Theodora from the excessive animation. "I can make it up to you when I'm big. My prince husband—I guess he'd better be a king by that time—will go over to your country an' kill your husband's father an' his grandfather an' all the kings an' princes until there's nobody only your husband to be king. Then you'll be a queen you see, an' live in a palace. So now hush up." And one future majesty was rocked upside down by another until the royal face of the younger queen was purple and her voice was still.
Mary found it more difficult to quiet her new and painful agnosticism, and in her efforts to reconcile dogma with manifestation she evolved a series of theological and economical questions which surprised her father and made her mother's head reel. She further manifested a courteous attention when the minister came to call, and she engaged him in spiritual converse until he writhed again. For a space her investigations led her no whither, and then, without warning, the man of peace solved her dilemma and shed light upon her path.
A neighbor ripe in years and good works had died. The funeral was over and the man of God had stopped to rest in the pleasant shade of Mrs. Buckley's trees and in the pleasant sound of Mrs. Buckley's voice. Mary, the gocart, and Theodora completed the group, and the minister spoke.