FLOURED GLASS
Sesooā heard a sob. A frank sob that published the trouble of some
girl’s heart to the dunes and to the sea! And Sally did not know what to
do about it.
It was the first sob she had heard during the six weeks that the girls
of the Morning-Glory Camp Fire had been camping on the white Sugarloaf.
“Somebody is thinking that it’s nearly the end of August and that we’ll
be going back to the city pretty soon!” she surmised. “Oh-h, to be a
_seal_!” The golden spark in her eyes, the dancing firefly, lit out over
the waves and hovered above a sleek dog-like head, but larger than a
dog’s, appearing above the water some fifty yards from the white beach
on which she stood. “Oh, to be a harbor seal and stay here always to sun
oneself on a sands-pit in summer and in winter ride an ice-cake, as the
seals do! I was made to be a wild thing!” Her laughter rippled, clear
and low, like the ebbing tide, but she dammed it up lest it should
intrude upon the feeling betrayed by that other unaccountable sound
which she had just heard, coming from the farther side of a barrier of
rock that intersected the beach.
“I wonder, now, which of the girls it is?” she silently speculated. “Is
Kitty yearning for her orchard and the grunting society of Mary-Jane
Peg? But she seems so happy here among us! Yet, perhaps, the scare we
got three days ago upset her, when that big seal dived under our rowboat
and upset it, half-way up ’Loaf Creek! Oh, bubbles! that _was_ a bad
_spill_.” Here another low splash of laughter dropped its liquid notes
to mingle with the distant mirth of the tide, breaking far out, as
Sesooā, in thought, glanced past the rock-barrier, past some acres of
intervening dunes freshly swept by a southwesterly wind, at the winding
blue creek, Sugarloaf Creek, that crept in round the back of the
Sugarloaf Peninsula until it lost itself in the woods where the fat
Astronomer came to grief.
“Captain Andy says we were lucky to see a seal out of the water even at
the cost of a ducking,” she ruminated further, “and that we, probably,
wouldn’t have done so at all if that great big fellow, weighing a couple
of hundred pounds or so, hadn’t gone far up the creek after the ‘feed,’
meaning the huge eel that he was devouring, half out of water, when we
rowed round a marshy bend right on to him.... Goodness! of all the
‘mix-ups’ then! I’ll never forget it!” The last words formed themselves
aloud in her laughter-filled throat. “Six of us girls struggling in the
water! Sybil and Kitty an’ Betty up to their necks although ’Loaf Creek
is shallow! And that big, spotted harbor seal which bumped into us and
capsized us, just making for the creek’s mouth as hard as he could swim!
I guess he knew where the deep water was, all right!”
She stood gazing out at the receding tide, seeing again the sleek head
of the capsizing mammal as he put for the open water, the tidal channel,
doubtless, vowing by the shades of his ancestors, the tidal tadpoles,
that he would never be caught up a narrow creek again by a boat-load of
shrieking girls.
“I hardly think it’s Kitty who is sorrowful or ‘peeved’ over something.”
Sally was conscious of the thought which crowded out the seal as another
low, gulping noise, mysteriously like a sob, came from the other side of
the crusted barrier of rock. “That doesn’t sound like Kitty, either!”
She put her ear to the crusty rock-heart. “Kitty Sill behaved as well as
any of us all through the ducking in the creek—our wildest adventure as
yet—all she said when it was over and we were safe in the boat again
was: ‘Will you tell Mary-Jane Peg that I was brave?’ She’s simply
_killing_ with her talk about that pedigreed pig! She’s the funniest
little thing! And Jessica vowed she’d make a special call on
Mary-Jane.... Oh, _gracious_!” Sally’s hands came softly together upon a
flame of dismay that scorched their palms. “Good gracious, I do believe
it’s Jessica, herself—Morning-Glory, if you please—who’s having a quiet
cry ‘all by her lonely’! And she’s the most popular girl in camp.”
The camp favorite, the most popular girl, had, nevertheless, if sounds
could be trusted, a pent-up trouble of some kind which she wasn’t
withholding from the sea; there was a restless movement on the other
side of the rock as if somebody rolled over on the sands, followed by a
lonely, grieved sobbing that appealed to the ebbing tide for comfort.
Now, all at once, impulsive Sally was filled with a jealousy of that
low-ebb tide for being chosen as a confidant; she would have liked to
thrust it farther out still. Before she knew what she was doing this
feeling and another, overwhelming curiosity, spread wide their wings and
wafted her lightly over the rock-barrier.
She descended with a pounce upon the other side and immediately began to
flutter and cackle inarticulately, like a hen in a flowerbed.
The patch of white beach beyond the rock-fence was fairly abloom with
colored articles which attracted the scanty sunshine that, to-day, was
having a tilt with the ruffling southwesterly wind as to which should
rule the weather.
One sunbeam poked his finger inquisitively among the small blocks of
paint in a box of water-colors lying open upon the sands. Another
slanted his eye like an amused connoisseur at a sheet of cardboard
pinned down by a chunk of pale driftwood and bearing a crude, very
highly colored painting of blue water between dauby green marsh-banks
and of a boat being upset by some fabulous sea-monster that was
apparently trying to climb into it.
Sally jumped to the conclusion that this was meant for a kind of
“colored supplement” comic illustration of the accident which had
happened in ’Loaf Creek, on which her thoughts had lately been dwelling,
for the seal had the ears of a jackass and claws an inch long upon his
fore-flippers which grappled the side of the boat.
She cackled exceedingly at sight of it and shuffled in the sand, like
the hen who has found not colors only, but something fruitful, also, in
the bed of bloom.
Then she caught her breath with an amazed start, like Captain Andy’s
when he saw the same sort of thing; a third sunbeam was surveying
himself under difficulties in a sheet of glass about the size of a small
window-pane, which looked as if it had been floured over, dulled and
whitened by a very watery paste of some kind.
“Gee whiz!” exclaimed Sally who thought that she had eschewed slang with
Penelope before her eyes as a horrible example. “What are you doing with
the pane of glass, Jessica dearie, mixing biscuits on it?” with a low
explosion of laughter.
“No-o,” mumbled the owner of the flowerbed who, with face averted from
the intruder, looked rather like a glossy, green shrub trained and
clipped into fantastic shape, of the style which, once upon a time,
presided over old-fashioned gardens; for her sweater of dark green wool
and her Camp Fire Girl’s Tam O’Shanter finished with an emerald pompon
matched in hue her olive-green khaki skirt—all of which apparently
failed to create a verdant atmosphere of spring in her young heart at
present.
“Are you trying cookery experiments on the glass?” laughed Sesooā, much
mystified and excitingly tickled by curiosity, for her roving gaze now
took in among the litter of articles on the sands a little earthenware
crock with a paste that looked like very thin, dyspeptic dough in it.
“Olive—Blue Heron—says that her father used to declare that her cookery
ought to be tried upon the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals before human beings were allowed to partake of it—that was
before she became a Camp Fire Girl—but you’re testing it on the pane of
glass. Why! Jess—Jessica—Morning-Glory—I didn’t mean to tease you,
honey; you’re not _peeved_ with me for finding you here all alone and
feeling blue, are you?” Sesooā flung herself upon her knees on the
wind-ruffled sand and slipped an arm around the green shoulders of her
Camp Fire Sister whose breast was again ploughed by random sobs.
Sally—the little oriole of the city playground—was gay in throat and
inquisitive as that orange-and-black songster, but she was wonderfully
soft of heart, too; she bit her lip and puckered up her eye-corners,
determined that, if she could help it, a Camp Fire Sister should not
weep alone any more than she should stand alone.
Then in the space of one long breath her working face was smoothed out
as if an electric iron passed over it. Her glance had fallen again upon
the dauby comic picture of the blue creek and the boat with half-formed
human figures, some of which were being wildly shot into the air by a
dragon-like seal.
“Ha! you were painting _that_—our ducking in ’Loaf Creek—for little
Rebecca, weren’t you?” Caressingly she dropped her chin upon the green
heave of Morning-Glory’s shoulders. “You’re going to send it to her, eh?
But surely you’re not crying about her? She probably doesn’t realize
that she’s deaf-and-dumb, different from other children. And you’ve done
so much for her, dearie, saving her life and all—the Eagle Scout only
came in on the tail-end of the rescue. And you can do more when we go
back to the city.”
“Oh! what d’you take me for? F-Fudge! I’m not crying about her—I’m not
so—so soft—what earthly g-good would it do her?”
The Morning-Glory’s broken accents were snappish, scraping against a
rasp within.
“Well! you needn’t eat me up for suggesting it.” Sally withdrew her chin
and made a face at the green shoulders whose back was still toward her.
“I’m going away if you’re as cross as a thorn!”
“I wish to goodness you would! No, I _don’t_! Come here, Sally!” Jessica
stretched out a hand as the other girl rose to her feet. “I don’t mean
to be raspy and snappy; I have tried to live up to the Camp Fire law all
the time we’ve been here, to ‘Be happy!’ I oughtn’t to say that, for it
didn’t really take any ‘trying’—I have been! But every one of the rest
of you girls have a home to go back to—when this—this jolly camping-time
is over. I haven’t!”
“Haven’t you a home with the Deerings, with Olive and Sybil and their
awfully rich father—and your Cousin Anne?”
“Olive heard, to-day, from her father that he’s going to be married
again in the fall; Sybil doesn’t know it yet; she only told me. Olive is
away off on a sand-hill, now, making up her mind to be lovely to the new
stepmother because she thinks that’s what her own mother would have her
do. But”—a long-drawn gasp—“perhaps the new wife won’t want Cousin Anne
or me in the house—me, anyway, as I’m no relation at all to the
Deerings.”
“Pshaw, I’ll bet she’ll be delighted to have you! If not, Cousin Anne
and you can live together.”
“Cousin Anne hasn’t enough money to support herself, much less me! She
had, but she lost most of it a few years ago by the failure of a mining
company in which she had invested largely. She had just enough left for
‘pin money’, as Mr. Deering, who’s her cousin, told her; so he offered
her a home in his house to be a kind of mother to his daughters and
superintend their education. Then”—another long gasp shaking the
moss-green shoulders—“then when the friend of Mother’s who took me in
after my mother died nearly two years and a half ago—(I used to help her
with her housework, this friend, and call her ‘Auntie’ though she wasn’t
any relation, either), when she had to go to China with her husband,
Cousin Anne was so worried, not knowing what was to become of me, that
Mr. Deering, to please her, I suppose, invited me on a visit to his home
for a year, or a year and a half, until I get through high school....
But oh!—oh! it’s hard for a girl like me to lose _both_ father and
mother—not to belong to anybody—really.”
Yet, even as her lips quivered upon this climax of her sorrow,
Morning-Glory sat deliberately up, exposing her face to Sally’s voice,
and gazed off at the far-out tide which the ever-quickening
southwesterly wind was ruffling with a prophecy of squalls and rain,
determined not to make a scene here on the cloudy sands as she did in
the Deerings’ library under the glamor of that painted window where the
young monk pored over a parchment book.
But the association of _then_ and now presently made her chin tremble
again; blindly she caught at Sally’s hand.
“You—you were laughing at my pasty sheet of glass,” she gasped. “But
this morning, when I got thinking how, in ten days, now, we’ll leave
these lovely Sugarloaf dunes, go back to the city and to school, to hard
work, studying, I felt that if—if I could only study along the lines
Father had picked out for me, I wouldn’t mind _quite_ so much—that it
would seem to bring me nearer to him and to my mother, too.”
“What did he want you to do?”
“He had it all planned before he died three years ago that I was to take
up _his_ work—study art and design—become an artist. He thought I could
by an’ by earn my living, as he did, by getting into the designing-room
connected with some big stained-glass works where they turn out
beautiful painted windows.... He”—breathlessly—“he said I had just the
same love of color that he had. And I have! I have!” passionately. “When
I wake early and watch a dawn here over the river and those opposite
white dunes, I feel it—feel it in my very toes!” curling up those
tingling members.
“Ha-a!” Sesooā laughed shortly, but it wasn’t a mirthful chuckle; the
firefly was snuffed out in her eyes, the golden sparkle that lent such
life to them.
“And why can’t you become an artist—or a designer—look forward to
earning your living in that way?” she gravely asked.
“Oh, because I’ve no money, not a dollar, not a cent!” shiveringly. “And
I should have _some_ in order to educate me properly; I’d have to take a
long art course in some School of Design—or Institute——”
“But if you were to tell Olive—her father is so rich!”
“Sally! Do you think I want to ‘sponge’ on them? No, I’ll just have to
work ever so hard when we go back to the city, finishing out my course
in the Commercial High School, learning to be an expert typist, so that
I can earn my living as a stenographer. Other girls _like_ that—the
noisy room with fifty typewriters going together—I don’t!”
“Every one to his taste! I’d prefer it to painting on glass. Were you
trying to do that this morning?” glancing at the befloured pane.
“Yes, father used to prepare the glass first by rubbing it with lime (I
hadn’t any lime) and then spreading the thinnest layer of common paste
over it; when that dried he’d lay the sheet of glass over the paper
design which he had already painted and outline the design in
pencil—make a cartoon, as he said—on the glass. I was just trying my
hand on common glass”—whimsically—“thinking how it would be if some day
I could paint a design for a beautiful Camp Fire Girls’ colored window.”
Slowly Morning-Glory raised the dulled glass and gave a glimpse of a
crudely painted design underneath, which yet showed original talent; the
figure of a Camp Fire Girl in a ceremonial dress and pearly head-band,
her feet poised upon cloud-billows that looked very like ethereal
footballs at the present stage of the crude design; over her glowed what
was meant to be a sunburst, in one hand was a variegated flower, a
morning-glory, in the other an unrolling scroll intended to bear the
magic watchword, “Wohelo!”
“Oh! I think it’s lovely. Oh! aren’t you clever? You ought to get a
National Honor from Headquarters for even thinking out such a thing,”
effervesced Sally. “Oh! I wish you could ‘cut’ the typewriters and do
what you want to do. Haven’t you any relatives on your father’s side
who’d help you out?”
“No; his only sister died when she was young; there are just some
cousins who have large families of their own.” Jessica laid down the
pasty pane of glass, too cloudily dulled to be ever painted on
successfully.
Suddenly Sesooā skipped to her feet and began kicking at the pale sands
like an explorer.
“_O dear!_” she gasped, trying to be funny, and failing, “why can’t what
the Kullibígan guessing-top promised come true and some of us dig up a
fortune from the sands?”
“Not much likelihood of that! Besides the fortune-telling top was so
divided in its spinning mind about who was to find it!” Morning-Glory
laughed chokingly.
“And aren’t there any other living relatives of your mother’s?”
“Yes, one—my dear, handsome great-gran’father in the old miniature!” The
speaker dimpled through the tear-stains on her cheeks, her voice rocked
between a sob and a song, her white teeth flashed at the dead-low tide
which was just on the turn and thinking of flowing back again. “_He’s_
alive to me! I wish I had brought the ivory miniature down here with me;
then you girls would have fallen in love with him in his blue coat and
brass buttons—he has the _livingest_, merriest smile—the miniature was
painted when he was a very young man; he was over forty when he was
drowned, sticking to his ship and one helpless passenger to the last,
while most of the crew tried to escape in boats.”
“I should think you’d like to go over to the old town of Newburyport
where you told me he once lived and see it—it’s not so awfully far from
here by motor-boat and train.”
At this Jessica winced again; such a longing had been in her breast all
summer, but she was a loyal, loving girl who hated to draw more than was
necessary on Cousin Anne’s resources while in camp and even a
forty-mile, roundabout journey would cost something.
“My great-grandfather, Captain Josiah Dee, only sailed out of
Newburyport and down the Merrimac River, over the sand-bar at its mouth,
when his ship, _The Wave Queen_, was simply ‘ballasted,’ so Mother told
me; then he’d make a long trip to the West Indies and when he came back
heavily loaded—or the ship was—he’d put into Baltimore or New York,—some
big seaport! He made a good deal of money, but spent nearly all of it;
his wife died in 1839 and the next year he went away on his last voyage;
before he came back his only son, my grandfather, heard a rumor of gold
in California and started off there to make a fortune, taking only the
miniature in a wooden case that he made for it and a little old Bible
with him.”
“Did he make a fortune?”
“No, he never got farther than the Isthmus of Panama; it was so hard to
reach the Pacific Coast in those days. He was sick after landing on the
Isthmus and stayed there a long time. Any letters that may have been
sent never reached him. At last he got back to America, to New York, and
there heard that _The Wave Queen_ had been wrecked on her last voyage
and every one aboard her, captain and crew, lost.”
“Ugh-h! he must have felt bad then,” came softly from Sesooā.
“He did. He drew out a little money that my great-grandfather had
deposited in a New York bank in his son’s name and his own, and took
ship right away for England where _his_ grandparents had come from. But
he must have been restless,” meditatively; “he came back to America
again, just after the Civil War, settled in the South and married quite
late in life; my mother was his only child.... Always he kept the old
miniature for which he had a leather case made and, oh! I’m so glad he
did.” The Morning-Glory’s lip quivered again, but the moisture in her
eyes sparkled. “Whenever I look at it, I feel that, whatever happens, I
just must be as ‘game’ as my great-gran’daddy who was a hero, by all
accounts, and saved as many lives as Captain Andy did. Perhaps he, too,
sang Captain Andy’s old sea-song about ‘when perils gather round’:
“‘We sing a little and laugh a little
And work a little and play a little
And fiddle a little and foot it a little,
As bravely as we can!
As bravely as we can!’
And that’s what I’m going to do even among a storm of typewriters!”
“Yes, and you have ten whole days yet before you need think about facing
that storm! And picture the fun we’re going to have in the meantime!”
Sally crowed over the cheering prospect. “Think of the Grand Council
Fire meeting which our Guardian is arranging, when we’re to meet and
have a picnic with two other Camp Fire tribes of this region, the
Granite Shore Tribe and the Twin-Light Tribe.”
“It’s the Twin-Light Tribe, who take their name from the twin
lighthouses on Thatcher’s Island, who want to give a party in our honor,
next week, at an hotel on the mainland and invite some of the Boy
Scouts, too, from their camp on the dunes, across the river.” Jessica’s
eyes shone now between her red eyelids like twin-lights waking up.
“Then, indeed, we’ll all ‘foot it a little’ in the old-fashioned
dances—as bravely as we can!”
“Yes—and, Jessica honey!” Sesooā crept close to her Camp Fire Sister,
her voice a loving croon. “If the new Mrs. Deering shouldn’t really want
you to stay on in the Deering Mansion, as it’s called, why! you can come
to us—Father an’ Mother would love to have you—for a long visit. They’re
so dear!” with a yearning quaver in the voice. “Our home isn’t grand
like the Deerings’—but——”
“But ‘your heart’s right there,’ isn’t it?”
The two girls clung together upon the cloudy beach while the rising
southwester footed it round them.