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