responsibility of her. Her father wants her to read a little history
every day, and this is the best time--it's too hot for anything
else."
"Rather hot for history, dear?"
"It's not too hot for the Moonstone, I notice! She's been at that
since breakfast, steadily. Not a word for any one."
"'Moonstone' sounds cool, anyhow," drawled the contralto
appeasingly.
"Oh, Edith! You're as bad as the child herself!"
"She's fourteen, dear."
"Fourteen! What is that?"
"Anything but a child, when it's you, Sis. You talk to her as if she
were ten."
"You'd think she was, if you saw her riding that donkey--a great
girl like her!"
"There it is, dear! One moment she's a baby, the next she's a great
girl! It's hard on her, Sis."
"But, Edith--that donkey!"
"Poor Rose-Marie! I rode him myself--bareback and standing up!--when
I was fifteen--at a circus. Do you remember?"
The voice chuckled unwillingly. "You always were a tomboy, Deedee!
Do you remember Joe's bull fight?"
[Illustration: Caroline was not a hundred yards away, sheltering
under a heavy arbor vitæ, flat on her stomach.]
"And the lemonade stand!" Contralto cried, with a rich swoop of
laughter. Their voices took up a happy canon of gold memories; there
were no more cries for Caroline.
She was not a hundred yards away from the sister aunts, sheltering
under a heavy arbor vitæ, flat on her stomach, her nose glued to the
reprehensible Moonstone: that she had heard the calls and resented
them the scowl between her eyebrows exhibited. Behind her, patiently
at graze, a small, mouse-colored donkey stood, shifting a pair of
quaint panniers from side to side and wagging his scarlet ear
tassels thoughtfully.
The chapter ended, Caroline rose, peered across to the piazza,
nodded to herself at the flow of voices and shrugged her shoulders.
"Good old Aunt Deedee!" she muttered, "she choked her off! Now, for
heaven's sake, don't bray, Rose-Marie, and perhaps we can get away.
I wouldn't dare get over to the house for a luncheon; we'll have to
get along with sweet-boughs."
She slipped the book into one pannier, a cushion into the other
and threw a worn steamer rug over the little beast's back;
Caroline was a luxurious lounger and rarely traveled without
her sumpter mule and his impedimenta. She led him with practiced
quiet away from the house and paused under the gnarled old
sweet-bough tree: the greenish-yellow, almost translucent globes
dotted the lush, warm grass, their languorous sweet filled the
air. Selecting a dozen thoughtfully, she added them to the
donkey's load, and they went on at a foot pace, through the
slowly reddening Baldwins and seek-no-furthers, the tiny
lady-apples and the king-of-Tompkins-counties, through the
belt of dead, warped fruit trees, blighted and gray--"like
those Doré pictures," she murmured to Rose-Marie--down three,
crumbling brick steps, where the little fellow picked his way
as daintily as a careful lady, and across the dusty road into
a pasture trail that led to a wood stretch, sparse at first,
thicker as one plunged in deeper. The sun filtered through in
delicious diamonds; here and there a resinous pine, steeped in
heat, threw out a cloud of balmy odor; a chipmunk scuttered
across their path, clicking nervously, only to squat on his
haunches and stare beadily at Rose-Marie, taut with quivering
curiosity. Caroline scowled at him.
"Rise of the Dutch Republic!" she muttered angrily. "I think not!"
The chipmunk winked sympathetically.
"Your father says it's as interesting as any novel" (with startling
mimicry of the piazza voice). "I notice _they_ don't read it!"
The chipmunk's place was empty; only a slight stir among the leaves
marked his path.
Caroline's eyes widened, grew dreamy. She leaned her sharp elbows on
Rose-Marie's hairy back and threw her weight on him thoughtfully: he
checked and stood like a table.
"Do you suppose there really are regular roads through the trees,
like the monkeys took Mowgli on?" she queried.
Rose-Marie waved his long, hairy ears meditatively, but said
nothing.
"I don't mean in any fairy way," she explained hastily, "but just
scientifically. It might be. Corners and turns and short-cuts--why
not? they all know them. He may be running home by a back way, now,
to call his children to look at Rose-Marie; it's as good as a whole
circus parade to them, I suppose. And they talk to each other...."
Held in a muse, she leaned against the donkey; the moments slipped
by. She lost all count of time. Her eyes stared emptily at some
sunny flicker, some dappled pattern of leaf work; her ears were
filled with the forest drone, the mysterious murmur made up of so
many nameless instruments that only the Great Conductor can classify
and number them. Time ceased to be.
At length she woke with a start, shook herself coltishly, and they
pushed on. The wood grew thicker; now and then Rose-Marie had to
force his way along the tiny trail; his red tassels caught on the
twigs.
"I'll tell you what," Caroline began, suddenly, "I'm going to try
that wood track to-day and see where it goes, to the very end. It
must go somewhere. Where do they haul the wood from, if there isn't
some place at the end? Come on, Rose-Marie!"
At a point where the trail forked she led the donkey along the wider
and less interesting way. It was ridged and rutty, and Rose-Marie
sniffed disgustedly as he slipped among the gnarled roots; the
apples bumped and slid in the pannier. After a while Caroline
stopped under a tree, ate three of the apples, gave the donkey two,
and resting in an artfully constructed nest of rug and pillow,
dipped refreshingly into the Moonstone.
"That's a kind of luncheon," she remarked philosophically, "and now
we'll start again. I'll go to the end of this, if it takes all day!"
They settled down to a dogged pace and after an hour, during which
the wood grew thinner by imperceptible degrees, found themselves on
a relatively easy track that forked suddenly into a genuine country
road, stretching far to left and right of them. It was a new country
to Caroline; she found no landmarks whatever. The road glared with
heat, the dust was powdery, the shade nowhere, once they had cleared
the wood. She sighed with fatigue and emptiness; it seemed a long
pull, and the harbor far from worth the voyage, when all was said
and done.
"What _did_ we want to get to this nasty hot road for, Rose-Marie?"
she cried pettishly, shifting from one long leg to the other,
shrugging a nervous, bony shoulder. "Oh, what's the sense of
anything, anyway?"
Rose-Marie turned a patient, clear brown eye toward her and shook
his head vaguely. Gnats buzzed about his flexible ears, and with a
swishing fanning motion he displaced them.
"If my back aches," she warned him callously, "you'll have to take
me home, you know! Tired or not. It feels as if it might, any
minute. I never used to get tired, this way."
A half mile along the road, set off to the left, among cool trees
and behind a great well sweep, she perceived suddenly a white farm
house. It stood alone, neighborless and well up on a drained,
southerly slope; smoke rose languidly from one of its chimneys.
"Perhaps they'll give us some milk, Rose-Marie," said Caroline, "and
farms usually have cookies. If there are any children there, you can
give 'em rides to pay for it!"
Rose-Marie nodded and they went on with some spirit. As they turned
into the deep front yard Caroline almost wept with comfort and a
pathetic sense of the wayworn wanderer on the edge of home and
rest, so the place breathed of these. Clear and white with the faded
whiteness of old New England white shingles, it drowsed under its
elms; a fire of nasturtiums smoldered along the broken, flagged path
that led to it; phlox and "Bouncing Bets" crowded up among the once
formal bed of larkspur on each side the sagging flagstone steps,
beneath the simple entrance porch. Old-fashioned green paper shades
hung evenly half way down the clean windows; the door stood
hospitably ajar.
"Just wait there, Rose-Marie, till I find out about things," said
Caroline, tapping lightly on the door. The house was perfectly
silent. She tapped again, and it seemed that something heavy moved
across the floor in a farther room, but there was no answer. Pushing
the door open gently, she stepped in and stood surprised, for she
found herself not in the stiff, unused country "parlor" she had
expected, but a neat bedroom. A quaint four-poster with a fluted
valance, a polished mahogany chest of drawers, a stand by the bed
with a Bible worn to a soft gray and a night lamp on it, some faded
photographs tacked to the white walls--this was an odd reception
room. She hesitated, and again the faint rumbling sound pointed to
some person stirring and she went into the next room.
Here was a clean, kindly kitchen of the best; a swept floor, a
freshly blackened cooking stove, a row of bright tins. It was
carpeted with faded oilcloth, but rag rugs, washed dim and
soft-toned, lay here and there, and the room was so large that the
spread table, standing in an ell, made only a pleasant episode in
it, a certainty of restoring food at needful times.
It was evidently a sitting room as well, in the primitive, clear
fashion that groups all domestic life about the central fire that
feeds it; a stand with books, a sewing basket, oil lamps for evening
reading, all not too far from brick-shaped pans where unmistakable
bread rose under a clean, folded, red cloth. The whole place seemed
waiting, quietly, hospitably waiting, for just such an empty,
discouraged pilgrim as Caroline.
She sank gratefully into a high-backed arm-chair, stuffed to just
the hollow of her tired back, covered with a clean, homely
patchwork, and drew out the faithful Moonstone from under her elbow.
"Someone'll come soon," she assured herself, and slipped into the
story as a hot swimmer slips off his sunny rock into the waiting
blue. Another world, a delicious, smooth element--Romance
itself--received her, and of hunger and heat, thirst and the fatigue
of the road, she knew no more than the blessed dead themselves....
A sharp tap at the farther door disturbed her, and instinctively she
called, "Come in!"
A swift, swishing step brushed across the bedroom and a slender,
angry-eyed young woman poised like a gull before her.
"Can I get something to eat here?"
Her voice was at once imperious, irritated, unsure of itself. It
could not be that the owner of this voice, dressed with that
insolent simplicity that need not consider the costly patience of
the work-women, ringed like a dowager with great audacious squares
of ruby and white diamond, booted and hatted as one who wears and
throws away, with a bag of golden mesh on her wrist to pay the
price of any whim--it could not be that she doubted what answer she
should receive. And yet she did--did, and had before this: so much
was evident at first sight. She was a curious gypsyish type, for all
her _Rue de la Paix_ curvings and slim, inevitable folds and pleats;
a full, drooping mouth in a slender dark face, great brown eyes and
heavy waves of black hair. She looked discontented and ready to make
some one suffer for it.
"Well--can I?" she repeated, as Caroline stared. "I'm ready to pay,
of course."
"I don't know--I don't live here," said Caroline shortly. She felt
untidy and badly dressed beside this graceful thing standing in a
faint cloud of subtle perfume of her own; her sleeves were too short
and her heavy shoes knobby and worn. She wanted furiously to smell
sweet like that; and the golden bag--oh, to feel it, powerful and
careless, on her wrist!
"Can you find out?" said the girl, eyeing the room attentively; "my
car broke down--the man left it in the road and went to Ogdenville
for gasoline. I've got to rest somewhere."
"I don't know anything about it," Caroline said coldly. "I'm waiting
for someone to come, myself. There's nobody here. I don't live here
at all."
With that, and because she was embarrassed and cross and hungry, she
opened her book ostentatiously and affected to read busily. The girl
frowned angrily a moment, then gave a foreign little shrug of her
shoulder and settled herself in a low rocking chair near the bread,
her hands loose in her lap. The old clock ticked reprovingly through
the hot and conscious silence of the room, but there was no other
sound. Caroline could not have lifted her eyes to save her life, and
the older girl's lips curled scornfully: her eyelids were sullen.
After a few moments of this intolerable stillness the same low
rumbling sound was heard again, this time moving nearer. Something
was advancing to the kitchen from a farther room, and as they looked
instinctively at the door it pushed open slowly and a sort of foot
rest upon wheels appeared; two large wheels followed, and a woman
pushed her chair into the kitchen. She was a large, good-looking
woman, middle-aged, and not weak, evidently, for she managed her
chair easily with one hand; the other held a slice of pink ham on a
white platter in her lap. Her face, under a placid parting of
grayish fair hair, was rather high colored than of an invalid
pallor, her chest broad and deep, her blue eyes at once kind and
keen. She wore a neat dress of dark-blue print with a prim,
old-fashioned linen collar and a blue bow, a white apron around her
plump waist almost covered the patchwork quilt that wrapped her from
the hips down: a shell comb showed slightly above her crisp hair. As
she faced her two angry guests a smile of unmistakable sincerity and
delight greeted them.
"Well, of all things!" she cried eagerly; "how long, 'you been
here?"
Caroline waited sulkily for her social superior; the girl was
undoubtedly a "young lady." Her errand was soon explained, her
question asked.
"Something to eat?" echoed their delighted hostess. "Well, I should
think so! I'm just getting my dinner. Of course I'm all alone, this
time o' day, but I always say if I'm good enough to cook it well,
I'm good enough to eat it comfortable, and I sit down to table
just's if the family was all here. There's some that believe in a
bite and a bit, when the men folks are out, but I never did. And
then--" she blushed shyly like a girl--"I always want to feel ready
in case anyone should come. Just in case. He says it's foolishness,
but look at you two, now! How'd I feel if I wasn't prepared! And
once--in April, 'twas--a sewing-machine man came. I had ham then,
too."
She beamed on them, frankly overjoyed in their company, and in the
mellow warmth of that honest pleasure the fog and anger in the room
rolled back like mist under a noon sun, and Caroline unbent, named
herself, and mentioned her donkey and their woodland journey.
"You don't say!"
Quick as a flash their hostess was across the room and peering
through the window.
"Well, of all the funny little fellows! I never saw one before, that
I remember. Aren't those red tossels neat, though! I s'pose he's
tame?"
Caroline put him through his paces, as he came like a dog at her
call, and she of the wheel chair applauded like a child at a Punch
and Judy.
"We saw so many of those in Italy," said the older girl. "I rode one
in the Alps."
The woman's face flushed a deep, quick red; she gripped the arms of
her chair and stared at the nervous little jeweled creature before
her as if she were a vision of the night.
"Have you been to Italy?" she cried eagerly, "not really!"
"Me? Oh, yes, I've been all over Europe," said the girl
indifferently. "Why? Do you like it?"
Now it was the woman who echoed, "Me?"
She flashed a whimsical look at Caroline; instinct taught her that
they were two to one, here.
"Why, dear, I've never been out of Lockwood's Corners in my life!"
Simple, rude incredulity pushed out the girl's lip.
"Nonsense!" she said brusquely, "that's ridiculous!"
"Maybe it is," her hostess answered quietly, "but it's true, all the
same. I never have." Gold-bag did not blush for her rudeness, for
the simple reason that she did not realize it, and Caroline suddenly
felt less embarrassed by her. Girls of that age were too old to talk
so pettishly to people not in their own families, and she twiddled
her fingers too much, anyway, and stared too much, or else, again,
she didn't look at one enough.
"You've been to New York, haven't you?" she asked abruptly.
"Never," said the woman. "I've been this way since I was seventeen.
I'm a pretty heavy woman, you know, and they couldn't put me on a
train very well. So--"
"There's plenty of room in a drawing-room car."
"I guess we couldn't afford that," said the woman simply.
There was an awkward pause; Caroline blushed furiously. How horrid
it all was! But their hostess brushed it away in a moment.
"And here you are hungry!" she cried; "the idea! I'll get this ham
right on and fry up some potatoes--I'll do them French! I've got
some fresh raised-doughnuts--I got the prize for them at the county
fair, years ago, so I know they're all right--and some summer apple
sauce; 'tain't much, with summer apples, but I put in lemon peel and
a taste o' last year's cider--it makes a relish, anyhow; and I've
got some fine sweet-pickled watermelon rind. I could have had sponge
cakes, if I'd only known! Would you care to try a cut pie? The
sewing-machine man said he hadn't tasted anything like my squash pie
in years. It was cut, too."
With incredible swiftness she rolled from table to buttery, from
stove to larder. As the pink ham curled and sputtered in its savory
juices, she turned an earnest face to the girl who watched her
curiously.
"Can't you tell us a little about Italy, while we're waiting?" she
begged.
"It's full of fleas," said the traveler carelessly, "and moldy old
places--it's awfully cold, too. I wore my furs a lot of the time. It
smells bad nearly everywhere. Do you stay here in the winter, too?"
"I've stayed here forty-five winters"--she turned the ham
capably--"and I expect to stay as many more as the Lord spares my
life! I was born here. So was father. Grandfather was born right in
the Corners. In eighty-eight we were snowed up a week here. Mr.
Winterpine--that's my husband--had bronchitis, and he couldn't get
out to tend to the stock. Edgar--that was the hired man's name--was
only twenty, and I had to help with one of the cows; I went out in
my chair through a snow tunnel!"
She chuckled reminiscently and her guests listened, fascinated.
"We were caught in a bad storm outside of St. Petersburg, once,"
Gold-bag volunteered. "If it hadn't been for J. G. we'd have gone
out, probably. As it was, the driver lost a finger."
"St. Petersburg, Russia?" the woman inquired respectfully, her
skillet full of potatoes colored like autumn beech leaves.
The girl nodded. "J. G. swore at the man, so he didn't _dare_ die,"
she continued, with a hard little grin; "and we just about pulled
through."
"Who is J. G.?" asked Caroline abruptly.
"J. G. Terwilliger," she answered simply. It was as if one had said
"Edward Seventh" or "Adelina Patti" or "P. T. Barnum."
"Who's he?"
"He's my father, for one thing. I suppose you know who he is as well
as anybody else."
"I never heard of him," Caroline said carelessly, "are you all
ready, now, Mrs. Winterpine?"
"He is the greatest mining expert in the world," the girl declared
emphatically, "and I don't know where you've lived not to know it.
You--" with a look at the woman, "you know him, of course?"
"I don't know anybody of that name, no," the woman admitted; "but
then, you know, we don't know much, 'way off here, about city
people."
"There hasn't been a daily paper for ten days that hasn't had his
name in it," the girl remarked dryly.
Mrs. Winterpine wiped her face, flanked the ham with the potatoes,
assembled an incredible array of sweets and relishes in odd, thick
little glass dishes, and with a wave of her hand indicated her
guests' places.
"We take the _Lockwood's Corners Clarion_," she explained
pacifically.
They addressed themselves to the meal, a strange trio. Caroline,
usually a hopeless chatterbox, fell somehow and inevitably into the
listener's seat. Their hostess could no longer be denied: her thirst
gleamed in her eyes, and flesh and blood could not have withstood
her plea for tidings of those distant, rosy lands whose laden
wharves she could never see, nor ever glimpse their tiled roofs
under foreign sunsets, their white spires beneath mysterious moons.
Their clothes: was it true that the French wore wooden shoes? She
had read that men in Italy walked in gay capes, colored like birds.
Was there water in the streets, and were boats really their
carriages? Did soldiers, red-coated, demand passports? Had her guest
seen the snow tops of green slopes? Did dogs drag milk carts for
white-capped women?
The girl, sulky at first, yielded finally, and in quick, nervous
phrases poured out of her full budget. Taken from her convent
school in California at fifteen, she had roamed the world with the
tireless "J. G." From Panama to Alaska, from Cairo to Christiania,
with her uncreased Paris frocks and the discontented line between
her dark eyes, she had steamed and sailed and ridden; she had
ridden a camel in Algeria, a gelding in Hyde Park, a broncho
on the Western plains.
"Why do you call your father 'J. G.'?" Caroline demanded suddenly.
"Do you like 'Klondike Jim' any better? That's his other name,"
Gold-bag shot at her defiantly.
Then came strange tales of a flaring, glaring mining camp: lights
and liquor and bared knives, rough men and rougher words, and in the
midst a thin, big-eyed little creature in the hand of a burly,
red-shirted miner, with the very gift of gold under his matted hair,
the scent for it in his blunt nostrils, the feel for it in his
callous finger tips. Klondike Jim! He had made for his Klondike as a
bloodhound makes for the quarry; he could not be mistaken. Night and
day she had been with him, his first claim named for her--the
Madeline--his first earnings a gold belt for her childish waist!
And then, money and money and more money. Rivers of it, ponds of it.
"If J. G. said there was copper under Fifth Avenue, they'd dig it up
to-morrow!"
"You must be real proud of him," said Mrs. Winterpine genially.
"I used to be," the girl answered, with her mouth a little awry.
"My dear, my dear!"
"Oh, yes," she cried angrily, pushing back her chair and facing
them; "all very well, but who are we? Who was my mother? Who was my
grandfather? Where did we come from? Will a sapphire bracelet answer
me that, do you think? Who knows us? 'Miss Maddy Money Bags'! How
long do you think I'd stay in that convent? Who does J. G. know?
Hotelmen and barkeeps and presidents of things! If you could see the
counts he wanted me to marry! If you could hear the couriers laugh
at him!"
"But think of all the traveling you've done, dear! What things to
remember! How happy--"
"Happy! I hate it. As J. G. says, I hate it like--well, I just hate
it," she concluded, with propriety, if a little lamely.
Something in the look she cast around the warm, clean kitchen struck
the woman suddenly. "You don't mean you'd rather live here--_here_?"
she exclaimed amazedly.
"Don't you like it?" queried Madeline sharply.
Mrs. Winterpine considered a moment. "You see, it's my home," she
began. The girl's dry laugh interrupted her.
"That's just it. It's your home," she repeated. "We haven't any.
That's the idea. What's the use of traveling if you can't come home?
And we can't, ever. Unless we go back to the Klondike," she added
satirically.
There was a long pause. It seemed that the girl was slowly
undressing herself before them: travel and money and gold bag and
scented linings slipped from her like so many petticoats and left
her thin and cold between them, warm as they were in their solid
homespun of kin and hearth. Lean and empty, a houseless, flitting,
little shadow, she had scoured the world and sat now, envious, by a
kitchen fire. How strange!
Mrs. Winterpine gathered the dishes with accustomed hands and piled
them by a pan of hot, soapy water. Caroline, sobered, rose to help
her with the instinctive courtesy of the home-trained child, but
drew back at her shaken head and waving finger, and followed her
glance toward her other guest, who stared morosely into the
dooryard, her chin in her ringed, brown hand. She was evidently not
far from tears--in a nervous crisis.