FESTIVITIES AT THE ARK.
Up from the beach, lightly tripping, capacious reticule in hand, came
Mrs. Barlow to spend the day at the Ark, unexpectedly! The inspired and
felicitous customs of the Wallencampers admitted of no rude surprises;
rational joy, alone, pervaded the Ark at this matutinal advent.
Mrs. Barlow, Lovell's mother, presented a charmingly antique
appearance--antique not in the sense of advanced years, but the young
antique--the gay, the lively, the never-fading antique. She had even a
girlish way of simpering and uttering absurdly rapturous exclamations.
Her face might have struck one at first as being of a strangely elongated
cast, but for its extreme prettiness and simplicity of expression. Her
nose was marked by a becoming scallop or two. Her eyes were of the ocean
blue. Her dark hair was arranged, behind, in the simplest and most
compact manner possible but, in front, art held delightful play. There,
it was parted, slightly to the left, over a broad, high forehead, and
disposed in braids of eight strands each, gracefully and lovingly looped
over Mrs. Barlow's ears.
The tide of cheerful converse was at its full when I came from school to
lunch. Amid this preponderance of female society, my friend, Grandpa,
shone with an ardent though faintly tolerated light, giving to the lively
flow of the discourse, an occasional salty and comprehensive flavor,
which dear Grandma Keeler held herself ever in calm and religious
readiness to restrain.
I listened, intensely interested, to the conversation, quite content, for
my own part, to keep silence; but I caught Mrs. Barlow's eye fixed on me
as if in abstracted, beatific thought. Soon was made known the result of
her meditation. She had concluded that I was incapable of descending to
subjects of an ordinary nature. Leaning far forward on the table, with a
smile more ecstatic than any that had gone before, she directed these
words at me in a clear, swift-flowing treble:--
"Oh, ain't it dreadful about them poor delewded Mormons?"
"Why?" I exclaimed, involuntarily, blinded by the absolute unexpectedness
of the question, and not knowing, in a dearth of daily papers, but that
the infatuated people alluded to had been swallowed up of an earthquake,
or fallen in a body into the Great Salt Lake.
"Oh, nothing!" said Mrs. Barlow; "only I think it's dreadful, don't yew,
settin' such an example to Christian nations?"
"Dreadful! certainly!" I murmured, with intense relief, and allowed my
glasses to drop into my lap again.
Thus the conversation turned to subjects of a religious nature.
"Oh, I think it's so nice to have direct dealin's with the Almighty;
don't yew?" said Mrs. Barlow. "Oh, I think it is! Brother Mark Barlow
says he can hear the Lord speakin' to him jest as plain as they could in
Old Testament times; oh, yes, jest as plain exactly; Abraham and all
them, yew know! And Brother Mark Barlow generally means to go to Sunday
school. He says he thinks it's so interestin'; but it's sich an awful
ways. Don't yew think it is? Oh, yes, it's a dreadful ways! He don't
always. But yew remember that Saturday we had sich a dreadful storm? oh,
wasn't it dreadful! Oh, yes! Well, the next day, that was Sunday, Brother
Mark Barlow said he heard the Lord sayin' to him, jest as plain as day;
'Mark Barlow, don't you go to Sunday school to-day! You stay home and
pick up laths!' and he did, and oh, he got a dreadful pile! most ten
dollars worth; but I think it's so nice, don't yew, to have direct
dealin's with the Almighty!"
The Barlows, by the way, were regarded with a sort of contemptuous
toleration by the Wallencampers in general, on account of their thrift
and penuriousness, the branded qualities of sordid and unpoetic natures.
I was sorry when the brief hour of the noon intermission was over, and I
had to go back to school.
But at night the Ark became alive. Soon after supper, Mr. Barlow arrived
and "Brother Mark Barlow" and Lovell. Then the little room began to fill
rapidly. We adjourned to the "parlor" and the melodeon.
"Oh, I do think them plaster Paris picters are so beautiful, don't yew?"
said Mrs. Barlow, enraptured over a statuette or two of that truly vague
description, which adorned the mantelpiece. But she became perfectly
lost in delight when Lovell began to sing.
Lovell's was the one execrable voice among the Wallencampers--if anything
so weak could be designated by so strong a term--and his manner of
keeping time with his head was clock-like in its regularity and painfully
arduous; yet, out of that pristine naughtiness which found a hiding-place
in the hearts of the Wallencamp youth, Lovell was frequently encouraged
to come to the front during their musicals, and if not actually beguiled
into executing a solo, was generously applauded in the performance of
minor parts. There was comfort, however, in the reflection that if Lovell
had indeed possessed the tuneful gift of a Heaven-elected artist, he
could not have been so supremely confident of the merit of his own
performances, nor could his mother have been more delighted at their
brilliancy. She sat with hands clasped in her lap and gazed at her manly
offspring.
"Oh, I do think it's so beautiful!" she murmured occasionally to me,
aside. "Oh, yes, ain't it beautiful?"
Once, she remarked in greater confidence; "Oh, he's dreadful wild!"
"Lovell?" I inquired, with impulsive incredulity.
"Oh, dreadful!" she continued. "I don't know what he'd ben if we hadn't
always restrained him. But somehow, I think there's something dreadful
bewitchin' about such folks. Don't yew?"
"Very," I answered with vague, though ardent sympathy.
"Oh, dreadful!" she responded.
Meanwhile the perspiration stood out on Lovell's grave countenance, and
his head, like a laborious sledge-hammer, was swaying mechanically
backward and forward.
"Sing bass, now, Lovell," said Mrs. Barlow; and the expression of awed
delight and expectancy on her face, as she uttered these words, was a
rebuke to all cynics and unbelievers of any sort whatever.
"Yes'm, so I will, certainly," said Lovell; "so I will, and if I hadn't
got such a cold, I'd come down heavy on it too."
"What do you think?" Mrs. Barlow went on in the same confidential aside
to me; "he's took it into his head that he wants to get married! Oh, yes,
he has really! and I think it's a wonder he never got set on it before.
But he never has so but what we could restrain him. But William and I,
we're beginning to think he might as well if he wants to. Oh, yes, I
think it will be so nice. Don't yew? I think it will be just splendid!
And I tell William, Lovell's wife shan't do nothing but set in the parlor
and fold her hands, if she don't want to; and she shall have a music, and
everything. When we built our new house, you know we used to live in that
little house that Brother Mark Barlow lives in now, oh, yes, and I think
it's so nice to have a new house, don't yew? I had 'em make the window
seats low on purpose, so that Lovell's children could sit on them! Oh, I
think it will be so pleasant, don't yew?"
Mrs. Barlow turned her enraptured gaze on me.
"Lovell's wife," I hastened to reply, toying with my glasses; "whoever
she may be, is certainly to be envied--and Lovell's children, too"--I
added, induced by that transcendently beaming smile; "who will have such
a broad window seat to sit on."
Never an evening began in heartier fashion at the Ark.
George Olver, standing next to Rebecca, rolled out a grand and powerful
bass.
Lars Thorjon, the Norwegian, maintained a smiling silence, except when he
was giving utterance in song to his inspiring tenor.
Madeline played the "music."
I saw her wince sometimes, when the fine though untutored voices around
her took on a too wild and exuberant strain. The little woman's own voice
was exceedingly gentle and refined; more than that, it had a passionately
sweet, sad tone, a rare pathos. I used to wonder what there was in
Madeline's heart--what there had been in her life--to make her sing so.
Then I remembered how easy it was for her to get out of temper, and how
often she slapped the children, and I concluded that it was only a voice
after all, and not necessarily indicative of any inward sentiment or
emotion.
And the mischievous Harvey Dole--could it be the same youth who stood
there now with tearful eyes, chanting his longings to be pure and
sanctified and heavenly. This merry youth had a predilection for those
religious songs which contained the deepest and saddest sentiment.
"Now, what's the matter with you, Harvey?" said Emily Gaskell, who had
but just dropped in. "You know you'll go along hum to-night stunin' my
cats! You know what a precious nice time you're calculatin' to have,
about two months from now, up in my trees stealin' my peaches, you young
devil. 'Wash you from your sins!' Humph! Yes, you need it bad enough,
Lord knows! A good poundin', and boilin', and sudzin', you need--and a
good soakin' in the bluein' water over night, too."
Emily's eyes sparkled with keen though good-natured satire. There was a
flood of crimson color in her cheeks, not entirely the effect of her
brisk walk in the open air. She had a spasm of coughing, which she
endured as though such discomforts had become quite a matter of course,
merely remarking when she had recovered herself sufficiently to speak:--
"Thar', that'll last me for one spell, I guess."
"Won't you set, Emily?" said Grandma.
"No," said Emily. "I can't. I jest come up to tell my man, there, to go
home! Levi is over from West Wallen, and wants to see him. Lord, I didn't
know you'd got a party, Miss Keeler!" she continued, glancing with an
irresistibly comical expression about the room.
"Oh, no! we ain't got no party," said Grandma Keeler, pleasantly. "They
jest happened to drop in along."
"Wall now, I should think there'd ben a shower and rained 'em all down at
once:" again surveying the occupants of the room with a comprehensively
critical air that was hardly flattering.
"I don't see what on 'arth!" she went on. "Half the time you might
ransack Wallencamp from top to bottom, and you'd find everybody a'most
somewhere, and nobody to hum! It ain't much like the cake Silvy made last
week--she's crazier than ever--'Where's the raisins, Silvy?' says I--I
always make it chock full of 'em, and there wasn't one,--'Oh,' says
Silvy, 'I mixed 'em up so thorough you can't a hardly find 'em.' 'I guess
that's jest about the way the Lord put the idees into your head, Silvy,'
says I. 'Bless the Lord!' says that poor fool, as slow and solemn as a
minister."
"We've been a singing" interposed Grandma Keeler in a voice that
contrasted with Emily's, like the flow of a great calm river with the
impatient fall of a cataract. "It seems a' most as though I'd been in
Heaven. They was jest a singin'--'The Light of the World is Jesus,' I
shall never forgit, when I was down to camp-meetin' to Marthy's Vin'yard
a good while ago--there was a little blind boy stood up on a bench and
sung it all alone; and it made me cry to see him standin' there with his
poor little white face, and eyes that couldn't see a' one of all the
faces lookin' up to him, a singin' that out as bold and free, and he did
pronounce the words so beautiful so as everybody could hear--I can hear
him a singin' of it out, now--'The Light of the World is Jesus.' And I
suppose we git to thinkin' that the light's in our eyes, maybe, or the
light's in the sun, or the light's in the lamp, maybe. But you might put
out my eyes,"--said Grandma Keeler, closing her eyes as she spoke, and
looking very peaceful and happy--"and you might put out the sun, and you
might put out the lamp, and say--'Thar', Almiry's all in the dark room,
she can't see nothin' now'--but the Light of the World 'ud be thar jest
the same, you couldn't put out the light--'The Light of the World is
Jesus.'"
"Oh, I didn't know ye was havin' a meetin'," said Emily Gaskell,
mockingly.
"No more we ain't, Emily," said Grandma Keeler. "We was jest cheerin'
ourselves up a little, singin' about home. Come you, now, and sing with
us":
"We're goin' home,
No more to roam."
With eyes still closed, with head thrown back, and a heavenly serene
expression on her face, Grandma began the refrain, while Madeline struck
the chords on the melodeon, and the singers took up the words with a
hearty cheer:--
"We're goin' home,
No more to roam,
No more to sin and sorrow;
No more to wear
The brow of care,
We're goin' home to-morrow."
Then the chorus, "We're going home," joyfully repeated, died away at
last, more plaintively, "We're going home to-morrow."
"Wall, I'm goin' home to-night," said Emily, and, as I looked up at her,
I caught the same mischievous gleam in her unsoftened eyes. "So strike up
Something lively now, and I'll waltz down the lane to it. 'Are your
windows open towards Jerusalem?'--Lord, can't you think o' something
warmer than that for this weather?"
But the singers were going on gloriously:
"Are your windows open towards Jerusalem?
Though as captives here a little while we stay
For the coming of the King in His glory,
Are you watching, day by day?"
Emily tightened the shawl around her neck with a quick motion. In going
out, she took an indirect course through the room, purposely to pass by
where I was sitting.
"Are your windows open towards Jerusalem?" said she, stooping and
whispering in my ear: "Dave Rollin's out there hangin' onto the fence one
side the bushes, and Lute Cradlebow the other, and they don't see each
other no more than two bats."
"Are your windows open towards Jerusalem" was a favorite with the
Wallencampers. On this occasion they repeated it several times. Captain
Sartell and Bachelor Lot, who had been engaging in a game of checkers in
the little kitchen, left the board as the well-loved strains greeted
their ears, and came in to join the group.
Grandpa had been consigned to the kitchen stove, with a corn-popper. I do
not think that he regretted being removed, somewhat from the more
inspiring scenes which animated the Ark. I was amused to follow, with my
ear, the old gentleman's progress in the successive stages of his
corn-shelling and corn-popping operations with certain contingent
misfortunes, as when he went into the pantry to look for a pan, and
brought down a large quantity of tin-ware clanging about his ears, and
rolling in all directions over the floor, while I immediately inferred
from the tones of his voice that he was enjoying a little unembarrassed
colloquy with the powers of darkness. Once, in his shuffling
peregrinations, he tipped over the little bench which sustained the
water-pail. A deep sigh of horror and despair escaped his lips, and was
followed by a "What the Devil!" borne in upon the song-laden air with
unmistakable force and distinctness.
"For Heaven's sake, ma," said Madeline, looking up sharply; "what can pa
be a' doin??"
"Oh," calmly said Grandma Keeler, "I guess he's only settlin' down."
And with Grandma, indeed, the turmoils of this sublunary sphere implied
only a vast ultimate settling down.
But if such deep rest came to Grandpa, it was only as a dream from which
he was soon to be rudely awakened.
The sound of his footsteps had ceased. I knew that he was seated in his
chair by the fire, and I heard the long-handled popper shaken back and
forth upon the stove, at first as if moved by the power of a steadfast
purpose. But the sound grew fainter, the motions less regular. They were
several times desperately renewed, and then ceased altogether, so quickly
had Grandpa soared beyond the low vicissitudes of a corn-popping world.
Soon a burning smell arose. Then the door of the kitchen opened. Grandpa
was startled. I knew the catastrophe. The corn-popper with its contents
had been precipitated to the floor. Then I heard a courteous male voice,
with just a touch of suppressed merriment in it:--
"Never mind, Captain! small business for you, steering such a slim craft
as that, eh? On a red-hot, stove, too!"
"Humph! Topmast heavier than the hull," replied Grandpa, accepting with
gratitude, in this extremity, the sympathy of the new-comer.
The other gave a low laugh.
"Never mind, Captain!" he repeated, "we'll have it slick here in a minute.
Let me take the broom. You've got it wrong side up. By Harry, we've got
the deluge _inside_ the Ark this time, Captain!"
"Tarnal water-pail slipped moorin's," confessed Grandpa.
Then followed a vigorous sound of corn rattling, and water swashing
against the sides of the room, and I knew that Mr. Rollin, the elegant,
was sweeping out the kitchen of the Ark.
"I guess they's somebody else come," exclaimed Grandma, with hospitable
glee. "Wall, I declare for't. I guess I'll go out into my kitchen and git
that little no-back cheer. Seems to me as though we'd got all the rest on
'em in use, pretty much."
"I'll go, ma," said Madeline. "Teacher'll be wanted to play now, and may
be she will? though she can't be got to do it for common folks."
I did not enjoy playing on Madeline's melodeon. Any performances of that
kind which I had undertaken had been confined exclusively to an audience
of the Wallencampers. I had certainly never made an exception for the
amusement of the fisherman. But I flattered myself that there was no
trace of resentment in my tone when I said, "Sit still, Madeline, please,
I know where the chair is. Don't I, Grandma?" and was groping my way out
through the green curtained "keepin'" rooms, towards Grandma's culinary
apartment, thankful for a momentary escape from the heated atmosphere of
the "parlor," when I heard just behind me a voice of the most exquisite
smoothness:--
"Miss Hungerford, allow me."
"Mr. Rollin!" I exclaimed, with an overwhelming sense of the
ludicrousness of the situation: "How dared you come through the room
where they were all sitting and follow me out here! Did Grandma tell you
that I had gone after a little no-back chair for you to sit on?"
"She did," replied Mr. Rollin, with impressive gravity: "and I took it as
most divinely kind of you, too; though, if I might be allowed any choice
in the matter, I think I should be likely to assume a much more graceful
and more easeful and natural position in a chair constructed after the
ordinary pattern, Miss Hungerford, especially as after my exertions in
the kitchen I feel the need of entire repose."
"But this is the only one left," I answered, with suppressed laughter.
"Do you think you can find it, Mr. Rollin?"
"If you should leave me now," replied the fisherman; "I should have
positively no idea whither to direct my steps."
"Then I shall be very happy to get it for you," I said.
"But I could not think," he continued, "of allowing you to pursue your
way through this utter darkness to the extreme rear of the Ark alone. I
beg you to show me the way."
I was not disposed to commit so gross an impropriety as to linger with
Mr. Rollin in "Grandma's kitchen," which we had reached, and through
whose broad, uncurtained windows the moonlight was pouring in with a
clear, fantastic radiance.
"Isn't this glorious!" exclaimed the fisherman, in a tone nearly as
rapturous as Mrs. Barlow's own. "Oh, you don't think of going back now,
Miss Hungerford! After I've mopped the kitchen floor, and braved all
Wallencamp in its lair, and groped my way out through those infernally
black rooms, for the chance of having a few quiet words with you."
Mr. Rollin's eyes were not snaky, nor his manner suggestive of dark
duplicity; yet I always felt a certain unaccountable discomfort while in
his presence, as though there was need of keeping my own conscience
particularly on the alert.
I knew that the group in the parlor would be counting the moments of our
absence.
"How can you ask me--" I began, in a tone of cheerful remonstrance, at the
same time readjusting my glasses to glance about for the little "no-back"
chair--"How can you ask me to stay out here talking with you, when you
know----"
"Oh, I know." Mr. Rollin interrupted quickly. "I know how very thoughtful
and considerate you are for those people, Miss Hungerford. I know what
lofty ideas you have just now of consecrating yourself to the work of
refining and elevating the Wallencampers. I know how coolly you can fix
your eyes on a certain goal, and stumble indiscriminately over everything
that comes in your way. I know what a deucedly superior state of mind
you've gotten into. I know too about Miss B's school, and Miss L's
school, and the Seminary at Mount Blank, and the winters in New York."
There was triumph at last, in Mr. Rollin's tone.
"You have taken pains to collect a great deal of information about me;" I
replied, virtuously concluding that I should disappoint the fisherman
more by not appearing vexed.
"Is it strange?" he continued earnestly, with an unconscious parody on
his usually suave and insinuating manner. "You will allow, Miss
Hungerford, that you might strike one, at first, as not being exactly in
the ordinary line of home missionaries, that is, as not having been
trained for the work, exactly; a sort of novitiate, I mean--confound it!
You will allow that you might strike one at first, as being deucedly new
In that _rôle_."
After this, I smiled with a faintly malicious sense of satisfaction at
Mr. Rollin's confusion, though I felt that I had been cut to the heart.
"And when I spoke about having found out about your past life," he went
on, struggling desperately with his lost cause; "I did not mean that
there was anything bad, you know; only that you sought pleasant
diversions in common with the rest of humanity, and enjoyed the
Heaven-born instinct of knowing how to have a good time, and weren't
always the ambitious recluse and religious devotee that you choose to be
just at present; though I've sometimes wished that I could turn saint so
all of a sudden, but I couldn't," added the fisherman, despondently; "if
I should go to the ends of the earth in that capacity, nobody'd take any
stock in me, whatever; and, after all, what does it amount to?
"This isn't what I meant to say, any of it;" he sighed angrily. "It's
just what I meant _not_ to say--confound it! You've done gloriously;
you've played the thing through to perfection; you've made an inimitable
success of it; but Wallencamp doesn't offer scope wide enough for your
powers. I offer you a field hitherto untilled, left to the wandering
winds and the birds of the air, extensive enough in its forlorn iniquity,
I assure you, to engage your patient and continued efforts. It may prove
productive of good results yet, who knows? Is it my fault that I didn't
know you sooner?"
I did not mistake the change in Mr. Rollin's tone, nor the meaning in his
eyes, but as we stood there by the window, in the full moonlight, I
caught a glimpse of another face outside, vanishing up the lane--almost
like a ghostly apparition it seemed to me--the handsome pale young face.
I guessed instinctively whose it was, and suffered a pang of sharp,
unconfessed pain, while the fisherman was murmuring in my ear.
"Don't speak to me again of missions!" I cried with the strong and tragic
air of consciously blighted aspirations. "I shall go on no more missions,
great or small. It is very true what you have tried so delicately to
intimate. I was not fit for the work I undertook to do. I have only made
mistakes all the way along. Possibly I have been only 'playing a part.'
What does it amount to, indeed! What does it amount to!"
"Heavens!" said Mr. Rollin; "play a part, by all means; never be sincere
in anything you do. I never tried it but once, and I've made a desperate
mess of it. Can't you understand that what I said was only in the purest
sort of self-defence? You weigh my words so nicely. Well, you are
considerate enough, God knows, of those dirty brats and ignorant
louts--coddling that girl, Rebecca, who is a good-hearted creature
enough, but not fit for respectable people to touch their hands to; and
associating with such conceited boors as that George Olver, and that
grinning clown, Harvey, and that poor fool, Lovell Barlow, and that
what-d'ye-call him--that fiddling young devil with the bird-like
name----"
Mr. Rollin stopped suddenly.
"You might make allowances for a man in a passion," he said; "instead of
dissecting his words in that cold-blooded way."
"I had no notion of dissecting your words," I said, provoked into a
desperate honesty; "I believe them, as a whole, to be utterly false."
"From the very beginning," said Mr. Rollin; "thank you; so I can begin
all over again; meanwhile,--you will forgive me? Imagine that I'm one of
those dirty little beggars that go to school to you. If one of them
should come to you and say that he was sorry?--"
"I should only be intensely surprised," I said; "they never do such
things."
"Then I have a superior claim on your clemency," said the fisherman; "for
I am sorry and humiliate my soul to the lowest depths of the
confessional."
It was the voice of the plausible, easy-going fisherman again.
My hand was on the latch. "I am not angry; I would rather be friends," I
said with averted face, as we were returning through the dark
"keeping-rooms."
"When you get out of this realm of myths and missions, and general dread
and discomfort," said Mr. Rollin, "on to comprehensible soil again, where
ordinary sinners are sure of some sort of a footing,--and bad as a fellow
is he knows there are plenty more like him,--then I shan't appear to you
in such a deucedly poor light as I do now, a doubtful sort of pearl in a
setting of isolated cedars, with my beauty and my genius and my heavenly
aspirations all unappreciated, or made to descend as a greater measure of
condemnation on my devoted auburn head. Truly, I believe that an evil
star attends my course in Wallencamp. My own ideas seem strange to me. I
cannot grasp them. My language is wild and disconnected, I fancy, like
that of the early Norse poets. When I meet you in the world, I shall hope
to recover some of the old-time coherence and felicity of speech which I
remember to have heard practised among the world's people; and it isn't
long now, thank Heaven, before you'll leave Wallencamp behind you. When
you go home----"
When I should go home, indeed! I had hardly dared to cherish the thought.
I stifled the rising flood of exultation in my breast--but how pale and
interesting I should look! And, then, I would describe Wallencamp to my
own loving friends as it really was, and what a lion they would make of
me! Had they not always lionized my virtuous efforts to the fullest
extent!
My face must have been very happy in the dark. I felt even almost kindly
towards Mr. Rollin. We were at the last door. As we entered the lighted
room, Grandma's broad face began to beam with slow surprise, "Why," said
she; "where's the little no-back cheer?"
Mr. Rollin's resources in such extremities usually bespoke a lifetime of
patient and adroit application, but now he hesitated. The accumulated
glory of years seemed likely to be wrecked on the phantom of a little
no-back chair.
"Moonstruck? Eh, Mr. Rollin?" inquired Harvey Dole.
The fisherman regarded Harvey with a smile of quiet and amused
sufferance.
"Ah! Mrs. Keeler," said he, with a graceful bow in Grandma's direction;
"Mrs. Philander did me the honor when I came in, to ask me to stand up
with the singers at the melodeon; a position which I shall be most happy
to take, although I fear that my vocal powers are of an exceptionally
poor order."
The fisherman turned over the leaves of the despised Moody and Sankey
hymnal for Madeline, was profoundly attentive while the singing was going
on, and made suave and affable remarks here and there during the
intervals; then glanced at his watch with an expression of
highly-affected concern, bade an elaborate adieu to the company, and
retired from the scene.
"Oh, I think that Mr. Rollin is so elegant, don't yew?" said Mrs. Barlow.
"Oh, yes; I think he's so genteel!"
"_I_ don't think so at all," said Lovell. "_I_ don't, certainly. _I_
don't think so."
"He _ain't_ got much voice;" said Mrs. Barlow, clasping her hands in
raptured appreciation of her matchless Lovell.
Finally, Grandpa, with a haggard smile on his features, stumbled across
the little landing of the stairway, between the parlor and the kitchen,
bearing with him a pan of much scorched and battered pop-corn.
"Oh, _ain't_ them beautiful!" arose Mrs. Barlow's reassuring cry.
Grandma had already set an example to her guests by making a convenient
receptacle of her capacious lap, and pouring some of the corn into it, an
example which the fortunate scions of the skirted tribe, now arranged in
rows on one side of the room, followed, each in turn. Of the male species
on the other side of the room, Lovell happened to be first in line. As
the corn came nearer and nearer to him, he began to look about wildly,
and to cough. His legs trembled violently with the effort he was making
to keep them close together. He accepted the pan of pop-corn with a
gesture of feverish haste, and proceeded to pour the contents into his
lap, but, as he poured they disappeared, and the faster he poured the
faster they disappeared, and the more strenuous exertions he made to keep
his legs close together, the wider seemed to grow the chasm through which
the corn went rattling down on to the floor, until Lovell's eyes began to
whirl in their orbits and drops of sweat stood out upon his forehead.
Harvey, who appreciated the situation and was bursting with a desire to
roar out his mirthful emotions, showed a kind heart above all, and turned
the tables nicely in poor Lovell's behalf.
"Look here, Lovell!" he cried; "that's a pretty trick to play on us
fellows, you rascal! you'd better let up on that, now!"
Lovell grasped at the idea as a drowning man might grasp at a good
substantial raft that should come floating down his way.
"T-that's so," he stammered. "It is too bad, Harvey. It-t-t is,
certainly, but anything for a j-joke, you know. Here, take it yourself,
Harvey, t-take it; take it, quick!"
And Lovell got down on his knees as though he would have rendered dumb
thanks to Heaven for his unexpected deliverance, and proceeded to gather
up the corn with glad alacrity.
After this, the water was passed, and, at such times, it was always
comforting to consider how bountiful nature had been in this respect to
Wallencamp, and that the demand could never be quite equal to the supply.
Then the company began to disperse with many hand-shakings and "Why don't
ye all drop into my house?" etc., etc.
Lovell Barlow came back twice to shake hands with me; and returning the
third time, got lost, somehow, in the general confusion, and shook hands
very fervently with his mother, who was standing in the door.
I heard one of the departing visitors exclaim: "Why, where's Lute? I
should a thought he'd a dropped in, sure!"
And another answered: "Oh, he's got some new notion into his head, I
reckon! goin' on a cruise, may be!"
Rebecca was going out with a girl companion, talking rather loudly. I was
moved to take her hand a moment, gently detaining her. She looked
exceedingly bright and pretty. Her physical beauty was perfect, yet I
believed that the soul was only half awakened in the girl.
So as I held her hand a moment, with the others taking noisy leave about
us, I looked into her face with what she might have read as: "Weren't you
laughing rather loudly, my dear? I can see now that you are not so happy
as you would have people believe. Why not confide in me, and let me
straighten your difficulty out for you?"
But Rebecca's eyes were downcast, and her cheeks crimson. She let her
hand slip passively out of mine, and passed on, without a word.