The tears welled out of Patience's eyes. "I can't find that sixpence
anywhere."
The tears came into Martha's eyes too. She looked as dignified as her
poulticed face would allow. "I never knew you told fibs, Patience
Mather," said she. "I don't believe my mother will want me to go with
you any more."
Just then the bell rang. Martha went crying to her seat, and the
others thought it was on account of her toothache. Patience kept back
her tears. She was forming a desperate resolution. When recess came,
she got permission to go to the store which was quite near, and she
bought a card of peppermints with the Squire's sixpence. She had
pulled out the palm-leaf strand on her way, thrusting it into her
pocket guiltily. She felt as if she were committing sacrilege. These
sixpences, which Squire Bean bestowed upon worthy scholars from time
to time, were ostensibly for the purpose of book-marks. That was the
reason for the palm-leaf strand. The Squire took the sixpences to the
blacksmith who stamped them with B's, and then, with his own hands, he
adjusted the palm-leaf.
The man who kept the store looked at the sixpence curiously, when
Patience offered it.
"One of the Squire's sixpences!" said he.
"Yes; it's mine." That was the argument which Patience had set forth
to her own conscience. It was certainly her own sixpence; the Squire
had given it to her--had she not a right to do as she chose with it?
The man laughed; his name was Ezra Tomkins, and he enjoyed a joke. He
was privately resolving to give that sixpence in change to the
old Squire and see what he would say. If Patience had guessed his
thoughts--
But she took the card of peppermints, and carried them to the appeased
and repentant and curious Martha, and waited further developments in
trepidation. She had a presentiment deep within her childish soul that
some day she would have a reckoning with Squire Bean concerning his
sixpence.
If by chance she had to pass his house, she would hurry by at her
utmost speed lest she be intercepted. She got out of his way as fast
as she could if she spied his old horse and chaise in the distance.
Still she knew the day would come; and it did.
It was one Saturday afternoon; school did not keep, and she was all
alone in the house with Martha. Her mother had gone visiting. The two
little girls were playing "Holly Gull, Passed how many," with beans in
the kitchen, when the door opened, and in walked Susan Elder. She
was a woman who lived at Squire Bean's and helped his wife with the
housework.
The minute Patience saw her, she knew what her errand was. She gave a
great start. Then she looked at Susan Elder with her big frightened
eyes.
Susan Elder was a stout old woman. She sat down on the settle, and
wheezed before she spoke. "Squire Bean wants you to come up to his
house right away," said she at last.
Patience trembled all over. "My mother is gone away. I don't know as
she would want me to go," she ventured despairingly.
"He wants you to come right away," said Susan.
"I don't believe mother'd want me to leave the house alone."
"I'll stay an' rest till you git back; I'd jest as soon. I'm all
tuckered out comin' up the hill."
Patience was very pale. She cast an agonized glance at Martha. "I
spent the Squire's sixpence for those peppermints," she whispered. She
had not told her before.
Martha looked at her in horror--then she begun to cry. "Oh! I made you
do it," she sobbed.
"Won't you go with me?" groaned Patience.
"One little gal is enough," spoke up Susan Elder. "He won't like it if
two goes."
That settled it. Poor little Patience Mather crept meekly out of
the house and down the hill to Squire Bean's, without even Martha's
foreboding sympathy for consolation.
She looked ahead wistfully all the way. If she could only see her
mother coming--but she did not, and there was Squire Bean's house,
square and white and massive, with great sprawling clumps of white
peonies in the front yard.
She went around to the back door, and raised a feeble clatter with the
knocker. Mrs. Squire Bean, who was tall and thin and mild-looking,
answered her knock. "The--Squire--sent--for--me"--choked Patience.
"Oh!" said the old lady, "you air the little Mather-gal, I guess."
Patience shook so she could hardly reply.
"You'd better go right into his room," said Mrs. Squire Bean, and
Patience followed her. She gave her a little pat when she opened a
door on the right. "Don't you be afeard," said she; "he won't say
nothin' to you. I'll give you a piece of sweet-cake when you come
out."
Thus admonished, Patience entered. "Here's the little Mather-gal,"
Mrs. Bean remarked; then the door closed again on her mild old face.
[Illustration: LITTLE PATIENCE OBEYS THE SQUIRE'S SUMMONS.]
When Patience first looked at that room, she had a wild impulse to
turn and run. A conviction flashed through her mind that she could
outrun Squire Bean and his wife easily. In fact, the queer aspect
of the room was not calculated to dispel her nervous terror. Squire
Bean's peculiarities showed forth in the arrangement of his room, as
well as in other ways. His floor was painted drab, and in the center
were the sun and solar system depicted in yellow. But that six-rayed
yellow sun, the size of a large dinner plate, with its group of lesser
six-rayed orbs as large as saucers, did not startle Patience as
much as the rug beside the Squire's bed. That was made of a brindle
cow-skin with--the horns on. The little girl's fascinated gaze rested
on these bristling horns and could not tear itself away. Across the
foot of the Squire's bed lay a great iron bar; that was a housewifely
scheme of his own to keep the clothes well down at the foot. But
Patience's fertile imagination construed it into a dire weapon of
punishment.
The Squire was sitting at his old cherry desk. He turned around and
looked at Patience sharply from under his shaggy, overhanging brows.
Then he fumbled in his pocket and brought something out--it was the
sixpence. Then he began talking. Patience could not have told what he
said. Her mind was entirely full of what she had to say. Somehow
she stammered out the story: how she had been afraid to go to Nancy
Gookin's, and how she had lost the sixpence her uncle had given her,
and how Martha had said she told a fib. Patience trembled and gasped
out the words, and curtesied, once in a while, when the Squire said
something.
"Come here," said he, when he had sat for a minute or two, taking in
the facts of the case.
To Patience's utter astonishment, Squire Bean was laughing, and
holding out the sixpence.
"Have you got the palm-leaf string?"
"Yes, sir," replied Patience, curtesying.
"Well, you may take this home, and put in the palm-leaf string, and
use it for a marker in your book--but don't you spend it again."
"No, sir." Patience curtesied again.
"You did very wrong to spend it, very wrong. Those sixpences are not
given to you to spend. But I will overlook it this once."
The Squire extended the sixpence. Patience took it, with another dip
of her little skirt. Then he turned around to his desk.
Patience waited a few minutes. She did not know whether she was
dismissed or not. Finally the Squire begun to add aloud: "Five and
five are ten," he said, "ought, and carry the one."
He was adding a bill. Then Patience stole out softly. Mrs. Squire Bean
was waiting in the kitchen. She gave her a great piece of plum-cake
and kissed her.
"He didn't hurt you any, did he?" said she.
"No, ma'am," said Patience, looking with a bewildered smile at the
sixpence.
That night she tied in the palm-leaf strand again, and she put the
sixpence in her Geography-book, and she kept it so safely all her life
that her great-grandchildren have seen it.