Laura Ann stole quietly away and went upstairs to the little attic room.
Close by the window was a rough little easel arrangement with a picture
on it. Laura Ann stood regarding it thoughtfully. "I wonder"--she smiled
at the whimsy of the thought--"I wonder if it looks like Amelia," she
murmured.
It was not a wonderful picture. No committee would have hung it on a
"line." There were rather glaring errors in it of draughtsmanship and
coloring. But the face of the girl in it was appealingly sweet--brown
hair, blue eyes, little round chin. Laura Ann had not dared to put in
the dimples.
"Dimples need a master," she said, "besides, they only show when you
smile, and I don't believe Amelia smiles very often!"
She sat down and took up a brush. The picture was nearly done, but she
found touches to be added here and there. There might be a stray
lock--there, like that. And a little bit more shade under the chin, and
the wistful droop of the mouth relieved, oh, a very little bit! Amelia
looked so serious.
"Poor little thing! Well, it's a serious matter to be a dream-child,
with not an ounce of good red blood in your veins."
Laura Ann meant to slip back after they had started for the station, on
the last day, and hang the picture in the little sunny dining-room. She
did not want the girls to know there was a picture. But still--a new
thought had begun to obtrude itself unwelcomely. Was painting Amelia's
portrait a breach, too, of the Compact? She had undertaken it as a
little "offering" to Mrs. Camp, to show her own individual gratitude for
her own share of the dear little green cottage all these beautiful
weeks--T.O. had said Mrs. Camp had longed for a picture. But the fact
that it had taken many patient hours of work "unto others," was not to
be overlooked. If it had broken the rules of the Wicked Compact, and she
went back to the B-Hive without letting the girls know of it--oh, hum!
of course that would be another "wicked compact"! She would have to let
them know--and she didn't want to let them know--oh, dear!
Suddenly Laura Ann dropped her paints and gave herself up to laughter.
She had remembered that only T.O.--Thomasia O.--would be left now in the
B-Hive! For all the rest had broken the Compact. Thomasia O., living all
alone in the dear, shabby little rooms, presented a funny picture, for
of them all she was least fitted to live alone. Even Billy could do
better.
"The rest of us will live together," laughed Laura Ann. "There's nothing
to prevent that, if we live outside the old B-Hive. We'll start a new
B-Hive! Poor Thomasia O.!"
They would miss T.O. very much indeed--well, they could invite her in to
tea and keep her all night! In spite of the wicked old Compact, they
would keep together. "And we'll never," vowed Laura Ann for them all,
"sign any more nefarious bonds!"
She hung the picture of Amelia on the wall when they were all away, and
then went away herself. She stayed away until nearly dark. Thomasia O.
went to meet her.
"I knew it all the time," she said quietly, without preface of any kind.
"It's a perfect likeness."
"You knew it?" said Laura Ann.
"Yes, I was prowling 'round one day, to see what attics were like, and
I found Amelia. Only her hair and her eyes, then, but I knew her. I'm
so glad poor Mrs. Camp will have that picture to help her bear her
troubles!"
[Illustration: THE PICTURE WAS NEARLY DONE.]
"Poor"--"troubles." This was all enigma to Laura Ann. But she wisely
waited to be enlightened. She had divined the moment she saw T.O. that
the girl was unusually disturbed. This was true.
"I've had two letters--the first one came three weeks ago from her
brother. I didn't want to spoil your good time, telling sad things,
so I kept it to myself--Laura Ann, that woman _mothered_ me!"
Laura Ann stood still. "Do you mean Mrs. Camp? Is she--dead?" But the
other did not seem to hear. She ran on in a low, troubled voice.
"She bathed my ankle, and said 'My dear,' and waited on me, when she'd
never set eyes on me in her life before. How did she know but that I was
an--an _impostor_? And she let us have her dear little house to live
in--"
"Yes, yes--oh, yes, she let _me_ live in it!" Laura Ann interposed.
"You ought to have told us she was dead."
"She isn't dead. She's fallen downstairs and broken her hip. The doctor
says it's so bad she won't ever walk again without crutches, her brother
wrote. He said he wanted her to stay and live with him, but she wouldn't
listen to it. She wanted to come home as soon as she possibly could. So
she's coming--he's coming with her, to 'start' her."
T.O. fingered a letter in her hand in a nervous, undecided way, as if
she were half inclined to read it to the other girl. It was not Emmeline
Camp's brother's letter. It had come ten days ago, and she herself knew
it by heart. How many, many times she had read it! She had cried over
the wistful cry in it, and over Amelia's death--for the letter said that
Amelia was dead.
"My dear," it said, "I've lost Amelia--you'd think she would have stood
by her mother in her trouble, wouldn't you? But she hasn't been near me
since. It seems queer--perhaps after people break their hips they can't
'feel' anything else but their hips! Perhaps it breaks their
imaginations. Anyway, Amelia's dead, my dear. Sometimes I think mebbe
I'd ought to be, too--a lone little woman like me, without a chick or a
child. Old women with children can afford to tumble downstairs, but not
my kind of old women. John is real good. He wants me to stay here, but I
can't--I can't, I can't, my dear! I've got to be where I can limp out to
the old pump and the gate and the orchard, on my crutches--I've got to
see the old hills I was born in, and Old '61 marching past the house,
and the old neighbors--I've got to die at _home_, my dear. So John
can't keep me. I wish I was going to find you there. I keep thinking how
beautiful it would be. You'd be out to the gate waiting, the way
people's daughters wait for them. And mebbe you'd have the kettle all
hot and we'd have a cup of tea together just as if I was the mother and
you was--Amelia! All the way home I should be thinking about your being
there. It's queer, isn't it, you went limping in that gate first, and
now it's me? A good many things are queer, and some are kind of
desolate. I've decided, my dear, that daughters have to be the kind that
are born, to stay by a body in trouble. They have to be made of flesh
and blood, my dear--and Amelia wasn't!
"I've written this a little to a time, laying on my back. Mebbe you
won't ever read it. Mebbe I won't ever see you again, but you will
remember, my dear, that I've loved you ever since I took off your
stocking and saw your poor, sprained ankle. If the Lord would perform
a miracle for me, I'd ask for it to be the bringing of Amelia to life
and finding her you."
T.O. did not show the letter to Laura Ann. She put it in her pocket
again, and they walked home slowly, talking of Mrs. Camp's sad accident.
At the supper table it was voted that they all write a joint letter of
sympathy to her, and express, at the same time, their united and
separate thanks for her kindness to them in lending them her home.
Loraine wrote the letter, Laura Ann copied it, they all signed it. Into
cold pen-and-ink words they tried to diffuse warmth and gratitude and
sympathy, but the result was not very satisfying, as such results rarely
are. Still, it was all they could do. Billy and Laura Ann went off to
mail it.
"Do you begin to feel lonesome?" laughed Loraine softly, as she and T.O.
sat on the steps in the dark. "Thinking of being left all alone in the
Hive, I mean? The rest of us begin to feel lonesome, thinking of being
left out! We had a grist of good times all together, didn't we? Remember
the little 'treats' when you always brought home olives, and Billy sage
cheese? Laura Ann used to change about--sometimes eclairs, sometimes
sauerkraut! Always sardines for me. Oh, _do_ you remember the treat
with a capital 'T,' when we had ice cream and angel cake? And Billy
wanted to divide the hole so as not to waste anything--there, I don't
believe you've heard a word I said!"
She had not, for she was not there. Loraine put out her hand in the
darkness, but could not find her. She had slipped away unceremoniously.
She was down in the road, walking fast and hard. The battle was on
again.
"I thought I had it all decided--I _did_ have! Why do I have to
decide it over again?" she was saying stormily to herself. "I said I'd
do it, and I'm going to do it--what am I down here fighting in the dark
for?" But still she fought on.
It was so still about her, and with all her girl's heart she longed for
noise again--car-bells and rattling wheels and din of men's voices.
There were such wide spaces all about, and she longed for narrow
spaces--for rows on rows of houses and people coming and going. It was
the city-blood in her asserting itself. She had had her breath of space
and freedom and green, growing things, and exulted in it while it
lasted. Now she pined for her native streets. But all the sympathy and
gratitude in her went out to the little old woman who was coming home to
a lonely home--whose one dream-child was dead.
No one had ever really needed her before--to be needed appealed to her
strongly. And in the short time between her own coming to Placid Pond
and the coming of the other girls, a bond of real affection had been
established between Mrs. Camp and herself.
But hadn't she been over all this before? Long ago she had decided what
to do. Now, suddenly, she wheeled in the dark road and went hurrying in
the other direction. She would go back to Loraine on the doorstep, and
laugh and talk. She had decided "for good."
The stars came trooping out, and she lifted her face to them with a new
sense of peace. They were such friendly, twinkling little stars.
T.O. was humming a lilty little tune when she came up the path in the
starlight and joined Loraine again on the doorstep.
The other two girls were coming slowly back from the little country post
office, both to hurry and have the pleasant walk over. Billy had been
saying nice things about the portrait of Amelia they had found hanging
on the wall.
"It's a dear!" she said heartily. "I wish I could make a picture like
that."
"You've made one a thousand times better!" cried Laura Ann. "I saw it
this afternoon."
"_Me_--make a picture?" Billy's voice was incredulous. "I couldn't
draw my breath straight!"
"It was a beautiful one. I stood still and looked at it. Your background
was fine, dear--woods banked against a late afternoon sky, with bits of
red light straggling through the branches, a little box of a house in
the foreground, with patches of new shingles on the 'cover'; a crooked
little front path, a funny little well, a little rosebush all a flame of
color--"
"Mercy!" Billy's little triangle of a face put on alarm. Was Laura Ann
losing her mind?
"But that--all that--was only the setting. The heart of the picture,
dear, was an old man marching up and down the path--did I say it was a
moving picture? He was whistling a tune in a wheezy way, and keeping
step to it grandly. Once he seemed to lose a few notes; then he went
into a little box of a house, and I heard an organ--"
"Oh!" breathed Billy, assured of the other's sanity, "you mean Old '61
practicing! That's the way he does--he's learning to march through
Georgia without the organ, but he misses a step or two sometimes.
_That_ was the picture, was it?"
"It was a beautiful one," Laura Ann said softly. "You needn't tell me
you can't paint, Billy! That's the kind of pictures we shall find
hanging in the Great Picture Gallery."
They walked on for a little in silence, with only the piping chorus of
the little night creatures in their ears. The sweet, cool damp was in
their faces.
"Here we are at Jane Cotton's Sam's," Billy whispered by and by, to
break the spell. She could not have told why she whispered.
"So we are. Billy, look, he's studying like a trooper! That boy is going
to walk straight into college in September! Let's go straight home and
hug Loraine--come on! Take hold of my hand, and we'll run."
"Wait--wait! Look, there's another of your pictures, Laura Ann!" Billy's
lips were close to the other's ear; Billy was pointing. Into the little
lighted room where Jane Cotton's Sam sat poring over a book, had come
another figure. As they looked, it stopped beside the boy and bent over
him.
"That's just the setting--all that," Laura Ann murmured. "The heart of
the picture is her face, Billy!" For Jane Cotton's face was radiant.
* * * * *
The day at last came for their return to the city and to the work they
were so much better able to do. The little, green-painted house was in
spotless order to leave behind. As Mrs. Camp was to come the following
day, they had filled the little pantry with food--not remarkably light
cake or bread, not especially flaky piecrust, but everything flavored
with sympathy and gratitude and good will.
"Go on, all of you; I'll catch up," Billy said, as they stood on the
steps with the door locked behind them. "When you get out of sight I'm
going to kiss the house good-by!"
"T.O. had better stay behind with you, to kiss the pump!" Loraine said.
"Or we'll all stay--I guess we can all find something to kiss."
"Did anybody think to take down the Wicked Compact?" demanded Laura Ann
suddenly. "It would be awful to leave that behind."
They were at the gate. T.O. stopped suddenly, pointing. What they saw
was a tiny, tiny mound, rounded symmetrically. "There it lies--I buried
it," T.O. said briefly, but added, "And let no one keep its grave
green!" They looked at her a little curiously. Perhaps they were
thinking that it might have been appropriate for her to take it home
with her and hang it on the wall to keep her company in the lonely
little B-Hive. But they only laughed and tramped on cheerfully to the
station. They were a little late, and had to run the last of the way.
The train was already in, and they scrambled aboard.
"Well, here we are leaving Eldorado!" sighed breathlessly Loraine.
"And all of us heart-broken but T.O.--girls, where's T.O.?"
She was not there. The train was getting under way. In a flurry they
huddled to the windows.
"Good-by! Good-by!" shouted a gay voice from the platform. A little
white envelope flew in at one of the open windows. T.O., quite calm
and unexcited, stood out there waving to them.
"What in the world!" ejaculated Laura Ann, then stopped. For she alone
could see a little ray of light. "Read the letter," she said more
quietly. "The letter will tell us."
They all read it together, their heads bunched closely.
"Dear girls, I'm going to stay. I never was needed before, but I guess
I am now. And maybe you'll think it's funny, but I'm _wanted_! An
imaginary daughter can't wait on a poor little cripple--it takes the
flesh-and-blood kind. I found out she wanted me, and so I'm going to
stay. It would have been lonesome, anyway, all alone in the Hive!
I bequeath all my rights to you--"
"As if she had any now, any more than the rest of us!" muttered Billy
fiercely, her eyes full of tears.
"Sometimes when you're going and coming, some o' you listen to the
car-wires sing, for me, and the wheels rattle," the letter went on.
"Bump into somebody sometime for me! Good-by. You're all of you dears.
"Amelia."
At the signature they choked a little, and looked away at the flying
landscape without seeing it at all. Laura Ann saw another picture--a
girl waiting at a little gate. Woods and dusty road and humble little
homes for background, and an old stage rattling into view in the
foreground. She saw it stop--in the picture--and a helpless little old
figure be taken out. She saw the girl at the gate spring forward and
hold out her hands. But the heart of the picture was the face of the
little old woman on crutches. It was another picture for the Grand
Gallery.
[Illustration]
End of Project Gutenberg's Four Girls and a Compact, by Annie Hamilton Donnell