SIDNEY DIGS FOR COUSINS
The Romley house stood two stories and a half high, heavy-beamed,
thick-walled, of square spacious rooms with deep-set windows and
cavernous fireplaces under low marble mantels. Joseph Romley had chosen
it because he said it was so big a man could think in it; he liked the
seclusion, too, that the surrounding wall promised. If his wife
faltered before the care it presented she had given no sign but had
bravely spread their limited possessions through some of the rooms and
had sensibly closed off others.
There had never been a time since the Romleys took possession when the
house had not needed painting and shingling, when the guarding wall was
not crumbling and the gate swinging on one hinge, when the furnace was
not needing cleaning and the plumbing overhauling. But the wind sang
cheerily down the great chimneys and the sun poured in through the
windows and the ancient elms housed hosts of birds and the hollyhocks
bloomed early and late against the wall so that Joseph Romley knew only
the beauty of the place and was content and his family, perforce, was
content because he was.
There had never been enough of the fine old furniture Mrs. Romley had
collected in her bridehood to furnish a separate room for each one of
the girls. Isolde and Trude had always shared a sunny room over the
study. In a back room Victoria and Sidney still used the narrow beds of
nursery days. Only lately Victoria had painted them gray with a trim of
pink rose buds but the effect had suffered so sharply from Sidney's
"truck" that Sidney had been coerced into taking her precious
belongings to the attic where she established a kingdom of her own.
It was a beautiful attic. Its rafters, shiny and brown, were so low
that Sidney, by standing very straight, could touch them with the top
of her head. It had mysterious crannies and shadowy corners and deep
dusty holes. Sidney had walled off one end by piling one trunk upon
another and pushing an old wardrobe next to them. There she had her
possessions, a flat-topped desk with long wobbly legs which she reached
by a box balanced on an old stool, the skeleton of a sofa on which sat
five dusty and neglected dolls, a scrap of carpeting, amazing as to red
roses but sadly frayed about its edges, one boastful rocker in complete
possession of arms and legs, which Trude had smuggled up to her, and a
conglomeration of her favorite books scattered everywhere, for in the
seclusion of the attic she could pore over them without risk of some
Lady Leaguer discovering her love of them.
To this sanctuary Sidney retreated now from Vick and the Leaguers and
her luckless lot. Swinging open the door of the wardrobe so as to shut
off any unannounced approach to her den, she tiptoed to a corner, knelt
down and cautiously lifted a board from the floor, thereby revealing a
space two feet square between the beams.
From among the treasures concealed there she drew out an old ledger on
the first page of which was printed in large type: "Dorothea, friend
and confidante of Sidney Romley." Jerking herself closer to the window
she opened the book across her knees and began to write in it with the
stub of a pencil she extracted from the pocket of her middy blouse.
"Dearest Dorothea:
"Today I stand at a crossroad of life. I am fifteen. It is not my
birthday for I had my birthday as you will see if you turn back to
page 64 but I am fifteen today in the eyes of the world for I have
come into my legal and just rights. I am to have the next Egg. I
had to make a scene before I got them to promise I could have it
but it was ever thus with rights. I swear solemnly now to you, dear
Dorothea, that I shall never cry again in front of Victoria Romley.
Never. I hate her when she laughs. I do not hate Isolde even though
she does not understand me and that is hard. And I adore Trude as I
have told you on many other pages. However, I am to have the Egg.
"But that is not all that happened this morning. I have talked to
the most beautiful girl I ever saw. Her name is Pola and she goes
to Grace Hall, which is a boarding school for very rich girls who
have horses. Her father makes candy in a big factory and it is sold
all over the world. When I get the Egg I shall buy a great deal of
Betty Sweets. That is it. Pola has traveled so much that it bores
her to think of it. When she talked she lifted a curtain and let me
peep into a wonderful world. I think she liked me. She's going to
put me in a theme only she is going to make me like Isolde who just
to be mean made me receive the Leaguers this morning and went
upstairs and did things as though it was not Saturday at all. But
for that I must love her just as if she had not done it to be mean
for I would not have met Pola. Pola--is that not the most romantic
name you ever heard?--feels sorry for me because my father was a
poet and she knew right off how I hate having the Leaguers own us
and the house. She was wonderful. I shall never see anyone like her
again. My life is doomed to be sad and lonely.
"But though I never see Pola again I shall try to live to be like
her. Inside of me, of course. It would be no use to try to be like
her outside on account of my horrid hair. Pola's hair is curly and
short and she wears it caught with a 'bonny bright ribbon.' My eyes
are plain blue and hers are a mysterious gray like an evening sky.
Her skin is like creamy satin touched with rose petals and I think
it is natural for it is not a bit like Josie Walker's who uses
rouge for Nancy caught her putting it on one day at school in the
toilet. Pola is as brave as she is beautiful. She dares anything.
She would despise me if she knew that I just let my fate close over
my head and do nothing.
"But now that I am fifteen before the world I must take my life in
my hands. As adventure will never come to this house on account of
the League I must go forth to meet adventure. I will not let the
others know what I am planning for, as I said heretofore, Isolde
does not understand me and Victoria would only laugh. And as I said
heretofore, I hate her when she laughs. But, Victoria Romley,
remember the words of the prophet: 'He who laughs last laughs
loudest.'
"In case I pass to the Great Beyond and strange eyes read these
confidences, let me add that I only hate Vicky when she laughs. At
all other times I love her dearly. She is so beautiful that
sometimes when I look at her I feel all queer and gaspy inside.
Pola is not quite as beautiful as Vic but Pola is a girl like me.
"Dear Dorothea, friend of my inner spirit, as I close this page who
knows what the future holds for me? I shall probably be very busy
with my plans and may neglect you, my comforter, but as I go forth
on my quest I shall often think of you, waiting, faithful, in my
secret cranny. And I shall think of Isolde and Trude for I gleaned
from something Isolde said to me this morning when she was mad that
she and Trude long to escape from the League the way I do. But they
think they have to stay here the rest of their lives. Mayhap I can
bring escape to them. Vick will marry of course, but Isolde's beaux
look too poor to get married and they are mostly poets as I have
told you. And Trude has only her one Lost Love. Dear Dorothea,
farewell. 'Mid pleasures and palaces though I may roam, my heart
will come to thee in thy deep and secret chamber.'"
Sidney liked the last line so well that she paused to read it over,
aloud.
She closed the book simply because her thoughts were racing ahead so
fast that to write them became a torture. She restored "Dorothea"
rather carelessly to her "deep and secret chamber." Having secured the
loose planking she rose and turned her agile mind to the consideration
of a desire that had began shaping when Trude said she could go around
the world with the Egg. Of course the Egg would not take her that far
but if it would only just take her somewhere on a train she'd be
satisfied.
Travel in the Romley family had always been limited. One shabby bag had
done comfortable duty for them all. Joseph Romley had never wanted to
go away; if the girls' mother ever yearned for other horizons she had
hidden it behind a smiling contentment. Neither Isolde nor Trude had
gone further than fifty miles from Middletown until the two trustees,
after their father's death, had summoned them to New York. Victoria,
seemingly born to more fortune than the others, had been whisked away
on several trips with Godmother Jocelyn, traveling luxuriously in a
stateroom with a maid but she had returned from even the most prolonged
of these so silent and dispirited that Sidney suspected traveling with
Godmother Jocelyn, fat and fussy, was not the unalloyed pleasure Vick
would have them believe.
To how much Sidney longed to vision the world that lay beyond the level
horizons of Middletown an old map of the United States and Canada,
tacked to one of the rafters, attested. Upon this Sidney had marked
with various signs that meant much to her and nothing to any one else,
the different localities of which she read in books or newspapers. When
a Leaguer introduced some devotee from some far-off city Sidney
promptly noted the visit on the map. In consequence she had a vicarious
acquaintance scattered from coast to coast. It was the only way she had
ever expected to "know" the world until Trude had said that about the
Egg.
She did not count as "traveling" going once to Cascade Lake, twenty
miles to the South, and spending a week there with Nancy. They had not
gone on a train; they had driven down with Nancy's father in the
automobile. Though in anticipation the visit had appeared like an
adventure, in later retrospection it was stupid. It had been just like
being at Nancy's house in Middletown; Nancy's father and mother and
Snap, the dog, and Caroline, the colored cook, and much of the
furniture were all there. It had rained all week and they had had to
play in the house and Nancy had had a cold in her head which had made
her cross and horrid-looking. No, that had not been "going" somewhere,
the way Trude went to New York and Isolde to Chicago.
Crouched low in the sound rocker Sidney stared at the old map with
speculative eyes. One could not, when one was the youngest sister,
simply pack the old bag and start off for just anywhere. All the trips
she knew anything about had some objective; one went somewhere to see
somebody. Trude went to see Aunt Edith White, Isolde the Deerings. Vick
always went somewhere with Godmother Jocelyn. Plainly her first step
was to find someone who lived somewhere where she could want to go.
It was a pity, Sidney lamented voicelessly, that her father had shunned
all their relatives the way he had the autograph seekers. Nancy had a
great many; she was always going to reunions at some aunt's or cousin's
or her mother was having a big "family" dinner. It would help her now
to have a few cousins herself. They surely must have some somewhere.
Everyone did. That her father had snubbed them would not make them any
the less related.
She suddenly remembered a book she had found once in a box consigned to
the attic in that first settling. The book for a while had fascinated
her and Nancy, then they had thrown it aside for something more novel,
little dreaming that it was destined to hold an important part in the
shaping of Sidney's fortunes--and misfortunes. It was a very slender
little volume with an embellished binding, long since yellow with dust.
Finding it now Sidney drew the sleeve of her blouse across its cover
and opened it. Its first page was given over to a curious tree from the
sprawling branches of which hung round things much like grapefruits,
each ring encircling one or two names. From each fruit dangled more
fruit until the tree was quite overladen. A line at the bottom
explained that the curious growth was the Tree of the New England Ellis
Family.
At that first inspection Sidney had felt no particular sense of
belonging herself to the suspended grapefruits; the only thought that
had held her was how many, many years it had taken all those people to
live and what a little minute to read their names. But finding an "Ann
Ellis" in a corner of the tree had brought them suddenly close to her.
"Ann Ellis Green"--why, that was her mother's name. She and Nancy
figured out at once that these were her mother's ancestors--_her_
ancestors. Nancy had supplied the word. Nancy had been deeply impressed
by the Tree and the Coat-of-Arms which had come down to these Ellises
from a Welsh baron of feudal times. She had urged Sidney to use it on
her school papers.
But neither the Coat-of-Arms nor the Tree held any especial value to
Sidney, brought up as she had been in a state of family isolation,
until this moment.
Now the little book offered the reasonable possibility that each
ancestor recorded therein had had children, just as that Ann Ellis in
the round enclosure had had her mother and her mother in turn had had
Isolde and Trude and Vick and herself. These children would be
cousins--and cousins were what she needed!
She remembered certain notations that had been made in a fine script on
back pages of the book. In search of cousins she now scanned these
carefully, with a shivery feeling of prowling over dead bones--the
writing was so queer and faded, the paper crackled and smelled so old.
"Charles Ellis, son of James by Mary Martin, second wife. Served in the
102nd Regiment at Gettysburg. Awarded the Congressional Medal for
exceptional bravery under fire."
"Priscilla Ellis gave her life in the service of nursing through the
epidemic of small-pox that swept Boston in the year of 18--" Sidney
read this twice with a thrill. That was adventure for you. Small-pox.
She wondered if Priscilla had been beautiful like Victoria and whether
she had left a sweetheart to mourn her tragic death to the end of his
days. She liked to think Priscilla had had such.
That one Abner Ellis had been a Selectman for ten years did not
interest her--she passed him for the next entry.
"Ann Ellis married Jonathan Green, June 10, 1874. To this happy union
has been born one precious daughter, our little Ann." Why, this "little
Ann" was her own mother, of course. And the Jonathan Green who was her
father had written in the book the little notes about all the Ellises
so that when the "Little Ann" grew up she would know all about them and
be proud--Priscilla who had died of small-pox and the ancestor with the
Congressional Medal. Sidney suddenly thought it strange that her mother
had cared so little for the family tree that she had left it, dusty and
forgotten, in the attic. Probably that was because her mother had been
too busy being a poet's wife to bother about dead and gone Ellises.
She felt a little rush of tender remorse toward Jonathan Green--she
wished he had not died when her mother was a little girl. He was her
own grandfather. And _he_ had had a tree behind _him_--there had
doubtless been as many Greens as Ellises. She wished she knew what
_they_ had been like. And almost in answer to the thought her eyes fell
upon an entry on another page, made in Jonathan Green's fine hand.
"On this day, October 6, 1869, my brother, Ezekiel Green, sailed from
Provincetown for far shores on his good ship the _Betsy King_ which
same has come into his possession as a reward for years of thrift and
perseverance. God's blessing go with him--"
There were more entries concerning the brother, Ezekiel. He and his
good ship the _Betsy King_ were reported as returning safely from the
Azores, and again they had rounded Cape Horn, again had ventured to
East Indian waters.
"Oh-h!" cried Sidney aloud for at the top of another page she read that
the _Betsy King_ had foundered off the Cape in the storm of '72--with
all lives. "May the soul of my beloved brother, Ezekiel Green, rest in
peace with his Maker."
Sidney forgot the Burton-Ellis tree in her breathless interest in the
fate of Ezekiel Green who had "foundered" and then rested in peace. It
was like a story of marvellous adventure. Her grandfather had evidently
thought a great deal of this brother who had sailed the oceans wide. He
had added, beneath the entry of the foundering of the _Betsy King_:
"Our loving prayers go out in behalf of our beloved Ezekiel's son and
daughter, Asabel and Achsa. May they walk in the path their respected
father trod before them!" "That's funny," reflected Sidney, "How _can_
they when he sailed the wide seas!"
[Illustration: HER EYES FELL UPON AN ENTRY ON ANOTHER PAGE]
Sidney's brain actually crackled with lightning calculations. This
Asabel and Achsa must be old but they might be still living--and at
Provincetown, from whence the _Betsy King_ had sailed. Perhaps Asabel
had a boat, too. Provincetown--she looked at the map. Why, Provincetown
was at the very tip end of that crooked finger of land which always
seemed to be beckoning to ships to come to Massachusetts. She knew all
about it--she and Nancy had read a delightful book in which a little
girl had lived with two guardians who were old sea captains--like
Ezekiel Green. And she, Sidney Romley, had never known that she had
relatives, real flesh-and-blood relatives, lots of them, no doubt, who
lived right on Cape Cod! She wished that Nancy were with her that she
might tell her at once. She figured off the generations on her fingers.
Ezekiel Green was her mother's uncle, her great uncle. This son and
daughter, Asabel and Achsa, were her mother's first cousins, _her_
second cousins. She felt suddenly proudly rich in kin.
"Cousin Achsa!" she repeated the name slowly, wondering just how she
ought to pronounce it. She pictured Cousin Achsa living in a square
white cupolaed house of noble dimensions that crowned a rocky eminence
from which a sweeping view of ocean distances might be had.
This picture had no more than shaped itself in her mind than the
resolution formed to communicate at once with Asabel and Achsa. Not a
day must be lost. When one had girded oneself to set forth in quest of
the Gleam one must not dally over any uncertainties.
Sidney climbed on to the box before the high desk and spread the book
before her for reference in spelling her relatives' names. Then she
took out a sheet of writing paper and dipped an old pen into a bottle
of ink.
Her imagination seething, it was not difficult to frame her unusual
letter. Indeed, the writing of it fell into quite easy lines.
"Dear Cousin Achsa:
"You will be very much surprised to get a letter from your second
cousin, Sidney Ellis Romley. But I have heard my mother speak of
you often. (Let it be said in justice to Sidney that she hesitated
over this outrageous fib, then decided it was justified by the
necessity for tact. However, some quick calculation caused her to
amend her statement.) At least my older sisters have told me that
she spoke often of you. You see she died when I was a baby. My
father is dead, too. I live with my sisters in Middletown. I am the
youngest though I am fifteen.
"My sisters have travelled extensively but I have never gone
anywhere. But this summer I am going to have the Egg which is a sum
of money that comes to us each year. (Here Sidney had paused to
consider whether she ought to confess that her father had been a
poet. She decided she need not.) I can spend the Egg any way I want
to. I think I will go somewhere on a train. I came across a family
tree of the New England Ellises which told all about the Greens,
too, and Ezekiel Green who is your father as you know and his good
ship the _Betsy King_ which I think was thrilling and how his soul
is with his Maker and all about you and Cousin Asabel and it was so
interesting, I mean the Greens, not the Ellises, that I have
decided to visit you if it is convenient. I will not be any
trouble. I wish you would write and tell me if I can come. I shall
await your letter with trembling expectancy.
"Your most affectionate and new-found Cousin,
"Sidney Ellis Romley."
Sidney hurried the letter into an envelope, sealed it and addressed it.
For a dreadful moment she wondered if she ought to know a street number
in Provincetown. This Achsa might have married and have another name.
Then she remembered that Isolde always put their own address in one
corner of her envelopes. She printed it on hers in square letters.
"There, it'll come back to me if it doesn't find Cousin Achsa! But, oh,
I hope it does."
"_Sid-ney!_ Luncheon. I've called you three times."
Vick's voice, sharply rebuking, broke across Sidney's occupation. She
jumped hurriedly from her perch, tucking the letter into the pocket of
her blouse. Her lips pressed together in a straight thin line of red.
Life must, of course, appear to go on as usual--school and the same
stupid things she did every day, Nancy, who was so distressingly short
of the standard Pola had that day forever fixed. No one, her sisters
least, must suspect that Adventure loomed so close. She would guard her
plans carefully in her "inscrutable breast."