and heavier while the hunger for bread grew daily more acute. Not even
the departure of interfering relatives could bring freedom, for the
baby's stumpy arms bound Mary to the house as inexorably as bolts and
bars could have done. She passed weary hours in a hushed room watching
the baby, when outside the sun was shining, the birds calling, the
apples waxing greener and larger, and the shining knights and ladies
winding down to Camelot. She sat upon the porch, still beside the baby,
while the river rippled, the wheatfields wimpled, and the cows came
trailing down from the pasture, down from the upland pasture where the
sentinel hickory stood and watched until the sun went down, and, one by
one, the lights came out in distant Camelot. She listened for the light
laughter of the ladies, the jingling of the golden armor, the swishing
of the branches and of the waves. Listened all in vain, for Theodora,
that gift of God, had powerful lungs and a passion for exercising them
so that minor sounds were overwhelmed and only yells remained.
But the deprivation against which she most passionately rebelled was
that of her father's society. Before the advent of Theodora she had been
his constant companion. They were perfectly happy together, for the poet
who at nineteen had burned to challenge the princes of the past and to
mold the destinies of the future was, at twenty-nine, very nearly
content to busy himself about the occurrences of the present and to edit
a weekly paper in the town which had known and honored his father, and
was proud of, if puzzled by, their well-informed debonair son. Even
himself he sometimes puzzled. He knew that this was not to be his life's
work, this chronicling of the very smallest beer, this gossip and
friendliness and good cheer. But it served to fill his leisure and his
modest exchequer until such time as he could finish his great tragedy
and take his destined place among the writers of his time. Meanwhile, he
told himself, with somewhat rueful humor, there was always an editor
ready to think well of his minor poems and an audience ready to marvel
at them, "which is more, my dear," he pointed out to his admiring wife,
"than Burns could have said for himself--or Coleridge."
And when his confidence and his hopes flickered, as the strongest of
hopes and confidence sometimes will, when his tragedy seemed far from
completion, his paper paltry, and his life narrow, he could always look
into his daughter's eyes and there find faith in himself and strength
and sunny patience.
Formerly these fountains of perpetual youth had been beside him all the
long days through. From village to village, from store to farm, they
had jogged, side by side, in a lazy old buggy; he smoking long, silent
pipes, perhaps, or entertaining his companion with tales and poems of
the days of chivalry when men were brave and women fair and all the
world was young. And, Mary, inthralled, enrapt, adoring her father, and
seeing every picture conjured up by his sonorous rhythm or quaint
phrase, was much more familiar with the deeds and gossip of King
Arthur's court than with events of her own day and country.
So that while Mary, tied to the baby, yearned for the wide spaces of her
freedom, Mr. Buckley, lonely in a dusty buggy, jogging over the familiar
roads, thought longingly of a little figure in an irresponsible
sunbonnet, and found it difficult to bear patiently with matronly
neighbors, who congratulated him upon this arrangement, and assured him
that his little play-fellow would now quickly outgrow her old-fashioned
ways and become as other children, "which she would never have, Mr.
Buckley, as long as you let her tag around with you and filled her head
with impossible nonsense."
It was not a desire for any such alteration which made him acquiesce in
the separation. It was a very grave concern for his wife's health, and a
very sharp realization that, until he could devise some means of
increasing his income, he could not afford to engage a more experienced
nurse for the new arrival. He had no ideas of the suffering entailed
upon his elder daughter. He was deceived, as was every one else, by the
gentle uncomplainingness with which she waited upon Theodora, for whose
existence she regarded herself as entirely to blame. Had she not,
without consulting her parents, applied to high heaven for an increase
in live stock, and was not the answer to this application, however
inexact, manifestly her responsibility.
"They're awful good to me," she pondered. "They ain't scolded me a
mite, an' I just know how they must feel about it. Mamma ain't had her
health ever since that baby come, an' papa looks worried most to death.
If they'd 'a' sent that goat an' wagon I could 'a' took mamma riding.
Ain't prayers terrible when they go wrong!" And in gratitude for their
forbearance she, erstwhile the companion, or at least the audience, of
fealty knight and ladies, bowed her small head to the swathed and
shapeless feet of heaven's error and became waiting woman to a flannel
bundle.
Only her dreams remained to her. She could still look forward to the
glorious time of "when I'm big." She could still unbind her dun-colored
hair and shake it in the sun. She could still quiver with anticipation
as she surveyed her brilliant future. A beautiful prince was coming to
woo her. He would ride to the door and kneel upon the front porch while
all his shining retinue filled the front yard and overflowed into the
road. Then she would appear and, since these things were to happen in
the days of her maturity, perhaps when she was twelve years old, she
would be radiantly beautiful, and her hair would be all goldy gold and
curly, and it would trail upon the ground a yard or two behind her as
she walked. And the prince would be transfixed. And when he was all
through being that--Mary often wondered what it was--he would arise and
sing "Nicolette, the Bright of Brow," or some other disguised
personality, while all his shining retinue would unsling hautboys and
lyres and--and--mouth organs and play ravishing music.
And when she rode away to be the prince's bride and to rule his fair
lands, her father and her mother should ride with her, all in the
sunshine of the days "when I'm big"--the wonderful days "when I'm big."
Meanwhile, being but little, she served the flannel bundle even as Sir
Beaumanis had served a yet lowlier apprenticeship. But she still stormed
high heaven to rectify its mistake.
"And please, dear God, if you are all out of goats and wagons, send
rabbits. But anyway come and take away this baby. My mamma ain't well
enough to take care of it an' I can't spare the time. We don't need
babies, but we do need that goat and wagon."
And the powers above, with a mismanagement which struck their petitioner
dumb, sent a wagon--only a wagon--and it was a gocart for the baby, and
Mary was to be the goat.
With this millstone tied about her neck she was allowed to look upon the
scenes of her early freedom, and no inquisitor could have devised a more
anguishing torture than that to which Mary's suffering and unsuspecting
mother daily consigned her suffering and uncomplaining daughter.
"Walk slowly up and down the paths, dear, and don't leave your sister
for a moment. Isn't it nice that you have somebody to play with now?"
"Yes, ma'am," said Mary. "But she ain't what I'd call playful."
"You used to be so much alone," Mrs. Buckley continued. Mary breathed
sharply, and her mother kissed her sympathetically. "But now you always
have your sister with you. Isn't it fine, dearie?"
"Yes, ma'am," repeated the victim, and bent her little energies to the
treadmill task of wheeling the gocart to the orchard gate, where all
wonders began, and then, with an effort as exhausting to the will as to
the body, turning her back upon the lane, the river, and the sentinel
tree, to trundle her Juggernaut between serried rows of cabbages and
carrots.
Then slowly she began to hate, with a deep, abiding hatred, the flannel
bundle. She loathed the very smell of flannel before Theodora was six
short weeks old, and the sight of the diminutive laundry, which hung
upon the line between the cherry trees, almost drove her to arson.
The shy, quick-darting creature--half child and half humming bird--was
forced to drag that monstrous perambulator on all her expeditions. After
a month's confinement to the garden, where knights and ladies never
penetrate, she managed to bump her responsibility out into the orchard.
But the glory was all in the treetops, and Mary soon grew restless under
her mother's explicit directions. "Up and down the walks" meant
imprisonment, despair. Theodora should have tried to make her role of
Albatross as acceptable as it might be made to the long-suffering
mariner about whose neck she hung, but she showed a callousness and a
heartless selfishness which nothing could excuse. Mary would sometimes
plead with all gentleness and courtesy for a few short moments' freedom.
"Theodora," she would begin, "Theodora, listen to me a minute," and the
gift of God would make aimless pugilistic passes at her interlocutor.
"O Theodora, I'm awful tired of stayin' down here on the ground.
Wouldn't you just as lieves play you was a mad bull an' I was a lady in
a red dress?"
Theodora, after some space spent in apparent contemplation, would wave a
cheerful acquiescence.
"An' then I'll be scared of you, an' I'll run away an' climb as high as
anything in the hickory tree up there on the hill. Let's play it right
now, Theodora. There's something I want to see up there."
Taking her sister's bland smile for ratification and agreement, Mary
would set about her personification, shed her apron lest its damaged
appearance convict her in older eyes, and speed toward her goal. But
the mad bull's shrieks of protest and repudiation would startle every
bit of chivalry for miles and miles around.
Several experiences of this nature taught Mary, that, in dealing with
infants of changeable and rudimentary mind, honesty was an impossible
policy and candor a very boomerang, which returned and smote one with
savage force. So she stooped to guile and detested the flannel all the
more deeply because of the state to which it was debasing an upright
conscience and a high sense of honor.
At first her lapses from the right were all negative. She neglected the
gift of God. She would abandon it, always in a safe and shady spot and
always with its covers smoothly tucked in, its wabbly parasol adjusted
at the proper angle, and always with a large piece of wood tied to the
perambulator's handle by a labyrinth of elastic strings. These Mary had
drawn from abandoned garters, sling shots, and other mysterious sources,
and they allowed the wood to jerk unsteadily up and down, and to soothe
the unsuspecting Theodora with a spasmodic rhythm very like the
ministrations of her preoccupied nurse.
Meanwhile the nurse would be far afield upon her own concerns, and
Theodora was never one of them. The river, the lane, the tall hickory
knew her again and again. Camelot shone out across the miles of hill and
tree and valley. But the river was silent and the lane empty, and
Camelot seemed very far as autumn cleared the air. Perhaps this was
because knights and ladies manifest themselves only to the pure of
heart. Perhaps because Mary was always either consciously or
subconsciously listening for the recalling shrieks of the abandoned and
disprized gift of God.
"Stop it, I tell you," she admonished her purple-faced and convulsive
charge one afternoon when all the world was gold. "Stop it, or mamma
will be coming after us, and making us stay on the back porch." But
Theodora, in the boastfulness of her new lungs, yelled uninterruptedly
on. Then did Mary try cajolery. She removed her sister from the
perambulator and staggered back in a sitting posture with suddenness and
force. The jar gave Theodora pause, and Mary crammed the silence full of
promise. "If you'll stop yellin' now I'll see that my prince husband
lets you be a goose-girl on the hills behind our palace. Its awful nice
being a goose-girl," she hastened to add lest the prospect fail to
charm. "If I didn't have to marry that prince an' be a queen I guess I'd
been a goose-girl myself. Yes, sir, it's lovely work on the hills behind
a palace with all the knights ridin' by an' sayin', 'Fair maid, did'st
see a boar pass by this way?' You don't have to be afraid--you'd never
have to see one. In all the books the goose-girls didn't never see no
boars, and the knights gave 'em a piece of gold an' smiled on 'em, and
the sunshine shined on 'em, an' they had a lovely time."
Having stumbled into the road to peace of conscience, Mary trod it
bravely and joyously. Theodora's future rank increased with the decrease
of her present comfort, but her posts, though lofty and remunerative,
were never such as would bring her into intimate contact with the person
of the queen.
She was betrothed to the son of a noble, and very distant, house after
an afternoon when the perambulator, ill-trained to cross-country work,
balked at the first stone wall on the way to the old ladies' house. It
was then dragged backward for a judicious distance and faced at the
obstacle at a mad gallop. Umbrella down, handle up, wheels madly
whirring, it was forced to the jump.
Again it refused, reared high into the air, stood for an instant upon
its hind wheels and then fell supinely on its side, shedding its
blankets, its pillows, and Theodora upon the cold, hard stones.
After that her rise was rapid, and the distance separating her from her
sister's elaborate court more perilous and more beset with seas and
boars and mountains and robbers. She was allowed to wed her high-born
betrothed when she had been forgotten for three hours while Mary learned
a heart-rending poem commencing, "Oh, hath she then failed in her troth,
the beautiful maid I adore?" until even Miss Susan could only weep in
intense enjoyment and could suggest; no improvement in the recitation.
On another occasion Mary was obliged to borrow the perambulator for the
conveyance of leaves and branches with which to build a bower withal;
and Theodora, having been established in unfortunate proximity to an
ant hill, was thoroughly explored by its inhabitants ere her
ministering sister realized that her cries and agitation were anything
more than her usual attitude of protest against whatever chanced to be
going on. By the time the bower was finished and the perambulator ready
for its customary occupant that young person was in a position to claim
heavy damages.
"Don't you care," said Mary cheerfully, as she relieved Theodora from
the excessive animation. "I can make it up to you when I'm big. My
prince husband--I guess he'd better be a king by that time--will go over
to your country an' kill your husband's father an' his grandfather an'
all the kings an' princes until there's nobody only your husband to be
king. Then you'll be a queen you see, an' live in a palace. So now hush
up." And one future majesty was rocked upside down by another until the
royal face of the younger queen was purple and her voice was still.
Mary found it more difficult to quiet her new and painful agnosticism,
and in her efforts to reconcile dogma with manifestation she evolved a
series of theological and economical questions which surprised her
father and made her mother's head reel. She further manifested a
courteous attention when the minister came to call, and she engaged him
in spiritual converse until he writhed again. For a space her
investigations led her no whither, and then, without warning, the man of
peace solved her dilemma and shed light upon her path.
A neighbor ripe in years and good works had died. The funeral was over
and the man of God had stopped to rest in the pleasant shade of Mrs.
Buckley's trees and in the pleasant sound of Mrs. Buckley's voice. Mary,
the gocart, and Theodora completed the group, and the minister spoke.
"A good man," he repeated, "Ah, Mrs. Buckley, he will be sadly missed!
But the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be--"
"When?" demanded Mary breathlessly. "When does he take away?"
"In His own good time."
"When's that?"
"'Tis not for sinful man to say. He sends His message to the man in the
pride of his youth or to the babe in its cradle. He reaches forth His
hand and takes away."
"But when--" Mary was beginning when her mother, familiar with the
Socratic nature of her daughter's conversation and its exhaustive effect
upon the interlocutor, interposed a remark which guided the current of
talk out of heavenly channels and back to the material plain.
But Mary had learned all that she cared to know. It was not necessary
that she should suffer the exactions of the baby or subject her family
to them. The Lord had given and would take away! The minister had said
so, and the minister knew all about the Lord. And if the powers above
were not ready to send for the baby, it would be easy enough to deposit
it in the Lord's own house, which showed its white spire beyond the
first turn in the road which led to Camelot. There the Lord would find
it and take it away. This would be, she reflected, the quiet, dignified,
lady-like thing to do. And the morrow, she decided, would be an
admirable day on which to do it.
Therefore, on the morrow she carefully decked Theodora in small finery,
hung garlands of red and yellow maple leaves upon the perambulator,
twined chains of winter-green berries about its handle, tied a bunch of
gorgeous golden rod to its parasol, and trundled it by devious and
obscure ways to the sacred precincts of God's house.
"They look real well," she commented. "If I was sure about that goat I
might keep the cart, but it really ain't the right kind for a goat. I
guess I'd better take 'em back just like they are an' when the Lord sees
how I got 'em all fancied up, he'll know I ain't a careless child, an'
maybe I'd get that goat after all."
So the disprized little gifts of God were bumped up the church steps,
wheeled up the aisle, and bestowed in a prominent spot before the
chancel rail. Some one was playing soft music at the unseen organ, but
Mary accepted soft music as a phenomenon natural to churches, and failed
to connect it with human agency. Sedately she set out Theodora's bows
and ruffles to the best advantage. Carefully she rearranged the floral
decorations of the perambulator, and set her elastic understudy in
erratic motion. Complacently she surveyed the whole and walked out into
the sunshine--free. And presently the minister, the intricacies of a new
hymn reconciled to the disabilities of a lack of ear and a lack of
training, came out into the body of the church, where the gifts of God,
bland in smiles and enwreathed in verdure, were waiting to be taken
away.
"Mrs. Buckley's baby," was his first thought. "I wonder where that queer
little Mary is," was his second. And his third, it came when he was
tired of waiting for some solution of his second, was an embarrassed
realization that he would be obliged to take his unexpected guest home
to its mother. And the quiet town of Arcady rocked upon its foundations
as he did it.
"In the church," marveled Mrs. Buckley. "How careless of Mary!" she
apologized, and "How good of you!" she smiled. "No, I'm not in the least
worried. She always had a way of trotting off to her own diversions when
she was not with her father. And lately she has been astonishingly
patient about spending her time with baby. I have felt quite guilty,
about it. But after to-day she will be free, as Mr. Buckley has found a
nurse to relieve her. He was beginning to grow desperate about Mary and
me--said we neither of us had a moment to waste on him--and yet could
not find a nurse whom we felt we could afford. And yesterday a young
woman walked into his office to put an advertisement in his paper for
just such a position as we had to offer. She is a German, wants to learn
English, and she will be here this afternoon."
"Perhaps your little girl resented her coming," he suggested vaguely.
"Perhaps that was the reason."
"Mary resentful!" laughed Mrs. Buckley.
"She doesn't, bless her gentle little heart, know the meaning of the
word. Besides which we haven't told her about the girl, as we are rather
looking forward to that first interview, and wondering how Mary will
acquit herself in a conversational Waterloo. She can't, you know, make
life miserable and information bitter to a German who speaks no
English. 'Ja' or 'nein' alternately and interchangeably may baffle even
her skill in questioning."
Mary, meanwhile, was hurrying along the way to Camelot. She had not
planned the expedition in advance. Rather, it was the inevitable
reaction toward license which marks the success of any revolution. She
had cast off the bonds of the baby carriage, her time and her life were
her own, and the road stretched white and straight toward Camelot.
It was afternoon and the sun was near its setting when at last she
reached the towered city and found it in all ways delightful but in some
surprising. She was prepared for the moat and for the drawbridge across
it, but not for the exceeding dirtiness of its water and the dinginess
of its barges. She had expected it to be wider and perhaps cleaner, and
the castles struck her as being ill-adapted to resist siege and the
shocks of war since nearly all their walls were windows. And through
these windows she caught glimpses of the strangest interiors which ever
palaces boasted. Miles and acres of bare wooden tables stood under the
shade of straight iron trees. From the trees black ribbons depended. In
the treetops there were wheels and shining iron bars, and all about the
tables there were other iron bars and bolts and bands of greasy leather.
"I don't see a round table anywhere," she reflected. "What do you s'pose
they do with all those little square ones?" She sought the answer to
this question through many a dirty pane and many a high-walled street.
But the palaces and the streets were empty and the explorer discovered
with a quick-sinking heart and confidence that she was alone and hungry
and very far from home. She was treading close upon the verge of tears
when her path debouched upon the central square of Camelot. And
straightway she forgot her doubts and puzzlements, her hunger and her
increasing weariness, for she had found "The Court." Across a fair green
plaisance, all seemly beset with flower and shrub, the wide doors of a
church stood open. Tall palaces were all about, and in every window, on
every step, on the green benches which dotted the plaisance, on every
possible elevation or post of observation, the good folk of Camelot
stood or hung or even fought, to watch the procession of beauty and
chivalry as it came foaming down the steps, broke into eddies, and
disappeared among the thronging carriages. Mary found it quite easy to
identify the illustrious personages in the procession when once she had
realized that they would, of course, not be in armor on a summer's
afternoon, and at what even, to her inexperienced eyes, was manifestly a
wedding.
First to emerge was a group of the younger knights, frock-coated,
silk-hatted, pale gray of waistcoat and gloves, white and effulgent of
_boutonnière_. Excitement, almost riot, resulted among the
much-caparisoned horses, the much-favored coachmen, and the
much-beribboned equipages of state. But the noise increased to clamor
and eagerness to violence when an ethereal figure in floating tulle and
clinging lace was led out into the afternoon light by a more resplendent
edition of black-coated, gray-trousered knighthood.
The next wave was all of pink chiffon and nodding plumes. The first
wave, after trickling about the carriages and the coachmen, receded up
the steps again to be lost and mingled in the third, and then both swept
down to the carriages again and were absorbed. Then the steady tide of
departing royalty set in. Then horses plunged, elderly knights fussed,
court ladies commented upon the heat, the bride, the presents, or their
neighbors. Then the bride's father mopped his brow and the bridegroom's
mother wept a little. Then there was much shaking or waving of hands or
of handkerchiefs. Then the bridal carriage began to move, the bride
began to smile, and rice and flowers and confetti and good wishes and
slippers filled the air. Then other carriages followed, then the good
folk of Camelot followed, an aged man closed the wide church doors, and
the square was left to the sparrows, pink sunshine, confetti, rice, and
Mary.
The little pilgrim's sunbonnet was hanging down her back, her hair was
loose upon her shoulders, "an' real goldy" where it caught the sun, and
her eyes were wide and deep with happiness and faith. She crossed the
wide plaisance and stood upon the steps, she gathered up three white
roses and a shred of lace, she sat down to rest upon the topmost step,
she laid her cheek against the inhospitable doors, and, in the language
of the stories she loved so well, "so fell she on sleep" with the tired
flowers in her tired hands.