PLANTING OF SMALL SEEDS
But it was not all smooth sailing for Helen, although it had begun so
fair. The very next week was trying to everybody. It was warm and close
and rainy, not a heartsome downpour that sweeps everything clean, and
clears up with laughing skies, but drizzles and mists and general
sogginess, not a breath of clear air anywhere. No one could sit on the
porch, for the vines and eaves dripped, the parlor had a rather dismal
aspect, and everybody seemed dispirited.
Mrs. Van Dorn was not well. She lost her appetite. It seemed as if she
had a little fever. And she was dreadfully afraid of being ill. So many
people had dropped down in the midst of apparent health, had paralysis
or apoplexy, or developed an unsuspected heart-weakness. She would make
a vigorous effort to keep from dying, she had no organic disease, but
something _might_ happen. Young people died, but that did not comfort
her for she was not young. Helen fanned her on the sofa, in the chair.
The cushions and pillows grew hot, she fanned them cool. She ran out to
the well, and brought in a pitcher of fresh cold water.
"It tastes queer. I do wonder if there is any drainage about that could
get into it."
Then it was, "Helen, don't read so loud. Your voice goes through my
head!" and when Helen lowered her tone, she said, "Don't mumble so! I
can't half hear what you are saying. How stupid the papers are! There's
really nothing in them!"
If Helen had not been used to fault-finding, it would have gone hard
with her. As it was she was rather dazed at first at the change.
"She'll get over it," comforted Mrs. Dayton. "And if this weather ever
lets up we shall all feel better."
The Disbrowe baby was ill, too, and two or three times Helen went to
relieve the poor mother. Miss Gage came and stayed one night with Mrs.
Van Dorn.
Friday noon the sun shone gayly out, a fresh wind blew much cooler from
the west, and everybody cheered up.
"Railly," said Uncle Jason, when he came in Saturday with butter and
eggs, "you're a big stranger! Mother, she feels kinder hurt an' put out,
an' wishes she hadn't let you come. You do ridin' round every day an'
never come near us, as if you felt yourself too grand."
"Oh, Uncle Jason, it isn't that at all," cried Helen in protest. "We
were out just a little while on Monday, and the mist came up. Mrs. Van
Dorn took a cold, and has been poorly, and the weather has been just
horrid until to-day. Then I have been helping Joanna with the jelly and
canning, and Mrs. Disbrowe with her baby. I couldn't walk over, could
I?" glancing up laughingly.
"Well, I s'pose you might--on a pinch----"
"Oh, no; it would have to be on my own two feet. And see what a mess the
roads have been! Good going for ducks, but bad for your best shoes."
He laughed. Her tone was so merry it was good to hear. He had missed her
cheerful presence. Aunt Jane would hardly have admitted how much she
missed her about the work. 'Reely had so many slaps that she just wished
Helen would come home again, it made mother so cross to have her away.
"I s'pose, now, you couldn't go back with me, and I'll bring you over
Sunday."
Helen was sorry, and yet she shrank from the proposal, and was glad she
could not go. Was that ungrateful?
"Oh, I really could not, Uncle Jason. You see, Mrs. Van Dorn is just
getting better, and she wants a dozen things all at once, but I'll try
when we go out. Perhaps the first of the week."
"I'll have to hold on to my scalp when I get home," he said rather
ruefully. "Mother told me to bring you back."
"But I'm hired to stay here, and I can't run away as I like," she
answered pleasantly, but with dignity.
"That's so! That's so! Well, come soon as you can."
Mrs. Van Dorn's bell rang and she had to say good-by. Mrs. Dayton
entered at that moment.
"Helen," Mrs. Van Dorn said: "I've a mind to go down on the porch and
sit on the west side in the sun. I'm tired to death of this room. Get me
that white lambs-wool sacque, though I hate bundling up like an old
woman! I think I did take a little cold. And people who are seldom ill
are always the worst invalids, I've heard. Then bring that big Persian
wrap, I really do feel shaky, and that's ridiculous for me."
She managed to get down stairs very well. Helen fixed the wrap about the
chair and then crossed it on her knees. The white sacque was tied with
rose colored ribbons, and with her fluffy, curly hair she looked like an
old baby.
"Has the _Saturday Gazette_ come? Let's hear the little gossip of the
town. Who is going out of it, who is coming in, who played euchre at
Mrs. So and So's, and who won first prize, and who has a new baby."
There were other things--a column about some wonderful exhumations in
Arizona that were indications of a pre-historic people.
"Queer," she commented when Helen had finished, "but everywhere it seems
as if cities were built on the ruins of old cities. And no one knows the
thousands of years the world has stood. There is a theory that we come
back to life every so often, that some component part of us doesn't die.
Still, I do not see the use if one can't remember."
"But there is--heaven----" Helen was a little awe-struck at the
unorthodox views.
"Well--no one has come back from heaven. I believe there are several
cases of trances where people thought they were there, and had to come
back, and were very miserable over it. But it seems to me being here is
the best thing we know about. I feel as if I should like to live
hundreds of years, if I could be well and have my faculties."
"There's Auntie Briggs, as they call her, over to Center, who is
ninety-seven, and grandmother White was ninety-five on Christmas day."
"Tell me about them. Are they well? Do they get about?"
"Grandmother White is spry as a cricket, as people say. She sews and
knits and doesn't wear glasses."
"That's something like." The incident cheered her amazingly. "And the
other old lady?"
"She is quite deaf and walks about with a cane, but I think she's pretty
well." Helen did not say she was cross and crabbed and a trial to her
grand-daughter's family. It really was sad to live past the time when
people wanted you. But couldn't you be sweet and comforting? Must old
age be queer and disagreeable?
"I shall try to live to a hundred," said Mrs. Van Dorn. "Let me see--I
wish you'd read something bright, about people having good times. Why do
writers put so much sorrow in stories? It is bad enough to have it in
the world."
Helen ran up and brought down a pile of novels that Mr. Disbrowe had
selected in the city. But one did not suit and another did not suit.
"We will look at the sun going down. What wonderful sunsets I have
seen!"
"Tell me about them," entreated Helen.
"There was one at the Golden Gate, California. No one ever could paint
anything like it." Mrs. Van Dorn looked across the sky as if she saw it
again. She was an excellent hand at description. Then the men were
coming in, the dinner bell rang.
"I won't bother to dress, I'll play invalid."
Helen pushed the chair in a sheltered place, and laid the shawl over the
back of a hall chair. Everybody congratulated Mrs. Van Dorn, and she
said with a little laugh that she thought it was the weather, and she
had been playing off, that she hadn't been really ill.
"I think we all gave in to the weather," said Mrs. Lessing. "I had a
touch of rheumatism. You can have a fire in wet cool weather, but when
it is wet hot weather, you can hardly get your breath and feel
smothered."
"It's been a dreadful week for trade," remarked Mr. Disbrowe. "I haven't
made my salt. Perhaps it would have been better to have tried pepper."
They all laughed at that.
"Mrs. Dayton has tried both salt and pepper and been cheerful as a
lark," said Mrs. Pratt.
"And plenty of sugar," laughed Mrs. Dayton. "Though I confess I have
been tried with jelly that wouldn't jell. The weather has been bad for
that."
"And Miss Helen has kept rosy. She has been good to look at," subjoined
Mrs. Disbrowe.
Mrs. Van Dorn smiled at the girl who flushed with the praise.
She wanted to be read to sleep that night, just as she had been the
night before, and chose Tennyson.
"Well, I do hope we will have a nice week to come," Mrs. Dayton said
when they were alone. "Old lady Van Dorn _has_ been trying. Helen, you
have kept your temper excellently. What are you smiling about?"
"I guess I have been trained to keep my temper."
"Because your aunt doesn't let anyone fly out but herself? That's in the
Cummings blood. And you haven't any of that. Sometimes your voice has
the sound of your father's. You are more Grant than Mulford."
"You knew my father----" Helen paused and glanced up wondering whether
it was much or little.
"Well--yes," slowly. "And not so very much either. You see I was beyond
my school days," and Mrs. Dayton gave a retrospective smile. "Your
mother went to school to him the first year he taught. I never could
understand----" and she wrinkled her brow a little.
"I suppose he was very much in love with her?" Helen colored vividly as
if she was peering into a secret. The love stories she had been reading
were taking effect in a certain fashion. She was beginning to weave
romances about people. Aunt Jane blamed her father for a good many
things, and especially the marriage. But she never had a good word for
him.
"Oh, what nonsense for children like you to think about love! Well,"
rather reluctantly, "he must have been pleased with her, she was bright
and pretty, but it wasn't wise for either of them, and it did surprise
everybody. She was one of the butterfly kind with lots of beaus. Dan
Erlick's father waited on her considerably, he was pretty gay, and
people thought she liked him a good deal. Then he married a Waterbury
girl, and not long after she married your father. There were others she
could have had--we all thought more suitable. He was a good deal older,
and cared mostly for books and study. Then he began with some queer
notions, at least the Center people thought so--that the world had stood
thousands of years we knew nothing about, and that the Mosaic account
wasn't--well then people hadn't heard so much about science and all
that, and were a little worried lest their children should turn out
infidels. And he found a place in some college at the West, but it
seemed as if they made a good many changes until she came home to die.
But she always appeared to think he had been kind and taken good care of
her. If he hadn't the Center would have heard about it."
That didn't altogether answer the question. Helen wanted some devotion
on which to build a romance. Since she could not put her mother in a
heroine's place, she wanted her father for a hero. But she had never
seen much of him, and she had always felt a little afraid of the grave,
tall, thin man who never caressed her, or indeed seemed to care about
her. Had anyone really loved him? Somehow she felt his had been a rather
solitary life and pitied him.
"He had a curious sort of voice," continued Mrs. Dayton. "It wasn't loud
or aggressive, but--well I think persuasive is the word I mean. He had a
way of making people think a good deal as he did, without really
believing in him or his theories. He was a man out of place, you'll find
what that means as you go on through life, a sort of round peg that
couldn't get fitted to the square hole in Hope Center."
"Oh, dear! I wonder if I shall be like him?" The tone was half
apprehensive, half amusing and the light in her eyes was full of curious
longing.
"I _do_ suppose you get your desire for knowledge from him. I never
heard of a Mulford who was much of a student, nor a Cummings either.
Though I am not sure education does all for people. You have to possess
some good sense to make right use of it. And some people with very
little book learning have no end of common sense and get along
successfully."
Then Mrs. Van Dorn's bell rang. Helen had been polishing the glasses
with a dry towel. Joanna always went over them twice, and this was quite
a relief to her.
Mrs. Dayton was putting away dishes and thinking. Helen was different
from the Mulford children. She was ambitious to step up higher, to get
out of the common-place round. It was not that she hated work, she did
it cheerfully, looking beyond the work for something, not exactly the
reward, but the thing that satisfied her. And Mrs. Dayton had found in
her life that a little of what one really wanted was much more enjoyable
than a good deal of what one did not want, no matter how excellent it
might be.
The book to-night was talks about Rome. Mrs. Van Dorn lived over again
in her reminiscences, making sundry interruptions. "It was here I met
such a one," she would say. "This artist from England or America was
painting such a picture." And there were walks on the Pincio, lingering
in churches, viewing palaces. And then--it was all real. Hadn't St. Paul
written letters from Rome ever and ever so long ago? Somewhere he had
"Thanked God and taken courage?" Yes. Rome _was_ real. Had her father
ever seen it? She would like to see it some day. And if she could ever
get to where she could teach school--Mr. Warfield had earned enough to
go abroad, and she remembered hearing him say he had worked all one year
with a farmer for the sake of eight months' schooling.
There was a gentle sound of hard regular breathing, not to be called a
snore, but a sign of sleep. Helen went on with a dream. Why couldn't she
stay somewhere in North Hope and work for her board nights and mornings
and go to the High School? She was learning so many things now about
history and literature, and the whole world it seemed. Occasionally she
looked over the list of examination studies and caught here and there a
fact she had not understood a few weeks ago. Why this was as good as a
school.
She would not breathe her plans to a soul. If only Mrs. Dayton might, or
could keep her! But early in October Mrs. Dayton shut up her house and
went on a round of visits after her summer's work, and Joanna went to
her sister's who had seven children, the eldest hardly fourteen. But
some place might open. If boys could work their way up, why not a girl?
There was a succession of pleasant days with a bright reviving westerly
wind. Driving was a delight. Sometimes they went out an hour or two
after breakfast, and oh, how glorious the world looked.
For two days Helen felt she was a coward. She ought to go home, but she
dreaded it somehow. Why wasn't Aunt Jane like--well, Mrs. Dayton for
instance, glad that other people should have some enjoyment? Yes, she
did enjoy Jenny's pleasure, but how often she threatened the others!
"Could we drive around by the Center this afternoon?" Helen asked a
little hesitatingly.
"Why--I thought we would go to Chestnut Hill. I like those long faded
yellow chestnut blooms that hang where there are to be no chestnuts. It
is like old age hanging on to some forlorn hope."
"But you do not like old age," Helen said, with a bright smile.
"Not for myself. Not for people in general. But it is pretty among the
clusters of green chestnut leaves. Mrs. Dayton could make a little
sermon out of that--useless old age."
"We might come round that way on our return," ventured the girl.
"Are you homesick?"
"Oh, no." A bright flush overspread Helen's face, and the light in her
eyes as she turned them on Mrs. Van Dorn was so beautiful it touched her
heart. "Uncle wanted to take me back on Saturday to stay over Sunday.
They think----"
"Did you want to go?" with quick jealousy.
"Not very much, oh, no, I'm not homesick at all. I like it so much over
here. But I ought to go now and then."
"Well--we will see."
Helen had put on her last summer's white frock. She would rather have
worn the blue lawn or the pretty embroidered white muslin, made out of
Mrs. Dayton's long ago skirt, but some feeling withheld her.
How beautiful Chestnut Hill was to-day! It was not all chestnuts, though
they were there tall and stately, but with a mingling of maple and beech
and dogwood, and here and there hemlocks and cedars. A sort of wild
garden of trees, but all about the edges common little shrubs and sumac
stood up loyally as if the trees were not to have it all. And smaller
things in bloom tangled here and there with clematis and Virginia
creeper, and a riot of mid-summer bloom. They had brought along a volume
of Wordsworth's shorter poems, and Helen read here and there in the
pauses.
Mrs. Van Dorn was ruminating over a thought that had crossed her mind.
Wouldn't this girl be glad to go off somewhere and thrust her old life
behind her? How much did she care for her people? Someone could make a
fine and attractive young woman out of her, yes, there was a certain
noble beauty that might be cultivated and bloom satisfactorily from
twenty to thirty. Ten or twelve years?
"Take the lower road round by the Center," she said to the driver.
Helen raised her eyes in acknowledgment. They passed the old farm
houses, and at the gate of one of them stood Grandmother White, a small
wrinkled old lady in a faded gown and checked apron. She nodded to
Helen. Was that worth the living to old age? Mrs. Van Dorn shrugged her
shoulders. Thank Heaven she should not be like that when she came near
the hundred mark.
"Now I will drive around a little while you make your call. It must not
be very long, or we shall be late for dinner."
Helen sprang out with an airy lightness. The front windows were all
darkened as usual. She ran up the path, around the side of the house.
Aurelia was weeding among the late planted beets where dwarf peas had
taken the early part of the season.
"Oh, Helen!" She sprang up with the trowel in her hand, "I'm so glad
you've come. Are you going to stay all night? I miss you so much. I have
such lots of work to do, and mother's cross a good deal of the time. We
all miss you so. I s'pose its real nice over at Mrs. Dayton's, but I
shall be so glad when you come back."
"No, I can't stay all night----"
"But the carriage went away----"
"'Reely, you come in and peel the potatoes. You ought to have had that
weeding done long ago. Oh, Helen," as the girl had turned around the
corner that led to the kitchen. "Well I declare! I began to think you
had grown so fine that the Center would never see you again!"
She looked Helen over from head to foot and gave a little sniff.
"Are you coming in?" rather tartly.
"Why--yes," forcing herself to smile.
How different from Joanna's tidy kitchen! It was clean but in confusion
with the odds and ends of everything. The green paper shade was all
askew, there were two chairs with the backs broken off, the kitchen
table was littered, the closet door was open and betrayed a huddle of
articles.
"You don't seem to be very sociable, I must say. Why didn't you come
over Saturday? Your uncle felt quite hurt about it. Seems to me you're
mighty taken up with those people," nodding her head northward.
"I couldn't on so short a notice. Mrs. Van Dorn had not been well. I
read her to sleep nearly every night. And there are so many little
things to do."
"Well, if she'd employ herself about something useful she wouldn't need
to be read to sleep, nor want so much waiting on."
"That is what I am hired to do," Helen returned with a good-natured
intonation that she kept from being flippant.
"Well, if I had ever so much money I couldn't find it in my conscience
to dawdle away time and have someone wait upon me. And how's Mrs.
Dayton? All the boarders staying?"
"Yes, the house is full."
"Mrs. Dayton does have the luck of things! But she hasn't a chick nor a
child, nor a husband and a lot of boys to mend for. I was foolish to let
you go over there, Helen, when I needed you so much myself. It isn't
even as if you were learning anything, just fiddling round waiting on a
woman who hasn't an earthly thing to do. And I'm so put about, I don't
know what to take up first. 'Reely, you hurry with the potatoes or
you'll get a good slap."
There was a diversion with Fan and Tommy who shook sand over the kitchen
floor. Fan's face was stained with berries but she flung her arms about
Helen and kissed her rapturously, while Tom dug his elbows into her
lap.
"Did you come in a horse and carriage?" asked Fan, wide-eyed.
"I came in the carriage."
"You know well enough what she meant, Helen. You'll get so fine there'll
be hardly any living with you when you come back."
"When she came back." A tremor ran through Helen's nerves. Oh, must she
come back!
"How is Jenny?" she inquired.
"Oh, Jenny's first rate, working like a beaver. There's a girl worth
something, if she is mine! And the house is getting done up just
splendid. Joe's crazy to be married right off, but Jenny's like me, when
her mind's made up it's made up. There's a good deal of Cummings in her.
Why don't you take off your hat? You're going to stay to supper?"
"No, I can't," Helen returned gently. "Mrs. Van Dorn was going to drive
round a little----"
"She could have come in," snapped Aunt Jane. "We could have had the
horse put out and you could both have stayed to supper. I dare say we
have as good things to eat as Mrs. Dayton. She doesn't refuse our
butter and eggs nor chickens when we have 'em to spare."
"They all think the butter splendid, Aunt Jane. And Mrs. Disbrowe wishes
they could get such eggs in the city. She is sure what they get must be
a month old," said Helen, with an attempt at gayety.
"I _do_ make good butter. Mrs. Dayton's folks are not the first to find
it out," bridling her head. "And I'll say for Mrs. Dayton she's willing
to pay a fair price. But I s'pose that old woman pays well?"
Helen wondered how the woman in the carriage would look if she heard
that!
"I'd like to know the prices myself. Haven't you heard Mrs. Dayton say?
I might want to keep boarders, some day."
"No," answered Helen. "But there are a good many boarders at North Hope,
and some of them look as if they didn't mind about money."
"Carriage has come," announced Nathan, running in. Aurelia had finished
the potatoes and put them on to cook and now stood with one arm around
Helen's neck.
"Stay! stay! Can't you stay?" cried a chorus of voices in various keys.
"I am not my own mistress," answered Helen, cheerfully. "And when you
are paid to do a certain thing, paid for your time, it belongs to
someone else."
She loosened the children's arms and rose.
"Well it is a mean little call," said her aunt, "and your uncle will be
awful disappointed. But when you live with grand people I s'pose you
must be grand. Do come when you can stay longer," with a sort of sarcasm
in her tone.
"I'll try." Helen kept her temper bravely, left her love for Jenny and
Uncle Jason. Aunt Jane had gone at making shortcake. The children
followed their cousin out to the gate and showered her with good-bys,
staring hard at the old lady in the carriage.